For the typophiles out there, meet Max Kerning:
Very reminiscent of the Nokia ads featuring Stavros and his location-based art.
Doing a “whois” on the domain seems to indicate that Extensis is behind this, and indeed clicking on the suitcase that shows up within the flash animation has Max expounding on the latest font-management application from Extensis.
Reminiscent of the PARK(ing) project (for reasons you’ll see in a moment), Skip Conversions is a project by Oliver Bishop-Young which highlights a number of really creative ways to reuse a skip:
The skip which uses the recycled “to let” signs as a roof is particularly genius.
Quick link to some nice projects by Jed Berk over at Degree119.com, where you’l find answers to such questions as:
What happens when a blimp becomes a Portuguese Man O’ War?
What happens when a solar cell becomes a sheep?
In Carcade, a camera captures the landscape outside of a moving car and uses the passing scenery as a basis for a side-scrolling video game.
It’s not clear from the documentation how far along this project was developed, but the following video gets the concept across rather clearly.
As more cars have rear-view cameras and proximity sensors embedded in them, it would be an interesting exercise to see how such data could be used to power experiences such as video games or other types of interactions.
Game Over is a series of art projects or performances which translate old-school video games into “collaborative animation movies”.
A Game Over project/performance consists of a group of people seated in a theater, each of whom is considered a pixel. Over the course of about 4-6 hours, a series of photos are taken as each person moves from seat to seat, with quite impressive results:
For those readers who may not be familiar with Pole Position, here’s an original (and rather trippy) advertisement for the game:
I could imagine a version of Arkanoid could be pretty cool!
A brief review and commentary regarding the evolution of BarackObama.com over the past year.
What’s nice to see is brand consistency across the iPhone app and the website, and it’s clear from the prominence on the website of straightforward buttons which enable viewers to donate or volunteer why the Obama campaign has been successful at activating voters and drawing in micro-donations.
An interesting comparison: the John McCain site design to the Barack Obama site design. Discuss.
Cooler Planet is a company which installs solar panels and generally helps consumers and small businesses research and install renewable-energy sources. One set of tools they’ve developed include a series of interactive solar maps which help potential customers with things like discovering rebates in their local area and estimating installation costs.
Of particular interest is their heatmap of California’s solar installations which allows you to see a time-lapse of installations over the last ten years or so. While the actual visualization is a little on the fuzzy size (what does the diameter of each circle represent?), it’s nice that they include aggregate statistics. After all, while the visualization may aim to be flashy, it’s only as good as the data backing it up.
The Revolution Door by Fluxxlab is a project which retrofits an existing revolving door with a generator to produce a small amount of electricity as people enter or exit a building.
They prototyped a version of the revolution door earlier this year during the Feedback exhibition at Eyebeam in New York City.
The intention of the Revolution Door—as well as several other projects by Fluxxlab—is to help people understand the “metabolic relationship between people, technology, and architecture.” More specifically, the work produced by people is generated from agriculture and other sources of food, which themselves require energy for their production. While one response may be to attempt to do very little work so as to conserve energy (and thereby providing one justification for laziness ;-) , another rational response is to harness this otherwise wasted energy.
A more recent project is much simpler: a sliding closet door which, when opened, powers a light for about 20-30 seconds, about enough time to find and grab the thing you wanted. If you need more light, just close and open the door again. (The video is sideways, but you get the idea.)
The Fluxxlab blog also contains a lot of process documentation, which is always nice to see and learn from!
Chris Heathcote has some strong words about designing for the user experience. Or, rather, how user experience is a strategy, not a specific deliverable: it’s a constantly evolving process (a dance, if you will) between company and customer, involving all parts of a business.
User experience is a personnel problem. Or HR, if you work in a company the size of a small country. Everyone in the company has to care about what they do. Everyone has to be paid and judged on how they improve the user experience. Furthermore, this has to be communicated to the investors and shareholders, and they have to believe that the company can pull it off. It’s a differentiator that’s hard to compete with, precisely because it’s so hard to do. So, there’s only one or two people in a company that can be a user experience manager. Normally it’s the CEO – they have to believe in the singular goal of an awesome experience at all costs.
This dovetails nicely with what Mark Hurst recently wrote about JetBlue (a low-cost airline in the US) in his Good Experience blog post Underestimating the Brand. JetBlue recently launched a new advertising campaign that focuses on distinguishing Jetting from Flying. However, as anyone who has been a long-time customer can tell you, service has been slipping and that certain attitude and quality which made JetBlue stand out in the beginning has been lost:
If one is to measure the brand by the traditional approach (”let’s spend thirty million dollars shoving a logo and a tag line down their throats”), then the new JetBlue is, I suppose, consistent and well-known. Lots of money buys lots of ad impressions. Congratulations.
However, if one is to measure the brand through the lens of “good experience,” which I believe is the most accurate way of evaluating companies today, then JetBlue is doing poorly.
If your JetBlue flight leaves you feeling annoyed enough to tell your friends about the experience, no amount of “Happy Jetting” happytalk is going to convince your friends otherwise.
One particular aspect which I feel made JetBlue unique was the sense that it was a secret. That is, the leather seats, the seatback televisions, and the snacks (among other things) were nice, but it was the lack of overt advertising which made it feel like you as a passenger had somehow outsmarted other people flying with different airlines.
This is the same stage that Virgin America is currently in (no ad campaigns plastering subway car, as far as I can tell) and a distinctly “clubby” feel to the whole experience. I’ll fly with United or some other airline when I have to, but I want to fly with Virgin America.
This may simply be a phase in the life of every airline, or it may be a situation of early adoption (similar to new technology), but how thecompany manages to retain that feeling amongst its customers as it continues to grow is probably its biggest challenge, especially if it wants to distinguish itself with service and not fade into the background noise of splashy ads and cheerful slogans.