Category: design-and-ideas

You are invited to the thirty-ninth AIGA Experience Design London meeting.

Your computer is broken!

We have been using the same graphical users interfaces for 20 years, since the Apple Macintosh (launched on 24 January 1984) killed the command line. Our tools today would have been easily recognisable by maverick genius Doug Engelbart in the 1960s, and the Xerox PARC fraternity of the 70s. Yet in the meantime we have applied computers to many more, and more complex, tasks including communication, information retrieval, collaboration and planning, and entertainment.

How does the design of GUIs need to evolve, where is this happening, and what can we learn from it? Where do we go beyond the desktop metaphor? And application-centric computing? How do we manage 1000s of files, message, and other data elements? What new input devices are appropriate?

Web design has learned from GUIs, and now GUIs are drawing on (and are often based on) Web technologies. (And although everyone has a view on Web design most people ignore the more important interface that they use every day.) Eventually Web design and GUI design will merge and we will need to absorb the deeper lessons GUI designers have learned over three decades.

We will look at the past, present and future of GUIs to lay the ground for an informed debate.

THE EVENT
– – – –
Presentation: The past of user interfaces
— Event chair Nico Macdonald will discuss the history of GUIs.

Presentation: The present of user interfaces
— Nikki Barton, Creative Director of Nykris Digital Design, will present her company's work on the Aqua and MacOS X versions of some of Microsoft's MacOS products. (Presenter biographies can be found on the group Web site.)

Presentation: The future of user interfaces
— Here we invite you to give a 3-4 minute presentation on a key user interface challenge or solution. If you would like to take part please say so in your RSVP (see below) and we will forward you presentation information.

DETAILS
– – – –
When:
Thursday 29 January, 6:30 for 7PM (until 9:00 PM)

Where:
The Design Council, 34 Bow Street, London WC2E 7DL
(opposite the Royal Opera House)
http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/howtofindus/

RSVP:
mailto:RSVP@design-agenda.org.uk?Subject=AIGAExpDesLondon%20Jan%202004
There is no payment to attend. Attendance will be limited to 80 people.
Please only RSVP if you are likely to be able to attend.
Please email all enquiries to this address, not the Design Council.

NEXT EVENT
– – – –
Our February event is likely to focus on gaming and interaction design.

Quick note to point out that my students blogs are now live and kicking over at http://80.177.26.60/blojsom/blog/interaction_one. This is its temporary place for now. Feel free to comment about anything they write. I hope to provide the same to the 2nd year interaction designers too very soon…http://80.177.26.60/blojsom/blog/interaction_two

Lucas sent me a email with pictures he took while at the weather project by Olafur Eliasson. I was so impressed by the whole idea, that I'm going to visit it some time soon. Maybe Monday after the conference talk would be a light end to the day. I'm glad to see more interesting physical design like this.

http://www.alistapart.com/discuss/slashdot2/3/#c6013 – Left a post on alistapart about the problem with newer browsers such as Internet Explorer on PocketPC2003 and Smartphone2003. They show the CSS even if you use the @import trick. But I have not tried the CSS 2.1 mediatype thing yet. Would be fanatasic if it works.

http://www.3-23.com

As most of you know, I entered the built for the future – reuseit contest. I didnt do too badly as I spent 1hour on the css and used cubicgardens css as a base. But I've now recieved feedback from the judges on why I got the marks I got. At the same time I would like to say thanks to the Judges and specially Bob Sawyer. Maybe next time I'll spend more time on the design.

With that, here are the judges' comments:

====================

Too plain and bloggy (not in a good way though).
Not enough contrast on the link text colour
and I'm fairly sure Jakob would have expected the link text to be underlined. Sorry.
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The simplicity of the color scheme is nice, but I found the layout lacking in organization.
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suffers from similar problems original has -- poor separation of content.
yeah, there's the left column, but within the 2 columns,
it's tough to see where the different sections are.



(IE5/mac os9.2)
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One word: Yuck!

Although based on my favorite color, the design of this site is immature and lacks a focus on the user,
the primary message Nielsen provides those who read his work.
It needs lots of work to become anything of value to a real world user.

