Twice this week I’ve stumbled across interfaces which I’ve found irresistable and blog-worthy. The first is PicLens (not brand new this week – but certainly within living memory ie: several months). The second is the Zoomii interface for browsing Amazon books.

PicLens is a Firefox 3.0 plugin which allows you to navigate through sites such as Flickr, YouTube, Photobucket, MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo, Google and this week Amazon in 3d. When you enable PicLens, images and videos appear in an almost 3d infinite wall which resizes and zooms according to the velocity of your click n’ drag. (It’s so responsive that it gives me motion sickness…) When you click on a thumbnail, the interface becomes 2d while the image zooms up and resolves itself, quite rapidly, into higher res. The whole experience seems a lot faster than navigating a space like Flickr in a regular browser. This may have something to do with the ability to see more images simultaneously, in an environment which mimics our visual perspective in the “real” world. I like not least because I feel it assumes an intelligence in the participant/user.

Like Piclens zoomii offers a click and drag interface, but without the 3d immersion. Zoomii utilises many of the same navigation metaphors as Google Maps, so it’s instantly familiar that way. The attraction here, is the ability to browse books almost as if one were in a physical bookshop. It’s a welcome move away from the functional, yet incredibly dry visual environment of a regular Amazon page. Currently zoomii offers only a couple of hundred thousand titles from which to choose (quite a lot really).

Both interfaces prompted me to reflect upon the satisfaction factor in design. For me, both successfully deliver a satisfying experience for the viewer/user/audience, well beyond offering mere eye-candy or a distracting toy. It is genuinely pleasurable using both interfaces because they work at a practical and an intuitive level. They help close the gap between perception and experience. It removes that “arms-length” feeling one can sometimes have when navigating a space. It somehow physicalizes navigating and brings us into greater intimacy with the content. I’m sure that this is only the beginning of a general swing towards more “physicalised” spaces no doubt influenced by the rise of virtual worlds, MMPORG’s and the rapid spread of multi-touch interfaces generally.

Heads-up on the zoomii interface via information aesthetics and Ars Technica

Image: Mike Rohde

With the US economy described as being in “free fall”, the 3rd SEED conference held in Chicago a couple of weeks ago on 6 June, may be for some, a beacon of optimism in an otherwise bleak and stormy landscape. It was a small, one day affair which apparently attracted a (mostly male) audience of around 300 or so. The message appears to have been simple: “Take creative ideas and turn them into something SATISFYING & BANKABLE” – in other words, do what really fires you up.

Among the guest speakers were Carlos Segura, founder for the digital type foundry T26, Jason Fried of 37 signals, Jake Nickell and Jeffrey Kalmikoff of the über successful Threadless T-shirt community and the apparently mad (but rich and getting richer every day) Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine TV Library (who was apparently “kidnapped” on the day by Melissa Pierce of Life In Perpetual Beta fame – for fun). Of note, is that most of these guys didn’t go to business school and the common philosophy they share is that we should all be ready to “fail as much as possible”. Nickell and Kalmikoff also share the rule of “crowdsourcing” where content is community created, the community manages and grows itself and the community is ultimately rewarded.

Gary Vaynerchuk declares “Now, is the beginning of the gold rush in personal branding. . .”

Via: rohdesign, 37signals

Described by it’s creators as the “first step in an ongoing social experiment, based on twitter inspired by wefeelfine and drawing data from summize“, Twistori is a real time visualiser which displays tweets containing the words love, hate, think, believe, feel and wish. It has a much narrower focus than wefeelfine which visualises a massive spectrum of human emotions drawn from the blogosphere and then offers a number of beautiful, kaleidoscopic views. Twistori is still worth a mention for its visual simplicity and the lovely, incidental poetry borne out of the immediacy and spontaneity of the Tweets.

It would seem that multi-touch interfaces are the new black. In any case – they’re really really popular. They’re popping up like mushrooms all over the place with companies like Microsoft and Apple in a mad race to get devices/concepts to market. Ken Han introduced the genius of his multi-touch interfaces to a rapt crowd at TED in 2006. Smaller enterprises such as Italy’s IO are having an excellent time mapping interfaces on any surface which springs to mind. The reason for multi-touch popularity may be that it’s an incredibly intuitive way to build an interface and a really satisfying, nay joyful (fancy that), experience for the user/audience/content creator. I can attest to this experience now that I am the proud owner of an iPhone. Quite often I find myself playing with the interface without performing any function whatsoever – how often do you find yourself doing that on your average mobile device?

