The Ripple Effect of Your Impact
How do you think about your impact as a leader? Is it the bottom line of the business? The culture? Or is it on the people around you more individually? In this …
Andy Polaine
It's all about the people
What is the real work at work? I have very few coaching sessions about the actual design work. It’s all about people. In this week’s coaching …
Saying No
If you’re a people pleaser or self-identified high achiever, how good are you at saying no? This is something that comes up all the time in my design …
Julian Simpson - the life of a screenwriter and director
My guest in this episode is Julian Simpson, a London-based writer and director who has worked in film, TV and audio for the past 25 years. He made his …
How our parental relationships play out at work
In this week’s coaching reflections video I take a look at how our parental relationships and childhood experiences play out at work. For more of these, …
Using a Personal Kanban to combat to-do list overwhelm
If you’ve ever had that feeling of being overwhelmed and scattered because your to-do list is never-ending and you never seem to get anything properly …
Holding your boss accountable for their promises
Many of my coachees are presented with promises from their bosses in the guise of “this is a great opportunity for you” that never materialise. How …
How to deal with jargon
This week’s coaching reflection is all about dealing with jargon and that feeling of having no idea what people are talking about in meeting (spoiler: …
The Work Never Speaks for Itself
“I hate politics, the work should speak for itself.” It’s a designer’s affliction. But the work never speaks for itself. In this …
Navigating Difficult Work Relationships
Work is most often stressful not because of the amount of work part, but because of the interpersonal relationships. The idea of being …
Servant Leadership or Burnout Martydom?
The idea of “servant leadership” is quite popular, but in my design leadership coaching I often see this ending up as martyrdom and burnout. In this …
Hansi Singh - AI-accelerated environmental forecasts
My guest today comes from a very different field to design. Dr Hansi Singh is a former Professor of physical climate science, University of Victoria. A US …
Developing presence and confidence in leadership
What do David Byrne, David Bowie and Beyoncé, all have in common? They’ve all used a persona to help them step into the energy of performing and give them …
How To Use An Experience Portfolio To Plan Your Career
Roles and titles are abstractions from the actual day-to-day work activities you do, but it’s easy to get caught in the trap of climbing a title ladder …
How rules set you free to give great feedback
Rather than being constraints how can rules set you and your teams free? How can this help you give great feedback and raise the quality of design work from …
Understanding Your Thinking & Communication Style
A classic human bias is to assume everybody else thinks the way we do, but of course they do not. Understanding your thinking style and how you manage that when …
Presenting your portfolio and yourself for interviews
When people will present their portfolios of work, they often forget the most important thing, which is the storytelling about themselves. Every week I spend my …
Why does quitting your job make it more enjoyable?
Why do people have the best days of their jobs when they’ve just quit? And what can it tell us about how we relate to work? Every week I spend my days …
Management & Leadership as Slow-Motion facilitation
Instead of thinking you have to become a business suit as a design leader, what if you think about management and leadership as slow-motion facilitation, using …
Starting at the End + Avoiding Pointless Meetings
Every week I spend my days coaching design leaders. In these videos, I reflect upon common themes and questions that came up. This week, getting started by …
Scaling Yourself + Two Tricks for Clarity & Stakeholder Management
Every week I spend my days coaching design leaders. And in these short videos, I reflect on common themes and questions that come up. Last week. I talked a bit …
Indi Young — Mental Models and Thinking Styles
My guest in this episode is Indi Young, a solution strategist who uses purpose-focused qualitative data science. She created her method over a 30-year span, and …
Managing Up and Meta-Communication
I spend my days coaching design leaders, helping them improve themselves and their organisations. Since so many common themes and interesting questions come up, …
Are you my 100th coachee?
Although I have been mentoring designers of all levels for years as part of my work, I am formally in the fifth year of my design leadership coaching practice. …
Oliver Reichenstein - Keeping it real when writing with AI
While every app rushes to add an AI assistant, iA Writer’s Oliver Reichenstein asks, “Why should I bother reading what you haven’t …
Jaimes Nel - Do design frameworks lead to boring products and services?
