There’s been a lot of buzz online today about the news that mobile interface designer Matías Duarte is leaving Palm (now part of HP) and going to Google to be the user experience director for Android. And the consensus is that it’s good news for Android which, while a solid OS, has always been a bit lacking in visual design. At Palm, he was the vp of human interface and user experience — leading the…
 
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Back in the late 90′s and early 00′s, Quokka Sports was doing some pretty groundbreaking design. Their sites were unlike anything I’d seen online before. An amazing mix of raw data, bold images, and real-time data that really connected you to the events. Quokka was founded to cover the 1997-1998 Whitbread Round the World yacht race. After the race, they aimed to become the premiere digital sports media company. And they produced some great sites…
 
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Rhizome has a great post today Art in Your Pocket 2: Media Art for the iPhone and iPod Touch Graduates To The Next Level. It’s a really interesting collection of work that doesn’t normally get a lot of press. I’d love to copy/paste the entire post here.  But instead… go over and take a look yourself — and try downloading a few of the apps. They’re all pretty cool — each is pushing interactivity in its…
 
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Projection Mapping is a hot trend right now, and this piece from the UK collective Seeper, a promotion for Nokia Ovi Maps, is a beautiful interactive example. [The project] combined a high powered projection installation with dynamic face tracking, custom optical flow and a completely custom and crazy thing called arrow chess. The interactive projection mapping brings people right into the projection, from placing their face on the wall through to creating optical waves and…
 
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Since discovering it recently, I’ve really enjoyed the Monday Note blog. Today’s post by Frédéric Filloux, The lethal self-complacency of advertising, makes some bold statements that are hard not to agree with. He begins: Is advertising the next casualty of the on-going digital tsunami’s? For now, advertising looks like the patient who developed an asymptomatic form of cancer without realizing how sick he is. Such behavior usually results from excessive confidence in one’s body past…
 
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Over the past couple days, everywhere I turn it seems I’m finding stuff that has, for me, a nostalgic feel. So here’s my digital ramble… It first started with a series of posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6) at Rhizome on the demoscene. (Demos are computer-based audio-visual presentations that run in real-time with the goal being to show off programming, artistic, and musical skills.) I don’t follow the demoscene, but come across it from…
 
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Just announced are the winners of the Learning Lab Designers category of the 2010 Digital Media and Learning Competition. The competition is supported by the MacArthur Foundation and administered by HASTAC (the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory). The Digital Media and Learning Competition, now in its third year, is an annual effort designed to find — and to inspire — the most novel uses of new media in support of learning. In May…
 
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From precisioninformation.org: Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are developing future work environments for the emergency management community called Precision Information Environments (or PIEs). PIEs will provide tailored access to information and decision support capabilities in a system that supports the multiple user roles, contexts, and phases of emergency management, planning, and response. They have recently posted a future vision concept video demonstrating the five components of their R&D agenda: Tailoring information feeds based on…
 
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Information Aesthetics has a nice interview with Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg. After working for years at the IBM Visual Communication Lab, they’ve gone out on their own and founded a new data visualization firm, Flowing Media.  Their work is a inspiring mix of smart thinking and clever communication about the data being presented, allowing people to gain new insights into the content. And although their work tends to be primarially focused on data visualization, rather…
 
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Iron Man 2 opens today! And Engadget has posted a great collection of pictures and videos of interfaces that are used the film. Sure, we’ve seen a lot of this before — multi-touch Surface-like tables, Star Trek transparent screens, complex layered windows (any standard windowing os — mixed with a bit of old-school Unix), micro-projectors, and even a little magic — but who’s to say it’s not fun? The NYTimes review of the film describes…
 
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