Design has become ubiquitous in our lives. But everybody seems to have a different take on what’s design. Or sometimes design collaborates closely with another discipline and disappears into the process — then, the end product is not perceived as “designed”, despite the fact that works well. Sometimes more decorated (or colorful, or fancy) things are perceived as design. Or certain materials tend to convey the idea of design.

I understand Design as really a process: of looking at something from all angles, thinking it, playing with its behavior, its action in the world, in the hands of other, in the eyes of others. To me, Design is to think ahead of all the things that could happen, and use the past to gather knowledge of how similar things worked — then, apply this knowledge to the thing being created.

These all came to mind when I stumbled onto LINX, a drinking straw building system. It’s simple; it’s been reduced to its minimum (easy packaging, easy shipping); it will be sustainable once is built. In addition to have been well-designed (well thought-out, well considered), users can also use it to design and create more things. This idea, of creating a versatile unit that allow others to use their imagination to build upon, is fascinating to me.

But LINX wasn’t created out of a whim; rather, it came to be out of a need (big keyword in the design process). The artist who created was originally looking for a system to build immaterial structures; in another words, his own art.

LINX is still on KickStater phase. It was conceived by Patrick Martinez, a NYC-based French artist. Back it up!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/29943525/linx-the-drinking-straw-construction-game

2 units of LINX can be snapped together into a 3D connector that can create really complex 3D structures.

This is fascinating! I’ve been intrigued by the idea of the marriage between analog and digital for a while.

On the video above: the strings are 144 elastics, bathed by 144 beams of light. If seen separate, it’d be easy to know what’s what, but when mixed together, they affect each other and blur the lines between analog and digital.

See the entire series below. Read more about it at Fast Co. Design.

Here is a useful article on usability, Usability Is King For Your Product. Here’s How We Can Finally Measure It., where Roderick McMullen explains why he prefers to measure usability in qualitative terms, rather than quantitative. The former will give the big picture (is the user happy or not with the product/service?). He also points out how difficult (or not very useful) are the existing usability measurement tools.

Since usability presently might stand between a brand and its customers, it’s worth making sure it’s representing it in the desired way, and leaving customers a) satisfied, and b) ready to recommend that brand to others, says McMullen. But, he argues, you won’t know unless you measure it.

Below are quantitative ways to measure usability:

• Efficiency (how long a task takes)
• Effectiveness (whether or not a subject can complete a particular task)
• Subjective satisfaction (whether or not the experience is enjoyable)
• Error rate (how many times the subject makes a mistake, even if they eventually complete the task)

But here is what McMullen proposes, a single question that can help measure usability qualitatively:

• How confident are you using this system/product/service?

He notes that the important thing is not so much the question itself, but making sure it’s asked. If using a scale of 1 to 10 to slot the answers, pay close attention to scores below 7.

McMullen also presents three statements that are so true:

• The worst thing you can do to an adult is make them feel stupid (as in using products/systems usage that causes frustration).
• Technology is supposed to work for people, and not the other way around.
• We tend not to take things seriously unless we’re measuring them.

Read the full article.

I enjoyed this article. He asks questions such as:

• What “brick” can you give away?
• Who else benefits if you win?
• To where can you move the action?

http://www.fastcompany.com/1809306/training-yourself-to-see-new-strategic-options

As the only female in the office, here it goes: a decently designed tampon package! No more pastel colors or cursive typeaces. Yay!

Designed by Heda Hokschirr. Read more about this at Fast Company.

We’ve been drinking lots of good tea around here: aromatic mixes from Remedy Teas that graciously materialized in the kitchen (brought to you — I mean to us — by Patrick and Aaron).

Coincidentally I saw this report on tea kettles that look like the’ve been digitally made on a 3-D program. Interesting backwardness…

- I delivered this post sipping on Green Energy, with citrus bits.

This app, Gimmebar, collects assets right out of the internet. This is not a bookmark tool. It literally lets you drag images and videos from any page into your own stash, located as a bar at the bottom of the page.

A button can be added up at the browser toolbar that will bring up the “gimmebar” whenever it is needed. Besides images and video, you can also collect quotes, recipes, website snapshots, and twitter status. It all goes inside your private or public library in the cloud. The data organizes visually so it’s easy to see what’s what.

