I'm a slow typist. S-L-O-W. (That's took 20 seconds. Almost not kidding.) Which means I'm always on the lookout for some kind of advantage (current favorite: TextExpander).
An Android app is coming. Lucky little droids. On the other hand it apparently takes about 8 hours to master. Does anyone have the patience? That's almost a season of Game of Thrones right there.
IndieCade kicks off tonight with the Red Carpet Awards, and on Saturday the full festival experience will be available for the general public. What exactly does that mean? Why GAMES of course!
Yet a lot more goes into a festival experience than just throwing up a bunch of tables and tents, stacking them with games and developers, then letting people have at it. That’s where Scott Gillies, former Disney Imagineer and current user experience (UX) designer at Fourth Wall Studios, comes in. While Scott is busy working on secret projects for the Culver City based transmedia studio, he’s lending a hand to IndieCade to help polish up the festival experience for patrons.
“To me it’s a simple experience design thing,” Gillies said in our interview, “to make it accessible to the average person who doesn’t necessarily know what IndieCade is about. Or they get a badge and they don’t know what they can go to.”
The first step was simplifying the layout of the festival from previous years. Each of the festival’s venues, which are spread around downtown Culver City, will have a singular purpose this time out. Starting with what has been the heart of the festival: the Culver City Firehouse. (more…)
That’s well over double the amount he was looking to raise, and he’s still got half of the campaign left to go. But that doesn’t mean that Roman is resting. Oh no. He’s tackled on another, possibly bigger, goal. To reach 5000 backers for the campaign. Any size donation counts. If he makes it, the Design Matters Institute will kick in another $10K and Mars will buy a tropical island where he will construct a radio rocketship.
Okay, I made the island part up. And the rocketship.
[About the image above: Paola Antonelli’s favorite piece from Talk to Me: Sputniko!’s “Menstruation Machine” that communicates the feelings and discomfort of menstruation to a non-menstruating person (e.g. a man).]
99% Invisibleis, as producer Roman Mars tells it, a “tiny radio show about design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world”. Don’t let the “tiny” fool you: there’s nothing small about the ideas Mars explores.
Episode 41: The Human-Human Interface
“There’s a whole universe in every single object that becomes even bigger when put in relationship with a person.” – Paolo Antonelli
Paola Antonelli is the Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. Her most recent blockbuster show, Talk to Me, explored the communication between people and objects: from chairs that talk to subway kiosks.
It’s pretty easy to get overwhelmed and frustrated by all the human-object interactions in the modern world. I’ve never used a “coin return” button on a vending machine that worked and there is interesting criticism of the increasingly common “pictures under glass” type of interface on the iPhone and iPad.
But as Paola Antonelli explains to producer Benjamen Walker (from Too Much Information), the evolution of communication design is pointing to a world that minimizes human-object interfaces and leaves us to free to focus on real human habits and needs.
New episodes of 99% Invisible, air weekly on 91.7 KALW in San Francisco. Fridays at 7:35am and 4:30pm, Saturdays at 8:35am, and Tuesdays at 10:55pm. Also, 24/7 on Public Radio Remix.
It’s hard to imagine a place where more desperate and depressing drama unfolds on a daily basis than a family courthouse- custody battles, abuse, divorce- and if you were to design a place to reflect and amplify that misery, not mitigate it, it’d probably take the form of the old New York County Family Courthouse in Lower Manhattan.
The original shiny black cube, built in 1975, was referred to as the “Darth Vader building” by court employees (presumably after 1977). The foreboding and intimidating structure was primarily criticized in relation to its function as a family courthouse, which should strive to inspire a feeling of trust, authority, and (one hopes) inclusion.
The building was remodeled in 2006. The bones are largely the same, but the shiny, black cladding is gone, replaced by a more conventional grey/beige. The problematic entrance to the building has been completely opened up, making ingress and egress a much less daunting proposition. To quote our 99% Invisible reporter this week, Brett Myers (a producer at Youth Radio), “walking into the building is no longer like being consumed by a beast.”
But a little something was lost in the facelift. The original building was definitely not boring and commanded your attention. I don’t know if the same can be said for the current design. Modern design principles and cultural preservation are not necessarily at loggerheads, but when they do come into conflict, it’s not always easy to answer which ideology should win.
This is the forum thread started by Lofter1 on Wired New York referred to in the piece.
Here is Eugene Patron’s essay about his time as a paralegal in the New York Family Courthouse.
Laurie Johnston’s piece from 1977 New York Times about the Family Court.
99% Invisibleis, as producer Roman Mars tells it, a “tiny radio show about design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world”. Don’t let the “tiny” fool you: there’s nothing small about the ideas Mars explores.
New episodes of 99% Invisible, air weekly on 91.7 KALW in San Francisco. Fridays at 7:35am and 4:30pm, Saturdays at 8:35am, and Tuesdays at 10:55pm. Also, 24/7 on Public Radio Remix.
99% Invisible-30- The Blue Yarn by Roman Mars 99% Invisibleis, as producer Roman Mars tells it, a “tiny radio show about design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world”. Don’t let the “tiny” fool you: there’s nothing small about the ideas Mars explores.
In 1998 Dr. Gary Kaplan, the CEO of Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle received some bad news about his hospital. It was losing money. So Dr. Kaplan started studying how other hospitals were being run to see if there was a better way to manage his hospital. He scoured the country, looking for a hospital with a management system worth adopting, but he never found one. Instead he ended up in Japan. At a Toyota factory.
When Dr. Kaplan told his staff they would be changing everything about the way they operate and the changes were based on a car company and that doctors and nurses should refer to their new teachers as “sensei,” the response was less than ideal.
