*So, who’s gonna scale this up so that people can put on mesh suits and swoop around in mid-air, comic-book style?

via @golan

China is known as the place where a superstar foreign architect can win an international design competition and see their bold, dazzling creation actually see construction.

Volkswagen has turned this model on its head for their yearlong The People’s Car Project, which sought concepts for future vehicles not from superstar designers, but from the great, and local, masses. Chinese citizens could access a Chinese-language Volkswagen portal to upload ideas for transportation concepts they’d like to see, and by the 11-month mark, 33 million people had visited the site. Here’s the PCP’s fun pitch video:

Schoolgirl Wang Jia of Chengdu was one of the first winners, and while her hovercraft idea would be a bit difficult to produce, Volkswagen did what they could—and even incorporated her parents, in keeping with the family-centric nature of Chinese society:

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In a blog post (which is itself a paraphrased transcript of his talk at the Polish IA Summit 2012), Peter Bogaards talks about the relationship between user experience and customer experience, and how user experience designers can extend their influence in businesses.

“A customer-obsessed company focuses its strategy, its energy, and its budget on processes that enhance knowledge of an engagement with customers, and prioritizes these over maintaining traditional competitive barriers.”

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I was therefore really excited to stumble on this article “The Psychologist’s View of UX Design” by Susan Weinschenk which is the most comprehensive collection, I have seen, of these “truths” of human behaviors. For my and your reference, I’ve taken the liberty to summarize the list here and added a sprinkling of my thoughts.

1. People Don’t Want to Work or Think More Than They Have To
Consider simplicity, lead by example i.e. show users how it is done, provide what people only really need, and help users make decisions.

2. People Have Limitations
Remember information overload? This is where it rears its ugly head. Keep information on a need to know basis, clump and/or create visual priority.

3. People Make Mistakes
People will make mistakes, respect that and try not to make them feel stupid. Having an “Undo” is vital and the best error message is none at all. Oh, do make sure the errors, if any, are not fatal please?

4. Human Memory Is Complicated
Human memory is prone to errors and inconsistency. It’s BS to say, “oh they will remember how to use it after using it for the first time”. Susan says “People can only remember about 3-4 items at a time. The ‘7 plus or minus 2’ rule is an urban legend”. From my anecdotal experience, I agree with her.

5. People are Social
People are social animals and will listen to others for guidance even if they don’t know that person. This is probably why many companies that the 5 star rating system seriously. Furthermore, the famous 150 “friends” social limit does apply. Any greater, the bond between people weakens.

6. Attention
People are easily distracted; design for focus or for attention, not both. You will be surprised how often both things happen at the same or at the wrong time.

7. People Crave Information
Susan says it best:

People will often want more information than they can actually process. Having more information makes people feel that they have more choices. Having more choices makes people feel in control. Feeling in control makes people feel they will survive better.

Don’t forget that feedback, such as at acknowledgement chime or a message, is also considered as information.

8. Unconscious Processing
Be careful in creating the wrong associations with your design, particularly important with communication and object design. There is a lot of subtle processing that happen especially through the visual sense, and this impacts greatly on decision-making. That is why, for the longest time, aesthetics was the key driver for the definition of good design.

9. People Create Mental Models
Mental models are the reason why Skeuomorph Design is so important in user experience design. If user research cannot determine a relevant mental model, use Metaphors to help with the ease of understanding and acceptance of a new concept or technology.

10. Visual System
Despite knowing that our visual sense is the strongest sense, this insight surprised me:

Research shows that people use peripheral vision to get the “gist” of what they are looking at. Eye tracking studies are interesting, but just because someone is looking at something straight on doesn’t mean they are paying attention to it.

I do encourage you to check out the full article at UX Mag, it is well worth the read.

Much has been said about visual storytelling and how to tell stories of data in the information age, and there is no shortage of great books on data visualization. But count on Taschen to tackle a big conceptual challenge with a big, beautifully designed book: Information Graphics by art historian Sandra Rendgen explores the four key aspects of visualizing data — Location, Time, Category, and Hierarchy — through exemplary work from more than 200 projects, alongside essays by information architect and TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, Guardian Datablog editor Simon Rogers, Density Design’s Paolo Ciuccarelli, and Rendgen herself.

