How aesthetically beautiful are your photos? Try out Acquine, an Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine. Welcome to the brave new world of computational aesthetics!

Clever – video of evolving a human face using a genetic algorithm. A face detector is used for the fitness function.

Time to start gaming for mental health?

Haunting and beautiful sand art “animation” – very neat and worth the 9 minutes.

Any ideas on how I can design and build a Charisma Augmentation Device…? Learn about the science of charisma.

Handy handy – a useful new and free visualisation tool called Parallel Sets has just been released.

An arty digital analog clock designed by Humans Since 1982 – Clock Clock: The Analog Digital Clock (thanks Baz).

Me likes MOY – design and adapt the visual design of your car…in real-time! Probably a bit distracting but I suspect it could be useful for making your car visually pop-out in dangerous low-vision driving conditions? MOY is a design concept from Elvis Tomljenovic “The idea behind MOY concept is that everyone can design their own car on their own computer and then apply the design to the vehicle using wireless data transfer or share it with other people through web-site, forum, e-mail etc. To those who lack the necessary skills or time to create their own design, we offer the option of downloading ready made designs. The vehicles are interconnected, so the change is possible in motion. ”

Interesting article in MIT Sloan Management Review on Cracking the Code of Mass Customization. You can register for free to access it for free. The authors identify three required capabilities for mass customization companies. (found via Mass Customization & Open Innovation News)

Read Core77’s writeup Physical pixels: design for the not so near future on the Organic User Interfaces panel at CHI 09, which I previously mentioned. Is it a bit too futuristic? Psst, the answer is no – as long as futuristic innovations feedback into here and now innovations.

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 email as they knew it.

Join the list here!

We’ve put it back online because it’ll be showing in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) as part of “The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now” from November 8, 2008, through February 8, 2009. Press release for the show is here.

Other artists in the show include “bramović/Ulay; Vito Acconci; Francis Alÿs; Chip Lord, Curtis Schreier and Bruce Tomb (former members of Ant Farm); John Baldessari; Joseph Beuys; Blank & Jeron and Gerrit Gohlke; George Brecht; Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Mike Bennett; John Cage; c a l c and Johannes Gees; Janet Cardiff; Lygia Clark; Minerva Cuevas; Maria Eichhorn; VALIE EXPORT; Harrell Fletcher and Jon Rubin; Fluxus Collective; Jochen Gerz; Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz; Matthias Gommel; Felix Gonzalez-Torres; Dan Graham; Hans Haacke; Lynn Hershman Leeson; Nam June Paik; Allan Kaprow; Henning Lohner and Van Carlson; Rafael Lozano-Hemmer; Tom Marioni; MTAA (M.River and T.Whid Art Associates); Antoni Muntadas; Yoko Ono; Dan Phiffer and Mushon Zer-Aviv; Raqs Media Collective; Robert Rauschenberg; Warren Sack; Mieko Shiomi; Torolab; Wolf Vostell; Andy Warhol; Stephen Willats; and Erwin Wurm.”

Enjoy, next week regular blog posting will resume.

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 the My Drive Thru music video.

Air Ape art.

If you only ever subscribe to one podcast then I cannot recommend WNYC’s marvelous Radiolab enough. Over the last few months I’ve been listening to their back catalogue – science radio at its very best. A dash of depth, a dash of humor and lots of interesting diverse topics. It always leaves me delighted and wondering could I do research in that field, and that field, and that field. Boo, there’s never enough time for all the interesting things in the world!

What’s cooking in Research and Development at IBM, Microsoft and HP.

Blog-a-licious 3 Quarks Daily – An Eclectic Digest of Science, Art and Literature.

Zoomii reminds me of my old MLE project Media Dive. Media Dive was a graphical and audio ZUI for browsing large collections of music, where I played around with integrating zooming with controlling exposure to multiple spatially arranged audio sources. One feature of Media Dive enabled you to zoom towards a song/album to select what music to hear while also increasing (or zoom out to decrease) the music’s volume.

