via Fast Company

The talk about CSS3 was pretty exciting as it highlighted some new features you can now do on the web that couldn’t have been done in the past. The big advantages of CSS3 are better search engine placement from the use of real text,  increased page performance, better usability and accessibility, optimized styles, and the ability to draw and animate elements.

A topic that continually came up throughout the various talks was the concept of  responsive design, in which the layout of the content adapts to the device/media you are using. Greg Rewis in fact, stresses that browsing experiences should not be the same across different platforms and resolutions. The CSS3 specifications now includes media queries to target not only specific devices but physical characteristics of the devices like screen width and resolution. CSS3 also introduced some new background specifications; background-size is of particular interest, especially from an accessibility perspective. This property lets you specify the size of the background image, either as a fixed value or relative to the background positioning area.  It doesn’t sound particularly interesting so far — but say you use background images for text menu items and your users need to bump up the text size for easier reading, the background images would scale WITH the larger text sizes. You end up with an elegant and flexible UI where the text doesn’t look like they’ve broken out of the confines of static images. A great example of this is the Fresh Picked Design site:

The CSS3 talk was only one of many interesting presentations that day, but the other presentation slides can be found on the FITC site. For me, the conference was a great introduction to the new features and specifications enabled by HTML5 and CSS3 that will provide some inspiration for my future designs on the web.

User experience or interaction design is such a multi-faceted discipline that you need to build a foundation of skills ranging from the creative to the technical and analytical. There is no “one size fits all” educational path.

Victor rants that this future vision is not visionary at all. It focuses too much on screen interaction, which is is not that much different from our experience with our current devices. Case in point, look at all these ‘future’ interactions in Microsoft’s concept:

Each one of these scenes involves a flat screen. Yet, Victor also points out (and passionately so) that each interaction touchpoint involves the use of… hands! As humans, we have not only our fingers but our hands, arms and entire bodies that enable us to manipulate and interact with the natural world and to understand the tactile feedback we receive in return. So why should we be limited to finger pointing on a screen?

He illustrates the many ways in which we can use our hands to manipulate things that we could not possibly express via screen-based interactions:

Rather than limiting people to finger tapping/swiping, we should be inspired by our own human capabilities to design and enable a richer and more expressive interaction with our future tools.

Despite how it appears to the culture at large, technology doesn’t just happen. It doesn’t emerge spontaneously, like mold on cheese. Revolutionary technology comes out of long research, and research is performed and funded by inspired people.

And this is my plea — be inspired by the untapped potential of human capabilities. Don’t just extrapolate yesterday’s technology and then cram people into it. [...] Pictures Under Glass is old news. Let’s start using our hands.

Victor ends with a question that nicely sums up his entire point:

With an entire body at your command, do you seriously think the Future Of Interaction should be a single finger?

Information Visualization
2011
Oculus

GeoTime is an interactive 3D visualization of data over time and geography that allows analysts to follow entities, track movement and activities as well as visualize a sequence of events. This novel representation of complex data reveals patterns of behaviour that previously could not be observed with existing analysis tools and techniques.

I was involved with several conceptual extensions of the system, one being the storyboarding of tactical scenarios to demonstrate story narration augmenting data for analytic understanding and exploration. Another exploration was the aggregation of the massive data sets in both 2D and 3D modes, providing analysts an at-a-glance calendar view graph summary by either time or geography using various graphing techniques and geographic segmentation methods.

The exquisite corpse model is rooted in the surrealist movement, and we are inspired by how many experiments currently in public domain play with its framework (or lack thereof). Our take on the model—in which we essentially asked a group of collaborators to submit sentences/fragments—was to create a dynamic visualization for the “exquisite” story our writers had crafted. These collective fragments formed a base on which we layered sensory artifacts, from voice-over to tagged visuals, and we were curious as to how far we could take the experience.

They asked 150 people to submit a Twitter-length sentence. Using those fragments, they compiled a 1600-word story narrated by a single voice and illustrated it with images from Flickr linked to key words.

Exquisite Corpse Experiment – Chapter One from IDEO Labs on Vimeo.

via Core77

Information Visualization
2011
Oculus

We produced visual concepts for 2D and 3D visualizations of financial data to improve on an existing mobile app for a Fortune 500 client. We added functionality with novel interaction techniques and provided a new treatment of data to differentiate the product from its competitors. Our designs included sketches, wireframes, interaction flows and UI/visualization mockups.

Combining aspects of Lego, video game, and board games, Sifteo Cubes are a new way to play. The prototype concept was introduced in a 2009 TED talk by David Merrill, and now these interactive wireless blocks are coming to market. Showcasing innovating interaction design, these 1.5″-inch cubes with full colour screens are motion- and context-aware allowing players to shake, tilt, jolt, rotate, slide and click to affect neighbouring tiles.

They pioneer something the company calls “Intelligent Play,” which is a vaguely elevated term for a toy that manages to be both fun and smart. They’re video games for people who hate video games. [...] “We’re not trying to compete with Nintendo, Microsoft, EA and others,” Sifteo spokesman Paul Doherty tells Co.Design. “We’re trying to create games that promote learning, spatial reasoning and truly interactive play.”

See the Sifteo cubes in action:

via Co.Design

The preferred space for teaching preschool children avoids the classical dynamics of frontal lectures. In “Philosophical Investigations,” Ludwig Wittgenstein writes that what children and foreigners have in common is the absence of knowledge of language and a set of codified rules. This leads them—in the first instance—to learn through the senses and the body. To give the children more freedom to move around the school, the directors of the Fuji Kindergarten requested Tezuka to design spaces without furniture: no chairs, desks or lecterns. As a result, “Ring Around a Tree” offers an architecture where there are no measures taken to constrain space, in order to liberate the body.

The Japanese Zelkova tree had already been a “place-playmate” for several generations serving as a treehouse, temporary shelter, and climbing area before being transformed as an addition to the Fuji Kindergarten.

Looking back on my own experience, the staircase and balcony of my childhood home was a playmate for my sisters and I. In addition to functioning simply as a connection between floors, it became an area for us and our friends to slide down and climb, listen to story time and to put on puppet shows. What was your place playmate?

MOVE from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

3 guys, 44 days, 11 countries, 18 flights, 38 thousand miles, an exploding volcano, 2 cameras and almost a terabyte of footage… all to turn 3 ambitious linear concepts based on movement, learning and food ….into 3 beautiful and hopefully compelling short films…..

= a trip of a lifetime.

move, eat, learn

Rick Mereki : Director, producer, additional camera and editing
Tim White : DOP, producer, primary editing, sound
Andrew Lees : Actor, mover, groover