‘Geek Love,’ The New York Times, newspaper article, 2008

Exposed to Dungeons & Dragons Early in Life. Design: Sam Potts. Art Direction: Brian Rea

‘Medallandssandur,’ a blend of the sound specters form sonar and whale song. From a series of drawings, 2010

Design: Torgeir Husevaag. Article: Adam Rogers

‘The Very Many Varieties of Beer,’ poster, 2010

Design: Ben Gibson, Patrick Mulligan (Pop Chart Lab)

‘Two Mindsets,’ Stanford, magazine article, 2007

Data Source: Carol Dweck: ‘Mindset: The New Psychology of Success’, 2006. Design: Nigel Holmes

‘Body Parts,’ Esquire, magazine article, 2006

Design: Peter Grundy (Grundini). Art Direction: Alex Breuer

‘Frank Zappa Chart,’ painting, 2008

Artist: Ward Shelley (represented by Pierogi Gallery)

‘The Growing E-Waste Situation,’ GOOD, website, 2010

Data Source: CBS News; ABI Research; US EPA; Basel Action Network; Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Research: Brian Wolford. Design: Andrew Effendy (Column Five Media). Art Direction: Ross Crooks

‘Mission(s) to Mars,’ IEEE Spectrum, magazine article, 2009

Data Source: Cornell University; European Space Agency; NASA; RussianSpaceWeb.com. Design: Bryan Christie, Joe Lertola. Art Direction: Mark Montgomery, Michael Solita

Information Graphics features work by a number of Brain Pickings favorites, including Stefanie Posavec, Nicholas Felton, Ward Shelley, Hans Rosling, Nathalie Miebach, David McCandless, Toby Ng, Michael Paukner, Christoph Niemann, Sam Potts, and Jonathan Harris. The cover image is, of course, the unmistakable Web Trend Map by Information Architects.

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Nike Free shoes are more flexible than most, and the brand has found a novel way to prove as much–by getting all up in potential customers’ faces with facial recognition technology. Launching this week in Japan, Nike Free Face is a web app that allows users to squish, twist, and contort the shoe’s sole, armed with only their faces and a webcam.

The app, created by Wieden + Kennedy Tokyo, utilizes both facial recognition and expression recognition technology, photographing the user’s punim and then calculating facial flexibility to define the diagonal and horizontal movement of the shoe. It’s science! In addition, the application recognizes the color of the user’s clothes and the background to automatically coordinate the color of the Nike Free shoe using the Nike ID customization system.

Users can also submit their best face to the Free Face Off, a competition in which a weekly winner will win a Nike ID gift card. For a look at the kind of competition you might be up against, watch the video below.

Japan, like Italy, has a long tradition of highly-skilled craftsmen and specialty manufacturers. On trend with the larger design community, Japanese designers and manufacturers are working hand-in-hand to elevate public consciousness about the techniques and artistry indigenous to their native crafts. One organization that is doing just this is Japan Creative. Following last year’s tsunami disasters, the organization was founded to, “1) rediscover at a fundamental level in the modern world the distinguished aestehetics and tradition-oriented skills of the Japanese, and 2) create and present ideas and products from a new perspective.”

Last week in Milan, the first exhibition of Japan Creative was held showcasing prototypes for six specialty product collaborations: Oigen x Jasper Morrison, Hinoki Kogei x Peter Marigold, Pioneer x Paul Cocksedge, Mihoya Glass x Yeongkyu Yoo, Koubei-gama x Inga Sempé and Dome Carbon Magic x Nacho Carbonell. The exhibition, Simple Vision, emphazies the aesthetics that Japanese design is known for: simple, space-efficient and multifunctional, while examining the possibilities found at the intersection of contemporary design and traditional craft. Check out Japan Creative’s website for more beautiful process photography from the designers’ visits with the manufacturers.

