designcult

Quick links #4

• Shakespeare Searched - Stunningly useful (if you like Shakespeare) search from Clusty. The surrounding text and citation features are key. Some questions, though: Does the clustering actually add value (beyond the character and works facets)? How could you extend / combine this to make a more general literature search? Who thought "Clusty" was a good product name, anyway?
• Emotional clothing - "Bubelle, the "blushing dress" comprises two layers, the inner one is equipped with sensors that respond to changes in the wearer's emotions and projects them onto the outer textile." I'm very interested in the intersection of interaction design and clothing design -- most of the work right now seems to be in the "arty & experimental" phase like Bubelle or the firefly dress. I can't wait to figure out what the next, more practical, phases look like.
• The Funniest Grid You Ever Saw  (via Signal vs. Noise) - An incredibly elaborate, and for me frustrating, look at laying the grid out for the online edition of The Onion. Which only once, in an aside at the end of the essay, acknowledges that "some designers" might choose to give up rigid control over size. And then in the comments, people complain about those pesky users and their changing type sizes. People, this is the web. Fluid design should be the rule and fixed the exception.
• Too many people getting lost in new downtown library (via librarian.net)- "For all the architectural artistry of Rem Koolhaas' downtown Seattle library, there was just one little problem with the building: People kept getting lost inside."

(not so quick) links #3

Yep, it's been a while since my last update. I've been taking some time out to spend with my daughter, Kathryn! Hopefully posting will start up again with some frequency.

I'm even planning to combine the professional with the personal and review some interesting visualizations and interaction models in the baby-tracking space. No, I'm not kidding.

In the meantime, here's a few links to start catching up:

• A new framework - Todd W at Adaptive Path calls for a "new framework" for design: "Essentially, I am calling for an end to the decades-old framework that HCI, information architecture, and interaction design have been using for understanding users. That’s right, I say take a hike, task analysis! Good bye, user goals! These concepts are insufficient for the new kinds of systems we are designing."
  
  It's a good call! But I'm not sure it's all that new (certainly the better designers I've worked with have long since broken from using pure task analysis, for instance), I'm not sure the need for designing systems and not products is the best or only reason we should look for a new framework, and I'm not sure the essay actually lays out what the new framework should, rather than just the fact that we need one. But the comments are excellent (look for the good one by eBay's own Christian Rohrer) and overall it's a great start a needed conversation.



• Plot lines - "The end result is a staggering 76 floor plans in 221 units—with none repeated more than a dozen times and well over a dozen of them unique."
  
  Interaction designers who think structurally and in terms of components often make analogies to either Lego, or architecture. This Metropolis article about an apartment building in Copenhagen shows that what architects can do with structure and components that is elegant, but not simplistic. Read the article, but check out the insanely wonderful diagrams.



• We feel fine - "The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains."
  
  I'm a sucker for art made through clever data visualizations -- and this has 6 different visualizations of people's feelings posted online. Check out "mounds" -- it seems that even expressed emotion has a long tail!