But what if your dream is to prototype a multi-touch project but you don’t have the resources to start from scratch? I stumbled across TouchKit when I was checking out a story on a giant ceiling clock and suddenly found myself getting reacquainted with the work of eyebeam and a whole slew of folk out there experimenting at a grass roots level.

Eyebeam is a creativity incubator offering “state-of-the-art tools for digital research and experimentation…where artists and technologists actively engage with culture”. Eyebeam supports and offers open source projects from its own project (Atelier) workshops. One of Eyebeam’s “Atelier” projects is is a modular multitouch development kit called Touchkit developed by New York based studio NOR_/D. Touchkit aims to make multitouch source code readily available as open source and is a sister project of the CUBIT multitouch system, aimed at implementing rapid development of multitouch projects. It uses eyebeam’s openFrameworks, a soon-to-be-released C++ library for creative coding which underpins the whole shebang.

Further to eyebeam I discovered a story about a 17 year old boy in the US who has managed to create the first OSX multi-touch table, made possible in part at least by an open source project called OpenTouch which grew out of Google’s summer of Code. Good to see organisations facilitating the development of creative technology at a grass roots level. Even more interesting to see what really fires developers and designers up. There’s a growing passion for “natural interaction” – a dissolution between human interaction and the machine. If you want to get a quick review of some current multi-touch projects in development – hop over to the Natural Users Interface group (NUI) for a quick RE-view.

I’ve been meaning to post something about Pangea Day for a few weeks because I found it inspiring on a number of levels. I’m inspired by documentary filmmaker Jehan Noujaim and her acceptance speech at TED 2006 – which led to the creation of Pangea Day, a global film festival for social change held last Saturday 10 May which US ABC news described as “Groundbreaking”. It’s a pretty visionary thing for a documentary filmmaker to initiate and I think that there are techniques and forms in this that students and filmmakers could reflect upon. Noujaim has drawn on an international community to respond to global issues, and achieved an amazing result. She may also have shifted the model of documentary filmmaking by harnessing the power of Web 2.0, drawing upon the wisdom of the crowd and facilitating simultaneous conversations.

24 films (from 2500 submission), were broadcast over 4 hours from six locations worldwide in seven different languages and were viewed via the internet, television and mobiles. An global event like this is made far more possible by the convergence of everything we at LAMP ever talk about.

In addition to the main event and invitations to host an event or just give voice to an issue was the Anthems Project, where one country sings another country’s national anthem. Simple but incredibly powerful.

“Design and the Elastic Mind” is a major exhibition currently presented by MoMA till May 12 2008. The title of the exhibition emerges from the assertion that while “adaptability” is hard-wired into human intelligence, coping with the recent and dramatic changes in our experience of “time, space, matter and identity” requires something stronger – “elasticity”. In 2006, MoMA teamed up with the science magazine “Seed” and held a number of salons where designers, architects and scientists were invited to share ideas and work. According to Paola Antonelli, curator and co-writer of the companion book “Design and the Elastic Mind”, the exhibition “reflects on how the figure of the designer is changing from form giver to fundamental interpreter of an extraordinarily dynamic reality.”

The online component of the exhibition presents over 300 works which represent the designer’s “ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores, changes that will demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior, and convert them into objects and systems that people understand and use.” The website presents seven fundamental divisions: Thinkering where artists, designers and scientists use “design to give method to productive tinkering… or ‘thinkering’; People and Objects including Tagging and Responsive design where “New interfaces incorporate instinctive human traits; Design for Debate - placing human beings at the centre of emerging tech scenarios and debates; Visualization – examining the way designers and scientists grapple with dramatic contrasts of scale in data in order to facilitate human understanding; Thought to Action - envisioning objects and new modes of manufacture including 3-d Printing and Processing and algorithms; All Together Now! which introduces the concept of “Existenzmaximum” and examines the effects of “open-source movement and ubiquitous connection”; and Super Nature where nature is viewed as a “collection of sensible and sustainable structures” which are in many ways superior in terms of sustainability to man-made systems.

