One of my favourite bands, Arcade Fire, has collaborated with Google and writer/director Chris Milk to create an experimental video for their song “We Used to Wait”. Made to play in Google Chrome, The Wilderness Downtown starts off asking for the address of your childhood home and then becomes in an incredible audio and visual experience that uses choreographed browser windows of varying sizes popping open or closing and displays animations of digital flying birds flying from one window to the next and a pair of feet running along a street. All of that builds up to a climax when images of your street and childhood home are blended into the video, creating moments of surprise, delight and nostalgia. Self-reflection and sentimental thoughts are triggered near the end with pause allows you to write a message to your younger self, after which animated trees sprout all along your old street.

Using HTML5 technology, the collaborators have created a technologically impressive and creatively piece of work to create an awe-inspiring audio/visual experience.

Designing the interactions people have with other people, with organizations, and with systems is both a simple and a complex undertaking. Simple in that the mechanics of an individual interaction can be well-defined and articulated. The problem, and the solution, can be narrowed down significantly. Indeed, so simple can interaction design seem at times that the discipline is often collapsed to a plane of request-response interfaces that sit between the participants—the design of a web form; the layout of an ATM machine; or a ticketing booth for a public bicycle share scheme [...]

This simplistic view of interactions and their design, is not the only view, nor the most appropriate. When designers apply their more holistic lens to the design of interactions it becomes clear that the practice is a much more complex and deeper undertaking [...]

As designers of interactions broaden their perspective and take a higher level view of the problem, they simultaneously make another transition: they stop solving interaction design problems and begin solving problems with design. And it is in taking this step that designers—of all types—begin to play a more strategic role in the organisations and societies for which they work.

Source: Core 77

The places people experience in a city differ depending on whether they are tourists or locals. Mapping geo-tagged photographs illustrate the distinction between tourist shots (red) and local shots (blue) in Montreal. These maps tell a narrative of one’s journey through a city through either the eyes of a local or tourist, highlighting the varied points of interest of each group. And indeed, they are usually quite representative of people’s expected patterns of movement.  More city maps here.

Source: Urban Photo

Source: Information is Beautiful

A fun tag cloud of my delicious tags. Generated by Wordle.

Reminiscence

May 14 – June 12, 2010

Opening Reception: Friday, May 14, 6pm – 10pm at Twist Gallery

Twist Gallery is pleased to present it’s first photographic exhibition featuring work by photographers Dianne Davis, Andrew Myers, Sabrina Maltese, Clare Samuel, Mimi Cabell, Michelle Li and Sarah Burtscher. These 7 photographers create work that offers an array of personal reflections on nostalgia, the vernacular, and one’s sense of home. Whether critical, intimate, or introspective these artists delve into both their own personal memories as well as cultural memory, creating visual manifestations of them and transforming them in their work . The result is an interesting mix of photography that insists upon the importance of remembrance and memorialization.

Twist Gallery
1100 Queen Street West
(416) 588-2222
www.twistgallery.ca

Gallery Hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 11am – 6pm

Twist Gallery is a 5000 square foot social event and art venue located at 1100 Queen Street West in Toronto. Twist Gallery showcases emerging and established artists, exhibiting a variety of contemporary art practices, as well as hosting various cultural events.

via VisualEconomics

Also, check out Boston.com’s The Big Picture for imagery of the devastation.

We’ve all heard the phrase, “less is more,” overused, and here the author sums up the complexity in designing for simplicity.

This may seem overly philosophical, but as my co-author, Josh Porter, said recently, “Simplicity is much more than the trite “less is more” we so often hear. Simplicity is… about clarity.” And clarity comes from constant refinement.

John Maeda’s First Law of Simplicity states: The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. Refinement that is thoughtful, calculated, and whenever possible and appropriate, based on data is one of the fundamental tools of any designer.