I found the above diagram through celine celines blog who in turn found it at the post Life Below 600. While I can understand what’s trying to be said here (and I tend to scroll a lot), I think if you can’t deliver a good payoff above the first 600 pixels why would anyone scroll down any further?
Piers and PSFK have been pretty good supporters of the blog and helpful to me, so when he asked if I’d mention PSFK Conference New York 2010 on Friday, April 09, 2010 I said sure. Below are all the speakers—I’ve seen and hear a couple of them before and can attest to their smarts.
Colin Beavan – Green pioneer and journalist aka No Impact Man
John Dimatos – Lecturer concepting tech solutions for Unicef at NYU
Nick Felton – Designer and creator of the annual infographic Feltron Report
Zach Lieberman – Creative technologist whose work bridges the real world with the digital
Andrew Hoppin – CIO who leverages digital media to create social impact across New York
Grant McCracken – Anthropologist and author of the book Chief Culture Officer
Shantell Martin – Illustrator & DJ who creates vivid video-projection ‘Oras’
Steve Powers – Contemporary artist who recently created the city-wide A Love Letter For You
Erik Proulx – Creative catalyst who inspires peers about their future; filmmaker behind Lemonade
Tina Roth Eisenberg – Graphic designer; and global tastemaker through her blog SwissMiss
Rob Walker – national columnist and instigator of Significant Objects
There’s a good collection of short clips in the What Movie UIs Say About the Future. Looking at films like Minority Report, Ironman and even Microsoft’s newest products offers a glimpse of some people’s imagination. While I don’t agree with all the assessments in the post it contains enough stuff that it’s worth the read and look.
With spring just about here the last thing I want to do is go back in time and think about winter. But with that said photographer Laura Barisonzi has a great series titled Winter Surfing. I have a friend that does this crazy thing but I suppose with the proper gear anything can be fun.
When a person looks at a map they think of it as something tangible, hard to argue with. Lines have been drawn so it must be accurate. The above map that Greg points to illustrates that in WW1 that wasn’t always the case. He describes the maps action “as surveying the opposing edges of dug-in/fortified landscape to outline an amorphous contested zone”. Because of the nature of war and the fact that the soldiers were always on the move meant that the map wasn’t always accurate. Greg also describes in the post that he in turn is talking about that there was some friction between those creating the map and those that had to use the map.
By any measure the Fitbit is a really great piece of technology, or so I’ve read as I’ve never used one myself. As an idea it received great acclaim from TechCrunch. But as the blog Graphpaper goes into great depth of the writer’s experience one thing becomes clear—personal management of data. It’s not so much a beef about the product as the process.
In short, you just can’t lead a normal life with Fitbit. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the Fitbit experience, a lesson about the future of personal informatics, it’s that we simply won’t have accurate and reliable personal systems until the devices themselves are immune to these everyday emergencies and accidents and inconveniences.
I couldn’t help but feel the same way using RunKeeper for my iPhone. I still use it from time to time to track my walking, but even to press a couple buttons before I head to work seems a bit too much effort for what I’m going to get from it if I stop doing it for a day or two.
But by far the best response to Chris’ post was from Tiffehr. “I gave my FitBit to my dog. It actually works phenomenally well for him — I can see his data generated while I’m at work, including dog-walker visits and naps. I can monitor his weight and diet by setting up a very simple ‘menu’ of hand-entered foods”.
Edmonton (where I used to live) graphed the water consumption during the Olympic Gold Medal Hockey Game that pitted Canada vs the US. As the graph shows there’s some peak activity during the breaks between periods—essentially visualizing everyone flushing at the same time.
Not sure how I’d use this typeface though I imagine one letter reversed out in white on a black t shirt could be nice. Found at Type for you, Fingertype is credited to http://www.hellowman.nl
If you only have time to read a couple posts this Sunday morning, you should def. consider Core77 Wiretap: Portigal Consulting talk about the Analog Human and The Digital Machine as one to put in the cue. I’m friends with Steve but that’s not why I’m suggesting that people should read this. There’s a ton of great starting points for further discussion between design, marketing, technology and people. While I don’t necessarily agree with everything in the conversation there’s a lot to consider. These days I’m thinking about analytics, data and the way those elements influence design decisions. Steve mentions this quote…
We think of people with Bunsen burners and spreadsheets. It’s like the opposite of the Scientific Method: you’ve created this paradigm where it’s impossible—you reject any information that’s new because it doesn’t fit the framework of the information you already have.
There’s a lot more to the conversation that I don’t need to repeat wholesale, so just check out the post. And thanks to Christopher Butler for passing it on to me.
While it shouldn’t come as a surprise that larger people are influencing the way that some products are designed, I found the article Plus-size furniture grows with America’s girth fascinating to read. The LA Times talks about how some furniture companies are adjusting their products as society grows. Chairs are getting wider, bigger and marketed to people in as furniture that can site more than one person—though in reality will probably just sit one.
