Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Beepl Launches A Twitter-Simple, “Social Q&A Site”

Via Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com

DMesh Turns Any Image Into A Techy Artwork

All of these images were created in DMesh, a project by Dofl Yun that automatically generates triangle meshes using Delaunay triangulation. You may recognize the aesthetic, as a number of other artists have worked with triangle meshes, but where DMesh shines is in the automation.

DMesh started as a tool to allow people without a design background to make creative images easily. Yun says he was inspired by Eric Testroete’s Papercraft Self Portrait, Pill & Pillow’s Squeal, and Quayola’s Strata (click each of those links, you won’t be sorry).

The big benefit of DMesh is that it has an auto-generation feature, where other similar tools have required the manual insertion of points. Yun says the auto-generator analyses the image and plays with the density accordingly, allowing for images that are closer to the original source. This is convenient for people who want to play around with a few images, but where it’s really useful is in animation, allowing more continuity between frames and reducing noise in the mesh.

Yun says he is collaborating with animators and designers working on a major motion picture. The fruits of that collaboration will include a new Pro version of the application that is aimed at animation and motion design work.

DMesh is currently available for free from the Mac App Store.

Via Fast Co Design: http://www.fastcodesign.com

How SOM Plans To Build NYC A (Better) Silicon Valley

Late last year, Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology won a hotly anticipated contest to build a graduate science and engineering campus on a sleepy island just east of Manhattan. It was widely hailed as an unlikely triumph–cooler, techier Stanford had been the front-runner–brought off by an ambitious mix of cash promises, strategic partnerships, and vigorous alumni support.

But perhaps nothing was more ambitious than the universities’ preliminary design concept by the architecture mega-firm SOM. Developed in tandem with Field Operations (the landscape architects of the insanely successful High Line), SOM’s scheme would feature a smattering of big metallic structures that zig-zag down Roosevelt Island, weaving into and around a rambling, verdant landscape. It’d transform part of the island–which has variously hosted a quarantine, an insane asylum, and a prison, but now has a bunch of residential buildings–into a lush, low-carbon high-tech haven, one that sounds more like an 11-acre eco-resort than a place for geeks to toil away in the science lab.

Now there are questions over whether Cornell will plow ahead with SOM’s plans. As Julie Iovine reported in The Architect’s Newspaper, rumor has it that Cornell is under pressure to hire a Cornell architect for the job. University officials haven’t confirmed the rumor, but they’ve also been vague about SOM’s role in the project moving forward. An SOM spokeswoman clarifies: “What we were hired for was the RFP the city’s request for proposal and the master plan, which is underway,” Elizabeth Kubany tells Co.Design. “What happens with the individual buildings is not clear.”

Whatever the final result–the campus won’t be built until 2017–the proposal merits a closer look because it shows what a technology incubator can look like in the 21st century and how it can both satisfy its own insular needs and appeal to those of us who aren’t plotting the next revolution in mobile tech.

SOM’s plan has three distinguishing features: a net-zero goal for the academic architecture; flexible buildings that the universities buzzily call academic “hubs”; and half a million square feet of publicly accessible space.

Hubs
The hubs would be divided not by academic discipline but by interest (mobile tech, for instance). They would feature big, sprawling floor plans that’d allow for the sort of free-flowing exchange of ideas that has become a hallmark of the tech world.

Net-zero Academic Campus
Net-zero energy would be achieved by sipping power from a 150,000-square-foot photovoltaic array (the largest in NYC, the architects say) and geothermal wells. It would also draw on passive heating and cooling strategies. “The zig-zagging layouts have to do with harvesting daylight and mitigating heat gain,” SOM partner Roger Duffy says. A caveat: The net-zero goal would be confined to the campus’s academic architecture. That’s because, as SOM’s Colin Koop explains, PVs aren’t efficient enough to generate adequate energy for proposed housing units and a hotel. Those structures would earn LEED Silver certification.

Public Space
“It wasn’t in the RFP,” Duffy says. “But Cornell perceived themselves as an underdog and wanted to differentiate themselves, so one of the big things was public space.” Squeezing in half a million square feet, though–around the hubs’ outsized floorplates and on an island that’s just 800 feet at its widest point–would be no small feat. So SOM decided to feed the landscape directly into the buildings: “The open space is both at ground level and wraps up and over several stories of the base of the campus,” Koop says. “There’s more or less a continuous two-story base of the campus that you can walk up and across; you can enter buildings at multiple levels. It’s about the integration of public spaces and academic spaces, and trying to create as much public space as possible.” And with landscape architecture by Field Operations, you know it’d be good.

“These three distinguishing characteristics–the hubs, the net zero energy, and the public nature of the project–come together in a way that suggests that this is a unique position Cornell is putting out there in the world,” Duffy says. “Their aspirations are very high. They want to create the right atmosphere that will influence new businesses. Our plan is a manifestation of what they want. And what they really want is a 21st-century version of Silicon Valley.”

