Sit back and relax because this week is chock full of delights. But before we get to that I must torture you with this MAYAn service announcement.
I spoke at the 2010 Cusp conference in Chicago a while back and they’ve just started posting the video clips of our talks! Because I love me so much I can’t really resist linking to my talk. They edited my talk down from 25 minutes to a 15 minute summary. I framed the talk by explaining that I’m a designer who stumbled into a design science lab 10 years ago called MAYA. This presentation was my attempt to capture some of the things I discovered percolating in our research labs over the last 10 years. 15 minutes doesn’t quite do it all justice but it gives you a taste of the hidden design patterns in nature that inform our most advanced work in computing and information systems. What Nature Can Teach Us About Computing Systems (or Biomimicry in the age of a trillion nodes):Part 1 and Part 2… or you can view it on the Cusp2010 website…
John Fetterman’s talk has also been posted. He tells a story about malignant beauty that you really shouldn’t miss. If you look closely you’ll see some tattoos on his arms. On one arm he has the zip code of the town he is the mayor of (he wasn’t from around there and most people thought he’d run as soon as he saw how tough it was going to be), on the other arm are the dates of each person killed in his town on his watch. If you’ve seen any of the new Levi’s commercials, they are all filmed in Braddock.
On with the links!
—————-Top Five——————
1. Want to understand how we help customers think about their users when designing experiences? Watch this disarmingly simple film we made with the University of Pittsburgh to help them with their student portal.
2. Tree of code looks amazing. Each page is die cut. Foer is uneven in my mind with his wonderful book about a kid coping with the loss of his father on 9/11 he blew me away, but with other books of his I just end up thinking, well that was ok I guess. I’m very interested in getting my hands on a copy of this one though (and making something like it myself just as an art project.)
3. Beautiful digital cloud at San Jose Airport…
4. This is pretty brilliant. Nike had a promotion to run London over the course of a few days and it was set up as a competition between different parts of the city. Here is a video replay of an example day…
5. Best speech ever made, now visualized.
—————————The Rest——————-
Make any object a live gestural controller…
One way to compete with Google…
Nicely done visualization of top issues in the country over time.
Damn those tachyons. And damn the scientific method’s insistence on repeatability!
A hundred million 311 calls… So apparently they could reduce a bunch of these calls by handing out headphones?
Watch this before Disney takes it away.
Ok, I was wrong, photography is not dead.
Ghost map for streets and neighborhoods…
Imagine if a major monument on the mall was brought to life like this?
Old school interactivity for decision games about ecology…
Why making dinner is a good idea.
Kinect hacking has begun… and this shows you a bit more of what the Kinect cameras see (it tries to make a z-depth map of objects it can discern and give you that info, in this case you can see color gradients)…