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.

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.

Have you ever gotten into one of those silly arguments about the colour of something? You know where you’re sure that a t-shirt is red, while your friend is 100% sure its redish yellow. Frustrating isn’t it.

Strange as it is, both of you can be utterly right.

You both “see” a slightly different colour because of individual differences in physiology. The receptors in eyes that help convert light into colour often have slightly different sensitivities between people. For most people the differences are so slight they’re not usually noticed, but people with colour blindness experience a world where colours appear very different. Go here for details about the Ishihara colour plate image, which is used in testing whether people are colour blind.

There are thought to be women who are the opposite of colour blind, they are tetrachromats who are able to see more colours than most people (who are usually trichromats). Damn Interesting has a good introductory article about tetrachromats A Life More Colorful, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a good article with a little more science background, Some women may see 100 million colors, thanks to their genes.

Previously I’ve touched upon individual differences in genetics for Personalised Medicine and the Psychology of Individual Differences.

There are many other kinds of subtle physiological differences, such as variations in taste receptors and densities on the human tongue. Here’s an introductory article about taste blindness.

Individual differences in physiology can be measured. These measures can be used to shape the design of objects. For example measures of your taste receptors could be used to automatically adapt a collection of cooking recipes to enhance the flavour for your tongue. Or TVs could have inbuilt smarts that adapt football game colours so a person with red-green colour blindness can more easily see their favourite football team. No more struggling to see a team wearing a red outfit running around on a green pitch, or a red snooker ball on a green table.

If the above is to become possible then self-mallable / re-shapable objects that adapt to the individual physiology of users need:
1) measures of user physiology
2) predictive models of the impact due to physiological differences, i.e. if an object is adapting to a user how does it know an adaption has a positive or negative effect?

This builds on implications from When Toothbrushes Mate: Form & Function DNA. Malleable objects and artifacts need to be:
1) self-describing
2) user describing (predicting the impact on user experiences due to physiological differences).

Look at Smash Magazine’s recent article on Modern Approaches To Data Visualization for a quick overview of key information visualizations.

Admire the 500+ visualizations at visualcomplexity.

Create your own online visualizations at Many Eyes.

Today I’m adding a new category called Creativity Knowledge to the User Designer blog. Creativity Knowledge will feature short posts highlighting specific examples of Human Computer Interaction and Interaction Design research. Posts in Creativity Knowledge will help flesh out (often very) distantly related research around enabling anyone to take control and shape their own user experiences.

Why am I adding Creativity Knowledge? Around 10+ years ago when I was getting into HCI and Interaction Design I remember finding lots of academic papers that dryly outlined exciting-vibrate-in-your-chair ideas and design concepts. Many of the prototyped ideas had conceptual and research histories dating back decades. Some of those ideas made it into products, such as the iPhone, others have been forgotten, gotten lost among a sea of publications and projects, or were before their time.

Not being aware of what’s out there is depriving yourself of a powerful source of inspiration, because you don’t know how different ideas could weave together. Maybe some of the research will inspire you to create or enhance a product, or spin out a startup?

Best of all it can be lots of fun seeing what others have invented!

Helvetica sounds like a fascinating documentary by Gary Hustwit about “typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which is celebrating its 50th birthday this year) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives.”. There’s going to be a screening of it in Dublin, Ireland on the 28th of June.

If you’re not all podcasted out you could send your ears in the direction of iinnovate. The podcast is about innovation and entrepreneurship and features some interesting interviews with well known entrepreneurs.