It’s been 4 years since I’ve last updated my portfolio. I spent the last week tweaking it a bit. Nothing too fancy just a bit neater than before. The academic part of the portfolio will be coming soon (there’s a lot of content). I’d love to hear any/all feedback.

Thanks!

We all know that users don’t like to stray far away from their default settings. Gmail recently introduced the themes tab to their web service but not only did they advertise it, they actually showed you by changing the colors of your default view. If you are annoyed by the new color scheme then inevitably you’re going to go and play around with the themes. By playing around with the themes you are made aware of them and therein lies the genius. Whether you are annoyed by the change or not, you are aware that you can modify themes. This is a great strategy to think of when introducing new features to your product. How can you subtlety integrate a new feature with your service so that the user is made aware without interrupting their regular flow?

Google also introduced their new SearchWiki that allows you to promote and mark-up links through Google search. The promotion only affects your account but you can see the mark-up of other users. It’s a great feature if you do repeated searches and always gravitate to similar links. The issue I’m wondering about is if the natural ranking ever influences your search after you’ve promoted something. I.e. will you ever see any new links or do all of your promoted links always dominate the search now? I guess the simple answer is to log out and you’ll have the regular Google ranking.

Now this is just awesome:

I can easily see this being a great collaborative tool, probably not practical for the home quite yet. But think about collaborating in a space, saving it to a device near by or the podium and distributing the work you’ve done together. I really love the Z axis manipulation, which I’ve yet to see to this degree. I wonder if there is a keyboard interface that maps to the gloves?

Brings me to another great point. What should agencies do with your staff’s downtime? Start an innovation lab. It needs to have structured goals and outcomes of course but the results are 2 fold:

A: Great Marketing Tool
B: Aspirational/Inspirational work for the team

Minority report was a movie but it’s pretty much become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If nothing else these efforts can push the boundaries of what is possible and provide the team an novel look at the future.

I think every practitioner misses the freedom of the school studio at one point in their career. I’m definitely wishing I could play, incubate, and innovate uninhibitedly. This is mostly a nostalgic post and a plug for my old school The School of Interactive Arts and Technology at SFU Surrey.

I recently came across a marketing video the school put together. I think it does a great job of demystifying what one can accomplish at the school. I remember going into the school just thinking that I used computers a lot and that I may be interested in business at some level. How things have changed

I also loved the faculty. They really challenged you and treated you like a peer, a stark difference from high school that’s for sure. The learning style at the school reminded me of the article Allan Chochinov put together at Core 77 - Those Who Can, Teach. 1000 words of advice for design teachers.

There is a post maybe once a week on the IxDA list about how to get into the field. I’d highly recommend this little known school. Well it’s probably more known now that the school is hosting Interaction 09. But if you’re lucky enough to devote 4 years to the craft, this is one of the few places you can focus your undergrad on Interaction design.

Marty Neumeier the president of Neutron and author of such books as The Brand Gap and Zag has written a nice article for DMI as a preview of his upcoming book The Designful Company.

Marty polled top executives to find out the wicked problems that their organizations face.

The results are as follows:

2008 Survey of Wicked Problems*
(Sponsored by Neutron and Stanford University)
1. Balancing long-term goals with short-term demands
2. Predicting returns on innovative concepts
3. Innovating at the increasing speed of change
4. Winning the war for world-class talent
5. Combining profitability with social responsibility
6. Protecting margins in a commoditizing industry
7. Multiplying success by collaborating across silos
8. Finding unclaimed yet profitable market space
9. Addressing the challenge of eco-sustainability
10. Aligning strategy with customer experience
*A wicked problem is a puzzle so persistent, pervasive, and slippery
that it can seem insoluble.

In his article Marty advocates for business folks who live and breath the language of design. Not necessarily surrounding themselves with and hiring designers but embodying the process and thinking that is involved with design. He also mentions that the rise of eco-sustainability as an issue that will only gain in prominence and that it will provide many opportunities for innovation creating products and services for guilt free affluence of the mass market.

In New York, life moves by pretty quickly. Sometimes going to the grocery store or even spending the time to cook is a huge burden. Enter SeamlessWeb, a web service that connects a pool of restaurants to an online POS.

Usually the delivery people who come by my building flood it with new takeout menus. Yesterday, I was about to order from one place when I saw the URL for SeamlessWeb on their brochure. Once I went to the site I was pleasantly surprised. Basically SeamlessWeb has done the leg work of getting a large set of restaurants in Manhattan and a couple other urban centers and created a system that will show you a menu from these restaurants, take payment, and ping the restaurant with the order. It is rather seamless and there are a number of restaurants with additional discounts as well. You can include gratuity and basically make the entire transaction cashless.

What interested me more than tasty food (hard to believe, I know) was the platform. Enabling traditional brick and mortar establishments from a similar industry with a useful platform. I’m going to stew on it for a bit and thank SeamlessWeb for really fast food + an idea seed

Oh and the one criticism I do have is their name is not indicative of their service. They should probably rethink that a bit.

Jared Spool has written an interesting continuation to the discussion he started at IA Summit 08 in the IxDA mailing list. He proposes that Activity-centered design is a subset of User-centered design. Where the former is concerned with the activity/tasks necessary to interact with the system, the latter is more aware of the context of use, goals, and motivations of the user of the system.

I created a quick diagram to wrap my head around the spectrum of methodological approaches Jared speaks to:

I see the larger bubbles requiring more process to complete while the smaller bubbles have lower and lower user involvement.

And to define each methodology I’ll borrow from Jared directly:

“0) Unintended Design: The design that results from teams that don’t pay any attention to design. This is the true rubber-band-and-spit approach to creating things. Everything ends up with a design, but not every design is intentional. Some very lucky teams end up with successful unintended design, but the odds are against this.

4) User-Centered Design (UCD): The design that results from teams that look beyond just the activities, to the goals, needs, and contexts of the users. Because usage is all about activity, this approach needs to have the activity at its core. (Early UCD definitions always included an essential “task analysis” phase — something that’s disappeared from the lexicon, but is still essential to this design. Task analysis is, as far as I can tell, research about activities, and thus the core research component of ACD.) This design approach is informed by techniques such as field research (ethnographic techniques) and persona creation, which help the team to see contextual items and goals.”

Professor Luis von Ahn at CMU has created Gwap, a research tool in a similar vein as Google Image Labeler. It’s actually a fun diversion from the day to day. In the guise of a game, Gwap is a little more rich than Google Image Labeler in its offering. It allows the user to:

-map words to images
-come to a consensus as to whether you are listening to the same song as your partner
-map words in sentences to help describe other words
-trace aspects of an image based on an image and a word. the closer you and your partner trace the image similarly the more points you are rewarded.
-pick one image of two you believe your partner will favor

As we gather more human data and allow machines to process that information we can hope for a more friendly semantically aware web.

I remember a few years back getting excited at the prospects with using a webcam as an input device. I wasn’t sure how much fidelity of movement it would be able to understand but it was promising when I saw the Minority Cube a few years ago. Now a MS Research practitioner has created an algorithm that looks at the topology of an imagine, recognizes the foreground and background shapes, and maps interaction to the shape of the hand and its movement. Say goodbye to the mouse?