Comparing to Scoop.it, Gimmebar seems to be a less robust tool (which nowadays tends to be a preference and a quality); but it’s also a more intimate tool, in a sense that is a collection of your own “stuff”, maybe without publishing intention but with that capability included if desired.

I think it can be very handy when used for research as a non-complicated way to gather data fast, and that will be organized in an easy way to find. Or let’s say you’re visiting our site (as you do everyday, right?), and want to collect samples of our work to show to a co-worker or manager later in a nice organized manner. Well, Gimmebar!

As a team, we decided this year we would not send our clients a card. Nope. We were hungry for something else. A chance to use our hands perhaps? Or just drink beer.

One of us (Karina, our Art Director, with the funny hat) has access to — let’s put it this way — some of the greatest and latest technology [of the 19th Century].

Well, who knows us knows we’re hooked into technology. And there’s nothing like resorting to new technologies to challenge the brain, and next — boom! — come up with something brilliant, right? So, why not, we asked ourselves.

Excited, we embarked on this adventure. Some with said beers in hand, others armed with their Ikea aprons.

Jonathan, inking the Peerless Press with red, while… sipping beer.

Here’s what we did: we got part of the troupe into the Miss Cline Press shop (owned by the funny hat lady mentioned above) where we letter-pressed by hand, by foot, the words JOY and PLY onto 100% cotton coasters. It was no small task, but, hey, the best only for our clients.

That’s right: wood type below!

We hope that, in 2012, when our dear clients drink their favorite drink — tea, coffee, water, booze, or whatever their poison is — they will think of us, with joy, and remember these images of challenge, struggle and success; and perhaps also chuckle (ok, laugh) at some of us wearing Ikea aprons, or funny hats (hey, ink on your hair is no joke, besides, that studio has no heating system!).

After this neuron-bending hand-foot-brain-coordination experience, we wondered if we could apply that to code. You know, coding backwards, like the printers do in letterpress… Stay tuned for this additional skill on our part; or call Aaron, he might have figured it out by then. Kidding, of course.

We really, really hope our clients enjoyed our humble work made with our own 14 hands. Well, only 10 hands were there. Somebody needed to stay and stir the ship while others mess with so-called modern technologies.

All in all: the coasters were printed from antique wood type on two turn-of-the-century (the other century) iron presses, operated completely manually. PLY was “blind embossed”, so no ink, just the weight of 2 tons of iron. JOY was printed with linseed ink oil (just like Gutenberg used to do) in a carmin red color. All in 100% cotton, for the most fine, sexy feel.

God bless DENNIS GRAY, our Director of Software Development, who’s not seen in action because he was holding the camera that produced most of these marvelous photos and the video below:

See more photos on Flickr »

No, this is not a French app, although it sure makes a to-do list sound much fancier and fun. This is a simple app for “To Do” lists.

For starters, a clutter-free UI is a helper when the deal is to organize tasks; and it’s in the cloud, so you can access it anywhere.

This list remains always clean and organized (which is the opposite of my pencil-written lists). Your tasks rollover into the next day. What you crossed over doesn’t rollover, but it’s not deleted either. You can re-order items, delete, build a SOMEDAY list (and organize it in clusters), see a calendar, and move slow or faster through the days, or jump to TODAY. And it syncs with the sister iPhone app.

www.teuxdeux.com

I talked the other day about an agency (Berg) that played with rethinking the common receipt. Well, it seems that spurred another experiment. They are working now on Little Printer, a cubic-shaped device that might fit in the palm of your hand, and prints “receipt-like” size notes, or as Co. Design puts it, “a personalized mini-newspaper”.

The device is connected to the cloud and so far can deliver curated content from The Guardian, Facebook, Four Square, as well as content that Berg itself creates. It’s awfully cute. And the notes it regurgitates look sweet too. Co. Design wrote a pretty cool piece about it — read the comments too, as they run the gamut.

Regardless, the experiment is refreshing and curious to me. Yes, it’s said printing is dying (is it? not to me and my two letterpresses), but there is always the argument that people miss/need the tactile experience. Smart phones are already quite tactile in a way, but one is still interacting with a screen. I think there’s nothing like readily available notes for certain things, like a non-habitual bus number, or the address of a destination if you’re walking, or anything else that you want to read in peace without being too interactive or interrupted by, say, social media updates.

