tiny gigantic

Watch this brilliant talk by Jesse Schell on using game psychology to trigger behavior change. A little long, but completely and totally worth it.

You could actually fly to Cuba with this! Or puddle jump between the Hawaiian Islands! Can one of you buy me one please? More here.

Wow. This video is made almost entirely of logos. And it was nominated for best short animated film.

This super clever little video was created by Maya Rota Klein and Diego Lorenzo Zanitti. Seems foodies and design geeks have more in common than we thought. Enjoy.

I’m a huge Google fan, but it seems like Google’s been falling down a little bit lately. Granted, they’re richer than god, and damn smart too, but as far as I can tell, no one really adopted the much-buzzed Google Wave, and now there’s a bunch of back-lash against their entry into the social network marketplace, Google Buzz. As always, Umair Haque has the right things to say about it. Here’s a taste:

Next-gen products and services are built to fail, fast and cheap — instead of just offering tons of features. The flip side of bundling features together is that room to fail gracefully disappears, because interdependencies between them spiral out of control. It’s why Microsoft always made sucky stuff: bundling Windows, Office, and sundry other apps into one giant monolith increased improvement costs radically. Once upon a time, Google laid down the law: we’ll never bundle stuff the way Microsoft does — because that’s evil. But Buzz is bundled with Gmail so tightly, it’s the first thing you see beneath your inbox. Buzz makes it more costly to improve Gmail, and vice versa. Better that each was an independent service.

Read the whole thing here.

So last night, I went to see Dave Chappelle at a small club in Oakland. It started off funny, but not amazing-belly-laugh funny. And I think it’s because the first part of his act was scripted. But after half an hour, he just started riffing on things happening in the club: some dude’s forced laughter, questions from the audience, a girl who shouted out that she wanted to sleep with him. And once we all got comfortable with eachother, things got really fucking funny.

In other words the experience got way better because Chappelle was both aware of his surroundings and how he felt about them. And he was able to articulate it clearly. In our industry, this is called user-centered design: You become hyper-observant of your everyday experience. You become hyper-aware of how you are affected by it. You articulate it in a way that makes sense. And then you use that understanding to make things work better.

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 now have to spend time out of my already 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.