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I am a skeptic. I don’t believe in the widespread adoption of the iPad (probably wrong about that), didn’t think the Macbook Air would take off (was right about that one) and lately have not been convinced that Augmented Reality is going to make it into the mainstream. Then I saw this:

Now, as cool as this is, does this mean that I know have to spend time out of malready busy day to aim my iphone camera at my stack of AR imprinted business cards to see what kind of shit people are trying to sell me? Seems like a broken user experience to me.

More on this here.

I should have posted this long ago. Umair Haque’s ridiculously smart take on old-school thinking vs. new school thinking.

Here’s a taste:

Dear Old People Who Run the World,
My generation would like to break up with you.

Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences.

You wanted big, fat, lazy “business.”
We want small, responsive, micro-scale commerce.

You turned politics into a dirty word.
We want authentic, deep democracy — everywhere.

Get the whole thing here:

Now I don’t usually predict things because predicting things is a dangerous business. But this morning, with 60mph winds and driving rain, I’m feeling like taking some risk. So:

1. All the voice-activated software that’s getting so much buzz these days will not be adopted by mainstream. How long has voice-dial been available on your cell phone? Do you use it regularly. Me neither.

2. Apple’s much much much buzzed about iTablet thingy (the iPad, maybe?) will not be nearly as popular as the iPhone. It’s nothing more than a netbook without a hardware keyboard. And those already exist for medium-sized and omy semi-enthusiastic audience. Besides that, it’ll require a man-purse to lug the thing around with you. I think it’ll work as a niche product, like the Mac Air, but it will never live up to the hype.

So, apparently, if ever there was a solid UX opportunity, the typical airline boarding pass has got to be high on the list. Tyler Thompson got inspired by Dustin Curtis to take stab at it. And then got other people involved. This is a beautiful example of 1) crowd-sourced, collaborative, experience design that actually works and 2) a broad kind of activism that’s simply focused on making people’s daily lives just a little bit better. Awesome.

It’s long, and the embed technology sorta weird. But if you’ve got the patience, give this article a read. I think it’ll be worth it. The original is here.

Design & Society - Hacking Design

Check out Cheeming Boey’s super charming drawings on styrofoam coffee cups. It always felt good to me to write my name on crunchy-soft styrofoam with a pencil, but this is a whole new level of obsession. Enjoy.

A long time ago, when we were a different sort of company, we wrote a little manifesto bookie — called Dirty Words & Dick Jokes — about some of the worst business jargon cliches in the industry. This year, the awesome info design company, xplane, has an updated visual version that blows our old textual one away!

Over at GOOD magazine, they’ve got a nice little round-up of the top moments in design throughout the decade. My favorite: The phrase “design thinking” got referenced in a Business Week article in 2003. As far as I could tell, design world went bonkers from then on.

The rest are here. Enjoy and happy new year.

Lately, we’ve been working alot with capturing, using, and visualizing everyday data, all the data that humans create, but don’t use. It’s encouraging that lately, a bunch of different ways of capturing and using that data have sprung up. See nike+, daytum, and mint.com for good examples of what I mean.

And now there’s a new one: the Copenhagen bike, an electric, networked bicycle. Check it.

In my mental catalog of creative practices, I mostly ignore window displays. But now that I’ve seen Tokujin Yoshioka’s beautiful installation for Maison Hermés in Tokyo, I’ll never do it again.

Wow. This excruciating and fascinating piece of art was found for us by our designer & web-surfer extraordinaire, Emily Craig.

One of our favorite shops of all time is Maya. Take a look at their youtube channel and you’ll see why. They’re the minds behind the oldie but goodie, Information. Here’s a link to their latest brilliant brilliant video, called Trillions.

Chinese artist Liu Bolin has made an art of camouflaging himself so well against any background that he becomes almost invisible. Awesome.

More here.

Thanks to Delford for the tip.

Creepy and super well-produced. Yowza.

Pretty cool animation by Donato Sansone. At first, I was a little bugged by the inclusion of the animators hands, but now I kinda dig it.

In 1974, artist Gordon Matta-Clark operated on a two-story home in New Jersey slated for demolition, effectively splitting it down the middle with a chainsaw. More here.

Interesting article in the NY Times magazine about true virality. Now we’ve got real, published, proof of what we’ve all been hinting at re: viral marketing and stuff: you can infected by the behaviors, actions, and even sub-conscious thoughts of others.

Here’s a taste:

Between one immediate peer and another, some contagious behaviors — like smoking — seem pretty commonsensical. If lots of people around you are smoking, there’s going to be peer pressure for you to start, whereas if nobody’s smoking, you’ll be more likely to stop. But the simple peer-pressure explanation doesn’t work as well with happiness or obesity: we don’t often urge people around us to eat more or implore them to be happier. (In any case, simply telling someone to be happier or unhappier isn’t likely to work.) Instead, Christakis and Fowler hypothesize that these behaviors spread partly through the subconscious social signals that we pick up from those around us, which serve as cues to what is considered normal behavior. Scientists have been documenting this phenomenon; for example, experiments have shown that if a person is seated next to someone who’s eating more, he will eat more, too, unwittingly calibrating his sense of what constitutes a normal meal.

Yup, you hippies out there have been saying this for a while: we’re all connected, man. Right you are.

Check out Converse’s latest campaign for their mass customizeable shoes. Made by Anomaly of course.

Maybe this stuff is made of clay or maybe, since she’s a character designer, Meredith Dittmar makes super awesome computerey work. Either way, it’s damn beautiful.

Check out Ukrainian artist Kseniya Simonova’s super amazing and beautiful sand illustrations of the the Ukrainian political/cultural climate. Wow.

Found at popeater.