Has the product and design obsession with frameworks and process led to everyone working on autopilot, churning out a bland monoculture of design? When are they …
Mediocrity and the current state of design
I wrote a long essay in my newsletter about mediocrity and the current state of design. It was largely in response to Robert Fabricant’s The big design …
Peter Merholz - State of the Design Nation
My guest in this episode is Peter Merholz. We talked about the state of the design nation, the burst bubble of the Cambrian explosion of design from the last …
Defensive Calendaring Tips
As part of my book writing process, I have been putting out videos on my YouTube channel about the topics and sections I’m writing. Many people will tell …
Linn Vizard — Service Design for Real World Outcomes
My guest in this episode is Linn Vizard, one of Canada’s leading advocates of service design who co-founded Service Design Toronto in 2013. She’s the …
Leaving Substack
Just a quick note to say that I will be moving Doctor’s Note from Substack to Buttondown1. You don’t need to do anything to remain subscribed and the archive …
Leading versus Enabling
Although I coach design leaders for a living the obsession and even the word “leadership” has always made me uncomfortable. The kinds of articles you find in …
Busywork is junk food
Back to back meetings, clearing through email and Slack messages, admin might feel like work, but isn’t really purposeful. It’s just busywork and …
YouTube Channel for Design Leadership Coaching Tips
I recently launched my YouTube channel with a new series of videos of advice, tips and thoughts about the journey into creative leadership, based on 30 years of …
Aparna Rae – Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Requires Deep Structural Change
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in the workplace requires data, but also deep structural change and the most powerful lever is transparency, argues my guest, …
Sara Wachter-Boettcher – Breaking the Gaslighting Cycle of People Pleasing & Overwork
In this episode I’m joined by Sara Wachter-Boettcher, an author, speaker, coach and strategist dedicated to changing design and tech for good. If you are …
Alison Coward - Workshop Culture
This episode’s guest is Alison Coward, a strategist, workshop facilitator, coach, and an author with 20 years’ experience in leading creative teams. …
Kate Tarling - The Service Organization
My guest in this episode is Kate Tarling, a service leader and specialist who helps large organisations create successful services, by changing their working …
Pierce Otlhogile-Gordon – The Space Between Transformation and Liberation
My guest in this episode is Dr Pierce Otlhogile-Gordon, known as Doctor OG, an innovation catalyst, researcher, facilitator, and evaluator, based in Botswana. …
Talking Design Leadership on The Wicked Podcast
I tend to be an extroverted thinker, which means I need to talk (or write) about half-formed ideas in my head in order to reflect upon them and make sense of …
The Demise of Wise
I recently had a terrible experience with Wise (formerly Transferwise) arbitrarily suspending my account that turned me from an evangelist to a detractor in the …
Navigating the Leadership Dip Book
I’m planning a new book on the psychological experience of transitioning into creative leadership. From my coaching practice, I know the shift from IC to …
Sheryl Cababa – Systems Thinking for Designers
My guest in this episode is Sheryl Cababa, author of Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers. Sheryl is a design researcher and strategist, and is the …
Alex Schmidt – Deliberate Intervention
My guest in this episode is Alex Schmidt, author of Deliberate Intervention: Using Policy and Design to Blunt the Harms of New Technology published by Rosenfeld …
Fear & Anxiety in Stakeholderland
A common topic that comes up in my design leadership coaching is a difficult relationship with a senior stakeholder. For design folks, used to opining about …
Abby Covert - Stuck? Diagrams Help
My guest in this episode is the wonderful Abby Covert, an author, teacher and community leader in the field of information architecture who aims to make …
A New Look
I felt it was about time for an update of my website. It’s a bit more smooth on the transition front, has much better typography and also has a dark mode …
Natalie Dunbar - from solo to scaled
My guest in this episode is Natalie Dunbar, UX-focused content strategist with a unique blend of skills as a journalist, content writer, and user experience …
Meta and the Paradox of VR
I sat through Mark Zuckerberg’s painfully stilted Meta Connect Keynote about The Metaverse pondering two questions. The first was why the team that puppet …
The Greed for Speed
I often see the same symptoms in the first sessions with my coaching clients. They’re highly stressed, feeling overwhelmed, sometimes close to burnout, …
Shut Up and Do Something
I wrote a little rant on LinkedIn the other day having heard same story from several of my female coachees within the space of a couple of months: Dear male …
Powers of Ten Updated
The BBC and Open University have created an updated version of the famous Eames’ Powers of Ten film from which my podcast gets its name. It’s …
Your product is probably a service and why that matters
Product design has had a meteoric rise in the last decade, but most digital “products” are actually services and that slippage of meaning has …
Announcing my online courses
I’ve taught offline and online courses in design & innovation for many years, but when the pandemic hit and everyone suddenly went online I decided to …
Output is Input
There may be people out there who conceive of ideas in crisp, clean sentences and can deliver them as if they are reading off a mental autocue. I am not one of …
Smalltalk
Smalltalk gets a bad name. As an Englishman living in Germany, I often experience a lack of smalltalk – it really seems to be perceived as something redundant. …
Design Leadership Masterclass
I’ll be giving a masterclass at the Design Leadership program from Echos Innovation Lab starting on July 12th. My session is all about design leadership …
Your time is a non-renewable resource
I wrote a short thought over on LinkedIn based on a conversation with a coachee, who was worried she wasn’t doing enough at work (she was doing more than …
Escaping your personal escape room
This post was originally part of my newsletter Doctor’s Note. It is traditional at this time of the year to either write an end of year round-up or …
