There’s lots of design activity around how to bring more digital services to drivers, but the passenger often gets left out of the fun. So, it’s interesting to see this work from GM on how to enhance the passengers’ experience. For their Windows of Opportunity project, they focused on engaging children in the rear seats. Apparently passengers often feel disconnected from the surrounding environment. So, the project brief asked “to turn car windows into interactive…
 
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FastCompany recently posted a insightful analysis, definitely worth a read, of the challenges the auto industry faces as they work to embrace consumer electronics and other ditigal trends. The title begins “Cars Are Horrible Mobile Tech Devices…” and details the root of the problem: “Fast as they they may go, automobiles are some of the slowest-moving mobile devices in the industry, plagued by fragmented software ecosystems, unwelcoming development environments, and old-world product cycles.” Last year,…
 
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Here’s a charming Augmented Reality vision piece, “Medley,” created by Mattias Wozniak and Björn Svensson as part of their Masters Thesis at Lund University in Sweden. It’s full of great, beautifully delicate, examples how AR could be incorporated into everyday life. A nice contrast to some of the alternative nightmarish advertising or boring corporate scenarios. Medley is based around the notion of “augmented reality visor seamlessly integrated into your world.” With this visor as a…
 
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Monday Note has a great post by Frédéric Filloux on Reconciling efficiency with serendipity. He starts with, what should be for us designers, an encouraging quote: “For digital media publishers, Design is the biggest challenge.” He then talks about how trapped we remain by traditional notions of publishing: After more than fifteen years of internet presence, many online publications are still having trouble moving past the newspaper metaphor. Columns, pages, sections, vertical scrolling…, the old-world…
 
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In a short but interesting piece in the Harvard Business Review, John Maeda & Becky Bermont provoke with Why Business Leaders Should Act More like Artists. Their three big “ahas” around breaking stereotypes and working like artists are 1) artists constantly collaborate, 2) artists are talented communicators, and 3) artists learn how to learn together. All good stuff. But I found their notion of artist as leader (related to my previous post mentioning the designer…
 
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