As I’m not likely to be in New York before May 12, I’m wading my way through the 300+ projects online. Some projects are legendary – the Mandelbrot set; some are familiar – Digg Labs beautiful and elucidating data visualisations; some are fresh – Nokia Morph which illustrates “how a portable personal device can connect its owner to the hidden information in the surrounding physical world and, at the same time, to the massive global data, information, and digital content via the Internet”; some fantastical – Typosperma the second part of Israeli typographer Oded Ezer’s Biotypography series “cloned sperm with typographic information implanted into their DNA.”; this is downright scary – Dressing the Meat of Tomorrow; fun – the SMS Guerilla Projector which enables users to receive texts and project them onto public surfaces; and some are even practical – the Touch Messenger designed to “provide the large number of blind consumers in China with the same cell phone features available to everyone else, at an affordable price.”

This is an important exhibition not just for the fanciful and fun explorations of science colliding with design, but because it is a recognition of the importance of visual design as a fundamental aid in human perception. Designers have the ability to re-present complex and otherwise baffling concepts, to facilitate access and to give form to potentially abstract objects and systems. Paola Antonelli: “Without designers, instead of a virtual city of home pages with windows, doors, buttons, and links, the Internet would still be a series of obscure strings of code”.

My favourite quote: “Designers stand between revolutions and everyday life”.

Now you can wear your social network (or your heart) on your sleeve – literally. This is what you do:

1. Buy a set of threads from the Get Wickd clothing label

2. Download the special Get Wickd software onto your mobile

3. Go outside and start looking for other people wearing Get Wickd bar-coded clothes

4. Take a snap with your mobile

5. Your phone will connect you with the personal page of that person – from MySpace to YouTube

Apparently not new – but made “newer” with the advent of a camera on your phone. A similar idea, the UrbanSeeder project, was developed a couple of years ago by Maya Lotan for her thesis project at the Interaction Design Institute of Ivrea. Back in the late 90’s, apparently, there was an even earlier version of social-widget-fashion in the form of skim.com, which Salon Magazine described at the time as “stalker chic” and asked “Is skim.com dressing up the antisocial pervert or outfitting the terminally hip?”. Good question.

via: twenty1f and nextnature

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6G5YlICVRg

Not sure whether this could be defined as a gadget – but it’s my object o’ the week in any case. Not sure about form, and I’m certainly not sure about function but, at the end of the day, it’s a sweet way to see what your feeds are doing in a physical sense (and that might be literally if you rested some snacks on the blocks…). If you want to know more about the “wable” – go here…

Via Infosthetics

Interesting to see a number of “design” companies relying heavily (but poetically and thoughtfully), on code to generate visualisation work these days. I know it’s nothing new, but I am genuinely excited by the possibilities inherent when really good information design, generates really good visual design generated by really good code. People are probably familiar with the work of Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar via “We Feel Fine” (check it out if you haven’t already). We Feel Fine was built using Processing, a Java-based language. I keep stumbling across a whole raft of recent design school graduates who are genuine hybrid designer/programmers – for whom the intersection of maths and art is almost incidental.

In addition I came across the latest visualisation tool in Digg created by Stamen Design in collaboration with Digg Labs. Digg Pics dynamically displays images as people vote for them – thus capturing a snapshot of Digg community activity from moment to moment in real time. Stamen and Digg Labs are also responsible for Swarm, Stack, Big Spy and Arc. BigSpy is another personal favourite largely because its creators respect the value of typography, form and colour and thus design. It’s a nice example of good code meeting good design. Stories appear at the top of the page as they are Dugg – the more Diggs a story has, the larger it appears. “Form follows function” as one of our favourite thinkers once said – or perhaps “Form Follows Data“?

A couple of weeks ago JWT, released a trendletter entitled “The Han Internet”. The term was coined by JWT to describe that part of the online world which is “characterized and shaped by Chinese language, culture and needs”. JWT claims that it would be “myopic” of advertisers and marketers to ignore the estimated 210 million Chinese already online. The trendletter explores such topics as: the unique qualities of the Han Internet and its users; the explosion of blogging; the impact of censorship on the Han Internet and how it, in turn may change Chinese views of censorship; and what approach foreign companies should use in attempting to enter the Chinese dot-com market. “The Han Internet” includes data from a study conducted by JWT in conjunction with IAC exploring current attitudes toward digital technology between Chinese and American youth.

The full report is available from JWT Intelligence