User Designer

Zoomii is an interesting and well executed Zoomable User Interface (ZUI) for browsing books on Amazon. With Zoomii you see virtual bookshelves that you can zoom in and out of, a little bit like the experience of exploring a physical bookstore. I reckon they should tweak Zoomii so when you zoom towards a book cover [...]

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Neat video showing off a 360 degree 3D display created by researchers from the Graphics Lab at University of Southern California. More details can be found on their website and in their SIGGRAPH 2007 paper. Read about Buckminster Fuller – architect, inventor, innovator, designer, futurist. Evolution at work Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the [...]

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Fashionable Technology is a just released book on The interplay of electronic textiles and wearable technology, and fashion, design and science is a highly promising and topical subject. Offered here is a compact survey of the theory involved and an explanation of the role technology plays in a fabric or article of clothing. (found via [...]

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A true HCI classic from 1945 (pre-pre-HCI). Vannevar Bush’s reflections on how technology can augment the human intellect: As We May Think Neat – Kickable self-reassembling robots. (thanks Graham) Get some insight into how Google approaches usability and HCI in the talk The Art and Science of User Experience at Google. An amusing ad. Have [...]

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Very neat – A Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods from Visual-Literacy.org. Hover your mouse over any of the entries and up pops the related visualisation. Excellent, the 2nd Irish Human Computer Interaction Conference is going to be on on the 19th and 20th of September in University College Cork, Ireland. Submission date is June 13th, [...]

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Sensisphere is a multitouch hemispherical display that lets you drag, move, push and pull digitial things with your hands. Pop over to YouTube and see it in action. Scientists have created an entire synthetic genome. Another important step towards making biological nanobot “machines”, which would be extremely useful as smart malleable materials. Very very blog [...]

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Alan Kay, all round Human Computer Interaction (and much more) thinker, talks at TED about how good programming can sharpen our picture. His unique software lets children learn by doing, but also learn by computing and creating lessons themselves. Learn about traffic waves. You’ll never be bored sitting in traffic again. (found at Population of [...]

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More sketching Phun. Another very pretty sketching “game” like those I mentioned in Sketch & Draw = Create & Design Interactive “Things” and Link Bucket: Crayon Physics, Optical Illusions, Design Is & Rocky Origins. (thanks Ross) Design lovely – 16 of the Most Extreme & Modern Beds You’ll Ever See. Especially relevant to User Designer [...]

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Visit WhiteVoid for a unique website navigation structure. Kind of a fusion between 3D and Zoomable User Interfaces. We can simulate you. Out Of The Blue is an engaging article about whether a supercomputer can be used to simulate a biologically accurate brain. Sounds like they’re getting real results. Nanoscale pretty. We can model you [...]

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Time for another Creativity Knowledge. Today I’m pointing you towards Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp), aka. Calm Technology. How could you make shopping for food easier? Imagine making a shopping list on your computer. As you head out the door to the supermarket the shopping list automatically stores itself on your mobile phone. Of course you’re always [...]

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Florian Kräutli has designed and created malleable magnetic curtains that retain their shape. Clunky elegance. Embodied Cognition “is a growing research program in cognitive science that emphasizes the formative role the environment plays in the development of cognitive processes.” Learn more about this increasingly important area from this website. (via MindHacks) Gimme gimme one of [...]

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Break out the champagne. Today User Designer is 1 year old! I’m happy with how the blog has developed over the first year. Though it took a while to settle into writing weekly. Two posts a week has become my regular rhythm. For the 2nd year my posting target will continue to be one post [...]

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Don’t stress a driver by showing them too much visual information, but how do you know when a driver is getting stressed? Use EEGs to measure brain activity and have the visual displays automatically adapting. Yep, more Augmented Cognition with Brain-Computer Interfaces. Here’s the New Scientist article about the research. Are you a hacker (maker) [...]

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I had today’s post planned out and was about to sit down to write it when Ross (thanks!) suggested I try out a new computer game called Passage. Wow. Go download and play. Stop reading until you’ve tried it out. Done already? Seriously I mean it – don’t read any more. Play it. Beautiful, sad [...]

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I’m curled up with a bug and head cold so today I’m posting a Link Bucket instead of the normal long Tuesday post. Enjoy. Looks Tasty – see the world with your tongue. For the last few years I’ve been keeping my eye on the emerging transdisciplinary field of Augmented Cognition. On the AugCog website [...]

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