Archive for the ‘design’ Category
Take it from the Dod
CCN - Collaborative campaign news thingy
The Dod is a master hacker and overall kewl kat who has been putting his skills in the service of good people for many years. Currently on his agenda is the campaign against biometric ID in Israel (Hebrew). As part of his support for that campaign, he has developed a very clever widget which allows a group of people to collaboratively update a news ticker and embed it on various sites. The ticker is very web2.0, with flickr galeries and all. RSS coming soon.
Here’s the use scenario. You’re running a campaign, and need to constantly collect and distribute news in real time. You have 0 budget but a good group of activists.
Old school: nominate a PR person, have everyone email her the news, she edits them and maintains a website.
New school: open a private room on friendfeed, everyone joins the room and picks up the bookmarklet, and starts pushing news to the room. Next, everyone picks up this widget and plug it into their blogs, sites, etc. Now the news is flowing from the people to the people by the people.
The Dod has promissed twitter feedout and other goodies, but will not say when. With a bit of nudging, he’s ported the widget, and its documentation, to English. Only bummer is that it doesn’t work on wordpress.com. It works fine on blogspot, or on hosted wordpress.
The original, as used by the Israeli human rights society's campaign against biometric ids, as seen on Bracha Goleshet
Cameron Sinclair: we have an army of designers, and only 3 paid staff
Cameron Sinclair, founder of Architecture for Humanity and recently the Open Architecture Network, was awarded the TED prize in 2006. In his acceptance speech, he talks about housing crisis, HIV/AIDS, natural catastrophes, and how solutions can be designed for saving lives and making them better. How? not by a centralized structure. By a global network of design innovation, based on an open source model.
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A model that assumes that every human being is a potential design innovator, every person is an expert in his environment and needs, and the role of the Architect is to bring out that expertise and unleash that potential. |
Mark Stimpson’s eerie lego reproductions
Unexpected jems you find in Metro.
Mark Stimpson has a set of iconic photos reproduced with lego minifigs.
| A Lego recreation of Jeff Widener’s 1989 photograph of “The unknown rebel”.
Original here … en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Tianasquare.jpg Setup shot here … http://www.flickr.com/photos/balakovsetup/2377765369/ It took me hours to make 4 identical Lego tanks from my big bag of random Lego bits! I could have saved some time and only made three. |
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 Anti-Empire protest |
 Viet Cong Captain |
good designer karma for sale
Thor Fredrik Eie tells me that the 2008 bad usability calendar is out.
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If you have any thing to do with interface / web design, please, please, get a copy. hang it before your eyes and reduce the suffering ours have to endure. |
Flo control
Flo has a habit of catching various animals, dragging them inside through the cat door, and letting them loose so they can be chased for hours. To put an end to this we have built a computer-controlled device that visually determines if Flo is carrying anything in her mouth when she enters, and if she does, it simply does not let her in.
Isn’t this what science is all about? Using the state of the art image analysis algorithms, to solve one of humanities oldest problems. I mean, I’m sure the morning after the australupitacus domesticated the first Dingo, his mate said “Ugh U-a GRigaga”, meaning “your filthy dog dragged her rotten boar leg all over my mammoth rug. Now you clean it up or get me a new one.
Coming up: the no-way-those-muddy-boots-are-coming-into-this-house sliding door.
I want night googles!
I was reading on Slashdot that -
“Recent commentary at Nature Climate Change describes an on-going debate about the energy savings associated with the background colors used by high-traffic websites such as Google and the NYTimes. A back of the envelope calculation has suggested energy savings of 750 Megawatt hours per year if Google switched their background from white to black. In response, a new version of Google called Blackle was created. However, other calculations by the Wall Street Journal suggest minimal energy savings.”
And I’m thinking, what could be easier than for google to put a ‘night vision’ checkbox on iGoogle? Or in the preferences page? iGoogle is my home page, and my personal portal to the web. So I spend a lot of time there. Also, the setting could be applied to gmail, docs, etc.
And if not google, then maybe someone could make a firefox extension for this?
Web design, rule #1
Text is interface.
I think I finaly got it. Now I know why I like the web-too-oh style. As a side effect of being geek-driven, its a back-to-text movement. Sure, better fonts, softer colours, using text size and arrangment to configure meanings. But at the end of the day, its text. no flash, no voiceover, no click-here-to-skip-the-intro-then-why-the-hell-did-you-bother-with-an-into-in-the-first-place.
Text. As in written words.
