Nice writeup from Manny Tan, including some gotchas on choosing HTML5 for a role usually occupied by Flash (which has first-class blend mode support).

"For more than two decades, in such landmark studies asThe Second Self andLife on the Screen, Sherry Turkle has challenged our collective imagination with her insights about how technology enters our private worlds. In The Inner History of Devices, she describes her process, an approach that reveals how what we make is woven into our ways of seeing ourselves. She brings together three traditions of listening--that of the memoirist, the clinician, and the ethnographer. Each informs the others to compose an inner history of devices. We read about objects ranging from cell phones and video poker to prosthetic eyes, from Web sites and television to dialysis machines."

TO SEE how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read.

Love this project! RT @helvetica: new work: Can We Talk? - - A chat client for serious conversations. #arthack weekend

"You must train the robot that will replace you (or at least train the engineer building it)"

My critique of @databloom's Planetary as a meaningless fantasy interface failed to realize it's all based on metadata!

Apple Design Award winner, via daringfireball

Grave popularity contest on @mlkshk:

How personal should a final resting place be? Two memorial designers talk about the brave new world of headstone carving"

"What other natural urges do we have that have not been exploited by game companies?"

There is no such thing as a bad font, that being said these are terrible fonts with beautiful letters.

Design of causal diagrams: Barr art chart, Lombardi diagrams, evolutionary trees, Feynman diagrams, timelines

The Kinected Conference by MIT Media Lab uses all kinds of tricks to help improve people's focus and discussions through video conferencing. For instance, if you are faced with a few people around a table on the screen, the Kinect can pick up which person is talking and blur the other faces out, keeping focus on the speaker (demonstrated above). It also times how long someone has been speaking (useful for timed presentations), freeze frame if you want to do something else but make it look like you are listening, and use augmented reality for making projects.

It's done by using C++ software and openFrameworks library, plus two networked locations with video screens, the Kinect, calibrated microphones, and a lot of algorithms (see the map plan). Check out the video below and convince yourself that you don't wish you could use this at work.

I don’t mind real-world UI, textures, trompe-l'œil — as long as it doesn’t trigger the part of me that feels like it has to reach in and fix things.

I don’t want to have to go wash my hands, blow off the eraser crumbs, wind up the tape measure, tear off the bits of paper.

If this rumored new UI for iCal is real and not just a mockup by a misanthropic Photoshop sadist, then I’m going to be distracted forever by the bits of torn paper under the toolbar.

The uncanny similarity among the three designs — the painstakingly protracted approaches to the galleries — underscores the challenges the architects faced when trying to preserve the essence of these museums while making room for the cafes, bookstores, event spaces and education departments that have become regular features of the contemporary museum experience.

But there is something else behind the uniformity of these plans as well. What were once eccentric creations have become polite and well behaved. Gorgeously crafted, they are about reinforcing the existing cultural consensus — not rebelling against it.

Speeder Reader couples the notion of dynamic typography with the notion of the car as interface. A speed-reading protocol called RSVP (for Rapid Serial Visual Presentation) allows people to learn to read up to 2000 words per minute. This is because it flashes words or short phrases onto the screen in front of you, affixed in one spot; you don't have to move your eyes around a page to read.

Speeder Reader gives you a gas pedal to control your rate of speed-reading and a steering wheel to navigate between streams of text. You can also jump forward or backwards in the text (by sentence, paragraph, or chapter).

In Western culture, the act of driving is very personally empowering (just like reading!). By combining the driving interface with dynamic text, we're offering a model of reading as a medium that gets you places. Here's a preprint of the Computers and Graphics journal paper that goes into more detail on the design and technology behind Speeder Reader.

SPEEDER READER credits
Maribeth Back, Jonathan Cohen, Rich Gold

conducts creative, participatory research that aims to temporarily transform public spaces dominated by non-public agendas. Using performance and conversation, we investigate social and political "tiny things".

These have included corporate ads, street names, and post-9/11 security terminology. The Institute markets dissent through its research reports in the form of maps, books and videos.

Just for kicks. Themes: semantic web (e.g. linked data, conversational interfaces — though these are considered to be web 4.0 by some?), metaverse (a.k.a. living in the ether/augmented reality), brain-computer interfaces(!)

Spot-on production values in this video by @Coudal for Field Notes: (filed under: good design can sell *anything*)

We should all stop blogging/tweeting/etc and instead do video keynote presentations like this: Way cool.

"biases in computer systems can be difficult to identify let alone remedy because of the way the technology engages and extenuates them. Computer systems, for instance, are compar- atively inexpensive to disseminate, and thus, once developed, a biased system has the potential for widespread impact. If the system becomes a standard in the field, the bias becomes pervasive. If the system is complex, and most are, biases can remain hidden in the code, difficult to pinpoint or explicate, and not necessarily disclosed to users or their clients. Further- more, unlike in our dealings with biased individuals with whom a potential victim can negotiate, biased systems offer no equivalent means for appeal."

"Social software both creates and cures FOMO (fear of missing out)." —@caterina

not your typical etsy, except the letterpress—but used to good effect!

Neuromatters is a neurotechnology research & development company designing and building neural signal processing and brain-computer interface systems for capturing and decoding brain activity. Founded by recognized neuroengineering and machine learning experts, Neuromatters' goal is to evolve brain-computer interface systems into application areas where information overload is prevalent.

The Practice of Typography; Modern Methods of Book Composition by Theodore Low De Vinne, 1904. Free download.

scroll down to the table of geologic time

an ever-changing, ever-increasing variety of views onto the world’s most popular web services like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, youTube, Netflix, Dropbox, Instagram, and so forth. Some of these instruments will be lyrical, some playful, some analytic, many of them combinations of all three, but all will provide compelling and engaging handles on the information that matters to you most, each one evolving and improving over time, building on your understanding of its performance. Starting later this year, you’ll find these instruments on iOS and Android devices, like tablets, phones, and media consoles in the home.

couches in galleries!

Big Dog’s movements and reactions – it’s behaviour in response to being kicked by one of it’s human testers (about 36 seconds into the video above) is not expressed in a designed face, or with sad ‘Dreamworks’ eyebrows – but in pure reaction – which uncannily resembles the evasion and unsteadiness of a just-abused animal.

The 15% tip - standard in New York City - is now unavailable, unless you go through the mental arithmetic and manual entry of the amount. But beyond the annoyance factor, there's the "you've got to be kidding" element. For a commodity service like a point-A-to-B cab ride, what would rate a 30% tip? (Let alone a permanent "30% tip" button in the interface?) The lesson: details matter. One change to one button in the interface changes the experience from delightful to annoying, leaving the rider feeling taken advantage of.

People have been distracted from reading for the better part of several generations now. And yet, we still read. If our web habits are any indicator, we read more than we used to. But the shape of that reading—the type—determines whether we lose ourself in that reading, or else skitter from one text to the next. Design a distracted reading experience, and you'll have distracted readers. Design for immersion—and, well, don't be surprised if it works.

Design nerds: free PDFs of the official report on the 1972 Munich Olympics designed by Otl Aicher—tons of great images:

Interesting comment on Khoi's Google post about Apple firing usability experts. "Smart folks but not product people."