Futurice Show and Tell – Design Leadership
I was recently invited by Futurice Berlin to give a short talk on design leadership, along with Melanie Dreser. The video is now available and embedded below if …
Finding meaning and purpose in work and life
This post was originally part of my newsletter Doctor’s Note. My most recent Power of Ten podcast episode is with Jungian Psychoanalyst and author Dr …
Understanding services as games with janky controls
This post was originally part of my newsletter Doctor’s Note. I recently tweeted a Games Studies article by M. D. Schmalzer called Janky Controls and …
Antirom reunited apart
Much of my thinking about the relationship between playfulness and interactivity was formed during my time as a member of Antirom. Nikola Tosic managed to …
Finding the Shape of You
My leaving This is Doing and This is HCD wasn’t a pleasant experience, despite my desire for conscious uncoupling instead of painful divorce. Asking …
Boiling the Ocean: Complexity, Service Design, & Systems Thinking
I recently gave a talk for Dan Levy’s Future of Now series called Boiling the Ocean: Complexity, Service Design, & Systems Thinking. The session was …
A new home for Power of Ten
After a couple of years of being on the This is HCD network, Power of Ten is going solo with the episodes at their [new home here on polaine.com](/podcasts/), …
Design Leadership as Slow-Motion Facilitation
A lot of traditional models of leadership, especially in the corporate and political worlds, take on military language. There has been a lot of it recently. …
Design Politics Online, On Sale
After a lot of behind the scenes work switching from the live event and working out how we make the virtual one engaging, we are delighted to announce Design …
The Design Leadership Dip
Since I’ve just started offering Design Leadership Coaching, I thought I’d share my experience of moving into that role. But first, some background. A journey …
Taking bookings for Design Leadership coaching
No more flying by the seat of your pants. I’m now offering one-to-one or small group Design Leadership coaching. Moving into a design leadership role can …
Workplaces need to change, not women
I wrote this piece on International Women’s Day for my newsletter and forgot to post it here. I had cause to go looking for it, so here it is. One of the best …
Teams learning from families learning from teams
A small group of people sharing a space for several weeks, all with different needs and preferences. Sound familiar right now? While it’s true of families and …
Seeing Change Creates Change
Gerry McGovern has just written a new book called World Wide Waste: How digital is killing our planet—and what we can do about it. It’s an extremely important …
Systems Thinking Failure
I committed a cardinal sin of systems thinking in the last issue of Doctor’s Note. Well, a little bit, at least. I mentioned the fact that the annual influenza …
Online Teaching Tips
I’ve been teaching online since the late 90s when I first started working on the Omnium Virtual Design Studio project. Back then 50 participants from all …
Suddenly remote? Tell me your stories
Suddenly working from home remotely? Tell me your stories for a new podcast. We’re in the middle of an unprecedented social experiment with so many people …
Workplaces need to change, not women
One of the best pieces I’ve read all week about the structural gender inequality of workplaces was the transcript of HBR’s IdeaCast podcast with Michelle King, …
Remote Work in the Age of Corona
In wake of the coronavirus (COVID-19), many organisations are telling their workers to switch to remote working, including 7,000 GPs (MDs) in the UK. An …
Organisational Amnesia
I’ve noticed a pattern recently. In the last 18 months or so, I have had three client organisations ask me to come and teach and coach their CX, UX or Service …
Revisiting The Californian Ideology
I finally had a chance to read Derek Thompson’s piece in the Atlantic, The Real Trouble With Silicon Valley in which he laments the fact that “too much American …
Leaving Fjord
Now that the Fjord 2020 Trends are live—of which I’m very proud—I have some news to announce. After four-and-a-half years in various roles at Fjord I have …
A second life for avatars?
Avatars have been part of the Internet for a very long time. I once had a book called Avatars! by Bruce Damer that documented many of the early attempts at …
Moved to Hugo
As previously mentioned, I’ve finally moved off of Wordpress and am running my blog as a static site using Hugo hosted on Netlify. What does this mean for …
Next Conference and eDay
I’ve given a couple of shorter versions of my Creativity in the Age of Synthetic Realities talk recently at Next in Hamburg and Emerce eDay. It’s a …
Design for the long term
During my move from Australia to Germany I somehow missed posting the talk I gave at Web Directions Design 18 called Design for the Long Term (another version …
Design in the Age of Synthetic Realities
AI-generated and mixed realities are blurring the boundaries of “truth” and challenging how we value it. Synthetic Realities have reached new heights of …
Learning from Ed Sheeran
I went to see Ed Sheeran live the other day. I can assure that’s not a sentence I thought I would be writing. At the start of his meteoritic rise, I couldn’t …
Storytelling, Pitching and Synthetic Realities at UX Australia 2019
I’m heading back to Australia in August forUX Australia 2019 where I’ll be running a workshop on Storytelling & Pitching for Designers and …
Innovation = Conversation + Doing
“What should we be doing to be increase innovation?” It is a very common question from clients. It’s not unreasonable, since the chatter around innovation is …
The complex is not complicated
I wrote a piece for my Doctor’s Note newsletter about the difference between the complex and the complicated. The central point is that if we don’t …
Introducing the Power of Ten podcast
I’ve podcasted on and off for a while and always enjoyed it, first with Core77 in the mid-2000s, last year as a regular host of a Fjord Fika (new season …
Value versus Values
That extra ’s’ makes all the difference. Whilst we are talking about the dysfunctional desire to reduce the world to bottom-line numbers, there was …
Design Maturity
Leah Buley, Director Design Education at InVision, and a wider team from InVision just published the Design Maturity Model. I very much preferred this to …
