Striking palette

striking-ipad-design

Striking iPad design and palette for this new Katachi iPad app (featuring Chinese textile industry in this screen)

Katachi Magazine covers design culture in its widest sense, creative individuals and social projects. Watch the video to see how it works (or download a free issue for the iPad).

It’s created using the company’s own publishing system, Origami Engine. The company hasn’t said so far whether it’s going to licence it to other firms, but from the explicit detail that it’s provided about the Origami Engine, it seems likely.

Deluge in Norway

300,000 Norwegians move house every year. If the pattern made by this process could be compressed into one short animation, what would would it look like? What could you learn about your country from such an animation, if anything?

Deluge is a C++ application designed to answer these questions. The underlying data was generated by cross referencing Norwegian tax records from 2006 and 2007 to find changes in postal codes.

HT @Even Westvang via @Notcot

GE Data Viz

Lovely and simple.

Over the past few weeks, Fanthom have being building two interactive installation pieces for the lobby of GE’s headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut. The pieces are part of the GE Works campaign, which describes and organizes the company’s work with four verbs: Powering, Curing, Building, and Moving. Fathom’s job was to show how data can illustrate these first two activities.

When to Build

We shape our tools and our tools shape us.

As more of the tools we live with every day become digital instead of physical, our opportunity – and responsibility – as designers is multiplying. We live in a world of screens, and we are the ones who decide what goes on them. We are in a unique position to have an impact – one that lasts longer than the next redesign or the latest technology. What happens when we stop thinking of ourselves not just as developers or experience designers, and take up the mantle as a new generation of product designers for a digital world?

HT @Wilson Miner

Forest Time

You should really check this out: Click it for the enlarged view

Active desktops are a smart and nifty Microsoft concept that build in desktop support for HTML/RSS feeds allowing weather, news and updates to propagate to your attention

Most active desktop concepts fall into looking pedestrian but this one really caught my attention.

Sensory box

ENVISION : Step into the sensory box. Sous ce nom se cache l’expérience immersive offerte par ALCATEL-LUCENT à ses clients lors du dernier Mobile World Congress. Une expérience à base de vidéo mapping conçue par l’agence SUPERBIEN et le département New Media de l’Agence \Auditoire. Le public était invité à entrer dans un cube et à découvrir une vision artistique de la tagline de l’événement : Transforming the mobile experience.

Hat tip to @gnatgnat.com

Form, Function

While a binary timepiece will certainly up your geek cred, it’s not very useful for providing at-a-glance information. Robert Dabi’s Zero concept above, however, remains simple, beautiful, and amazingly enough, useful, all that same time. Practical too if he can coax a batch of round LCD displays into a production run. More pics and video after the break.

Caught up with some amusing reader feedback:

Awful design: Forcing the user to add an extra decode step in order to adapt its function to their design narrative. The function of the device (time display in this case) should not be subsumed by the design. Period.

Designer: Robert Dabizero

Useful, usable, delightful

“Useful, usable, delightful” are three words that inspire every project. Great article with James Hilton, Chief creative officer, AKQA in this Guardian article about design.

I would add – classical designs aspire to be timeless for decades, whereas websites design aspires, at best, to stand for a few months. That’s where modern digital design has it’s challenges from evolving the methods.

Vectorial Elevation

Vectorial Elevation is an interactive artwork that allows participants to transform the sky over Vancouver, Canada. Using a three-dimensional interface, this web site lets you design huge light sculptures by directing 20 robotic searchlights located around English Bay. A web page is made for each participant with photos of their design from four cameras located around the city.

RAF Ressington

Retro visual bizarrely named ‘Gardeners Question Time for the Web’. It’s a podcast about web design, web standards and features people like Mark Boulton from the former air command of RAF Ressington.

Information Aesthetics

information-aesthetics

Inspired by Lev Manovich’s definition of ‘information aesthetics’. This infosthetics site explores the symbiotic relationship between creative design and the field of information visualization. Found a great visual library of assets on ning.

More specifically, [infosthetics.com] collects projects that represent data or information in original or intriguing ways. Since its conception in December 2004, several other terms have been introduced within the academic world for similar phenomena, ranging from ‘Information Aesthetic Visualization’ (PDF) over ‘Casual Information Visualization’ (PDF) to ‘Artistic Data Visualization’ (PDF).

Marissa Mayer on Charlie Rose

Ms. Mayer came off as someone who has an amazing combination of common sense and intellect that is rare in technology. It was interesting to hear her explain the development of Google’s products and how they have the user in mind. Mayer is earnest and charming, perhaps too charming. What’s her fascination with Roy Lichtenstein and pop art?

A comment on Charlie blog said:

There’s something depressing – even degrading – re social-computing. Even (or especially?) this. Face-book, twitter, myspace, yadda yadda. More demeaning, too-often witless, self-serving proselytizing political or commercial peddling.

Beyond mathematics, science etc the cost-benefit for computers plummets – possibly into negative territory. The diverted time and thought on vacuous social exchanges would doubtless go along way toward solving (their own?) problems.

Seed


Seed Magazine content navigator. They are flying the “Science is culture” trademark with strong aesthetics and design sensibility.

“The Universe in 2009. In 2009, we are celebrating curiosity and creativity with a dynamic look at the very best ideas that give us reason for optimism. Rethink your assumptions and pose better questions about the future”

Reuters Mission

Open data is to media what open source is to technology. It is an approach to content creation that explicitly recognizes the value of implicit user data. The internet is the first medium to give a voice to the attention that people pay to it. Successful open data companies listen for and amplify the rich data that their audiences produce.

Reuters Thompson’s highly scalable value proposition for the digital world. That’s the “why”—- the “how” is a much more complex vector to do with illuminating “value” through a series of “simple is smart” interactions.

GE Ecomagination

Ogilvy PR Worldwide graciously spoke about somebody else’s new creative concept from GE. At first I thought, ha, that’s a fake, no way! Try it out here for yourself: http://ge.ecomagination.com. It turns out that this code is from an augmented FLARToolKit. FLARToolkit will detect the marker from input image and calculate the camera position in the three dimension space. Something like Helper library are planned to add but further processing like synthesize the 3D Graphics needs to implemented by yourself.

From SwissMiss