The question now is whether that 21st-century version of Silicon Valley will at all resemble the gleaming renderings we see today. “We expect the broad principles of the design to be maintained because Cornell/Technion believe in them and because they have been made public,” SOM’s spokeswoman says. “But, this a conceptual design, so some evolution is probably inevitable. The design will continue to develop as the project progresses.”

Images courtesy of SOM

Via Fast Co Design: http://www.fastcodesign.com

Modai, A Smartphone Concept With Replaceable Brains

Smartphones are the epitome of planned obsolescence. If you don’t upgrade your phone every two years, you’re likely to be left out in the cold as software outpaces its capabilities. But all you really need to do is upgrade the phone’s brain, not its whole body. What if there were a smartphone whose body was designed to let this kind of modular upgrading happen? Julius Tarng has created one called Modai. It’s only a concept design, not a working prototype or a shipping product, but I wish it were.

Tarng has devised a boatload of intriguing user-interface conventions for Modai, some familiar (separate “paradigms” for work and play, much like Divide), some more surprising (a flexible “peelstand” on the back of the phone lets it flex in your pocket to silently signal incoming messages, or stand up on edge when an alarm goes off).

But Modai’s coolest idea is its modular design to encourage users to extend the device’s lifespan. Removing the “peelstand” also lets you access Modai’s “internal pack,” which you can swap out and attach a new, better CPU unit, RAM cache, or battery to, just like snapping Legos together. “From batteries to the camera, from the RAM to the CPU, most internals that evolve quickly can be upgraded,” Tarng writes. “Modai employs an ecosystem that allows you to return your old module for disposal or resale after you buy a new one.”

In the same way that talk is cheap, so are concept designs. Modai is an awesome idea, but fabricating and manufacturing all its components, as well as spinning up the infrastructure to support the trade-in/recycling “ecosystem,” would be a mammoth undertaking, and perhaps not practical. Then again, “perhaps” is the operative word there. Modai looks like something that should exist. We’ll never know if it could exist until someone actually tries.

Read more about Modai

Via Fast Co Design: http://www.fastcodesign.com

Funhouse Chute Offers A Gumball For Each New Twitter Follower

Whenever someone follows brand communications agency Uniform‘s Twitter account, a toy train inside a cuckoo clock shoves a gumball out the door onto a circuitous track. When the gumball comes to rest, it’s available for studio members to consume. After that’s all done, their Twitter account automatically @replies the new follower with a link to a video of the thing in action.

The contraption is called Sweet Tweet and it’s an experimental “physical app” created by Uniform’s research platform, called ULAB.

“We wanted to create a physical app that connected our studio to our Twitter followers,” says Pete Thomas, Uniform’s future director, “raising awareness and alerting us all to each new follower.”

Sweet Tweet is a toy, but behind it is a pitch for a different way of doing interaction. It’s specifically a response to the spread of touch screens. ULAB envisions Internet-connected devices (the physical apps) that allow access to information or services without a mouse, keyboard, or touch screen. “We think that as mobile touch screens become ubiquitous, we’re increasingly going to see brands rely on physical apps to create more engaging real-world Internet-enabled experiences,” says Thomas.

Though Uniform is most excited about how brands might make use of this kind of thing, the idea of physical apps ties into a larger discussion in the design world about the future of interaction.

When Apple introduced the iPhone, Steve Jobs made the case for a touch-screen interface. He put up a slide with four, then current, smartphones, cropped to show the buttons. “They all have these keyboards that are there whether you need them or not,” he complained. “And they all have these control buttons that are fixed in plastic.” The advantage of a touch screen with a bitmap screen is clear. You can change your interface to suit each application and you can update the interface without needing to make a new device.

The case for the opposition is well articulated by Bret Victor in “A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design.” He points out that the cost of these very visually flexible interfaces is that they severely limit our best means of interacting with the world. He offers a simple thought experiment. First, tie your shoelaces with your eyes closed. Second, try it when your eyes are open but your fingers are numb. “When working with our hands, touch does the driving, and vision helps out from the back seat,” says Victor. “Claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It’s obviously a transitional technology.”

As a sort of proof of concept, it’s worth asking what kind of interaction Sweet Tweet is enabling.

Uniform’s team gets the brunt of the experience. The cuckoo clock sits in their office. The gumball rewards are offered for an event that no one in the studio controls. Is this charming? I’ve never been in the studio, so I can’t say one way or the other, but heaven help them if the account ever gets really popular. Seven gumballs a day might be charming. Seven per minute would be a cacophony. In the early days of Amazon, they used to have a bell that went off whenever someone made an order on the site. They had to turn it off pretty quick. I keep thinking of Lucille Ball on the chocolate assembly line.

For the people who follow Uniform, their experience of the project is an automated @reply to a follow request. This is generally considered to be bad Twitter etiquette. While there is the nice payoff of the video, it’s not a video of the actual gumball being dropped. Instead, it’s the playful promotional video.