History Repeating
This week’s Doctor’s Note is all about value versus values. That extra ’s’ makes all the difference. Here’s the first part of it. …
The Box Is All There Is
AI getting sneaky Recently, I wrote about the games that AI’s play, gaming training environments as logical responses to the reward and assessment stimuli they …
Reading Habits
The original of this article was published on Medium. I have a distinct childhood memory, queuing up at the railway crossing that was always a feature of my …
Corporate Culture and the Games AIs Play
The original version of this article was published on Medium. One of the fascinating features of artificial intelligence is how much it tells us about …
Doctor's Note
I plan to keep blogging here, though the slowdown of content has been mostly due to me procrastinating about platforms (Wordpress, Hugo, Medium, newsletter). …
Service Experience Conference 2017 Closing Keynote
I had the pleasure of giving the closing keynote at the Adaptive Path Service Experience Conference 2017. There was a fantastic line-up of speakers and now all …
Speaking on Living Design at UX Australia 2017
I’m very excited to be speaking at UX Australia 2017 again, but have been terribly slow at telling anyone about it on my blog. That’s right, all six …
Fjord Fika with Dave Gray
Fjord have recently started a podcast series called Fjord Fika, the Swedish word for slowing down and catching up with colleagues and friends over coffee and …
Service Design Now in Korean
Our book on service design was recently translated into Korean by Dr. Grace Bae from CMU HCII and Dr. Younkyung Lim from KAIST Design, Korea. It’s great …
The Service Design Show
I had the pleasure of chatting with 31Volts’ Marc Fonteijn on the Service Design Show the other day. We talked about the possible boundaries of service …
Design to the Power of Ten UX Australia 2016
Thanks to everyone who came to my workshop at presentation at UX Australia. Below is the deck for my Design to the Power of Ten presentation: UPDATE: The audio …
Services need to manage reverse ID better
Having finally relocated to a permanent address in Sydney and re-docking with government and utilities, I’ve been experiencing the whole gamut of customer …
Hello UX Australia 2016
Just a quick note to say I’m heading to Melbourne for UX Australia 2016 where I’ll be running my Design a Service in Six Hours workshop and also …
The Circular Economy Officer
There’s an interesting short piece over at Sustainable Brands asking whether we need a new kind of CEO - a Circular Economy Officer. They interviewed my …
You drive me crazy — considering the brand and human experiences of autonomous cars
Photo: Steve Jurvetson When Google’s self-driving Lexus cut off Delphi Automotive’s self-driving Audi, forcing it to take “appropriate …
Service Design masterclass links and goodies
I recently taught a Service Design in Helsinki for Ratekoulutus and put together a set of links for the participants. They have their own special, private page …
Switching hemispheres
I have some big news to announce. After six years teaching and researching service design at the Hochschule Luzern I will be leaving my post there at the end of …
The Apple Watch, skeuomorphism and metaphors
I had a Twitter exchange with John Gruber yesterday in response to his point about the Apple Watch and skeuomorphism: I don’t think iOS or OS X needed to eschew …
Stop researching and start doing
Austin Kleon with some sage advice for anyone considering writing a book. It’s all good, but this is especially true: Stop researching, start writing. …
Safety in games, from Shakespeare to Plato to Play Theory
Interesting piece from Jesper Juul on play with this note about Brian Sutton-Smith: On two occasions I heard Brian Sutton-Smith claim that play provides a …
Antirom 20th Anniversary Event
REWIND to 1995 - A collective of young Londoners launches Antirom, a CD-ROM of experimental interactive software, at Cameraworks gallery in Bethnal Green. The …
Comcast Customer Receives Bill Addressed to ‘Super Bitch‘
In our book on service design and elsewhere, we often talk about how much people are at the heart of services. Although branding folk like to speak of products …
Fixing photo and video file metadata with ExifTool
This post is really a note-to-self for when I next have to remember how to deal with missing photo and QuickTime movie metadata. Nevertheless, since it took me …
Getting from here to there – from hunch to research direction to design concept
The most common issue my students face is project paralysis in the face of infinite possibilities and the synthesis of a mass of research material. Services are …
Be My Eyes ~ Lend Your Eyes to the Blind
Be My Eyes is an app that actually benefits people. Imagine that. It crowdsources help for visually impaired people by simply using a video link to someone else …
IFTTT vs ifttt
You may have noticed some very short posts recently. Today actually. Except they are from a while ago. I have a recipe on If This Then That that posts the …
The Cheapest Generation
The Cheapest Generation is an interesting piece over at The Atlantic about “why millennials (Gen Yers) aren’t buying cars or houses, and what that means …
Winterhouse Institute
The Winterhouse Institute focusess on non-profit, self-initiated projects that support design education, as well as social and political initiatives. What the …
UXpod podcast interview
Gerry Gaffney interviewed me about service design and UX for the UXpod podcast a few weeks ago and it’s now online. You can play it on the UXpod website …
Protection Racket
On Thursday, Google launches a new service called Contributor that Gigaom bills as “a crowdfunding platform for publishers.” According to Gigaom, …
Presentation Notes to my Design to the Powers of Ten UX Futures Talk
Here are the links to sources and resources, people and videos that I drew upon for my UX Futures Design to the Power of Ten talk. In no particular order: …
Join me for Interaction 14 South America
Update: The workshops are now open for registrations and there are early bird discounts available. I’m super looking forward to taking part in Interaction …
Help Launchlabs crowdfund their creative co-working space
“At home you feel lonely and at the office you get nothing done.” True words from my friend and frequent collaborator, Andreas Erbe, from Launchlabs …
Service design combined with smart resource usage
