Here’s a great video surveying the creative coding movement from Off Book — a PBS web series about cutting edge arts. What’s especially nice is that the video’s YouTube page includes links to the people interviewed, as well as a Google doc listing every project shown. The video is broken into three sections: Simplifying code with Processing –… Read More
I love it when designer talk about the process behind their work. And even more when that process is both thoughtful and sketchy. For it’s through sketching and making design tangible that one can begin to experience and understanding it. And from that comes learning and thus the ability to iterate and improve. Berg recently… Read More
GMUNK, who I previously interviewed for his work on “Tron,” recently put up a Pintrest page full of eye-candy fantasy UI and GFX process videos. They’re all worth a look, but here are a couple cool highlights… The “Tron” video shows some of the graphics from the Solar Sailor sequence. Very beautiful. It’s interesting to see… Read More
Happy new year! It’s the start of a new year, and so the web is flooded with best-of and what’s-next articles. So bear with me if, over the next couple days, I share some favorites here. 5 in 5, from IBM Research, is a thoughtful look at how innovations, organized around our five senses, will… Read More
A couple short films with some eye-catching interfaces… The first film is Lost Memories, by Francois Ferracci, and it has some nice holographic-like projections. For more on the film’s production there is an interview with the director on One Small Window. The second film is Plurality, by Dennis Liu. It’s a bigger film, with a lot… Read More
The IxDA just announced the winners of their 2013 Interaction Awards. However their awards page only links to the firms that did the work, not to the projects themselves. Because I wanted to find out more about each project, I did the clicking to get the details on the winning projects. It turns out it was… Read More
Take a look at Connecting — it’s a short film on the current trends in UI, interaction and experience design — and how it’s making us more deeply and richly connected to information and each other. Created by Bassett & Partners, the film is full of great examples of the current state of user experience… Read More
This past weekend I went to see Sleep No More. The show, which takes place in New York’s “McKittrick Hotel” is an immersive theater experience. The audience, wearing masks, explores a hundred rooms spread over seven floors — you open drawers, examine props, follow actors around, and generally try to figure out what’s going on…. Read More
Lately I’ve been thinking about the evolving world that interactive media designers inhabit. My recent post on Digital Archeology may be to blame, as it highlighted how the needs and interests of users have changed over the past 20 years. And the role of designers — including the types of environments in which we can best… Read More
Sorry for not posting lately, I’ve been surprisingly busy. I’m off to Paris for the long Thanksgiving weekend – and just remembered an old post I had started on France’s Minitel. I’ll include it here. If anyone has any suggestions of interesting interactive work I should check out while in Paris, drop me a note…. Read More
Sometimes it takes me a while to get through my old bookmarks. And sometimes I discover something unexpected and comforting. Case in point was Eye Magazine’s post The Past is a Foreign Domain about Digital Archaeology — an exhibition and collection of videos about some of the early breakthrough moments in web design. The show… Read More
Recently I was asked (along with Anne Burdick who is chair Art Center’s Media Design Program, and Golan Levin who teaches at Carnegie Mellon) to review the MFA program in Design and Technology (DT) at Parsons The New School. (We also reviewed their BFA programs in Communication Design (CD) and TD, but I won’t discuss… Read More
For years I’ve though about writing a book on interface design in science fiction movies. The idea always started as a big coffee table book full of great examples, but then the details started to get tricky: “how would the book be organized?”; “how would all the interconnected themes weave together in the examples?”; and… Read More
I’ve posted before about Chrome Experiments (and just recently Google celebrated 500 Chrome Experiments) – but this new one, more like their grand experiments such as The Wilderness Downtown, is fascinating. Entitled Movi.Kanti.Revo it’s from Cirque du Soleil and was developed by Subatomic Systems. (Note: you’ll need to view it with Chrome.) It’s still got… Read More
I may be new to this party, but it sure looks like a cool one. It’s the Leap Motion gesture control system — a $70 device that’s scheduled for release some time this winter. Technology Review described it as The Most Important New Technology Since the Smart Phone. That may be a bit strong, but…… Read More