Merrick Angle is a Freelance illustrator and designer based in France. Check his About page for a list of his clients. Visit his official website to buy his stuff.
“Take something as fundamental as pages, for example. The metaphor of flipping pages already feels boring and forced on the iPhone. I suspect it will feel even more so on the iPad. The flow of content no longer has to be chunked into ‘page’ sized bites. One simplistic reimagining of book layout would be to place chapters on the horizontal plane with content on a fluid vertical plane.” (much more)
Craig Mod says he’s a “developer; writer; book designer; publisher; professional world-wide digital hobo”. He has a special interest in books and computers :
“I’ve always loved books. I’ve always loved computers. We are currently experiencing a very unique convergence point for things digital and analog. Because of this, I think that right now is a very exciting time to be involved with storytelling. The world is smaller than ever and the stories hidden in data and hitherto inaccessible cultures are just a few keystrokes or a plane ride away. I’m interested in engaging these stories, developing sustainable businesses that evoke thoughtful communities and finding ways to bridge cultures.” (more)
Read his newest ideas on this specific subject : “Embracing The Digital Book” (April 2010).
 | Data visualization is a pretty literal term that means, quite simply, the visual representation of quantitative data. In this course we’ll learn common techniques for visualizing data, as well as some strategies for managing information digitally. But first, a brief history. |
This is part of a course belonging to an MFA program in Interaction Design offered by the School of Visual Art (New York). The course intend to
introduce students to the fundamental concepts of data visualization, and provide a structured environment for experimentation with a variety of methods in both digital and physical media. (more)
About Shawn Allen:
Shawn is a partner and design director at Stamen, a San Francisco studio specializing in data visualization and mapping. (more)
Check his official website.
Previously on Skandalon: New York School of Visual Art
Panic Blog: “Good UI”, July 15th 2010 [follow the link to watch the video]
I don’t know who designed the iOS “Unlocking” UI, but they did a pretty good job. Joby just turned one. (And isn’t alone!)
| Told you so, everyone who has tried to convince me that our elevators’ door-close buttons did anything |
Arment, as do so many others, really wants to believe that the door-close button does nothing in an elevator. There are stories going around about this: door-close buttons aren’t really working in elevators, they are just there so you can feel like you’re in control. For his article, Paumgarten may have got some information about this from Otis representative:
In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer. (more)
But there’s no specific references in his article : who did confirm this to him? Is it true about all elevators? All brands? Everywhere? Can an elevator be configured one way while another elevator, identical in brand and model, be configured another way? There’s no hard fact about this in the article. Nothing to prove that all door-close buttons are fake. And nothing to disprove it.
And that’s why Arment reaction is so interesting. He doesn’t know for a fact if the door-close button work or not in a given elevator. But he wants to feel in control : he doesn’t want to be controlled by an elevator’s fake button (eh, come on, nobody’s that stupid : we’re not monkeys, right?). So he will likely dismissed any piece of information telling him the very opposite of what he wants to believe. Just like those who believe in the door-close button will dismiss any delay in the closing of the door as being a sign that they did not controlled its action. Arment, though, will be very interested in information (Paumgarten’s article for example) that reinforce his belief. Just like the door-close button believers will consider any closing door as being an empirical proof of the control they can have on the elevator.
And thus, those who think the door-close button is just a fake are not smarter than those who think the door-close button works. It’s just two different ways to cope with a lack of adequate information, a certain degree of uncertainty : without hard facts about this issue, we’re all but believers trying to stay in control in front of an ambiguous situation.
[Update : July 17th, 2010] The same argument goes for Slavoj Zizek:
Zizek loves to correct viewpoints when precisely the opposite is considered correct. He calls this counterintuitive observation. His favorite thought form is the paradox. Using his psychoanalytical skills, he attempts to demonstrate how liberal democracy manipulates people. One of his famous everyday observations on this subject relates to the buttons used to close the door in elevators. He has discovered that they are placebos. The doors don’t close a second faster when one presses the button, but they don’t have to. It’s sufficient that the person pressing the button has the illusion that he is able to influence something. The political illusion machine that calls itself Western democracy functions in exactly the same way, says Zizek. (Spiegel Online: “Welcome to the Slavoj Zizek Show” by Philipp Oehmke, July 8th, 2010)
| Apple are trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat. That’s the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry. Unless they can turn themselves into an entirely different kind of corporation by 2015 Apple is doomed to the same irrelevance as the rest of the PC industry — interchangable suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligable profit. |
Interesting thoughts about the future of the computer ecosystem.
Charlie Ross
“writes fiction full-time, has sold around 16 novels, has won one Hugo award and been nominated nearly a dozen times, and has been translated into about a dozen languages.” (much more)
More over at the Dieter Rams Flickr pool group.
About Dieter Rams:
“Dieter Rams (born May 20, 1932 in Wiesbaden, Hesse) is a German industrial designer closely associated with the consumer products company Braun and the Functionalist school of industrial design. […] Rams once explained his design approach in the phrase “Weniger, aber besser” which freely translates as “Less, but better.” Rams and his staff designed many memorable products for Braun including the famous SK-4 record player and the high-quality ‘D’-series (D45, D46) of 35 mm film slide projectors. He is also known for designing the 606 Universal Shelving System by Vitsœ in 1960.” (wikipedia)
Laughing Squid: “A 2.5 Year-Old Uses an iPad for the First Time” by Todd Lappin, April 6th, 2010
“My iPhone-savvy 2.5 year-old daughter held an iPad for the very first time last night, and it turned out to be an interesting user-interface experiment.
As you can see, after geeking out on my Sutro Tower homescreen, she took right to it — including figuring out how to enlarge some of her favorite iPhone-legacy apps to 2x to display full-size on the iPad screen. If you’re good at understanding kid-speak, you’ll also notice that she immediately saw its potential as a video-display device. She lamented the lack of a camera, and wondered about its potential for playing games.
On the downside, she had the same frustration as many adults, where touching the screen-edge with your thumb while holding the iPad blocks input to all home screen icons. Notice also that she was confused by the splash page for FirstWords Animals, her favorite spelling game: Because the start button looked like a graphic, rather than a conventional button, she couldn’t figure out how to start the game.
Most of all, though, it’s cool to consider that as one of the new Children of Cyberspace, her expectations about computing will be shaped by the fact that she’s growing up in a touchscreen world.”
“Let’s call it ”Wimbledon.” Released in 2004, it’s a romantic comedy about tennis that I could have seen for $8 or so in a theater four years ago or ordered from Netflix, caught on HBO or bought as a DVD for $4 on eBay. But I didn’t. In fact, I only now discovered it in the modest movie lineup on Hulu. After a rocky start during which it was hazed as just another slick effort to upstage the fun, do-it-yourself YouTube, Hulu became great. The Associated Press just named Hulu its Web Site of the Year for 2008.” (more)
Previously on Skandalon : Kevin Van Aelst
| In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automated teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hardware, the mainframe sitting in a locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction. I sensed something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed. A deranged person was escorted from the bank by two armed guards. The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now. The networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies. |
White Noise won the National Book Award in 1985. Learn more about it on Wikipedia.
