In just over a year, the Windows Phone app marketplace has quickly grown from nothing to 50,000 apps. An exciting part of watching the marketplace grow is seeing how app developers and designers have taken on and interpreted Metro for their own apps. While Metro can sometimes be seen as stark or very black and [...] Read more – ‘My Favorite Metro Apps’.
This post describes “How Print Design is the Future of Interaction,” a talk I gave at SXSW Interactive on March 12, 2011. The slides from the talk are available to view on Slideshare, and you can see some of the discussion that followed on Twitter here. Introduction There are three areas that I covered in [...] Read more – ‘How Print Design is the Future of Interaction’.
While working on my SXSW talk about the influences I think print design is starting to have on interaction design, I became curious about how many talks at the recent IxDA ’11 conference had to do with aesthetics and visual design. After a quick survey of the 50 talks and workshops from the conference, I [...] Read more – ‘The Aesthetics of Interaction Design’.
This post is a summary of a talk the Windows Phone Design Team has given a couple times recently. This article was originally posted on the Windows Phone Developer Blog. In November, myself and Albert Shum drove a few hours north to visit our friends at the Vancouver User Experience Meetup, to talk about [...] Read more – ‘From Transportation to Pixels’.
On Monday, Facebook published a visualization of the connections between friends across the world. The connected points between cities and countries create a beautiful map of how far Facebook has spread, and how connected we are. The map is also remarkable for how much of the world is still dark, and thereby unconnected – at [...] Read more – ‘Us, Electricity, The Internet, and The Social Network’.
In February I’ll be holding a workshop at the IxDA 2011 conference on the topic of Advanced Design. The purpose of the workshop is to discuss ways to build a design team within your organization that is focused on future products or strategies. The idea for the workshop came from some conversations I had while [...] Read more – ‘Thoughts on “Advanced Design”’.
In October, Toyota announced that it had sold over two million Prius hybrids globally since it introduced the vehicle in 1997. Remarking on the announcement, Jalopnik (an automotive blog owned by Gawker) compared the Prius sales to U.S. truck sales during the same period. Even though the comparison was between Prius global sales and truck [...] Read more – ‘Hybrids vs Trucks. Comparing sales over the last decade.’.
I like stories. And I wouldn’t normally admit it, but, I also like a good love story. Last weekend I married the smartest, most beautiful, fun, and talented woman I’ve ever met. She is perfect to me in every way. I like to think that how we met – and eventually got married – is [...] Read more – ‘How I met my Wife, the comic book’.
A couple weeks ago I posted a photo on Flickr of my less than modest iPod collection, which prompted a question from my French Canadian colleague Raphael: I didn’t want to know, but that’s usually a good sign that I probably should. So, here goes: I started buying music from iTunes in late 2005, and [...] Read more – ‘Apple Tax’.
The “petrol pump problem” emerged from a conversation with Jones a while back, and stems from a stupid error I found myself making at some gas stations. Compare the pump above to the pump interface below, found at other stations: The difference is small but significant. The first has large labels with smaller buttons above [...] Read more – ‘The Petrol Pump Problem’.
I’m not a morning person, and in that gradual stage between sleep and awake my mind messes with me. Monday morning I was particularly unexcited to wake up, so I reached over to the passenger side pillow and mashed the keys of my phone to see what time it was. The display of my phone [...] Read more – ‘Do mobile phones dream of networked sheep?’.
“…it’s like Sudoku” is a phrase I’m told I’ve been using somewhat often recently. Oddly, I don’t even play Sudoku. The point is, it’s a problem that can’t be solved all at once; you just have to start. Somewhere, anywhere. And have your eraser handy. The phrase comes from a zefrank video, which is easily [...] Read more – ‘Creativity is like Sudoku’.
I had a chance to visit the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge last week, and among the many inspiring things I saw was this beautiful information graphic – albeit not for its content – illustrating the total energy flow in and out of the U.S. in 2005. (Click to enlarge – Energy in Quadrillion Btu). [...] Read more – ‘Energy Flow’.
…has found its way onto the web. These are actually a couple examples of the products from the View of the Future project we released on YouTube earlier in the year. I like the description: “What will you get if you take Nokia 7380 L’Amour collection phone, mix it with the design of LG SV280 [...] Read more – ‘A bit of our work’.
What public spaces might learn from the internet: I landed at Washington Dulles International Airport Monday evening at about 8:50PM. The flights bags were taking longer than usual to come down the carousel than normal, but when I found myself still standing waiting at 10PM I decided it was time to assume that my bag [...] Read more – ‘Help’.
A couple years back Jan Chipchase wrote about a hotel nightlight that was most likely designed to be stolen and taken home. It’s a cheap form of ‘physical’ viral marketing. I was in Washington this week and found myself in a familiar situation: I needed to do some work but the desk in my room [...] Read more – ‘Considerate advertising’.
I bought this charger for my phone back in February, after my bags had been lost on a flight through Paris. For a while, I thought it was a bit of a waste to have an LED light up whenever the charger is plugged in. LED’s don’t consume a significant amount of power, but over [...] Read more – ‘Simple reminders’.
The UK mobile operator 3 launched X-Series today, which is basically a flat rate for unlimited mobile 3G service (like broadband for your phone). I’ve been waiting for this to happen for a long time – so many of the best services that we concept and already offer in Nokia devices require a fat and [...] Read more – ‘All-you-can-eat 3G’.
A recent BusinessWeek article lists their top design & “innovation” schools around the world. As can be expected a lot of U.S. schools make the list, but almost half are overseas. Two nice things about the article: they didn’t try give a number ranking to each school, and the articles describe the kind of education [...] Read more – ‘BusinessWeek’s D-school list’.
There were just too many great projects at this year’s Umea Insitute of Design grad show to mention all of them, but one of my favorites was Paula Guntaur’s E-MEM, a self-described “time and context based file management” system. Paula’s concept is a companion to the Smartphones, PDA’s, or Notebooks of today (and tomorrow). It [...] Read more – ‘Contextual Memory’.
The Khronos Projector is a project from the University of Tokyo that goes beyond temporal control of video, by “giving the user an entirely new dimension to play with: by touching the projection screen, the user is able to send parts of the image forward or backwards in time. By actually touching a deformable projection [...] Read more – ‘Spatial / Temporal Video Control’.
To get around a noise curfew, organizer’s of the Glastonbury music festival in the UK are organizing a ‘Silent Disco’. They will be handing out wireless headsets that are connected to the stereo system. The headsets will have bass, treble, and volume controls, and will be handed out in the dance tent only after the [...] Read more – ‘Plato has landed’.
One of the most interesting presentations from eTech this past week was from Saul Griffith from Squid Labs and Howtoons, who has built iFabricate.com iFabricate is a community site that makes it easy to document and record projects, which are then available for others to use. Photos, illustrations, and even CAD data can all be [...] Read more – ‘Open Source Design’.