My older brother Matt works as Lead Researcher, The Circular Economy at British Telecommunications (yes, he is older than me, although I get the bald head and …
Capital One's acquisition of Adaptive Path shouldn't be news
Last week’s announcement by Adaptive Path that they have been acquired by Capital One sent, if not shockwaves, certainly large ripples through the tech …
Learning from Raiders of the Lost Ark
I’m in the research phase for a book project that looks at how and what designers and organisations—particularly those involved in service design or …
UX Week 2014 Talk Video
The video of my UX Week 2014 talk, Designing Multichannel Services for Lives Beyond the Screen is now online (and embedded below). There were some great …
UX Week 2014 Blueprinting Workshop
Hint: The future of air travel is not this If you’re here, you were probably at my workshop on Developing Services with Service Blueprinting for UX Week …
Customer service experienced in bits
Dr Drang tells two stories of failed customer service. The first one involves him trying to assist his mother getting to the gate at the airport. I use flying a …
Talk & Workshops at UX Week 2014
It has been a long time since I have been in San Francisco, so I am thrilled to have been invited to give a presentation and two workshops at Adaptive …
Interview at the 2014 Science-to-Business Marketing Conference
I gave a keynote a couple of weeks ago at the 2014 Science-to-Business Marketing Conference in Winterthur and Todd Davey interviewed me afterwards about service …
Apple, Beats and wearable tech
All the speculation about Apple designing and iWatch and the noise about their acquisition of Beats got me wondering why we do not pay more attention to the …
Service Design in Japanese
I’m happy to announce that our book, Service Design: from insight to implementation has just been translated and published in Japanese by Maruzen …
Chris Risdon on Orchestrating Touchpoints
Whilst I’m at it, here’s a great talk by Chris Risdon from the same conference talking about orchestrating touchpoints. His anecdote at the …
Dave Malouf on Storytelling and Interaction Design
I talk a lot about the importance of thinking about the story of your product or service. I have always assumed this has to do with my background of studying …
Collaborative long form writing – the story behind the book
A few people have asked me about the process of writing our book on service design given that the three of us are in different countries and all have different …
Smart companies trust people
I just backed David Hieatt’s upcoming book, Do Purpose on the crowd-funded publishing site, Unbound. David is a smart guy and a kind of serial …
Mentalism for service delivery?
I hope I have left enough time between the broadcast of Series 3 of Sherlock, but just in case you are waiting to binge view, the following contains mild …
Swiss Design Network coordinator job
The Swiss Design Network (I am the HSLU Board Member) is looking for a coordinator to support the head office located at Bern University of the Arts BUA. You …
Services that fix services and the inverse experience umbrella
I often use air travel as the archetypal example of a multi-channel service that unfolds over time. Modern air travel consists of lots of minor annoyances that …
Lists and numbers versus stories
Eugene Wei posted a piece about why our brains love lists over on his Remains of the Day blog. It explains why all those “20 ways to…” blog …
Lamy's attention to detail in customer service
Several years ago my wife bought me a Lamy 2000 fountain pen as a birthday present. It is a design classic created by Gerd Alfred Müller, released in 1966. If …
Design Research Techniques
Design Research Techniques is an “online repository is a necessarily unfinished and evolving resource for Participatory Design Techniques. These …
Square Cash
I’m fascinated by Square’s new service, Square Cash, that allows you to send someone cash simply by sending them an e-mail and cc’ing …
May the force be with you – service design for invisible connections
The video of the talk I gave at DESIS Lab Melbourne at RMIT is online at Service Design Melbourne’s website. The audio is a bit hard to hear because the …
Interaction 14 Student Design Challenge
Now in its fifth year, the IxDA Student Design Challenge will run during the Interaction14 conference in Amsterdam, February 4-8, 2014. I’m happy to be on …
Service Design, The Force and Yoda
While I am down under in Melbourne later in August for UX Australia I’m going to be giving a different talk and hosting a discussion at RMIT’s DESIS …
Mural.ly - super duper collaborative walls
Anyone who has worked with me in the last few years will know my propensity to use a lot of Post-It notes. It’s a design cliché, I know, but true. I just …
Tile and Internet of Things Services
I have a re-occurring conversation with my MA Design students, especially those specialising in products. It goes something like this: Student: “I’m …
Backing the Kickstarter campaign for What Doesn't Kill You
My lovely friend Rachel Meyrick has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to make a feature documentary called, What Doesn’t Kill You. It’s …
ALA Article on Service Design Beyond the Screen
As usual I’m behind the curve, but this time I’m behind myself, which is weird. I don’t think I’ll psychoanalyse that too much more. I …
Storytelling for Designers
As a design educator I watch and read a lot of project presentations. I worked out the other day that I must have seen at least 2,000-3,000 student projects in …
Infographic Movies
The Inforgraphic Movie blog is a rolling resource of, well, infographic movies from Swiss designer, “Hitch”, who is an ex-student of ours here at …
UX and Service Design in Lisbon
From UX to Service Design at UX-LX I’m heading off to Lisbon tomorrow to run a workshop at UX-LX in Lisbon called From UX to Service Design. It’s …
Hopscotch - programming on the iPad for kids
Hopscotch is a new programming language/environment iPad for kids. I don’t have my iPad here right now, but I’m looking forward to having a go on …
Create a one-click expiring link
DeadC.net is a link shortening service with a difference. You can create a URL that can only be clicked upon once. Of course, it’s only a re-direct, so …
Presenting a nested set of meta-principles for service design
A rather last minute post to mention that I’m on my way to the EAD Crafting the Future Conference at the HDK, School of Design and Crafts in Gothenburg, …
Draft. Write Better.
