Category: Links

“Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen.”

Interesting look at Apple’s methods and what it really means to be as innovative as they are.

What’s the deal with the huge wiimote in this trailer? AYIM looks like it’ll offer a clean break with ‘traditional’ video game aesthetics.

Interesting installation that allows kids to create a piece of original music and a video all in a playful manner.

A solid piece that dissects the Tim Langdell / The Edge / Mobigame in an even-handed manner.

The first few speakers for the most interesting interaction design event in NL have been announced.

My service design friends at 31Volts discuss how they use a camera originally used for tracking pets in user research.

My friends in Malmö will have one of their installations placed permanently in Dale: “Telemegaphone Dale is a seven-metres tall loudspeaker sculpture on top of the Jøtulshaugen mountain overlooking the idyllic Dalsfjord in Western Norway. Anyone can dial +47 90 369389 and have the sound of their voice projected out across the fjord, the valley and the village of Dale.” How awesome is that?

Nicolas finds a book on designing responsive environments. From 1985. From reading his notes it seems that, back then, someone decided to write the book we’d need in the future.

“He reached for his loaded AS3. It felt cool and heavy in his hand, reassuring, but the iPhones were freebasing on C, real strong shit. How was he gonna keep pace?” Possibly the coolest intro to a tech event I have ever seen. If I were close to Hove, I would be there in a, um, Flash.

A group of clever Finnish researchers have gathered all the materials they produced in a project where they looked at creativity and innovation techniques for game design. If you manage to plough through the unwieldy Flash interface you’ll find a PDF of a booklet that came with an ideation kit they sent to games companies. It’s a useful resource that lead a group of my students to create some really interesting concepts. It’s sure to stay in my toolbelt for times to come.

Interesting collection of video clips recorded at a recent evening where plans for a new Utrecht media lab were discussed.

“Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova invert this common perspective on data-enabled experiences and speculate on the existence of an “asynchronous” city, a place where the database, the wireless signal, the rfid tag, and the geospatial datum are not necessarily the guiding principles of the urban computing dream” It’s about time someone challenged what is becoming ubicomp dogma. Knowing Julian and Nicolas, this will be chewy brainfood.

“This book presents a family of social web design principles and interaction patterns that we have observed and codified, thus capturing user-experience best practices and emerging social web customs for web 2.0 practitioners.” Slightly sceptical, but who knows, this might be good.

On demand printing and board games. Why didn’t I see this coming? Via Tom.

Tom shares a little info on the making of the Dopplr iPhone app, in particular the map bits. It’s nice to see you can get so far nowadays with “easily accessible libraries, tools and open data.”