#000000book is an open repository for sharing and archiving motion captured graffiti tags. Tags are saved as digital text files known as GML (Graffiti Markup Language), which can be captured through freely available software such as Graffiti Analysis (marker), DustTag (iPhone), EyeWriter (eye movement) and Laser Tag (laser). Graffiti writers are invited to capture and share their own tags, and computer programmers are invited to create new applications and visualizations of the resulting data. The project aims to bring together two seemingly disparate communities that share an interest hacking systems, whether found in code or in the city.
An interactive site from Pentagram that features a headless, but remarkably demonstrative psychoanalyst who asks you four simple questions about specific aspects of your behavior. Depending on how you answer, he’ll show you the typeface that best encapsulates your persona. (Enter password “character” to begin.)
Spark: blog, radio show, and podcasts on technology and culture from CBC radio Canada
January 11 2010
Spark is a weekly audio outlet of smart and unexpected trendwatching. It’s not just technology for gearheads, it’s about the way technology affects our lives, and the world around us.
Recent interviews include host Nora Young’s chat with Bill Buxton and Jared Spool about the relative merits of single-purpose and multi-function devices.
Catch this little bit of Canadian radio goodness here. Enjoy!
A collaborative animation by Blu and David Ellis. Amazing.
To embetter the usability of this page, here’s a couple of tips. If you want to post a link, select a piece of text,
and then click the chain icon  
and paste the link in: Link URL, don’t worry about the rest in the pop-up. The one next to the chain icon will remove the link and the third one will break the page in two, use this if you are making long posts.
To put images to the page use the square icon on the left. 
and then select an image from your computer or from another webpage URL. After you’ve selected the image, click this –>
, otherwise it won’t show up.
If you want Youtube videos do this:
and Vimeo
2010’s the year that brings skype into your living room via the new line of skype enabled tv’s.
What is the main reason why you don´t do things that you know is good for the environment? For me it is usually because I am too lazy :-(
Feel free to give us comments, feedback and ideas….
Serious play
http://seriousplay.posterous.com/
game trailer
www.sisirnath.com/game
New decade! What’s hot for this year or the next few years? I’m going to tune myself into a nostradamian mode and do some palm-reading. Comments are more than welcome.
First-up, Nordkapp predicts the coming of Transfomation Design. Â Which is “the process of applying design methods and thinking to normally undesigned things and services”. I completely agree, designing stuff that is complex beyond comprehension is for the benefit of humanity. I mean economics, politics and all that should be redesigned to fit this day and age. A few examples:
Credit card reader for the iPhone. While this is a solution to a system that doesn’t exist yet, it’s consequences can already be foretold.
Interactive Democracy. Maximum citizen participation to politics would be achieved using eParticipation, eVoting eetc. forming eDemocracy. Utopia, you say? Wrong. Such things already exist in Switzerland and ..Sweden! Watch this space.
Dildonics. Designing sexxx. Philips has done it, there’s a conference for it. Heck, there’s even an open-source community for it!
2nd: I predict that the next few years will be the years of free as in free beer. Spotify has now paved the way in Europe and next in line is Voddler, that will come out of beta soon (with hopefully a lot of things fixed, absolutely the worst UI I’ve tried in a long time. What else do we need for free? Games? Probably. Books? Certainly. Beer? Unlikely.
3rd: More bullshit. Think about it. The world revolves around it.
4th: Less designed design. The tools of design mend to the level of intuition quickly. (except maybe Flash) People will become the designers of their own things and print them out with Cupcakes or equivalent.
5th: A greater division between controlled and uncontrolled applications and devices. iPhone will probably thrive another few years, but developers will eventually get bored of the soviet way Apple handles the appstore and probably move on to design for other systems as well. Symbian? If forced, yes. Windows Mobile? No. Maemo? Maybe. Android? Probably. Meanwhile, open-source will gain a greater foothold in the mobile world and phones will become more and more like small computers.
KADABRA is recruiting Interaction Designer in Trondheim, Norway. Go to coroflot to see the job posting:
http://www.coroflot.com/public/job_details.asp?job_id=24504
A nice pixilation movie (stop-motion animation with real people). It took about a year to make and 26 000 images!
Youpi! Some PhD friends and colleagues on the way :-) It will be a real class now!
Umeå Institute of Design is currently looking for four doctoral candidates. The PhD positions are within the fields of product design, transportation design and interaction design. The application deadline is January 29th 2010 and the positions are scheduled to start February 15th 2010.