Draft is a way for writers to collaborate online writing in Markdown with version control. It’s very straightforward so far, which is probably a good way …
Moving Playpen's RSS Away From Feedburner
Since Google is shutting down Google Reader, it seems pretty likely that Feedburner is going to get axed at some point too. So, I have decided to move …
No-rage CSS layout
Learn Layout is a great little site. I can code HTML and CSS, but not brilliantly and I don’t have to do it that often. When I do, I always have to re-cap …
Service Design: From Insight to Implementation is here!
I’m extremely happy to announce that our book, Service Design: From Insight to Implementation, was officially published today. I wrote a welcome post …
A Golden Rule for Interactions and Life
Most of us have experienced a relationship in which the other person constantly assails you with their problems, yet when the tables are turned, their response …
O'Reilly Webcast: Designing cross-channel service experiences
A quick cross-post from our Rosenfeld Media book blog. Ben, Lavrans and I are going to be doing (giving? What does one say…?) an O’Reilly Webcast titled …
Director 12 Publishes to iOS and Adobe's Wallet
The new release of Director 12 publishes to iOS, which is big news to old Director hands like me. I believed that Adobe had let Director starve to death in the …
Guide to Camera Types for Interactive Installations
Guide to Camera Types for Interactive Installations is an absolutely brilliant, detailed round-up by Blair Neal (@laserpilot). I recently had to do some …
Self-Ethnography and the Quantified Life
(Image: Nick Felton’s public data on Daytum) Marius Watz has put together a great compilation of “possible resources of interest in connection with …
Students, Ideas & Prototyping
While perusing Nicolas Nova’s post on Prototyping session with post-its and cardboard at EPFL I followed his link to Stickers on Boxes, a …
Marco on The Surface
Marco on The Surface is a great subjective account of visiting a Microsoft store and trying to have a go on a Surface Tablet. This bit sums it all up: The …
Kickstarting the Light Fantastic
I just backed a new Kickstarter project, Light by Moore’sCloud. What is it? Here: The light that turns you on Beautiful, intelligent, connected light. …
Mapping The Entertainment Ecosystems
Mapping The Entertainment Ecosystems has already been blogged by John Gruber so you have already read it, so this is more for my own reference as anyone …
Dropbox's Mental Models Are Broken
As Dropbox develops and expands, decisions they have made early on are tying them, and their users, in knots. The biggest problem they have is that they keep …
On Users, Customers, Interactors, Participants and Roles
Jack Dorsey’s post about reconsidering the word users and preferring the word customers has been doing the rounds of various popular tech blogs. John …
infogr.am
infogr.am is a pretty swish new online service to easily make infographics. You can enter or upload data and use or edit the templates to create some quite …
Journeys
Journeys is a useful collection of customer/user journey maps on Pinterest from Jamie Thomson. (Via Simon Clatworthy).
LeapMotion
LeapMotion is a USB device now available for pre-order that “creates a 3D interaction space of 8 cubic feet to precisely interact with and control …
Webdagene 2012 Notes and Slides
From UX to Service Design workshop Thanks to everyone who took part in our From UX to Service Design workshop at Webdagene 2012 today. As promised here are the …
Touchpoint Observatory: Touch Elevator Buttons
I think I could write a whole series on lift buttons - I regularly see people struggle with this most rudimentary of interfaces. These buttons are from a smart …
formd
formd >formd is a tool for (for)matting (M)ark(d)own that allows rapid conversion between the two styles of Markdown links and images—inline and referenced. …
Dead Drops
Dead Drops is an interesting physical digital crossover from Aram Bartholl: ‘Dead Drops’ is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public …
Bill Moggridge
It’s been a sad and bad year for interaction design losing some of its pioneers. Hillman Curtis, Andy Cameron and now Bill Moggridge, arguably the father …
Designers are not researchers: the difference between design and social research
Designers are not researchers: the difference between design and social research from Sam Ladner is worth a read by all designers engaging in this kind of work. …
PromptDown
PromptDown is a super simple, browser-based teleprompter for mobile devices (ideally Safari on iOS) that uses markdown for its markup. Paste some markdown text …
The Naked Sheep
I probably don’t blog about my students’ work enough, but this piece I particularly like because it was a collaboration between students who are …
Airbnb 10 Million Guest Nights Booked
Airbnb 10 Million Guest Nights Booked is a nice infographic showing just how much the service has grown over the past four years (up 720% here in Germany). I …
Little Digits - Finger Counting with the iPad
Little Digits (iTunes link) is a new iPad app from Chris O’Shea’s company Cowly Owl described as a “fun educational app that teaches children …
Unamed Soundsculpture
What with all the talk of service design, I’ve been ignoring my interactive roots, but for a research project about buildings as hybrid communication hubs …
Service Design Workshop at Webdagene, Oslo
If you’re involved in Web work and UX and interested in Service Design, live|work’s Lavrans Løvlie and I will be running a workshop on service …
Andy Cameron
This morning I received the shocking and very saddening news that my ex-lecturer and colleague, friend and mentor, Andy Cameron died yesterday (May 28th) of a …
Without Design Methods, I Feel Like I Am Cheating
Without Design Methods, I Feel Like I Am Cheating - another cracking post from Jon Kolko. This one is close to my heart because I teach design methods on …
Research and Experience Prototyping Tools, Tips and Apps
I have been giving lists of experience prototyping tools and tips for doing research to quite a lot of students recently, so I thought I would start compiling …
Life is a prototype - fail early and often.
