Archive for March, 2008
We were working on a project recently where we were researching different ways to visualize structured data sets and we came across this gem of a site called Visual Complexity whose purpose is to “be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks.” Currently they have over 560 different visualizations catalogued on their site visualizing topics from art to the web. Those of particular interest were the “shape of song” (pictured) and the “business network” visualization showing the relationship between board members of different businesses. Often visualizations of this sort are just good at analysis of large complex data sets. What makes some of these especially interesting is their ability to simplify things down to an understandable and interactive software UI.
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March 25th, 2008
It’s always great seeing what creative ideas kids come up with when challenged to solve complex issues. Popular Science Editor-in-chief Mark Jannot challenged a class of 5th graders to “change the world.” Their response - a collection of short essays and sketches - shows unique and inventive creativity that is so great in young imaginative minds. Some great ones include living in space for part of the year to reduce energy consumption on the Earth (pictured), using salt from ocean water as a fuel source, and using polymer body panels on cars so that they “bounce” off each other in a collision. Maybe we should invite kids to our future brainstorm sessions…?
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March 18th, 2008
Well in this case, I’ll break with tradition and spill the hot gossip from Sin City.
Mix was a blur, perhaps a ‘blend’ (ouch) of drinking, debauchery and people talking about technology. This particular mix of ingredients seems like the only kind of Vegas I’ve ever experienced (my four previous adventures where all at technology conferences). It was truly a 72 hour conversation, as the conference leads you to believe, I think I got 8 hours of sleep in 3 days. Suffice to say several days later I still feel hoarse and hungover, but have managed to gather a few of the personal highlights.
Ballmer vs Kawasaki – Ballmer by a knock out. I wasn’t looking forward to this keynote, but it turned out to be real laugh. Guy Kawasaki (former Apple evangelist, Venture capitalist and author of The Art of the Start, did a kind of Rude QA with Steve Ballmer. Steve handled most of the questions skillfully, honestly and directly without the marketing spin, and managed to be very entertaining in the process. Qudos to organizers for this frank and earnest format which I thought was fascinating and informative, qudos to Steve and Guy for making it fun. The incident with the Macbook Air is a news story in its own right. Steve Ballmers opinion about Apple is pretty interesting. Worth watching in its entirety if you are interested in Msft’s overall viewpoint about how its sees its business interests and its competitors.
Paul Dawson, Conchango did a talk showing how they do ‘total experience design’, he showed some nice examples of their personas and a really nice spec project for Virgin galactic on the total experience of buying a mega expensive seat on Virgins space program. I really liked the process innovation they showed and it seemed like a great business development process.
Nice demo from the Hardrock Cafes museum curator. This site is using deep zoom technology (formally called Seadragon). The deep zoom is apparently now available as part of the Silverlight platform. To get really nice zoom effect you need lots of pixels. I mean like “Billions” of pixels. This along with Silverlight 2 could enable us to build the Nau demo almost identical. Also great for deep tunneling 3d presentations. Check out this how too guide.
NBC 2008 Olympics - Didn’t think much of the design but Schematic are working with NBC on the 2008 Bejing games website saw a glimpse during the keynote. It promises 2200 hours of streaming live video coverage that will happen in during the Olympics, and kudos to NBC as it will be ‘Free’ . However, expect to have viewed as much commercial content by the end of the games as you would have 5 years ago watching it on TV, because it seems every event will have lots of uninterruptable sponsored advertising video as part of the experience. Needless to say not a big fan of interstitial video.
Silverlight 2.0-Silverlight Looks good, features common controls, re-layout, data binding, skinning styling, and more performance, it’s a tad bigger than before 2.48mb?, and install is still a 12 click process on Vista. Siliverlight is arriving on mobile platforms, we saw a couple of demos of Silverlight output running on Smartphone (Nokia) platform which doesn’t require any kind of recompile. One of the nice things I heard is that there is now some support for SharePoint and Silverlight, which has potential interest. Check out this Silverlight Financials Demonstrator application built in Silverlight it gives you some idea of the power.
David Armano (critical mass.com) did a Fuzzy talk on how it helps to remain not too Rigid as you become an expert in your domain. Interesting implications for organizational structures, and what it means to collaborate. If I’m not mistaken he was advocating ‘forgetting that you are an expert in anything’ because everything (especially in the technology world is changing so quickly).
Dan Roam, gave an entertaining and excellent promotion of his book, called the ‘back of the napkin’. His pitch is about visual thinking and he handed out napkins to everyone in the audience to participate as he talked. He also got everyone to self access their ‘whiteboard’ skills. I scored a 9.
Overall the conference seemed a bit more developer oriented this year than last, but it was worthwhile. Thanks to Microsoft’s evangelism community for putting this on.