The site designer should also remember many people print Jakob's content and
post it on bulletin boards, outside of office cubicles, etc. This entry does not print well.

The site appears to render adequately in IE 5.1.7 for Mac OS.

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I like your choice of steel gray--very easy on the eyes, but the links do not contrast enough.
The top box is too tall and you need more leading before "news."
Your focus is on "search" -- reminds me of Google.
------------------------------
An interesting take to go with light text on dark for the site,
but you have a lack of support for resolutions lower than roughly 1000px
or so which is a big usability no no.
------------------------------
ouch. this doesn't layout properly in mac ie5.1.7, it is just one column.
dull colors, low contrast between link color and background.
------------------------------


====================

Too early for comments at the moment. But yeah should have done a print style sheet and spent more time on design.

Thanks NTK. In a joking response to all the comments on my earlier post.

I can feel the flames now…

chris sanderson from the future laboratory – http://www.thefuturelaboratory.com. Came to college today in a lecture arranged by Fashion for the whole college. So of course I'm live blogging this as he talks

First part involved a talk about the 3 points bellow.

Instict – follow your gut instict, always judge a book by its cover.
Observation – be influenced, be imersed, always looking and reading
Research – always ask and question

Yeah quite good, nothing new and product and fashion driven. He answered my question about ip quite well with mentions about ip and copyleft. Before that he made references to social software after one of my students asked about how the internet affects all what he was talking about.

All the other questions afterwards were pretty lame and more about products and branding rather than the higher level concepts. Need to check out this viewpoint magazine, sounds like wallpaper with slightly more brains.

I love the fact that he believes the GM battle is over, which drops the audience into complete slience. But he explained himself really well by explaining the fact that monsanto was setup as charity. And is retrospect, someone could have applied GM else where before moving to food. Say for example GM body parts, etc. Which is fair enough and quite smart because he also got his little comment about how people who dont want GM are old fuddie duddies.

Then he went into a slight rant about how he hated Apple and if it was up to him he would systematicly destroy his G4 and Apple the company. I have to agree with him that Apple are a very good marketing company which people desire, but the rest of it is a joke. Caused some of my interaction design students to shuffle and look around a bit.

I will need to get a copy of the pdf he was presenting, the book of light.

One day I would love to beable to use slashdot on my ipaq without scrolling here there and everywhere. Anyway this is written after reading the alist apart article. The challenge of changing slash is a interesting one, as there are many good opensource applications which dont do standards well, slash being one of them.
Next week: printer-friendly and handheld-friendly Slashdot with a few simple additions. – I wonder if people will catch on to the fact that the new palmtops support css now, which is ignoying as they shouldnt.

At long last the winner of the reusit contest has been announced. Where did i come? well I didnt do it that badly, about half way down which isnt bad considering I spent 1 hour doing it while on jury service back in August.

Visual Appeal – 1.89
Usability – 2.00
Valid HTML – 5.00
Valid CSS – 5.00
Cross-Browser – 5.00
Accessibility – 5.00
Total Visual Score – 1.94
Total Validity Score – 5.00
Total Score – 3.47 – not bad seeing how number 1 was 4.58

I love the fact no one really liked the style of it but it was valid html/css, accessable and cross browser. Just wish I kind of finished the white edition. As that was cleaner and more pleasent on the eye. Saying that I think i was one of the only entries which deployed a dark background with white text.

On the downside, one of my MA students came 2nd from last which isnt good as they didnt even validate there xhtml or css. Oh well thats what happens when you face the rest of the world.
Talking of which, some of the entries were great work, nothing as radical as the stuff you see on csszengarden but very practical and useable layouts, real attention to detail style. I kinda of feel better than I didnt come near the top ten with my lame effort. Its quite cool how alot of them used a picture of Jakob Neilsen but I decided against it as I wouldnt put a picture of myself on my own website. I cant believe my entry was viewed by some of the great minds of the web at the moment, Zeldman, Meyer, etc. By the way nice to see Louise Ferguson on the panel. Would like to hear what Jakob says about the entries…