We live in a culture that encourages envy. Envy for products we don’t own, lifestyles we don’t have, happiness we believe others have. Growing up …
Touchpoint Observatory: One company’s junk service is another company’s gold
In Germany and Switzlerand1 there is an accepted culture that contracts for most services can be renewed for a year – sometimes even two – automatically if you …
Touchpoint Observatory: ICE restaurant car
Breakfast on the German ICE train While there are a few things not to like about German trains - officious staff, annoyingly slow ticket machines - it’s …
Kickstarter, Pitchforks and Torches
Kickstarter, Pitchforks and Torches – the latest update from Casey Hopkins’s Elevation Dock Kickstarter project has a priceless paragraph about the …
Bye, Hillman. Knowing you has been a privilege.
Photo: Gabriel de Urioste What a sad thing to hear. The very brilliant and lovely Hillman Curtis died on the 17th April at the too-young age of 51. I watched …
All companies are going to become software companies.
All companies are going to become software companies. Jon Kolko trying out some provocative thoughts. Obviously the idea that all products are services appeals …
Photo check deposits fail from Chase Mobile App
Photo check deposits fail from Chase Mobile App – Marco Arment details why Chase’s idea of a mobile app with which you can photograph your cheques and …
Entrepreneur designers in final form
Entrepreneur designers in final form - Liz Danzico has posted a thorough set of links to SVA’s IxD MA (@svaixd) brilliant course (in Europe we would say …
Does Your Research Exist?
Does Your Research Exist? Another great list of tips from John Thackara about how to get your research out there in a useful way. These three are particularly …
Design research: sorting your shoe walking from your talk talking «
Design research: sorting your shoe walking from your talk talking « is a good piece on being realistic about design research and choosing the appropriate method …
On The Value of Tinkering
On The Value of Tinkering is a thoughtful piece by Jeff Howard on the issues of teaching service design: An entire generation of web designers have bootstrapped …
Germany Is a Nation of Grumblers
Germany Is a Nation of Grumblers says SAP Co-Founder Hasso Plattner. Maybe they wouldn’t be if SAP’s software wasn’t so awful. There’s a …
How to tell managers they're wrong about UX research and still get hired
How to tell managers they’re wrong about UX research and still get hired from Dave Travis over at Userfocus. Heard these before? ‘Market research uses …
Design for a two speed world
Design for a two speed world is a painful example of how a number of small touchpoint gaps lead to a service experience crevasse from made by many’s …
Falling Light by Troika
Falling Light by Troika is an installation that will be available to view at the V&A;’s British Design exhibition opening on 31st March. 50 ceiling …
Rigor and relevance in interaction design research
Rigor and relevance in interaction design research is a good find by @nicolasnova from the Near Future Laboratory. As Nicolas describes: It addresses the …
Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving
Serendipitously, given my previous post, I’ve just seen that Jon Kolko has put out a new book called, Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving that focuses …
Design Research: What Is It and Why Do It?
Design Research: What Is It and Why Do It? is a good piece from Panthea Lee arguing the case for design research in the public and international development …
Sir Jonathan Ive: The iMan cometh
Sir Jonathan Ive: The iMan cometh is an appalling headline for an unusual interview with Jonny Ive in celebration of his knighthood. Some great quotes: Most of …
Digital to Analogue with Paper.li and Newspaper Club
Newspapers are tomorrow’s chip paper anyway right? (Photo: Sameold2010 CC licensed on Flickr) I’m working on a research project at the moment that …
Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi, if you haven’t already heard, is an ARM GNU/Linux box for $25. It is a roughly credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a …
The Psychologist’s View of UX Design
The Psychologist’s View of UX Designis a useful article from Dr. Susan Weinschenk, author of Neuro Web Design: What makes them click?. It really applies to all …
Coursekit
Coursekit is a free online learning management system. I’ve used a lot of the heavy duty, clunky systems over the years, such as Blackboard, WebCT and …
Speaking at Webdagene, Oslo, 26-28 September 2012
I am very pleased to announce that I will be giving a keynote talk on Service Design at Webdagene, billed as “Norway’s premier conference for web …
Snake the Planet!
Snake the Planet! by MPU is a new project in Sydney that takes the classic mobile phone game ‘Snake’ and “adopts it for the urban canvas”. When …
Spun Gold
Spun Gold is a lovely post from Meena Kadri on upcycled rope making in Ahmedabad. As always, Meena’s article is accompanied by her wonderful photography: …
To Crowdfund or Not to Crowdfund?
