Bre Pettis is a founder of Makerbot, a company that produces robots that make things. Bre is also a founder of NYCResistor, a hacker collective in Brooklyn. In this talk from 25C3 conference, he talks about the future of desktop printing of anything from knitted scarves to sugar-coated cakes.
OR
Design with Intent has a series of very interesting patterns that help to design through various “lenses”.
Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to “democratize” visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Jump right to our visualizations now, take a tour, or read on for a leisurely explanation of the project.
http://www.google.com/mobile/default/brainsearch.html
and also some very exciting new features in google docs!
to be honest i got quite disappointed when i found the truth..
Now that the first year IXD have just embarked on the second grand ethnographic course, this video created by the very talented deltree is an interesting study of the rich amount of individuality that can be found on the street( even though it´s NYC, does not make it invalid in Umeå). I think most importantly it sheds light on the approach to people, the small but important issue of warming up, and although it is high-tech (well we are not documenting with an HV20 out in the field) the manner is candid, and the interviewers are seemingly unintrusive.
It is in the fashion of journalism, but I´m sure that if for nothing else it might inspire the field of ethnographic endeavour. And you can almost smell the summer..
From Qualcomms website:
Interconnectivity has never been more important. Digital networks serve up more and more of our entertainment, information, and communication than ever. Indeed, our ability to easily connect with each other is the foundation of our daily lives.
Qualcomm, with its newly developed convergence program, seeks to create the first truly ubiquitous digital network so that everyone, everywhere, can find themselves connected.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3agYeT-T9co]
an interesting book I’ve stumbled upon in my browsing of maps and urban research.
here is the link to the website.
via critical spatial practice
one inspiring example of changing a situation even momentarily.
source : Techtree
Opera has done it again. It has long claimed to be the complete web browser out there providing most functionalities out-of-the-box, instead of stupid, memory-hogging applications known as extensions.
Eight years after the introduction of “Mouse Gestures” with the Opera 5.1, Opera has announced that it will integrate a revolutionary “Face Gestures” feature into the latest version of Opera 10 Alpha. Like Mouse Gestures, which helped users to control actions on their browser with a mere movement of their mice, Face Gestures allows the user to make a browser do almost everything a browser can possibly do, with their face (facial expressions to be precise). All you need is a decent web camera installed on your computer and the rest will be taken care of by the browser.
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Opera Face Gestures currently includes more than 45 controls. That’s a lot for a start! Almost anything you can perform using your mouse can be done easily just by expressing your desire on your face. The functionalities supported include the opening of new tabs, restoring sessions, and even scrolling. If that was not enough, you can even compose an e-mail message using expressions. To activate Opera Face Gestures, simply press the single-key shortcut F8. To have a look at some of the features and the most important calibration part during setup, take a look at the video below.
Maby some of you have already seen this, but I thought it was a bit interesting and “mind tickling”.
Nice to see some more tactility aspets in new screens.
Here’s a link to the talk that Mr. Buxton gave at Mix ’09 http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/buxton/2009/03-18MIX09Keynote.mspx [02:18:00]
… And here‘s a written interview.
Video of many of those will be shared (soon-ish I imagine) so check this space for them.
Both IxD1 and 1xD2 banded together to help make the event run smoothly. As a thank you souvenir to the visiting speakers, we made some artifacts to help them remember their time here (if they get them past security on their flights home).
Mikko put some more photos on Picasa, here.
Tired of writing academic text? Just put in authors of your sources and click generate and voilá, you got a paper. Works with computer science papers, so ACM is probably ok.
Titles I got:
Decoupling 802.11 Mesh Networks from the Memory Bus in Red-Black Trees
Synthesizing Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games Using Compact Communication
Metamorphic, Metamorphic, Self-Learning Epistemologies for Web Services
POI: Exploration of Lambda Calculus
Stochastic, Extensible Symmetries for Scheme
Towards the Deployment of the Producer-Consumer Problem
If you have the same opinion as I have about advertising and advertisers you’ll know I’m twisting my nose here. On the other hand, I do have the ability to recognize good ideas even from the evil. :)
I was just forwarded this Nike ad for the competition between men and women through the Nike+ website. I happen to be working right now on a complex collaboration platform for a client at IDEO. I think my biggest learning – and that’s why this ad is so interesting – is that designing (collaborative) applications for the web moved from centrally controlled and static websites (the dreamweaver model) focused on individual users to the model we have almost everywhere now which is based on user generated content and all the 2.0 features and capabilities that derive from that.
Getting the collaboration going is far more complicated than designing beautiful pixel behaviors. It involves identifying what motivates us, how we measure and stimulate exchange between people, where and when it will happen and etc. We also won’t collaborate through software if we can do it easier in person. And why, should we? So, it’s also about what are the meaningful ways we should use technology to collaborate through.
It is 80% people’s behaviors and 20% pixel behaviors.
That said and back to the Nike ad. One could argue that their pixel behaviors are really nice but the core of the ad and the application are the simple and old people’s behaviors like men vs women games and how they can now be translated and augmented through technology.
I know it is a simple example but the lesson applies all the way to complex business collaboration platforms for companies that have branches pretty much all over the world.