The point is (and I wonder if that’s where Berg is betting their money): maybe sometimes we need a space that’s less interactive but still informative. And I wonder if that’s the space where Little Printer could fit.

Little Printer is scheduled to come out in the Spring of 2012.

A digital agency in London is experimenting with rethinking… huh… the receipt! The project grabbed my attention: I’m a big fan of limitations in the creative process, and I’m also interested in exploring mundane objects. The project was initiated by Icon Magazine, who’s been asking designers to rethink everyday life products.

As I read about the endeavor, I asked myself: how did we not do this before? From a marketing point of view, it’s quite interesting. Anytime a company interacts with its clients there is a chance to enrich the connection from various angles: raise brand awareness, help, inform, and plant the seed for future sales.

The redesigned receipt looks actually quite interesting. I mean, we’re talking about an every day receipt. We all know how uninteresting they are. Beyond the trivia, calories info, and a tip when your favorite item usually sells out (brilliant useful data!), there is an entertainment tip and a chance to customize your receipt if you’re a regular. This last piece of data is also very good because it allows the customer to interact back and perhaps make the receipt even more useful for them. I have to say, I collect most of my receipts (mainly for return safety) and I was delighted when I saw this. What a good use of time, space, and paper. And since many of these are given away every day anyhow, what a better way to capitalize on it? It’s a like an analog Call-to-Action.

Read More.

Designer Adam Henriksson created Pockit, a game console concept that’s played without a screen or graphics. All players use is a Wii-like motion-sensing wand.

“The console is actually a portable motion controller that focuses on various objects around the gamers and returns feedback to the gamers through sound, light and vibration depending on which the gamers acts to win.”, says Adam. The goal is to trick your opponent into waving his controller around too much, which takes him out of the game. Quite different from attacking or “kill” your rival, right?

Fast Company featured the gadget and reports that “the players do this [the tricking] by fencing or jousting, and trying to parry each other’s moves with as little movement as possible. The speed of movement allowed for each round is defined by a piece of music, Henriksson explains. “Typically, the music plays very slowly, which means the players spend most of their time in slow motion.”"

The groundbreaking news is that the player is not focused on an avatar but on real people. And according to Adam, the intention is to “enhance social engagement”. And get some exercise. Check out this video; it shows a bit of the fun it is, and some of the product creation process.

Pockit doesn’t have a manufacturer yet, but with all the social media going on in our times I bet it won’t take long till this is a reality. If not, it was a good experiment.

Here’s a quote I saw today:

“It would be ridiculous to try to express by curved lines moral ideals, the prosperity of peoples, or the decadence of their literature. But anything that has to do with extent or quantity can be presented geometrically. Statistical projections which speak to the senses without fatiguing the mind, possess the advantage of fixing the attention on a great number of important facts.”

— Alexander von Humboldt‘s early ideas on data visualization, circa 1811, quoted in Visual Storytelling

Here’s an interesting graph on Social Media ROI — something not always easy to compute.

A few worthy highlights from looking at that graph:

• Facebook is the activity with highest ROI right now.
• YouTube is the medium companies plan to increase marketing use most.
• Over 80% of companies are using social media to recruit (talent and not only customers), and 64% find it highly successful.
• Businesses plan on increasing their budgets for social recruiting by 55% in 2011.

The diagram also mentions that if you’re planning to incorporate more social media into your marketing plan, a helpful step is to define your key objectives, such as:

• Short-term sales
• Engage existing customers
• Brand awareness
• Complement promotional campaign
• Encourage word of mouth
• increase searchability
• Spread news and important information about your business

Last Wednesday and Thursday, Patrick, Aaron, Tim, and I spent a good amount of time at SIC, the first Seattle Interactive Conference.

1600+ attendees were already connected, and in full network mode even before the start of the conference on Wednesday. This networking was possible by an online community created by SIC and powered by Pathable — so sleek to see who’s attending each session as well as to have the ability to connect directly with anybody (by requesting a private meeting). Over 80 sessions encompassing keynote speakers, panelists, and moderated audience debates combined great visionary speakers on technology, creativity, and emergent trends.

On both days, entrepreneurs, developers, online business professionals, advertisers, producers, designers, artists, writers, and thinkers gathered inside the Seattle Convention Center — almost all digitally armed with laptops, iPads, and smart-phones; some with all of the above. Occasionally between sessions, I saw groups of fellowgeeks going out to enjoy the Seattle street food coming from the various food trucks that alternatively parked on 8th Avenue, on one side of the Convention Center. Yes, I sugared my brain between talks with a competent coconut brownie by Street Treats (free if you stopped by the AOL booth… oh well).

