Clutter - shows the album cover art of whatever’s up in iTunes.
Trusted Blog Search - best Google hack I’ve seen yet from Micah, a friend over in the HCI program here. It allows you to do a Google search against your RSS subscriptions (using your OPML file) to search the weblogs you read most often. I’ve set it up on my links page for now, which goes largely unused due to NetNewsWire.
From Seb’s Open Research
Sometimes people surprise you with their skills. Marc Rettig, for example. By day he’s a visiting professor: mild-mannered, insightful, and affable. By night he’s a party-thrower, the seasoned mixologist that keeps a drink in every hand and the conversation lively. Obviously, this is a man who takes the wide view of “interaction design”.
It makes me wonder what his tutorial at DUX is going to be like…
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Frog Design put together an interesting system of wearable devices for Motorola. The School of Design is hosting a Career Days event tomorrow, and both Frog and Motorola will be there, so perhaps I’ll find out a bit more.
We’ve been exploring wearables quite a bit this year in school - I just looked at some today. My graduate studio class, taught by Jodi Forlizzi, is participating in the Design Expo (used to sponsored by Apple, now it’s Microsoft), a visionary design challenge involving a couple of grad design programs. This year’s theme is “Sharing Personal Media” - a bit vague, though plenty of room to play. Today we critiqued various concepts, one which involved wearables. I busted out foam mockups that are a little closer to the tangible interfaces paradigm than wearables. It’s still in the early stages - functionality lists and personas abound - but Jodi has us on a tight schedule, and so it’s fairly inspiring to see the collective progress.
But yeah, wearables. If you like ‘em, you should check out a great paper called Design for Wearability that was done in part by Francine Gemperle, one of the design researchers I worked with on the auditory interface design last semester. Some of the others who worked on Design for Wearability spun off a wearables company based around body-monitoring called BodyMedia, which is also worth checking out.
Frog/Motorola link from Boing Boing
Using 2 sheets of ordinary 8.5 x 11 inch paper, create a structure that supports the weight of 10 pounds worth of books for 30 seconds. How tall can you make that structure?
Hugh Dubberly visited our grad seminar last week week and posed us design problem. Stacking three dictionaries on top of the table, he handed us a ream of paper and let us - students and faculty alike - loose. It was a nice moment, seeing that much experimentation and innovation (not to mention excitement) in such a short period of time. In the land of thoughtful, user-centered design, I enjoyed having such a difficult yet clearly defined challenge. You might want to try it sometime as an icebreaker or kickoff activity for a brainstorm. Track the height of the successful designs against time to reflect on once you’re done.
Anyone who tries it out is welcome to post their results - think tall…