BumpTop, a new interface for manipulating documents on your computer desktop. While some of the interactions here are cool and novel, I’ve got to wonder how useable this would be in practice (especially given that the documents have no accompanying title). A really interesting aspect of computer interaction design is the inherent advantage of previously learned interactions – replacing folders is hard partly because folders are such a well-understood metaphor.
update: PeterMe had the same reaction, except that he expressed it much more eloquently than I did and offers some interesting links to other UI experiments – including the very cool zooming interface.
Design Boom has an article about a fun Clothes Peg Exhibition. So many variations for such a simple object…
The Tate Museums in Britain now allow users to create their own collections, which they can then print or share with their friends. I love this idea; discovering a museum through a friend’s guide would make it so much more enjoyable. Incidentally, the Tate Modern is my favorite museum in the world.
Awesome perspective art in the Toronto subway.
Core77 has a great gallery from the Material Trends 2006 conference.
Tourist
Golden Gate, San Francisco, Winter 2005. This picture was taken on my recruiting trip to California last winter, just a few weeks after I got my D70. I couldn’t help but think that these binoculars were characters on their own, admiring the bridge. The post-processing on this one is very light, but here’s the unedited version anyway.
Something funny for the weekend: TrunkMonkey. Viral advertising for an Oregon Ford and Chevrolet dealer (Suburban Auto Group).
A moderately interesting article about speeding enforcement. The reason I bring it up here is that it has a rather telling omission. While it discusses a lot of the trade-offs in speeding enforcement, mainly in terms of the effect on accident rates versus the cost of enforcement, it completely fails to mention the opportunity cost. Let me make up some numbers: say reducing the average speed by 10mph resulted in a 5% decrease in accidents. Good thing right? Except that an untold number of people are now driving 10mph slower, and losing an as-of-yet unspecified number of minutes of their life. Without taking into account this side of the equation, the cost/benefit calculation doesn’t quite hold. Opportunity cost is a basic Econ 101 concept that everyone ought to learn, yet it is all too often missed in mainstream news articles.
Interview on the Panasonic site with the designer of the new Lumix SLR. A bit overly enthusiastic, as you’d expect from the corporate site, but some nice insight in their design process nonetheless.
Great pictures at The Press Photographer’s Year 2006 site. You can tell that it’s a British competition by the fact that “Royals” is one of the categories.