PhD position in Industrial Design with a focus on innovative transportation design
2 PhD positions in Industrial Design with a focus on Interaction Design for Mobile Services
PhD position in Industrial Design with a focus on Human-centered Product Design
Mikkel Koser (okdeluxe) designed a piece of software that enabled COP15 (the 2009 United Nations climate change conference) to have a generative identity/logo.
Design thinking, so it seems, didn’t save our planet’s health. Not this time at least. Meh. At least the conference’s graphics looked nice.
Anyway, more on the generative COP15 identity here.
Here is something that a few people you might know have been working on…
After over 40 years of pioneering work in the Life Science industry, we have been working for the past months to put together our take on the future of Life Science. Our story comprises not only scenarios and a clear picture of the eco-system in which Life Science might exist (in 2015) – but we have gone as far as prototyping glimpses of how interaction might occur with doctors and other medical professionals and services. The future concept and prototype was developed by the Life Science team at Ergonomidesign including user experience and interaction designers, design strategists, graphic designers, developers and health care professionals. Our challenge was to envision the future of Life Science and develop possible solutions for the world to test, use and reflect on. read more…
Being unemployed sucks. Here’s a guide to find jobs, dudes and dudettes. At least in Europe.
First: The European Job Mobility Program. It sounds scary, but it will crawl through all the national job portals  in Europe, and it also finds a lot. Type in Interaction designer or User experience designer or something. Mostly you will get a lot boring visioomnigraffleaxureajaxphpaspnetflashwireframecrap in London, but sometimes you will find actual IxD or UX (what’s the difference?) jobs.
Second: A secret place on a certain website contains a list of  about 300 interaction design companies. Ask around, someone knows where it is.
Third: Coroflot and Behance. Again a lot webcrap. But a lot of decent ones as well. Mostly US of A.
Fourth: I wish there wasn’t a fourth. Instead of these use the second option first. Recruiters. They are really bad. Usually no answers, they use a lot of times a form, which only allows posting of a CV, and probably that’s the only thing they look at. So, if you are desperate here’s a bunch. MajorPlayers, Adrem (design specialists), IC Software (they have a lot), TechnoJobs (UK only, send you a lot of spam, thank you very much), and more more more.
Fifth: The odd forums, twitters and facebooks, LinkedIns, IxDA job board, what else? Post a comment if you know more.
And probably Monster.com. The rest is up to you and how much you are willing to sell out in the name of the almighty Euro. All hail the new president of Europe, Herman van Rompuy!
via Future-Sense.
I’ve recently been working a lot using the Agile method – a method used alot in the software development World, but something that has immense value for us to use as Interaction Designers.
I’m sure alot of my colleagues/alumni are now experiencing this method wherever you are in the World. Please feel free to add to this post.
Johnny Holland recently posted an amazing article titled ‘ How UCD and Agile can live together’ where a lot of the definitions are given. I think it would be very interesting for us to read and try to implement this method more into how we approach projects – especially those in teams. Several projects of our’s are done in teams, with different backgrounds – experience levels, skills and roles.
Excerpts from the amazing Johnny Holland blog:
User Centered Design is the methodology by which you design a holistic product while considering the needs of stakeholders and users. Agile Development is a programming methodology and philosophy intended to overcome the challenges of the waterfall development process and to deliver clean and functional code. How can these two methodologies come together?
Framework
In order to have this discussion, I would like to define a few terms as they will be referred to in this article. These are by no means absolute definitions, but in writing this article and soliciting feedback from practitioners I thought it prudent to define what I do (and don’t) mean by certain terms for the sake of the article.
- Agile Philosophy: the tactical, iterative and transparent perspective on a project engaging all stakeholders and members of a project team. The ultimate goal is a clean and functional product built through transparency and accountability;
- Agile Method: also referred to as scrum, the actual development process including all the hard deliverables including user stories, backlog, burndown charts and all the other tangible by products of an agile team;
- User Centered Design, The iterative strategy where design and research practitioners involve stakeholders and users to gain a cohesive view of a project and to empathize with users. The ultimate goal is a cohesive vision and product definition backed with qualitative and quantitative findings;
- User Experience, or IxD, or any other of dozens of titles: the actual process of qualitative and quantitative research, concept validation, and design. The end deliverables include system visualizations, information architecture, and design spec’s.
- Scrum at work
The picture above is from my flickr-stream and was taken during one of the projects to show the all important ‘Scrum-board’ where time and responsibilities were mapped.
You can read more about the Scrum method and order your own FREE copy here. (highly recommended!)