March 14th, 2008
The end. After five days of panels, parties, lectures, and libations, I leave Austin duly exhausted, and yet, exhilarated; full of ideas for future projects and interactive experiments, full of promise for the future of our emerging discipline, and its prospects for empowering humans to live smarter, happier, more meaningful lives.
In her closing keynote, the futurist and game designer, Jane McGonigal, spoke of the moral responsibility we designers face in our everyday practice. Ours is the onus of bringing happiness, challenge, and reward into the quotidian of human existence. If we can make our daily reality more like the alternate realities we seek in games, perhaps drawing upon the models used in game psychologies, might we enable a richer human experience? Is there a way to make household chores fun? Can exercise routines take on the character of a massively multiplayer online game? Can an online simulation force us to envision a world depleted of its natural resources? See choreWars, ziked, and worldWithoutOil for examples.
And now for self-interest: what might the future hold for our profession? Several themes emerged from the conference’s dialogues; most centered around the concept of building social networks (surprise!), which in turn foster communal intelligence. Ah yes, the start of transhumanity. One panel even suggested designers of tomorrow would not “design” in the traditional sense of the word, but instead, create systems that enable a communal approach to design. We designers would provide the factory, the cogs, the wheels, but users, or at least some of them, would build out and iterate upon the design itself. In some ways, the SDK’s and API’s of today are precursors to this trend, though such systems limit the potential “user-as-designer” base to those with specialized programming skills. What happens once computer science becomes a prerequisite alongside math and reading and phys ed? Power to the user.
March 13th, 2008
Such is the rumor circulating among veteran attendees of the infamous interactive (plus film, plus music) gathering in Austin, Texas. As a first-time conference attendee, one whose cumulative “South By” experiences total just over 48 hours, 12 of which were spent sound asleep, I don’t have a strong opinion on the matter. However, I do believe that a better question to ask might be: what exactly is meant by the phrase “to lose an edge”? Geometrically, an edge is defined as the intersection of two planes. Losing an edge could therefore entail the parallelization of two planes, or perhaps the disappearance of one of two planes. In the latter “lost edge” case we have distilled the object to the core of its essence. In the former “lost edge” case we see a logical restructuring of components. Another scenario may involve the curving of space such that the line that defines the planes’ intersection consists of a series of equal slopes with respect to both planes, i.e. the planes now curve into one another. The “edge” has been “lost.” Now with further exploration I believe a pattern will emerge: the phrase in question, “to have lost its edge” will have ironically lost its edge. Absurd? My point exactly.
And now for the choicest highlights and tidbits, and please pardon any paraphrasing:
1. The official, introductory panel for newbies, “How to Rawk SXSW”, began with six panelists and one unopened fifth of Jack Daniels. It concluded 45 minutes later with just the six panelists. While I hesitate to equate feats of alcoholism with edgieness, the panel set a bold opening tone.
2. The Internet is not making us stupider. According to Henry Jenkins, who gave an insightful opening keynote, interactive media is not dumbing us down, instead it is cultivating new types of literacy. Where past assessments evaluated the learner as an individual, we now need new standards to assess skills for processing and communicating information for group intelligence.
3. About the scene: The crowds tend to be extremely friendly, even hyper-engaged. The networking factor is intense. The social events (read “parties”) have been generally well-organized though almost every one of the open bars I’ve attempted to visit has been closed by the time of my arrival. Could this be the “lost edge” to which veterans have been referring? The one functionally open bar I found was at party hosted by frog design, though the branded green miller lite was a bit disconcerting.
4. Jason Fried of 37Signals / Ruby On Rails fame was able to condense the accumulated wisdom of his ten years in dot com land into an excellent 45 minute talk. One of the more insightful takeaways: “READ YOUR COPY; we don’t pay enough attention to the words on our sites, in our manuals, in our dialog boxes. Do a re-write before doing a re-design.” Agreed.
5. ICANHASCHEEZBURGER.COM gets 1.5 million hits per day and supports a staff of 9. See highlight number two.
That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more coverage.
March 10th, 2008
We’ve been exploring some ideas around what 3-dimensional visual interfaces would be like and always one of the trickiest problems is “feeling” objects in space. This new technology uses magnets and special joystick-like grips to simulate not only the size, weight, and location of objects in space, but even subtle things like texture. Obviously it has a long ways to go as we doubt monsterous magnetic pucks are in our future.
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Watch the video on YouTube »
March 5th, 2008
This is not necessarily an easy task considering that it requires a sophisticated collection of hardware and software to pull it off. Microsoft has been working at it for quite some time. However, we recently found some guys that are willing to give it a shot. Check out their post at toddvanderlin.com, and don’t miss his Flickr feed with more pics.
March 4th, 2008
Art Center and the Mayor of Barcelona, Jordi Hereu, have teamed up to offer a Global Dialogue series that focuses on art and design on business innovation. It takes place this Thursday in Barcelona.
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March 3rd, 2008