Category: design
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An Exit Is Not Happiness
Thanks to Liz Danzico for pointing at designer Tony Chu's response to an answer posted on Quora by Mike Sellers explaining some common blind spots for first time entrepreneurs. Mike's answers in bold, Tony's response in italics. An idea is not a design, but it is an invitation to a journey. A design is not a…
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#Firestarters 2: Design Thinking In Planning – The Event
Might Design Thinking, instrumental in bringing human-centred design principles to innovation processes, change the practice of planning? Is it relevant? These were the questions tackled in the latest Firestarters event – part of the series I'm curating for Google to facilitate different thinking and debate around some of the more interesting and challenging issues facing the practice…
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B-Squares
Oooh, a modular electronics system that can bring solar power, energy storage, and interactivity instantly to a whole range of stuff. Yes please. God I love Kickstarter.
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Parsing Nature
"Visual experience, if attended to, tells us that the things of nature are uncountable but connected; unpredictable but patterned; nothing to do with us and everything to do with us." Stephen Taylor Over the Christmas break I read Alain De Botton's The Pleasures And Sorrows Of Work, a fantastically evocative series of essays on a…
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Journalism In The Age Of Data
"The ability to take data – to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it – that's going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades…Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is…
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Design Thinking, Agile Enterprise
The slow death of Dopplr was a sad thing to read. Whatever the reasons behind it, the atrophy of such an elegantly designed and executed idea is a cheerless thing to behold. But unfortunately it's symptomatic of something of a pattern (MySpace, Bebo, Friends Reunited). It's no accident that strong design thinking played such a…
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Put A Grok On It
BBC Dimensions, the prototype designed by BERGLondon that "takes important places, events and things, and overlays them onto a map of where you are" rightly got some twitter love over the last few days. It's a lovely idea. One of the things I liked most about the story of how it came about was Matt…
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Art From Code
"Generative art refers to art that has been generated, composed, or constructed in an algorithmic manner through the use of systems defined by computer software algorithms, or similar mathematical or mechanical or randomised autonomous processes." Thanks to Alan for sharing this. Keith Peters writes code. But he also creates breathtaking pieces of art, derived of…
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Cooking Dinner With The iPad
Early iPad content apps seem to have suffered from a McLuhan-esque propensity to consider a new technology through the lens of the old, and what Jakob Nielsen called a 'crushing print metaphor'. There's perhaps an inevitability to the inconsistency in usability that Nielsen described, but the iPad is a re-imagined interface, and so requires re-imagined…
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Gesture-Based Computing
What makes something interesting? It's an intriguing question. According to research by Paul Silvia (Univ of North Carolina Dept of Psychology) it's a cluster of variables around novelty-complexity, combined with a cluster of comprehension variables. In simple language, in order to be interesting, something has to be both new and understandable. I think one of…