Sound Bubbles from Charlie Williams on Vimeo.

Download it here. (via)

• Because of its harder edges and probably also because of its reduced thickness, it doesn’t lie as comfortably in the hand.
• Because of its symmetrical shape its pretty much impossible to tell apart front- and backside by touch alone. With the 3GS i always knew which side the screen was on when pulling it out of a pocket. With the iPhone 4 i have no idea and have to spend a splitsecond to figure it out. I find this surprisingly annoying.

Things Organized Neatly is just what the name suggests: a wonderful collection of things organized neatly.

Augmented City 3D from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Previously: Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop

The book Designing Obama offers a comprehensive look into the design and visual branding of Obama’s presidential campaign, written by its design director Scott Thomas. Aside from the book and iPad app, there’s also a free digital pdf edition available for download. (via)

Adding multi-touch sensing to the surface of a mouse has the potential to substantially increase the number of interactions available to the user. However, harnessing this increased bandwidth is challenging, since the user must perform multi-touch interactions while holding the device and using it as a regular mouse. In this paper we describe the design challenges and formalize the design space of multi-touch mice interactions. From our design space categories we synthesize four interaction models which enable the use of both multi-touch and mouse interactions on the same device. We describe the results of a controlled user experiment evaluating the performance of these models in a 2D spatial manipulation task typical of touch-based interfaces and compare them to interacting directly on a multi-touch screen and with a regular mouse. We observed that our multi-touch mouse interactions were overall slower than the chosen baselines; however, techniques providing a single focus of interaction and explicit touch activation yielded better performance and higher preferences from our participants. Our results expose the difficulties in designing multi-touch mice interactions and define the problem space for future research in making these devices effective.

I’m rather sceptical of touch-sensitive mice (like the Apple’s Magic Mouse) – i’m pretty sure they suck for all gaming purposes. (via)

Social networking sites deal with several different types of user data, and it’s essential to separate them.

Schneier on Security: A Revised Taxonomy of Social Networking Data

The video installation “crossroads (what to do)” deals with the influence of others onto one’s own path of life in an abstract way.

crossroads (what to do) from Garvin Nolte on Vimeo.

The iPhone, however, is not only dependent upon highly developed systems in its production, as Banham acknowledges all such objects have always been, but is also now equally dependent in its operation upon a vast array of infrastructures, data ecologies, and device networks.  Even acknowledging this, though, and realizing that its operative value comes from its ability to tap those data ecologies and attendant socially-constituted bodies of knowledge, it is still possible to miss the landscapes that it produces. Until we see that the iPhone is as thoroughly entangled into a network of landscapes as any more obviously geological infrastructure (the highway, both imposing carefully limited slopes across every topography it encounters and grinding/crushing/re-laying igneous material onto those slopes) or industrial product (the car, fueled by condensed and liquefied geology), we will consistently misunderstand it.

a preliminary atlas of gizmo landscapes