Inventing Interactive

The Fate of Digital Advertising

May 24, 2010 - In Present - 2 comments

Since discovering it recently, I’ve really enjoyed the Monday Note blog. Today’s post by Frédéric Filloux, The lethal self-complacency of advertising, makes some bold statements that are hard not to agree with. He begins: Is advertising the next casualty of the on-going digital tsunami’s? For now, advertising looks like the patient who developed an asymptomatic form of cancer without realizing how sick he is. Such behavior usually results from excessive confidence in one’s body past…

Read the rest…

Sex'n'Crime #14, one of the first disk magazines (Commodore 64,1990)

Demos, Hacks, Robots and OK Computer

May 20, 2010 - In Past, Present

Over the past couple days, everywhere I turn it seems I’m finding stuff that has, for me, a nostalgic feel. So here’s my digital ramble… It first started with a series of posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6) at Rhizome on the demoscene. (Demos are computer-based audio-visual presentations that run in real-time with the goal being to show off programming, artistic, and musical skills.) I don’t follow the demoscene, but come across it from…

Read the rest…

Digital Media and Learning Competition

May 13, 2010 - In Present

Just announced are the winners of the Learning Lab Designers category of the 2010 Digital Media and Learning Competition. The competition is supported by the MacArthur Foundation and administered by HASTAC (the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory). The Digital Media and Learning Competition, now in its third year, is an annual effort designed to find — and to inspire — the most novel uses of new media in support of learning. In May…

Read the rest…

Precision Information Environments

May 11, 2010 - In Future

From precisioninformation.org: Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are developing future work environments for the emergency management community called Precision Information Environments (or PIEs). PIEs will provide tailored access to information and decision support capabilities in a system that supports the multiple user roles, contexts, and phases of emergency management, planning, and response. They have recently posted a future vision concept video demonstrating the five components of their R&D agenda: Tailoring information feeds based on…

Read the rest…

Flowing Media

May 11, 2010 - In Past, Present

Information Aesthetics has a nice interview with Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg. After working for years at the IBM Visual Communication Lab, they’ve gone out on their own and founded a new data visualization firm, Flowing Media. Their work is a inspiring mix of smart thinking and clever communication about the data being presented, allowing people to gain new insights into the content. And although their work tends to be primarially focused on data visualization, rather…

Read the rest…

Iron Man 2

May 7, 2010 - In Future

Iron Man 2 opens today! And Engadget has posted a great collection of pictures and videos of interfaces that are used the film. Sure, we’ve seen a lot of this before — multi-touch Surface-like tables, Star Trek transparent screens, complex layered windows (any standard windowing os — mixed with a bit of old-school Unix), micro-projectors, and even a little magic — but who’s to say it’s not fun? The NYTimes review of the film describes…

Read the rest…

"I Want Those Good Times Back," The Little Mermaid

I Want The Good Times Back

May 6, 2010 - In Past, Present

Is it embarrassing to admit that when I was driving recently, my radio tuned to the Broadway channel, I was listening to “I Want The Good Times Back” from The Little Mermaid? Maybe. But it’s not totally irrelevant. From this recent post on PSFK: Top 10 Luxury Brands’ Sites Fail To Work On iPad… Out of the top 10 luxury brands ranked by Forbes in 2009, none of their websites worked sufficiently to match their…

Read the rest…

Japanese Advertising Candy

May 4, 2010 - In Present

Once, back in the pre-web days, when I was in Japan, I spent a lot of my time grabbing as many interactive CD-ROMs as I could get my hands on. They were filled with strange and fun interactive candy — even if I couldn’t quite understand what was going on, or what I was supposed to do. I just stumbled upon Iain Tait’s blog Crackunit, and a cool post from last year: 9 Reasons Japanese…

Read the rest…

Serendipity vs Apps

May 4, 2010 - In Future, Present

Monday Note has a great post by Frédéric Filloux on Reconciling efficiency with serendipity. He starts with, what should be for us designers, an encouraging quote: “For digital media publishers, Design is the biggest challenge.” He then talks about how trapped we remain by traditional notions of publishing: After more than fifteen years of internet presence, many online publications are still having trouble moving past the newspaper metaphor. Columns, pages, sections, vertical scrolling…, the old-world…

Read the rest…

Glowing Pathfinder Bugs

April 30, 2010 - In Present

I just discovered Glowing Pathfinder Bugs and think it’s super-charming. Created by Squidsoup, and originally shown in 2008, the piece was commissioned by Folly Gallery for Portable Pixel Playground. Glowing Pathfinder Bugs, an interactive art project primarily aimed at children, uses projection to visualize virtual bugs on a real sandpit. The bugs are aware of their surroundings and respond to its form in their vicinity. By altering the topography of the sand, participants affect the…

Read the rest…