The last day featured the TechStars Demo Day, at the ShowBox SODO. This presentation was comprised of 10 startups pitching their hard work of 10 weeks to investors of all calibers. TechStars is a startup accelerator with participation requirements higher than Ivy League schools, for a rough idea of what this “pitch show” was like.

There’s so much more to talk about that I’m going to go dead-simple in conference-style, if the reader doesn’t mind. Here are some words / impressions still buzzing in my head:

• It’s not about the UI, it’s about the total UX
• Good interactive design is data/user/goal/idea-driven
• Build on data!
• Tackle business goals with user goals
• Have an experience strategy
• Audience anticipation and participation = use narratives
• Local semiotics (!!)
• Never forget: technology as a means to a solution, not an end in itself
• Positioning is dead; interaction is itself branding
• Narrative and interaction go together = a more human experience
• Use ethnography (really: talk to and observe people)
• Social trigger: the now is irresistible
• Halo effect: focus on one strength
• Cold leads vs. warm leads = build an aggressive homepage
• Post-opulence design = the non-wealthy look and feel approach
• Disruptive technology / innovation
• Less options = more conversions
• Make a claim, show the proof = instant credibility
• Interactive experience is the most powerful thing to connect users and brands

Some list, right? A few of them are quite inspiring (not to mention it seems there’s a design revolution in the works?).

If any of the above got anybody thinking — or craving a good ol’ discussion — why, that’s a good opportunity to stop by, or call and say hi. We wouldn’t say no to partnering and exploring, or at least play, with some of these ideas.

Oh, and muchas gracias to Dennis, Bounmy and Jonathan for guarding the HQ while we were out.

There are a lot of interesting info graphics nowadays floating on the web (and lots of books on it too). I recently read something interesting on how data visualization relates to textual visualization, and how it’s taken in by the brain. Here’s what Alex Lundry, Director of Research at TargetPoint’s VP, says in a presentation called Chart Wars: The Political Power of Data Visualization:

“Vision is our most dominant sense. It takes up 50% of our brain’s resources. And despite the visual nature of text, pictures are actually a superior and more efficient delivery mechanism for information. In neurology, this is called the ‘pictorial superiority effect’ [...] If I present information to you orally, you’ll probably only remember about 10% 72 hours after exposure, but if I add a picture, recall soars to 65%. So we are hard-wired to find visualization more compelling than a spreadsheet, a speech or a memo.”

Because of the Pictorial Superiority Effect (what a great “brainy” name) it’s easy to understand why telling a story through images is in some ways more effective. Evidently, the marketing industry knows this since long ago, given the truck load of imagery used to communicate anything, anywhere, all the time. It’s a powerful tool.

Going back to info graphics: I find that some are clearer than others. As I observe, I see that some let the brain focus on one or few ideas, and meaning can be grasped quickly. Others become a mesh of information, almost in an artful manner, and that’s how perhaps one perceives the meaning. Certain graphs will by nature more complex than others (like train schedules). But for the graphs that need to convey information clearly, I think a good rule of thumb could be: if it’s getting too crowded or complex, break the ideas up into different graphs (just like chapters are separated in a book).

And that’s one way to tell a story: with separate diagrams (or images); the information being delivered a bit at a time, in easily digestible portions. This could engage viewers promptly and keep them engaged longer—and more deeply (maybe to the point they want to act on it). In other words, maybe presenting the visitor with clear and easy information which they can grasp quickly (understand, thus establish a connection with it) will (hopefully) make them “feel ready” for more—or confident that the experience will continue to be meaningful to them.

Of course, we don’t want out viewers to be bored, which usually means they have been presented with something they perceive as not challenging or new—therefore, they resist the engagement (which in the internet might mean quitting that page/site). The trick here is to find the balance between simple and interesting. It’s hard, but worth the effort in my opinion. If we think about it, any of us probably had had an experience like that, that is dosed just right: a bit of familiar, a bit of excitement; safe and new at the same time. We don’t perceive it as a high or as a low; it’s just perfect, because we apprehend it as genuine. (And that’s another post, on genuine experiences).