Just a short title, a little graphic if you wanted and some color (not demonstrated here.) This is about actual size which means the icon size strikes a good balance between too much/too little. This icon/button combo always worked for me. There’s something physical about the size and the presentation. You want to touch them.

If you bank with Wells Fargo you hopefully have seen the new(ish) ATM design using the modern-day equivalent of PacerForum buttons:

It’s finger-friendly, the controls are big, almost physical. Minimal amounts of info on the screen means less clutter and more focus. There’s some nice background on the project from one of the designers available too.

Frog’s Celltop project takes the big button concept and shrinks it for the mobile phone.

However this video overview probably does a better job of communicating how it works:

There’s always the danger of taking a perfectly good UI concept and shoehorning it awkwardly into a new environment. The PacerForum and Wells Fargo ATM design succeeded because of what they left out. Celltop took the button and made it a data-rich widget–dense with info and light on context. You no longer think about “touching” these things.

But touch is everywhere now. The iPhone still defines the experience with HTC (Android handsets), Blackberry and maybe even Palm coming up fast. Finger-friendly is only getting more important.

The people over jazzmutant.com have come up with a generic input device for controlling music and video apps, custom things, etc. etc. And it is totally multi-touch. You design the interface and you design how that interface controls your app. Meet the Lemur:

The videos are quite interesting, as is paging thru the manual (PDF).

Here’s an actual live use of a Lemur:

Someone gave me The Prisoner TV series DVD box set long ago. Had no idea what to expect but was totally absorbed once I started watching. This was great TV. Obvious the care and thought that went into every aspect, from the dialog to the things hanging on the walls. Sadly #6 just passed away.

And catch a glimpse of Karsten Schmidt’s sketchbook as he works out the details.

And I think I like them because they remind me of Stefan Sagmeister’s “Things I have learned in my life so far”. Remember these:

Ok. That’s a stretch.

Amble Time / “A shortcoming of standard maps is their inability to convey a sense of temporal scale. Can I stroll to the park for lunch, or would it take me all day? Amble Time adds an element of time to a PDA-based tourist map. By using a GPS system and your average walking speed, it creates a bubble that indicates everywhere you could walk in an hour.” This could be a lot of fun.

Don’t bother clicking, the url is kaput. One quick Google finds Amble Time alive and well:

A steadily shrinking area of a city map shows where you can walk as time ticks by. The bubble shows everywhere you could go within timing constraints that you provide. Researchers used this “travel-sensitive alarm clock” to explore ways that location-based information and ad-hoc networking could support participation in interactive stories.

There’s even a nice PDF available, Time, Voice, and Joyce, that discusses the project Amble Time was built to support:

We present a design for recapitulating walks through Dublin’s City Centre by characters in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Our computationally supported walkers will avail themselves of a “map with a sense of time” and a system that translates their hand lettering gestures as attributes of colourful typographic forms.

Now I definitely have to see it working again. Amble Time has iPhone written all over it.

Testing out some new Tumblr-like code.

This is a time-lapse of an Adobe Illustrator master doing his thing. One of my favorite new Portishead songs provides the soundtrack.

It’s a list of things I enjoyed doing and wanted to spend more time doing: “Presentation, Conceptualizing, Communication: drawing, motion/video/animation, writing, Structure, architecture, env design” (Pretty certain I meant “environment” for “env”.)

Today, many years later, how much experience design fun am I having? Not enough! Hardly any video, no animation, very little drawing. Nothing but numbers buried in reports. It’s easy to blame the usual things: tight project schedules, disengaged clients, budgets, complacency, etc. Bah—lame. Really, there’s no good excuse.

Recently, in the design world there’s been a discussion regarding a research technique, the persona, and how they’re used and misused. For background read these: Persona Non Grata, Personas 99% Bad? and Personas are NOT a Document.

Couldn’t come at a better time for me. As I sit here fretting about research, along comes
Dave Robertson with all the answers. His article, “What would we do if they banned personas?“, laid it all out for me and presented a very clear direction. Ultimately, personas are a tool to communicate and whether you use them or not, you still need to communicate. That’s my problem! Communicating through reports isn’t particularly satisfying or effective.

