Category: design
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When Every Page Is Your Homepage
"Instead of adding new flooring and fixtures, they've taken the house down to the foundation" Reuters are redesigning their site from the ground up and the approach that they're taking with it is fascinating. Most websites (news services included) put a lot of focus on the homepage to draw people into the site in the…
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Longplayer, and the Long-term View
Longplayer is Jem Finer's intriguing project to write and perform a one thousand year long musical composition: "It began playing at midnight on the 31st of December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again". As part of…
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On The Future Of Feature Writing
Multi-chapter, multimedia, highly immersive digital features from publishers seem to be becoming quite the thing. The latest is the rather lovely ESPN Grantland story of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, which follows on from their similar feature on The Long, Strange Trip of Dock Ellis. Then there was the beautiful Pitchfork cover story on…
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The 3D Printed Building
I've written a couple of times about Enrico Dini, the Italian who has developed a 3D printing machine that is big enough to print houses. At Next Berlin I saw a talk from architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars (from Universe Architecture) whose vision is to take this technology and 3D print not just a small dwelling, but…
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Kowloon Walled City, Podcasts and Sabbaticals
After a hiatus I've suddenly (and somewhat randomly) started listening to podcasts again. The end of this intermission was marked with this episode from Roman Mars' 99% Invisible series on the subject of the Kowloon Walled City, a 6.5 acre enclave in Hong Kong that became home for 300 interconnected high rise buildings that grew organically over…
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Where Traditional Design Thinking Meets Startups
So many mobile apps deliver relatively poor user experiences, or else are skeuomorphically trying to take traditional formats, assumptions or models and reapply them to a mobile experience (like Apple's newstand). Craig Mod talks about this in this wonderful post on 'Subcompact publishing' in which he deals with the inadequacies of many existing publishing apps…
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Stamen’s Watercolour Maps
Thanks to a tweet from Tom Uglow, I happened across these wonderful watercolour maps from Stamen design. I've long been a fan of Stamen's visualisation work. They were one of FastCompany's 50 most innovative companies last year and have done some great work with MTV, MSNBC, BMW, Digg and LOCOG which I'm a fan of. But…
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Organised Complexity
This is an image from the Blue Brain project, showing a network of 30 million connections between the 10,000 neurons that make up just one neocortical column. Our brains contain around ten million times this many neurons in total. Manuel Lima (a senior UX design lead at Microsoft Bing) uses this as illustration in this wonderful…
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The Man Who Prints Houses
I wrote about Enrico Dini a couple of years ago. Enrico has developed a 3D printing technology large enough to print buildings. Yes, buildings. It uses sand combined with an inorganic binder to print structures in stone with no human intervention. Constructions which are strong, cheap, environmentally-friendly, and rather amazing. The technology allows the design of…
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Digital Intimacy And Gestures
There's some rather lovely work here by Marco Triverio, an interaction designer at IDEO, playing around with (and disrupting) the asynchronous nature of much non-verbal communication over mobile devices. Feel Me experiments with different ways of creating a 'sweet, playful connection with the person on the other side'. I'm quite taken with some of the ideas…