Showing 133 posts tagged design
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Massive Fiber-Optic Installation Lights Up Library Queries
Getting a glimpse into the curious minds of others has never been so beautiful – or so bright.
Designers Brian W. Brush and Yong Ju Lee of E/B Office New York created an extensive fiber-optic installation for the Teton County Library grand opening in Wyoming that visualizes library searches in flashes of colored light. Dubbed Filament Mind, the installation, which opened at the end of January, uses over five miles of fiber-optic cables and 44 LED illuminators to collect, categorize, and render searches from libraries all across the state of Wyoming into glowing bursts of color.
» via Wired
“By tracking the cell records, they found that it’s just a small number of drivers from a small number of neighborhoods who are responsible for tying up the key roads. Specifically, they identified 15 census tracts (out of the 750 in Greater Boston) located in Everett, Marlborough, Lawrence, Lowell, and Waltham as the heart of the problem, because drivers from those areas make particularly intensive use of the problematic roads in the system. Besides letting us point the finger of blame, the research suggests a potential new approach to alleviating traffic: focus on those problem neighborhoods. The engineers calculate that if you were to reduce the number of car commuters from those 15 areas just 1 percent, all drivers across Boston would get home about 18 percent faster each night.”
Study Shows How Classroom Design Affects Student Learning
As debate over education reform sizzles, and as teachers valiantly continue trying to do more with less, a new study suggests that it might be worth diverting at least a little attention from what’s going on in classrooms to how those spaces are being designed. The paper, published in the journal Building and the Environment, found that classroom design could be attributed to a 25% impact, positive or negative, on a student’s progress over the course of an academic year. The difference between the best- and worst-designed classrooms covered in the study? A full year’s worth of academic progress.
» via Fast Company
“On the day after the election, complaints started pouring in from the volunteers themselves indicating that not only did Project Orca not improve the process, it may have actually hindered it. John Ekdahl, a volunteer who writes at Ace Of Spades HQ, outlined the various glitches and breakdowns of the system. Instead of handing out voter lists at local offices, volunteers were emailed 60 page PDF files and told to print them out at home the night before the election. They weren’t given official poll watcher certificates or told that those were required to enter most polling places. The “app” wasn’t really an app at all, it was a secure website, creating confusion for volunteers trying to find it in the iTunes store. It also didn’t auto-forward users who didn’t know to add an S to the http:// protocol in the app’s URL (which most browsers don’t ask you to type anymore), leaving numerous user lost on a broken webpage. Volunteers in other parts of the country shared similar complaints. The emailed packets came late or not at all. PINs that were required to login and download the voter lists didn’t work and couldn’t be reset. Calls and emails to the help desk went unanswered, and the entire system may have just completely crashed in the middle of election day. Frustrated volunteers struggled to get answers that never came, leaving most of them to fend for themselves or simply give up, wasting an entire day without bringing a single new voter to the voting booth.”
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How Better Typography Could Reduce Car Crashes
Across the two studies, the men required 10.6 percent less time to read the humanist text than the square grotesque. This may not sound like a lot, but that’s the equivalent of about 50 feet in distance in a car traveling at typical highway speeds.
“In the vehicle, fractions of seconds are the difference between avoiding accidents and colliding with things,” Reimer says. At 65 miles per hour, you cover 95 feet every second in a car. “In most other environments that we think of, the safety benefit from fractions of a second doesn’t have the consequences it does in a vehicle. Even in aviation, encroachments between planes are measured in minutes, not seconds.”
» via Popular Science
“I am a behavior designer. I take a deep understanding of human psychology and emerging research in the behavioral sciences to build products that change user behavior in planned and predictable ways. However, these days I’m somewhat dismayed by the persistent chatter about building “addictive” products. When did addiction become an admirable thing to cultivate? As members of the tech industry, we need to ask serious questions about the behaviors that we are promoting. Are we really helping people live better lives? Or, are we promoting suboptimal habits and aptitudes? At best, many of the products we’re building are time wasters. At worst, they’re the addictive equivalents of cigarettes — irresistible cheap thrills that feel good in the moment, but are destructive in the long run. “Addictive” products are rampant in our lives — Facebook, Farmville (or any Zynga game), Twitter, Pinterest. The list goes on and on.”
“Poetry is not about words. Poetry is about the right words. Innovation isn’t about ideas. Innovation is about the right ideas. Innovators need to carefully select the features, functions, or experiences that comprise a new product, process or service. As poets need a large vocabulary to precisely convey their meaning, innovators need a deep vocabulary of science and practice, engineering and management, to construct their innovative wares.”
“There can be a lot of stimulation in working with other people, especially if they have different backgrounds, different perspectives, if they come from different disciplines,” she says. “That can actually spark ideas, as long as people can effectively communicate. And it can be more fun to do creative work with others.”
“We try to develop products that seem somehow inevitable. That leave you with the sense that that’s the only possible solution that makes sense.”
(via dbreunig)
