User Designer

Super busy at the moment but I’m delighted to announce “BumpList: An Email Community for the Determined” (my project in collaboration with Jonah Brucker-Cohen) is back online after being offline for 4 years! So now is your chance to join the email community that had most people scratching their heads and wondering what happened to […]

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All the world is aflame with the iPhone! Have a look at this example of the iPhone used as an Augmented Reality device. (thanks Karl)
See how the world looks to a baby’s eyes.
What is our psychology of time? Read The future is nonlinear on Mind Hacks to learn more.
Drool drool love the visual style in […]

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Think Nintendo’s Wii is deliciously haptic? Then click over to Exertion Interfaces: Sports over a distance for social bonding and fun. Checkout their Table Tennis for Three website and video, where three friends in different parts of the world play table tennis together. I wonder have they built their Remote Impact - Shadowboxing over a […]

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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 lab.
User Designer […]

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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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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 is […]

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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) or […]

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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 and moving […]

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Lovely overview about The History Of Visual Communication.
A bunch of interviews with User Experience pioneers.
Can you touch it? Workshop on designing multi-touch interaction techniques for displays (thanks Aaron). Invent a new interaction technique for the likes of Microsoft’s Surface and the DiamondTouch.
Can you sing it? World’s First HCI Rap
Chill out and sketch a personal kaleidoscope. […]

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Tune your ears (listen) to Donald Norman, deep thinker about the implications of cognitive psychology for usability / HCI / design, getting interviewed by Peter Merholz. (found at putting people first)
Flybot - read about Harvard University’s microrobotic fly. Visit Prof. Robert Wood’s Harvard Microrobotics Lab website. (thanks to Baz for the suggestion)
5 Alternative Ways to […]

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Would you like one of these futuristic disappearing car doors? Here’s an online video of it in action.
At Ellyssa Kroski’s InfoTangle read about the leading forms of information design and navigation structures for the web. Non-technical and clearly written - perfect.
Here’s lookin at you, human. Golan Levin and co’s art piece Opto-isolator is going to […]

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Want a seat that’ll be there when you need it? Watch this neat design concept video of an interactive seat which follows you around! (via core77)
Have a look at Yahoo’s Design Innovation Team project website for some interesting visualisations and interactive concepts.
we make money not art writes about creating art with living materials. There’s something […]

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Recently I came across JennyLC’s Intimate Controllers project (via the always interesting we-make-money-not-art). She writes that the project involved “building game controllers into undergarments so that games are played through players physically touching one another. The goal of this project was to research and create objects that challenge the traditional notions and orientation of video […]

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Turn your old CDs into jewelry!
An interesting Evolutionary Psychology Primer by Leda Cosmides (Psychology) and John Tooby (Anthropology), University of California Santa Barbara.
Want to take part in a short online research study into the connections between music and personality? If you’re interested and live in the UK or Ireland you can pop over here for […]

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