DMI Blogs » Dan

Dan (10 unread)

Posted: March 9th, 2010, 2:25pm PST by dan

[sloanreview.mit.edu]
This is more for personal reference, I’d like to go back and read some of these articles in the future. Since it’s coming from MIT Sloan, these topics are viewed through the lens of management, but the content still looks pretty interesting. Nice to see how other professions / fields can use the principals of design to achieve better results.

Design thinking — distinct from analytical thinking — has emerged as the premier organizational path not only to breakthrough innovation but, surprisingly, to high-performance collaboration, as well. “It’s not about the pretty,” says one design-thinking practitioner, “it’s about the productive.” In this special section of articles, interviews, illustrated cases and research findings, the Review explores how to put design thinking to work.

How to Become a Better Manager … By Thinking Like a Designer
Elegance By Design: The Art of Less
Usability for Evil
Designing Waits That Work
Posted: March 9th, 2010, 2:04pm PST by dan

[whereismymilkfrom.com]
The UI is crap (you type the milk code into the skewed form on top of the milk carton), but the idea is cool. The milk at my office comes from Franklin, MA, not too far from Boston. Where is yours from?
Posted: February 2nd, 2010, 2:46pm PST by dan

Uggggggggg, I really really really hope this does not happen!
Posted: February 1st, 2010, 6:00pm PST by dan

Really cool infoviz project the duo at hint.fm put together about colors seen on Boston Common throughout the year. I’m seeing this one a bit late cos it was originally published in Boston Magazine, maybe I should actually start checking that publication out!

Anyway, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg have tons of really interesting projects. Check out Seer also if you have the time.
Posted: January 29th, 2010, 2:14pm PST by dan

Interesting article from New York Times
The Age of Undoing

Facebook, for instance, allows you to register approval for a posted message in a very concrete way, by clicking a thumbs-up like button. Toggling off the button results in unliking your previously liked item. Note that this is different from disliking something, since unliking simply returns you to a neutral state. This kind of instant reversibility is now an inescapable facet of our digitized life — like it or un-.
Posted: January 28th, 2010, 3:30pm PST by dan

This collection captures findings of consistent, unique or interesting interfaces and design flows from across the web.
Posted: January 28th, 2010, 10:01am PST by dan

Working through Screens: 100 Ideas for Envisioning Powerful, Engaging, and Productive User Experiences in Knowledge Work

Working through Screens is a reference for product teams creating new or iteratively improved applications for thinking work. Written for use during early, formative conversations, it provides teams with a broad range of considerations for setting the overall direction and priorities for their onscreen tools. With hundreds of envisioning questions and fictional examples from clinical research, financial trading, and architecture, this volume can help definers and designers to explore innovative new directions for their products.
Posted: January 22nd, 2010, 11:27am PST by dan

The N. Building in Japan is one huge QR code that becomes a living website thanks to augmented reality on the iPhone.
Posted: January 22nd, 2010, 10:54am PST by dan

Here are two cool new ways to track who is consuming your content, and which pieces users find most interesting. First up:

[www.tynt.com]

Depending on the site, up to 6% of page loads results in a user copying content. While this may not sound like much, think of it this way: on a site that has 20 million page views per month, content is copied over one million times during any given month. That’s a lot. How do we know this? Tynt’s patent pending Insight technology is currently running on hundreds of thousands of web sites and monitors billions of page loads per month.

This is a potentially very cool idea, however, it’s a bit annoying that they auto-include a link back to the source content. I’d prefer a more ’silent’ solution. According to Tynt, they are: “currently working on providing users an option to opt out of Tynt Insight. If you’d like to disable Tynt Insight immediately, you can use an ad or script blocking tool to disable Tynt Insight.”

Second is:
[speakertext.com]
SpeakerText is an easy-to-use tool that lets you find, read and share what people are saying inside of videos. This is another powerful tool, that’s still in beta. I don’t know if it’s technically possible, but it would be great to see this technology drop Flash as its presentation layer. It could be much easier to spread content like this. For example, you would be able to combine the previous Tynt service to do some pretty wild things! Check out Nieman Labs for more.
Posted: January 22nd, 2010, 10:43am PST by dan

So, I’ll probably never actually use this stuff now that I’m done with school, but just thought I’d share these links if anyone is interested:

[www.amarino-toolkit.net]
Cell phones are great for communication in a virtual manner, but lack expressiveness in personal surroundings. Many people try to give their phones a personal touch by customizing them. ‘android meets arduino’ is a toolkit to connect Android-driven mobile devices with Arduino microcontrollers via Bluetooth. The toolkit provides easy access to internal phone events which can be further processed on the Arduino open-source prototyping platform. This toolkit seeks to empower people to externalize their phone events to creatively demonstrate them on wearables, living spaces, or other tangibles.

[android.processing.org]
Pre-release downloads of Processing with built-in support for Android. Note that this code is incomplete and contains many bugs. It is not ready for widespread use. It should be considered “nightly build” quality. Do not use this code while operating heavy equipment. Do not rely on this code for thesis or diploma work, as you will not graduate. Do not use this code if you’re prone to whining about incomplete software that you download for free.