October 2010
21 posts
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Welcome to 2010, part 2
Yesterday, I began to review IDEO’s predictions for 2010, which they made in the year 2000. I’ve already covered the enabling technologies they were counting on; suffice it to say that we’re a little behind. But what does that mean for the product concepts they designed? Did IDEO strike out, or have some of their predictions come true even without the prevalence of flexible LCDs and holography?
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Welcome to 2010
In the March 2000 issue of BusinessWeek, there was a special report titled Welcome to 2010. In it, IDEO envisioned technological advances and the products they would enable 10 years into the future. That time is now, and I thought it might be fun to take a look at their predictions to see how close they came.
To focus its own future, IDEO recently launched Project 2010, a six-month program to...
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App App
In July of ’09, I made a posted titled “What’s Hiding in My Apps Folder?” I bemoaned the fact that I had 145 items in my Applications folder, many of which I had forgotten about or didn’t even know what they did.
My first conclusion is that I should take some time to clean out my Applications folder. My second conclusion is that I think I’ll try introducing a little bit of organization with some...
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Design Matters
Of all the design-related podcasts I listen to, Design Matters with Debbie Millman is my favorite. Debbie’s manner with her guests is warm and inviting—alluring even. She takes a very personable approach to her interviews that makes it seem more like you are listening in on a private conversation. I had been enjoying the show late last year as she spoke with Tim Brown and Stefan Sagmeister, but as...
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Everything I know about interaction design, I...
Okay, that’s not at all accurate. But there are some basic lessons to be learned. Yesterday, I explained that fear is the result of a bad experience, unless you desire to be scared, in which case a simulation of a bad experience is in order. I described several qualities of a haunted house that make for a good bad experience:
Disorientation
Surprise
Lack of visibility
Tight quarters
Malice
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Designing for Good Bad Experiences
Feeling frightened is the result of a bad experience, unless, of course, you want to be frightened and purposefully engage in an experience expressly for that purpose. A haunted house, then, is designed to facilitate a bad experience. So, what makes for a good haunted house?
Disorientation - When people can’t tell where they are, where they have been, or where they are going, it is unsettling....
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Haunted Prototype
Building a haunted house is an exercise in prototyping. For one thing, there is a very short, very strict deadline. The whole house has to come together within a couple weeks, and it has to be ready for the opening night. And of course, everything in the house is temporary. There is no need for a prop to last more than a couple of weeks. For these reasons, any construction must be done quickly and...
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Photo Synesi
A good friend, former co-worker, and fellow interaction designer has just launched a web-based service that he has been working on for, oh, at least a year. Derek Wahila is a gifted designer with some background in programming who also happens to be a talented photographer. He has been collaborating with another photographer, David Wells, on a service that will allow photographers of any...
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Back to Basics: Prototype Types, part 3
Finishing up the series…
Physical Models One of the more common prototypes, the physical model allows us to get our hands all over the product. It may not be the correct weight or color. It probably doesn’t have the exact texture, as it is most likely not made of the material that will be used for the finished piece. Or, it may be created to exactly represent a particular attribute, like the...
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Back to Basics: Prototype Types, part 2
Continuing from where I left off yesterday…
Digital 3-D Models When designing a physical object, 3-D computer modeling allows for formal exploration of shapes, volumes, and mechanical relationships before sparing time and expense on physical materials. Of course, there are the added benefits of being able to generate exact specifications to build the object or send it directly to a 3-D printer....
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Back to Basics: Prototype Types, part 1
There are many types of prototypes ranging from low to high fidelity. They are useful at different points of the design process, answering different types of questions and communicating different qualities of the products they represent.
Sketches Some may not consider sketches to be prototypes, but I see sketching as the first in a long continuum of prototypes. It is a starting place for...
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Museings
Back in 1995, some good friends of mine (though I didn’t know them at the time), participated in an Apple Design Project. They were students in design at Carnegie Mellon University, and the project was a semester long course. They designed and prototyped a digital music stand for the symphony musician. They named it the Muse. The user interface was exquisite, the industrial design of the stand was...
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Designer’s Toolbelt: The IxD Library
Dan Saffer, author of Designing for Interaction and Designing Gestural Interfaces, just announced a great new resource for Interaction Designers. He is curating The IxD Library.
The IxD Library is a collection of books, articles, and presentations of interest to interaction designers. It attempts to not be the definitive collection of every piece of content about interaction design, only the...
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In The Cloud We Trust
Because I make daily posts, I typically write the post for a given day the night before. I use Tumblr’s cueing feature to schedule when I want the post to go up. Yesterday, I noticed that the post I had written Sunday night and cued up for Monday hadn’t published. I tried to open my cue and was greeted by a nicely designed message stating that they were working on upgrading a feature and that I...
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So much I don’t know
I’m deep into a complete redesign of my church’s website, which hasn’t changed in the past 10 years. While I know HTML and CSS very well and work on web-based applications on a daily basis, I am woefully out of touch with website implementation. I depend on the developers I work with to do all of the JavaScript and server-side functionality. Now, I’m having to implement a website on my own, and...
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Interaction 11 Program Announced
Last Friday, we announced the full program for Interaction 11.
At long last, we’re announcing the full Interaction11 program — and what a lineup it is! Check out our full list of lightning sessions, workshops, and the first few of many special events we’ve got planned. Highlights include:
Smart pre-conference workshops where you’ll learn from pros like Todd Zaki Warfel, Indi Young, Karen...
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