Inventing Interactive

Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

November 22, 2010 - In Present

Showing a little love for something local to LA, the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust opened recently and it’s got some nice interactive exhibits. The museum is a fairly small space and so interactive was required to allow visitors to as much content as possible. The experience may not be revolutionary, but it’s elegantly done. There are three interactive components: 1) the “World That Was” is an interactive table with images that float to…

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Very Recent History: 19-Nov-10

November 19, 2010 - In Present

Very Recent History – a view of things I’ve been reading recently… It feels like the past week has been an online flurry of intense ideas and conversations. It started with Helen Walters post (which, technically, was from last week) Design and Business: The Bottom Line. It’s lengthy, but it’s a great perspective on what designers need to do avoid the future where the design “discipline will be written off as just one more failed…

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Nanotechnology & Nokia Morph

November 17, 2010 - In Future, Present

Here’s some super-interesting work from the Nokia Research Center showing five future mobile interface ideas. The introduction film is a charming animated scenario called Morph. It demonstrates some possibilities nanotechnologies might enable in future communication devices. But it’s not just dreaming, there’s some pretty hard-core science going on behind the scenes. Much of the vision is based on nanotechnologies and research done with the Cambridge Nanoscience Centre. The applications are pretty cool. They include stretchable…

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Hacking Kinect

November 16, 2010 - In Present

Microsoft’s just launched Kinect is generating a lot of buzz right now. But it’s not the platform’s games that are most exciting — instead it’s the implications for future gesture-based interfaces. For example, check out Wes Keltner’s article about the possibilities for Gesture-Based Advertising. But I think what’s even cooler is the degree to which designers and programmers are working to hack Kinect and invent all sorts of new applications for the technology, and new…

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3D on the iPhone

November 15, 2010 - In Present - One comment

I have to admit, I’m always a bit skeptical about 3D. But then, whenever I see something in 3D I get a bit caught by the sense of wonder the technique can inspire — the way it draws you into the image and makes you forget the world around you. So the below examples of 3D on the iPhone may not be perfect, or, even interactive, but they’re still cool because they suggest fun future…

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12Pixels

November 9, 2010 - In Present

This may be small but it’s pretty cool, too. After some heaver, more function-oriented, posts about things like designing interactivity for people who are illiterate in developing countries and after reading this recent report on how mobile phones are used in Africa, why not post about something that allows people to be creative, too? So, go check out Ivan Poupyrev’s 12Pixels project. 12Pixels’ interface lets people with regular mobile phones (ie. with just a numeric…

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Visual Programming

November 4, 2010 - In Present

Douglas Rushkoff, in his new book Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, talks about the why it’s important for people to understand programming: “Whoever holds the keys to programming ends up building the reality in which the rest of us live.” It’s a far-reaching statement, but one I’ve believed for a long time. Even at a more basic level, understanding programming gives everyone, especially designers, important problem-solving skills, and insights into…

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Information to make a journey more interesting.

Media Surfaces

November 4, 2010 - In Future, Present

Check it out, two new films from BERG — what a great way to start the day. They’re sketches exploring ideas and principles behind Dentsu London‘s communications strategy Making Future Magic. The films don’t feature a lot of interactivity, they’re more about communication and information design. But they are quite beautiful, and calm, visions of how technology can be woven into our lives. Russell Davies points out that the films are “a great expression and…

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The Humane Interface

October 28, 2010 - In Past - One comment

In 1993 Jef Raskin wrote the article Down With GUIs! in which he decried the state of user interfaces. He started with a bang: “Bluntly: Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are not human-compatible. As long as we hang on to interfaces as we now know them, computers will remain inherently frustrating, upsetting, and stressful.” And his conclusion was just as strong: “Some of the deepest GUI features conflict with our wiring. So they can’t be fixed….

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Serendipity and the Unexpected

October 21, 2010 - In Present

It’s a common presumption that media will become increasingly personalized, but a recent article on ReadWriteWeb reminded me about the dangers, or at least dullness, of such a future. The article was commenting on Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg, who said “People don’t want something targeted to the whole world — they want something that reflects what they want to see and know.” She went on to say that, in a couple years, websites that aren’t…

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