Legendary designer Philippe Starck — with no pretty slides behind him — spends 18 minutes reaching for the very roots of the question “Why design?” Along the way he drops brilliant insights into the human condition; listen carefully for one perfectly crystallized mantra for all of us, genius or not. Yet all this deep thought, he cheerfully admits, is to aid in the design of a better toothbrush.
Popularity: 27% [?]
The Take-A-Seat concept by Jelte van Geest is about chairs that follow you wherever you go. For instance if you’re in a library and you are a member of that library. You hold your membership-card in front of the chair and from then on you have a seat that follows you around. (via fresh creation)
Popularity: 7% [?]
From the good folks at commoncraft.com who brought you convenient and simple explanations like Social Bookmarking in Plain English, Wikis in Plain English, and RSS in Plain English comes the soon-to-be Halloween paper-presentation classic Zombies in Plain English.
Popularity: 14% [?]
This article, plain and simple, blew me away. Presented at the ATypI Conference (Brighton, U.K., September 2007) by Joe Clark, a Toronto-based Accessibility Consultant, designer, and writer, this well-researched and comprehensive dissertation on the triumphs and foibles (but mostly foibles) of the inconsistent use of signage throughout Toronto’s city-wide transit system opened my eyes to so much happening around me (and I don’t just mean in regards to the TTC).
Everything from information design, accessibility, clarity, font usage, and branding comes into question throughout the article, taking into account history, opportunity, hegemony, possibility, and bureaucratic politics. It’s a bit of a long read, but I promise you’ll learn something.
Popularity: 15% [?]
I think the Star Wars Hologram communicator is close to becoming reality. If you want me information about this technology go to the researcher’s website.
Popularity: 10% [?]
If you can’t remember your first time or if you still are this might be entertaining for you!
Click this link :letusbeyourfirst.com
Popularity: 7% [?]
“A lot of rich qualitative user research loses its soul by the time it’s been squeezed into conference and journal submission formats and in addition, work involving concept generation tends to remain confidential. So what you see here scratches the surface, nothing more.”
And that quote is about right, but do not think that it’s not very interesting. There are a lot of odd tidbits that are worth knowing. They traveled to 11 cities, interviewed over a thousand people and have the pictures to prove it. If you have any interest in how hand held devices, any hand held device, may change in the future, these presentations may give you a little head start.
I enjoyed the blog format of their travels coupled with the PDF files that explain what they found. I guess the questionnaires must have been an exercise in information design by themselves, how do you ask a guy from Kampala about the interface design issues he’s been having? The writer posts some interesting thoughts from the cities, like this one, ‘ “What happens when everything is transformed into ‘experience’ shopping? And the experience shops are clustered in close proximity? Is it possible to experience, well, ‘experience fatigue’?” Some of them sound like he’s a bit jet lagged, some are relevant musings from a good scholar. It’s a blog, dammit.
Popularity: 26% [?]
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U”]
Popularity: 8% [?]
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