This entire, multiyear overhaul started with a ball of blue yarn. The staff met with a Toyota Production System sensei and he took out the ball of blue yarn and a map of the hospital and told the staff to trace the path a cancer patient would take on a typical visit for chemotherapy treatment. When they were finished, it was an immensely powerful visual experience for everyone in the room. They all stared at this map with blue yarn snaking all over the place, doubling back on itself and making complicated twists and turns from one end of the building to the other. They understood for the first time that they were taking their sickest patients, for whom time was their most precious resource, and they were wasting huge amounts of it.
New episodes of 99% Invisible, air weekly on 91.7 KALW in San Francisco. Fridays at 7:35am and 4:30pm, Saturdays at 8:35am, and Tuesdays at 10:55pm. Also, 24/7 on Public Radio Remix.
99% Invisibleis, as producer Roman Mars tells it, a “tiny radio show about design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world”. Don’t let the “tiny” fool you: there’s nothing small about the ideas Mars explores.
Episode 37: The Steering Wheel
If I asked you to close your eyes and mimic the action of using one of the simple human interfaces of everyday life, you could probably do it. Without having a button to push, you could close your eyes and pretend push a button, and that action would accurately reflect the action of pushing a real button. The same goes for flipping a switch or turning a door knob. If you closed your eyes and faked the movement, it would sync up with its real world use.
Now if I asked you to do the same with a car’s steering wheel, you’d think you’d be able to describe steering accurately and mime the correct movements with your hands in the air, but you’d be wrong. Very, very wrong. You’d probably kill a bunch of imaginary people.
Our friends at Humans in Design, Tristan Cooke and Tom Nelson, bring us this story about how our brain knows how to steer without really knowing how to steer, and what that means for steering wheel design. They interviewed Dr. Steve Cloete, from The University of Queensland, who conducted the awesome blind driver studies.
New episodes of 99% Invisible, air weekly on 91.7 KALW in San Francisco. Fridays at 7:35am and 4:30pm, Saturdays at 8:35am, and Tuesdays at 10:55pm. Also, 24/7 on Public Radio Remix.
99% Invisibleis, as producer Roman Mars tells it, a “tiny radio show about design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world”. Don’t let the “tiny” fool you: there’s nothing small about the ideas Mars explores.
Episode 29: Cul de Sac
When people critique cul-de-sacs, a lot of the time, they’re actually critiquing the suburbs more generally. The cul-de-sac has become sort of like the mascot of the suburbs– like if suburbia had a flag, it would have a picture of a cul-de-sac on it. Cul-de-sacs by definition aren’t well connected to other streets and they are far away town centers. People can argue whether or not these are pros or cons, depending on what lifestyle choices they prioritize. For little kids, cul-de-sacs can be great, but they do have some real, quantifiable design flaws. Imagine being a garbage collector, or a street cleaner, instead of driving down one long street and collecting all the garbage from that street, then taking a right onto the next street and so on, you have to turn around in all of these cul-de-sacs over and over again. It takes more time and uses more gas. They’re expensive for governments to maintain, and now, governments are starting to enact regulations against them.
Producer Katie Mingle talks with Matt Lassiter about cul-de-sacs, the pitfalls of suburban design, and of course, E.T.
Special thanks to The Congress for the New Urbanism, who provided very helpful background information, but didn’t end up in the piece itself.
Katie Mingle works for the Third Coast International Audio Festival. She produces Re:sound, hosts the Third Coast Podcast, and develops features for the TCIAF website. If you aren’t familiar with the Third Coast International Audio Festival, get familiar! It’s the best.
New episodes of 99% Invisible , air weekly on 91.7 KALW in San Francisco. Fridays at 7:35am and 4:30pm, Saturdays at 8:35am, and Tuesdays at 10:55pm. Also, 24/7 on Public Radio Remix.
John Cho Moore grew tired of the limitations of the industrial design process and is now trying to capture the essence of design with his beautifully handmade bamboo and canvas bags.
Follow John through his unique manufacturing process that challenges conventional thinking about product design and the creative process.
In today’s job market, people will do almost anything to inch their way towards steady income. But should that include working for free?
Jessica Hische, a graphic designer, letterer, and illustrator, decided to make a flowchart resource with her opinions about whether someone, especially in the design field, should work for free. And it’s worth traveling down every single path for a sharp and witty Yes or No.
Hische said the inspiration for creating the graphic came from getting questions about how much to charge for work. She heard horror stories about students working on a logo for eight months, and getting paid $50. “A lot of people try to get you to do work for the promise of exposure,” said Hische. But according to her chart, that “is one of the most toxic things people can say to you.”
“Cheap work begets cheap work,” said Hische, who said she’s probably been down every possible path of the chart herself.
From her own experience, Hische said that organizations often have budgets for designers, even if they state otherwise in order to try and get you to work for free. This can come up when doing design work for non-profits. “[My friends] assumed that charity and non-profit were the same thing,” she said.
All in all, there are more pathways on her chart that end in No than Yes, and the Yes pathways usually ask the question, “Are you altruistic?”
The biggest takeaway Hische wants to convey in her chart is that designers assign their own value to their work. “We are in control of how valuable other people think that we are. We are in control of telling people how valuable what we do is. It takes rallying when people are desperate for jobs, to keep the standards high, so that we don’t accidentally destroy our industry by trying to create more jobs to save it… Design becomes a hobby instead of a career,” she said.
Now streaming: the archive of our Google Hangout On-Air with Jesse Vigil of Psychic Bunny, one of the designers of the new audio adventure game FREEQ (iOS/Android).
I first encountered Sifteo Cubes back at IndieCade last October, and spent some time playing around with the little blocks which I first mistook for iPod Nanos.