We wrote about the 160-year-old Oigen Foundary’s beautiful and functional cast iron cookware last month at the International Home + Housewares Show. Morrison, who is known for his highly functional designs for everyday objects, created a beautiful collection of cast iron cookware that feels both modern and timeless. I especially like the stove-to-oven pot and lid with an integrated wooden serving tray that holds the lid for elegant tabletop presentation.

Dome Carbon Magic creates lightweight and structurally stable carbon fiber developed for high performing racing cars. Their collaboration with avant-garde design darling Nacho Carbonell, created a beautiful seating collection that, “emits a sound using the resilient properties of carbon fiber.”

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Chris Risdon, senior experience designer at Adaptive Path, looks at the explosion of smart products, which passively collect data about you and your specific behavior, and tell you a story which is designed to directly influence you, and argues that their very value proposition lies in behaviour change:

“These are products that have an explicit or implicit value proposition based on influencing your behavior. They’ve been around for a long time: smoking cessation and weight lose programs just to name a couple. But these highly personal solutions are exponentially enabled thanks to sensor technology.”

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Austin Brown, UX designer at EffectiveUI, and his colleague Lindsay Moore wondered if there was a way to design better, by combinubg the best aspects of interaction design and product design, as well as a little service design. They hoped that this would allow to create a holistic experience that transcends definition, and thus create better user experiences.

To test this idea, they set out to create design concepts for two common household products: an eco-friendly dishwasher and the home thermostat.

The article chronicles their process of combining disciplines and making decisions, and the lessons learned along the way.

“With the ability to incorporate modern techniques and practices to add value, we examined how we could make a dishwasher and a home thermostat more useful, usable, and desirable. These products tend to work just fine for most users, but fall short when it comes to providing a genuinely pleasant, compelling user experience. While some of the things we learned in this experiment could easily be applied to any product or digital interface, these were simulations only and did not result in any new products.”

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Architect Margot Krasojevic has created a beautiful shell like 3D printed lamp powered by the force of the wind spinning around it’s vertical axis.

The lamp is functional a propeller that uses the wind’s kinetic energy to turn it. The light is generated by the spinning of wire coils past magnets generating electrical current to power the LED bulbs. Appropriate to its shell form the design has been printed in a ceramic material that is lightweight and durable enough to spin in the wind.

The light was partly inspired by the Ropatec vertical axis wind turbines. I live in a city with abundant wind energy, as anyone who has visited Wellington is likely to agree - the street lights here should probably be powered by these.

Via Archello

Posted in 3D Printing, Art, David McGahan, Functional Art + Objects by David McGahan | 2 Comments

In a blog post today, the company’s chief executive, Mary Lou Jepsen, said her company is “finalizing” the development of its new screen family with its partners, and published a graph showing how Pixel Qi’s latest screens of equal display resolution to the iPad 3 (2048 x 1536) also use much less power than the iPad 3′s battery-guzzling screen (see below).

On the one hand, Jepsen isn’t just another upstart firing off a speculative blog post. Jepsen led the engineering for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project, where she architected the design of the so-called “$100 laptop.” So she’s got credibility.

Pixel Qi tablet screen uses less power

On the other hand, her blog post doesn’t contain any specifics about when exactly this new screen will hit the market.

The firm, based in San Bruno, Calif., late last year raised an unspecified amount of money in a round of funding from 3M New Ventures. Otherwise, the company hasn’t made very many announcements over the past year.

Pixel Qi has manufacturing operations in Taiwan and California.

In her post, Jepsen says about 90 percent of the iPad 3′s battery appears to be used for driving the display, and adds that while she loves the iPad 3 screen quality, she was “shocked” by the overheating reports and the massive 8 Watt power draw. She says her company’s screens will work inside and in direct sunlight, and that her company’s screens boast full image quality matching or exceeding that of the iPad 3 on most measures — including matching or exceeding contrast, color saturation, and viewing angle — all while saving batter power. The Pixel Qi’s low power mode runs at a full “100x power reduction from the peak power consumed by the iPad 3 screen,” she writes.

