February 12, 2012

I’m a sucker for public art installations at the best of times, and Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” sculpture in Chicago is always pretty special. The massive, reflective installation and the ever-changing weather provide a novel, magical experience every time you see it. Now I’m trying to figure out how I can wangle a trip to the city (perhaps to Doblin’s head office, which is right near by) before February 20th, in order to catch this spectacular-looking night time video design/sound installation by Sean Gallero and Petra Bachmaier of local firm, Luftwerk. According to this piece in the Chicago Sun-Times, the piece was funded by a $100,000 tourism grant from the State of Illinois, with the hopes that out-of-towners will brave the winter and pour their tourism dollars right back into city businesses.

[via Janet Ginsburg.]

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Filed under: public art installation Chicago Anish Kapoor Cloud Gate interactive art video design sound interaction experience 
January 27, 2012

Matt Rix’s app, Scorekeeper XL is an app for people playing games (and wanting to keep track of the score.) I love it for its beauty and the thought that has clearly gone into every design decision, reflected in a simple, easy-to-use interface that masks all the complexity and highlights fun and interactivity. Lovely.

[via Zach Klein.]

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Filed under: interaction design apps Apple Scorekeeper XL simplicity complexity interaction games lovely 
November 9, 2011
"

The next time you make breakfast, pay attention to the exquisitely intricate choreography of opening cupboards and pouring the milk — notice how your limbs move in space, how effortlessly you use your weight and balance. The only reason your mind doesn’t explode every morning from the sheer awesomeness of your balletic achievement is that everyone else in the world can do this as well.

With an entire body at your command, do you seriously think the Future Of Interaction should be a single finger?

"

—

In A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design, Bret Victor goes ballistic over some of those “Future of Technology” videos that have been doing the rounds of late. His problem: that the ideas contained therein are lame. Or, as he puts it:

This vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. It’s a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is actually rather terrible.

He’s totally right. What we really need from our leaders, our technologists and our innovators is imagination that doesn’t just extend the status quo, it builds a future the mere mortals among us couldn’t picture. Otherwise, they’re just engaging in a slow, steady slide into a present that is simply a continuation of what we have now. And that—not merely from an interaction perspective—is the last thing we need.

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Filed under: interaction design future Bret Victor rant status quo 
June 24, 2011
"You can’t convince someone to invest in this stuff. They have to convince themselves."

— Usability expert Jared Spool weighs in on the thorny topic of how to get executives to understand the value of user interface/experience design seriously. There are also some other good links on this IxDA thread that are worth checking out.

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Filed under: user interface user experience design interaction Jared Spool IxDA 
May 4, 2011
Genevieve Bell’s Vision of the Future

Genevieve Bell is both an anthropologist and the director of interaction and experience research at Intel. Her job is to figure out what motivates people—in order to inform what products Intel should develop next. As she describes in this article on PocketLint, “if you can make an engineer understand why a processor needs to work without a fan, not because of a power need, but because of a social one, then you can make them create devices that fit into our lives better.” Here are ten of her ideas for how the next ten years will play out. It’s worth reading the article for her explanation of each one:

  1. The Internet will get more feral
  2. Next-gen interfaces will become old hat
  3. We will still be social but the way we use the networks will change
  4. We will “sledge” each other…
  5. There will be stubborn artifacts
  6. We will be bored together
  7. We will have a lot of stuff
  8. We will manage our connectivity; we will manage our disconnectivity
  9. We have to maintain the network
  10. We will develop new anxieties.

(Story via Dave Malouf.)

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    Filed under: Intel Genevieve Bell future interaction design user experience research