design, innovation, mobile, social and emerging tech links for you
I love how Flixster for the iPhone (iTunes link) lets you add current release movies to your queue right from their showtime browsing interface because that’s exactly when we’re making a judgement on whether a movie is worth going to see in the theater or not.
It’s a subtle integration of Netflix’s API that reflects a great understanding of the frame of mind their users are in when they’re engaging with their product.
{ 1 comment }
I was completely blown away by this video the first time through. Such a simple, low-tech, solution produces such an amazingly rich, engaging experience that’s just bursting with possibility for further creativity.
While it’s just a concept at this point, you can see how it can make a new kind of storytelling available to the masses in a way that wouldn’t have seemed possible not that long ago.
There’s some more info here but it’s in Japanese.
{ 21 comments }
Volkswagen’s new viral video campaign, The Fun Theory caught my eye this week.
“The Fun Theory” is a series of experiments, captured on video, to find out if making the world more fun can improve people’s behavior.
Among the experiments: does turning a set of subway stairs into a real-life piano encourage people to use them (answer: yes, 66% more). Another experiment asks whether making a trash can sound like a 50ft-deep well will make people pick up their trash. An upcoming experiment, meanwhile, will turn a bottle recycling center into an arcade game.
Seeing it immediately got the ITP grad + Experience Designer in me all excited. Viral video + ad campaign blather aside, these videos can stand alone as great studies in how injecting a little playfulness can not only create a profound, memorable experience but it can also change human behavior. Pretty powerful stuff. I highly recommend you go watch them all.
{ 6 comments }
Amazing it took so long to design a flashlight this way.
If you’re still not convinced you need one, watch the demo video (I watched it once and had to order one):
{ 2 comments }
I’m consistently disappointed by what Apple allows (and doesn’t allow) on the iPhone homescreen (no email alerts?!) so I have to say I’m the perfect audience for the Intelligent Home Screen prototype for Android, thoughtfully designed by Larva Labs (right here in New York City!).
If you have a few minutes hop over to their site and check out their video demo. Not only does it look beautiful (great use of color, too) but the interaction model they establish for navigating this list manage to be dead simple and robust at the same time. It’s not often that I wonder what life would be like without my iPhone but this was one of those times. Time to cowboy up, Apple!
(Thanks to @konigi for the tip!)
{ 0 comments }
After tweeting once every couple of months that I’m looking for an app/service that allows me to consume the links/photos/videos the people I follow are tweeting about, I was finally introduced to Readtwit (Thanks, @fchi!)
As people continue to get more and more comfortable with Twitter and start following more people, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with the firehose of information contained within. While I’ve accepted I won’t always be able to keep up on people’s tweets about walking their dogs, going for a run and cooking dinner (I’m guilty of all three so settle down), I would like a way to stay up on all the media that’s being shared. Enter Readtwit.
Put simply, Readtwit creates an RSS feed of all the things the people you follow are linking to and converts it into a nice, clean RSS feed that you can dump into many of the most popular readers out there.
See below for an example of what a Mashable post looks like in my Google Reader. Notice how they include the context of who tweeted the content and what they had to say about it.
Also, in the footer of every piece of content, they give you two really useful links. One that allows you to hide future links from the person who tweeted that piece of content and a link that enables you to let them know that a particular piece of content is rendering incorrectly – presumably due to complications parsing, etc. (This weekend I was having problems with links coming from Radar and Twitpic.) The latter is more interesting to me because it shows that they are leaning on their users to help them create a better experience for everyone.
As someone who’s a heavy information consumer primarily using Twitter/Google Reader/Instapaper as my main tools of choice, I get the feeling that Readtwit is going to fit right in and actually streamline some of that workflow.
If you’re in a similar spot with your content consumption, I highly recommend you give it a try: Readtwit.
{ 4 comments }
Personas is an interesting installation from some folks at MIT that takes your first and last name and then uses your online presence to develop a high level persona for you. You can see mine above.
Here’s their description of how it works:
In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer’s uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.
I need to play around with this more but on the surface, it seems pretty neat. It practically loses all value if you don’t have a unique name (by Google’s standards).
Try it out and see what you think.
{ 2 comments }
I’ve loved this packaging from Help Remedies since the first time I saw them. Not only are they great to look at but in a world where Duane Reade aisles have become a cacophony of products serving redundant needs, these containers manage to be refreshingly simple while still being very informative.
Follow the link to read about Help Remedies and 9 other great package designs.
{ 1 comment }
Just the right amount of Stella Artois can make you feel like a star on the pool table but this is a whole new level of being in the zone. (ffd to 2 mins in to see what I mean)
(via Augmented Reality Pool – Henry’s posterous)
{ 1 comment }
Toscaninis (an ice cream shop in Boston) has a nice real-time visualization of what people are saying about their place on Twitter.
(via @dens on Flickr)
{ 4 comments }