Fifty years of DARPA: Hits, misses and ones to watch.

Sit back and watch the addictive flickrvision. flickrvision is a spatial photo visualisation that shows photos on Google Maps as the photos are uploaded to flickr.

Jump around jump around and smile Where the Hell is Matt?

Read about Buckminster Fuller – architect, inventor, innovator, designer, futurist.

Evolution at work Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab.

User Designer has been very quiet because I was on holidays and attending the Advanced Visual Interfaces 2008 conference, where I presented Perceptual Usability: Predicting changes in visual interfaces & designs due to visual acuity differences. Yet again AVI was an enjoyable conference with lots of friendly faces. Unfortunately its only on every two years.

While in Italy I headed to Pompeii and unexpectedly stumbled upon a 2000 year old bistable optical illusion mosaic in The House of the Faun. Wow. I hadn’t realised the Romans and Greeks used optical illusions in their art. Below is a photo of the mosaic:

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 architectradure)

Therein lies the future – as a follow-on to my post Metamatter: Self-Reshapable Materials check out Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science. CTIHP is a report sponsored by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and Department of Commerce (DOC), so its worth paying attention to. There’s also the follow-on Managing Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno Innovations: Converging Technologies In Society.

Arthur Shaprio, vision scientist at Bucknell University, has setup a new blog featuring visual illusions with explanations of why they occur. I particularly like his Lucy in the Sky illusion.

Beautiful – The Singing, Ringing Tree.

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 Animi Causa’s malleable Feel Seating System bed (pictured above).

Read about morphological liberty in the essay Plateaus of Completeness on The Speculist blog. Should people be forced to use tools that are designed to augment their abilities? For example should you be required to use a computer and credit card to book an air flight? What about more futuristic “tools” that are implanted in people, such as FDA approved RFID Tags?

Graph your favourite website in your web browser using a spring / force directed layout. (thanks Baz)

There’s only going to be one UD post this week – lots of holiday days in Ireland this week so I’m chilling out and eating Easter Eggs! Yum.

Are you a hacker (maker) or a painter? Or both? Or neither? Which of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures do you belong to? Paul Graham’s essay on Hackers and Painters may be of interest.

Fascinating talk given by Professor Mark Reed from Yale talking about The Next Frontier: Bioelectronic Interfaces (video).

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 isn’t it. It well and truly answers the question whether games can be art. Jason Rohrer who developed it has written a Creators Statement. In the statement it is clear that he deliberately sought to make “players” experience deep feelings when playing his very low resolution “game”.

Will Passage be remembered in future histories of game art?

If you didn’t try it here’s a link to a Wall Street Journal article that describes the experience of playing Passage.

Though Passage isn’t as subtle it reminds me of one of my favourite poems, Eavan Boland’s poem “Love”:
    Dark falls on this mid-western town
    where we once lived when myths collided.
    Dusk has hidden the bridge in the river
    which slides and deepens
    to become the water
    the hero crossed on his way to hell.
(Unfortunately, I cannot post the rest of the poem due to copyright.)

The source code for Passage is readily available. Anyone want to do a Readymade style Duchamp on it?

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. Interactive realtime feedback on how your design changes over time.

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 Browse Amazon. Yep, more information visualisations that might be useful, but may well be utterly useless but ever so pretty.

Lots of tiny little builders = massive house. Watch this video showing myrmecologists figuring out how big an ant colony is. If you’re short on time just jump in 4 min 4 seconds for images of the ant colony structure. Tis amazing and beautiful!

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 stare you down. Time to plonk two of those eyes on top of every TV to cure us of TV addiction?

Help yourself by helping yourself while helping yourself. Ouch. Play the temporal-tastic Cursor * 10. Interesting game idea that could be extended to other forms of interaction design. Reduce task complexity by timeshifting collaboration with yourself?