Existing Pixel Qi screens have been shipped in about a dozen consumer products, and the company says at least 3 million screens have shipped in total. One of the products is the OLPC XO 3.0.

Filed under: media

"The ability to easily digitize, edit, and now annotate physical 3-D objects will revolutionize remote product visualization," said Jason Lawrence, Co-Founder and CEO of Arqball.

Laser etched Aluminium body at the From the Fab Cafe, Shibuya.

Cost 5,000 Yen per half hour – enough to create some stencils. Laptops come in at 10,000 Yen

When you want to make precision tools like a CNC mill or a lathe, it’s generally because, obviously, you don’t have one. The problem is, how do you make precision tools without using precision tools? It’s getting easier and easier to find a place to use one, but sometimes that is not a practical option. One possible solution being explored is the use of cast concrete.

Concrete is easily available basically everywhere, it’s extremely cheap, and it has the added bonus of being quite heavy, which stabilizes the tool. The downside is if you ever want to move it . . .

The lathe above is by Pat Delany, who has made the plans available for free. The approximate cost to make it is $150, which is truly remarkable for a metal lathe. The idea is based on the work of Lucien Ingraham Yeomans, who pioneered the use of concrete to make cheap machine tools during WWI.

Below is a CNC by Kenny Cheung from MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. The site for the project suggests that the plans will be made available, but the project still looks to be very much in progress at the moment.

Via Make

Posted in Hardware, Open Source, Taylor Gilbert by Taylor Gilbert | No Comments

Previously on Fubiz

• Street Art by 183Art
• The Art of Rap
• Luzinterruptus Installation

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I must admit that I have a particular fondness for projects that combine traditional and modern technology. They prove that not everything made with digital fabrication has to look like something from a space adventure movie (not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that).

These small containers by nendo start with a paper-based 3D printer that glues and cuts sheets of regular paper to build the form. This kind of machine is normally considered a relatively cheap and low-quality alternative to the more common plastic extrusion printers, in part because of the terraced look of the models.

Instead of trying to hide the paper texture, nendo used it to its best advantage with a coating of traditional japanese lacquer. The combination looks something like wood grain.

Posted in 3D Printing, Functional Art + Objects, Taylor Gilbert by Taylor Gilbert | No Comments

The producer simplifies the concept behind melody and harmony into a colorful app.

This is one of the many wonderful illustrations you can find in Christoph Niemann’s latest book called Abstract City, a collection of visual essays. If you’re as much of a fan of Christoph’s as I am, you might enjoy his humorous CreativeMornings talk.

(via explore)

The UK Government has published an alpha release of its digital design principles with examples of how they have been used so far.

1. Start with needs
2. Do less
3. Design with data
4. Do the hard work to make it simple
5. Iterate. Then iterate again.
6. Build for inclusion
7. Understand context
8. Build digital services, not websites
9. Be consistent, not uniform
10. Make things open: it makes things better

(via Bruce Sterling)

Petter Silfver, an interaction designer from Stockholm (Sweden), has published an article on Smashing Magazine on “the tiniest of details that goes into creating the main centerpiece of your digital product—the construction of the elements of your navigation”.

“When users look for information, they have a goal and are on a mission. Even before you started to read this article, chances are you did because you either had the implicit goal of checking what’s new on Smashing Magazine, or had the explicit goal of finding information about “Navigation Design”.

After a couple of seconds of scanning this article, and maybe reading parts of the introduction, you may have started to ask yourself whether the information that you’re consuming at the moment is actually relevant to you—the user. Unfortunately (and as certain as death and taxes), if users cannot find the information they are looking for, chances are they will abandon their track, never to return.

Being the compassionate human being that I am, I’ll try to explain to you what this article is about, so you can make your choice either to continue reading, or not. This article is not about where you should place the menu of your website or mobile application, or about the number of options a menu should contain. It is also not about how you visually enforce the perceived affordance of a user-interface element, and why that is so important.

This article is about the tiniest of details that goes into creating the main centerpiece of your digital product — the construction of the elements of your navigation. This is the most important aid you can possibly give to your users as they are constantly seeking a reason to walk out on you.”

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