An interesting article on the design of the RAZR. My take: a beautifully engineered product, with a tragically bad interface. I own one, and while the hardware is great, I can’t say I like using it very much.
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Interview with the head of experience design at Nokia, originally a fashion designer.
Interesting article on the Long Tail of Beer.
Excellent usability review of invoicing application FreshBooks. A lot of good advice here!
Biomimicry
In the past months, I have come across no less than two articles on Biomimicry entitled Nature’s Design Workshop: MSNBC and more recently BusinessWeek (make sure you watch the slideshow).
Researcher Promode Bandyopadhyay has a very interesting quote:
I am against mimicry. I am against making a mechanical zoo. There is no science in that. It is imperative to understand the science first.
Nature is great at finding a solution to a very particular problem within a precise set of environmental constraints. The researcher’s role is to understand how nature’s solution works and to generalize it to other applications. Combine nature’s adeptness at finding efficient, sustainable solutions with our ability for abstract thinking and we get some of the very best engineering around.
For those not familiar with the term, the Biomimicry Institute gives the following definition:
Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a new science that studies nature’s best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems.
Their website has a good introduction to the concept, and a bunch of interesting case studies.
UK newspaper The Guardian has launched a service that allows users to print a version of the paper updated every 15 minutes. This is a really cool concept. While I read most of my news online, there are still so many situations where paper is preferable: breakfast, the commute, the beach… If in addition the printout were personalized to my particular interests, this could kill the daily newspaper as we know it.
Spalding redesigns the basketball for better grip and consistency.
Ants apparently navigate by counting their steps.
The reverse colorblindness test uses pictures that are only discernable to colorblind people. While we’re on the topic, this article describes color blind image correction, or how to help color blind people see images better.
Crowd Power is the idea of harnessing the energy generated by crowds, for example by capturing small vibrations in the environment. I’m skeptical as to whether the amount of energy produced would make this cost effective, but it’s still a neat concept.
