Adam Norwood

Tag: design

  • Attentrons

    I need to bring this theory up the next time I’m asked to create another link farm or overly-featured application. Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer of Netflix, responds to a question on Quora about A/B testing and usability (in the comments):

    “Simple trumps complete” – a 5% feature (used by less than 5% of all users) is a distraction for all the other users, and is better removed, unless its really critical (a small number of users do need to cancel service, for example).

    I have this mental model of particles of attention that a user brings, a finite quantity that they will spread around according to what catches their attention. I call them “attentrons”. An extra tab or button will attract a bunch of attentrons that are not then available to focus on other areas. So the tab had better be *better* than the competing areas of the site to avoid diluting the results, or it’s better off removed.

    (Via Jared Spool’s excellent User Interface Engineering blog)

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  • iPad Light Paintings

    This film explores playful uses for the increasingly ubiquitous ‘glowing rectangles’ that inhabit the world.

    We use photographic and animation techniques that were developed to draw moving 3-dimensional typography and objects with an iPad. In dark environments, we play movies on the surface of the iPad that extrude 3-d light forms as they move through the exposure. Multiple exposures with slightly different movies make up the stop-frame animation.

    We’ve collected some of the best images from the project and made a book of them you can buy: http://bit.ly/mfmbook

    Read more at the Dentsu London blog:
    http://www.dentsulondon.com/blog/2010/09/14/light-painting/
    and at the BERG blog:
    http://berglondon.com/blog/2010/09/14/magic-ipad-light-painting/

    From Dentsu London, Making Future Magic:

    We use photographic and animation techniques that were developed to draw moving 3-dimensional typography and objects with an iPad. In dark environments, we play movies on the surface of the iPad that extrude 3-d light forms as they move through the exposure. Multiple exposures with slightly different movies make up the stop-frame animation.

    Take that, Picasso.

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  • Lego Augmented Reality

    [Video no longer available]

    LEGO DIGITAL BOX – augmented reality kiosk system

    Excellent use of AR for marketing: an in-store display that’s actually fun to play with, and it makes you pick up the box in order to see it come alive. Nice.

    (Via Make)

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  • Mon Oncle

    Les lignes géométriques ne rendent pas les gens aimables [geometrical lines do not produce likeable people].

    Filmmaker Jacques Tati on Villa Arpel, the comically painful modern house depicted in his satire Mon Oncle. You can watch a nice video of the house being reconstructed piece by piece for the recent Tati exposition at the Cinémathèque Française.

    (Quote found on Wikipedia)

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  • Powerpoint Makes Us Stupid

    PowerPoint makes us stupid. It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control. […] Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable. Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, quoted in today’s New York Times article We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint.
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  • Whenever Humans Design and Make a Useful Thing

    Whenever humans design and make a useful thing they invariably expend a good deal of unnecessary and easily avoidable work on it which contributes nothing to its usefulness. Look, for instance, at the ceiling. It is flat. It would have been easier not to have made it flat. Its being flat does not make you any warmer or the room about you any quieter, nor yet does it make the house any cheaper; far from it. Since there is a snobbism in these things flattening a ceiling is called workmanship, or mere craftsmanship; while painting gods on it or putting knobs on it is called art or design. But all these activities: ‘workmanship,’ ‘design for appearance,’ ‘decoration,’ ‘ornament,’ ‘applied art,’ ‘embellishment,’ or what you will are part of the same pattern of behavior which all men at all times and places have followed: doing useless work on useful things. If we did not behave after this pattern our life would indeed by poor, nasty and brutish. Furniture designer and theorist David Pye, from The Nature of Aesthetics and Design. Quoted in Julie Lasky’s excellent post on Design Observer, Superbeauty.
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  • Rapid Prototyping with Ceramics

    If you’re the sort of lab that’s engineering a method of printing ceramic materials using rapid prototyping machines, I suppose it’d make sense that you’d already have made some real-life polygonal Utah teapots! I never thought about it before, but for the 3D graphics humor value I really, really want one of these now. You can read about the Utanalog project and see finished photos (and a video explaining the whole thing) over on the Unfold blog.

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  • Makes Me Feel Like Were All Just Wired Up Like a

    Makes me feel like we’re all just wired up like a 66 punchdown block. Hopefully with a bit neater cabling.

    (From the Otis Archives Flickr stream of Walter Reed’s medical museum)

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