Paul Saffo on spotting the future:
There are four indicators I look for: contradictions, inversions, oddities, and coincidences.
8 Visionaries on How They Spot the Future | Wired.com.
Twitter Digest for Week Ending 2012-05-27
- RT @smashingmag: We removed FB buttons and traffic from Facebook increased. Reason: instead of "liking" articles, readers share it on th … #
User experience is strategy, not design
Peter Merholz:
The practice of user experience is most successful when focused on strategy, vision, and planning, not design and execution. In other words, UX adds value by bringing design practices to strategic endeavors. This means generative and exploratory user research, ideation and concept generation, scenario writing and roadmap planning. The impact of those strategic endeavors will not be limited to product and service design, but should be felt across business development, corporate development, marketing, engineering, sales, and customer service.
User experience is strategy, not design
The Most Important Decisions are Non-Technical
While it’s fun to discuss whether an application should be implemented in Ruby or Clojure, to write beautiful and succinct code, to see how far purely functional programming can be taken, these are all secondary to defining the user experience, to designing a comfortable interface, to keeping things simple and understandable, to making sure you’re building something that’s actually usable by the people you’re designing it for. Those are more important decisions.
The Most Important Decisions are Non-Technical.
Jon Kolko:
Design methods are a tremendous way to teach and learn design. They have a structure and form, and you can offer a student both a set of steps to follow and a place to start. There’s a sense to design method that, if you follow the steps, you’ll arrive at an ending, and so there’s implicit trust placed in the method: it will lead me to finality, to a solution. And that’s factually accurate, because it will lead you to a solution. An experience of action is critical in design for building a foundation of skill, for self-reflection, and most importantly, for critique. You have to design something, and then reflect on the process of design, in order to learn how to design. A method forces this to occur. [...]
But a design method won’t lead you to a good solution, because a design method has no natural relationship to the content of the problem. There’s no presumption of quality in the method, as each method is simply a series of artificial constraints that are introduced into a particular design context in order to help frame it. Personas, flow diagrams, ecosystem diagrams, 2x2s: these are ways of structuring problems and solutions. They don’t speak of the particulars.
Without Design Methods, I Feel Like I Am Cheating. (via)
Ten Commandments of Good Design
- Good design is innovative
- Good design makes a product useful
- Good design is aesthetic
- Good design helps us to understand a product
- Good design is unobtrusive
- Good design is honest
- Good design is durable
- Good design is consequent to the last detail
- Good design is concerned with the environment
- Good design is as little design as possible
- Dieter Rams
Leap Motion
What exactly is The Leap?
The Leap is a small iPod sized USB peripheral that creates a 3D interaction space of 8 cubic feet to precisely interact with and control software on your laptop or desktop computer. It’s like being able to reach into the computer and pull out information as easily as reaching into a cookie jar.
The Leap senses your individual hand and finger movements independently, as well as items like a pen. In fact, it’s 200x more sensitive than existing touch-free products and technologies. It’s the difference between sensing an arm swiping through the air and being able to create a precise digital signature with a fingertip or pen.
Leap Motion. Available for preorder now with an estimated shipping date around late 2012 to early 2013, but i bet these guys will be acquired by Google / Apple / Microsoft / some other tech giant before they ship their first unit.
Touché: Touch and Gesture Sensing for the Real World
Touché is a new sensing technology that proposes a novel Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing technique that can not only detect a touch event, but simultaneously recognize complex configurations of the human hands and body during touch interaction. This allows to significantly enhances touch interaction in a broad range of applications, from enhancing conventional touchscreens to designing interaction scenarios for unique use contexts and materials. For example, in our explorations we added complex touch and gesture sensitivity not only to computing devices and everyday objects, but also to the human body and liquids. Importantly, instrumenting objects and material with touch sensitivity is easy and straightforward: a single wire is sufficient to make objects and environments touch and gesture sensitive.
Disney Research: Touché: Touch and Gesture Sensing for the Real World | CHI 2012 Paper.
Magnetic Wrist Piercing iPod Mount
By Dave Hurban. Reuters did a short interview with him. via.
Twitter Digest for Week Ending 2012-05-20
- RT @chartier: People scoff at spending 99¢ on an app that took months to make, yet hurl money at Kickstarter projects that, technically, … #
- RT @annegalloway: Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.) – Walt Whitman #
- Honestly, i didn't think it would be quite this bad, even after the open beta weekend. #
- What i want to do: Play D3
What i actually do: Trying to make my way past overwhelmed battle.net authentication servers.
Not fun. #