The weirdest part of this is that, spambot population being what it is, there’s a chance that the new follower isn’t even a person. A spambot follow that happens after hours would set off a chain of communication entirely devoid of human involvement.

Watching the video of the machine in action, I can’t help but think of operant conditioning experiments, with rats being trained using food pellet rewards. It’s B.F. Skinner meets Rube Goldberg as filmed by Wes Anderson. If you want to give the Uniform team some gum balls, you can click here to follow them on Twitter.

Via Fast Co Design: http://www.fastcodesign.com

How To Reach And Influence The Connected Consumer

Via Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com

4 Management Lessons From The Overhaul Of Android’s UI

There are a lot of things you might say about an Android phone–that it’s more powerful than the iPhone, more customizable, better integration with Google services. But one thing you probably wouldn’t say about an Android phone is that you love it–can’t-live-without-it, rip-it-out-of-my-cold-dead-hands love it. When Matias Duarte (the designer behind the T-Mobile Sidekick and Palm’s WebOS) joined Google a year-and-a-half ago as senior director for Android user experience, he set out to change that.

But Duarte has been around the block a few times. He knows you can’t just walk into a place like Google, wave a wand, and make large-scale changes–especially when the inmates probably don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with the way they’ve been doing things to date, thank you very much.

The fact that the latest version of Android, release 4.0, code-named “Ice Cream Sandwich” (shipped in December on the Galaxy Nexus), is such a leap forward, and perhaps, even, bordering on beautiful, means that Duarte was able to convince Google’s Android team to see things his way. Here’s how he did it.

Know that no one else might think there’s a problem, even if you do

Duarte walked into Google knowing there was a long way to go with the Android interface. But he was also aware that it’s one thing to try to convince people to change what they’re doing when things are going poorly. It’s another entirely when things are actually going quite well. “I was going to have to ask them to change the way they’d been doing things for years,” he says. “And the way they’d been doing things led to great commercial success.” If he tackled his assignment without acknowledging that, he would likely run smack into opposition.

And so he decided to …

Run a baseline study to identify users’ core issues

“I needed to have a mechanism that would both give me confidence that we were making the right changes and would also really engage everybody and not make them feel like we were arbitrarily throwing away work that had worked for them in the past,” Duarte says.

So he built up his research team–that was his first major step–and then initiated a study to establish users’ baseline attitudes toward Android. The three principle questions were: How did users feel about Android? How did they actually use Android phones? And how did Android compare to other platforms?

The first thing they found was perhaps predictable: People who have started using smartphones feel like they are an extension of themselves. They can’t imagine going back.

But the team also found two other things. The first was that users felt Android was hard to learn–though they didn’t actually phrase it that way. “They felt that, even though the device was powerful, maybe they weren’t smart enough to unlock that power,” Duarte says. “Of course, that’s not really their fault. That’s our failure.”

The second thing they learned is that users didn’t really love their Android devices. “Oftentimes there was enthusiasm, but beyond that sense of necessity, that sense that ‘This is my lifeline, I can’t live without it,’ there was seldom the positive that goes beyond that, the sense that they really loved it.’”

“It’s kind of funny to talk about something that you don’t hear as a finding,” Duarte says, “but when you do research, you have to be alert to the things that are unspoken as much as the things that are said.”

Bring your stakeholders along on your research

As they were doing the baseline study, Duarte’s team brought engineers out into the field with them to observe what the users were saying. “Engaging people in the research gives it credibility,” Duarte says. “They see first-hand what people are saying. So it’s not somebody else telling them, ‘Oh, by the way, maybe there are some issues that we should look at.’ They can see the real customers, and they can see the kinds of problems that they’re having, and that provides an opportunity for us to have a dialogue, to say, ‘Look, these are some things we could do to alleviate that.’”

Use the baseline research to establish your design goals

After seeing users’ attitudes to the operating system, the team established three goals for the next phase of Android design, which would serve to give the team focus and, as Duarte said above, confidence that they were investing their efforts in the right places:

1. Transform Android into an OS people fall in love with.

“We knew as designers that, for a really successful product, people should be having a stronger emotional reaction,” Duarte says. “They should be talking about how much they love it, how much they desire it, how much they appreciate it.”

2. Make Android truly simple and straightforward to use.

“People know that Android is powerful, and they’ve felt a little bad about it when they can’t figure it out,” Duarte says. “We want to turn that around and make you feel like you completely understand the system.”

3. Have users associate Android’s cutting-edge innovations with things that will turbo-charge their own lives.

Google is constantly turning out pioneering features, like voice actions or, the latest, Face Unlock, which allows you to unlock your phone using facial recognition software. Android wants users to have the feeling that “the technology is not just there for technology’s sake,” Duarte says, “but it’s there to make you an amazing person–to essentially unlock your own digital superpowers.”

This is part one of a two-part story on the design overhaul of Android. Stay tuned for the second installment, which will detail how Android is meant to create a visual look that recreates the experience of the printed page.

Top image by GWImages/Shutterstock

Via Fast Co Design: http://www.fastcodesign.com