Even though Dave’s article was really focused on persona use, my takeaway was a reminder of the truly inspirational communication tools available:

• Steal ideas from great creative briefs by our friends, the account planners who know how to talk to creatives and convey emotion
• Get a lot better at telling stories from the field research
• Create an animation or film that explains the customer and their needs
• Create a briefing that uses the video and audio recordings to impart key learnings
• Hold a workshop to convey and discuss the key findings with the team and our client
• Have real customers participate in ideation sessions to help brainstorm solutions
• Use other participatory design techniques like paper-prototyping
• Post large images of research participants, artifacts and environments on a wall in the work space with explanations of key learnings
• Post diagrams explaining the customers’ key processes or thinking patterns

Go read the whole thing; lots of wisdom in it.

Biomimicry is a survey of solutions the natural world has come up with to solve problems. Everything from spider webs to photosynthesis to the way chimps medicate themselves in the wild is covered. The end chapter takes a look at what we could learn from nature and apply to various industrial processes. After all nature works at room temperature, gets power from the sun and generates no harmful by-products.

Gabriel’s essay takes a look what it would take to build Ultra Large Scale Systems, which he defines as something impossible to build because of today’s software engineering technology. For impossible, substitute “trillions of lines of code, millions of computers, real time requirements with life critical applications.” His essay spins off on a number of fascinating tangents and brushes upon the natural world, both from a civic planning and a biology perspective.

So from Biomimicry, we see an end result (e.g. oyster nacre, incredibly strong, stronger than man-made composites, safe) without really knowing how to recreate and apply it. And in Gabriel’s essay, he makes a good case for extending the Biomimicry lessons and applying them to these ultra large scale systems as well. What are the technical analogs to “room temperature, sunlight, water and no harmful by-products” for ultra scale system design?

From A New Kind of Building?, Maurice Martel “was interested in generating architectural structures subject to spatial constraints (such as a given area in which they need to fit).” So he “settled on a project in which he would run 2D cellular automata on irregular grids determined by arbitrary polygons.” His ultimate goal was to design an actual 3D structure.

Using Mathematica he was able to go from this:

To this:

I think what’s interesting is just how benign the result of the Mathematica-assisted design process. Give certain architects free reign, no restrictions and no context and you could very well end up with more folly than form (or function.)

Googling around, you’ll find many articles & books
discussing (usually) the film’s architecture and set design. You can read about “Tativille“, the modern metropolis built outside Paris for the filming and famous for being a grand masterpiece of architecture so expensive as to have bankrupted Tati and the production company. But there’s so much more to it than that….

Everytime I watch Playtime I get something else out of it. This last viewing left me impressed with all the poor product & environmental design Tati manufactured.

Screen grabs of some of the better examples:

This scene has an office security guy using the building’s intercom to announce a visitor. It’s a great example of obscure buttons, meaningless feedback, and needless complexity.

This scene shows a demonstration of a broom with headlights. It’s a fun scene: the demonstrator loads the batteries at the top, screws on the end piece with this ridiculously long little springy contact thing and then switches it on with a flourish. Great sound design too.

Here’s what happens when you design something without any consideration for the actual audience. The kitchen pass-through doesn’t actually fit the various serving platters.

More design in a vacuum. Notice the hanging adornments behind the bar, right at head level. The bartender can’t see his customers without ducking.

I don’t know why I like this one so much. The maitre d’ is always banging into the column, perfectly placed to be in the way. Also the entry isn’t wide enough for both the maitre d’ and guests to walk through so it’s always an awkward interaction.

If you look closely you can see the imprint of the chairs on the backs of the men’s suits. Nowadays maybe a Nintendo or Nike could get away with that, call it a guerilla marketing campaign, walk around with a logo on your back—it’s edgy!

The green neon cross beams it’s unappetizing glow over the food display. Who can decide what to eat? It all looks inedible and gross.

Thumbs up from me!