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about the new Swiss crowd-funding platform, wemakeit.ch. In the post I suggested that this is a big opportunity for …
Social Edge
Social Edge is Social Edge is a program of the Skoll Foundation that was inspired by Jeff Skoll’s commitment to connecting people with shared passions. …
Social Innovator
Social Innovator aims to “bring together the people, experience and issues involved in designing, developing and growing new ideas that meet pressing …
Ninja Blocks
Ninja Blocks are a great Kickstarter project for anyone wanting to connect together their hardware world with Web services. From the Ninja Blocks blog: How it …
If… Behavioural Heuristics and Design
If… Behavioural Heuristics and Design is a excellent, long, but well-explained post by Dan Lockton on behavioural heuristics. Important for designers, because, …
Makego
Makego is a new iPhone app from interaction artist and designer, Chris O’Shea that turns your iPhone / iPod Touch into a toy vehicle. The app is basically …
Touchpoint Observatory: Badly Hand-Drawn Signs = Ruined Branding
You have spent thousands on your corporate branding, you keep a tight reign over the usage of your logo, you ship out expensively produced marketing materials …
kooaba Shortcut
kooaba Shortcut is “a shortcut between real life and the Internet: take a picture of what you are reading in a newspaper or magazine and instantly get …
Touchpoint Observatory: Service Sold in a Box
When companies struggle to get their heads around service, they often end up marketing services as if they were products. The above image is for television …
Andrew Hinton describing Path's failure as a UX failure
Andrew Hinton describing Path’s failure as a UX failure: This is in part what some of us in the community are calling the failure of “user experience …
Touchpoint Observatory: UK Lift Engineer Bodge Job
This lovely piece of work is in a multistory car park in Ipswich in the UK. There are two lifts next to each other and something must have broken or been …
The Three Rs of Modern Creativity
The Three Rs of Modern Creativity Iain Tait’s wisdom on what we all need these days. Resilience, Restraint and Respect. Pretty good combination if you ask …
Burn Note
Burn Note is either completely brilliant or rather sinister. It is an e-mail service that destroys all traces of the message once sent, a la Mission Impossible: …
What matters in life
What matters in life . Marco comments on Jeff Atwood leaving stack exchange. His own thoughts are worth pasting up on the wall: Whatever startup you’re working …
Touchpoint Observatory: SIM Card Vending Machine
In Germany, mobile phone contracts are 24 months by default, not just for an iPhone. Additionally, there is a culture here whereby contracts are automatically …
Pirating 3D objects
Interesting piece in The New Scientist about pirate file-sharing moving into the realm of 3D objects thanks to the growth of cheap 3D printers. Of course the …
Service Design in Tourism 2012 announced
Switzerland, like Austria (where Service Design in Tourism is being held), has a big tourism industry. Mainly in the mountains, of course, but also the lakes …
15 fantastic data visualisations
15 fantastic data visualisations is a collection of “some of the best and most beautiful visualisations on the web that are based on time, geography, …
wemakeit.ch - a new Swiss crowd-funding platform
wemakeit.ch is a new Swiss crowd-funding platform in the style of Kickstarter. It is the “Schweizer Crowdfunding-Plattform für Kunst-, Musik-, Film-, …
Touchpoint Observatory: Velobox
My home town of Offenburg has a whole load of Veloboxes at the station (at both entrances on both sides of the tracks). On one side they even have a Velobox and …
The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying
The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying is the result of an Australian palliative care nurse who interviewed her patients over the years. Number two from men? “I …
Interaction Awards 2012 Winners
Sadly I couldn’t be at Interaction ‘12 in Dublin this week, so I’ve been vicariously soaking up the vibe (but not the alcohol) on Twitter and …
Derek & Clive's Labels sketch
Derek & Clive’s Labels sketch is Peter Cook and Dudley Moore tackling service design in a discussion about the use of labels. (Note:This is very much …
Touchpoint Observatory: Send your post from the restaurant
This restaurant in Freiburg, Germany, called Omas Küche (Grandma’s Kitchen) was super family-friendly, but what caught my eye was the first page of the …
Touchpoint Observatory: Armed Ticket Collectors
These people - five in total - were ticket inspectors on an early afternoon bus in Luzern, Switzerland, very much a tourist destination. So why are they dressed …
Accepting Less
Accepting Less is a plea from designer James Victore about getting back on the right path in life - downshifting, essentially. “Emails, chats, texts, …
Designer Founders
Designer Founders is a “non-profit book of 35+ rare personal interviews with the founders of tech-startups who have various design backgrounds.” …
The Myth of the Brand New Innovation Myth
The Myth of the Brand New Innovation Myth I hear a lot of talk about innovation in my travels as an academic and consultant in service design. Innovation is not …
Master level program in Social and Collaborative Housing: Designing, planning and managing the contemporary housing
A new Master level program in Social and Collaborative Housing: Designing, planning and managing the contemporary housing has been organized by the POLI.design …
Ten rules for writing fiction – Part Two
Ten rules for writing fiction (part two) The second of The Guardian’s series on rules for writing from a survey of established authors. (Part one is here, …
The Irony of Neuroscience & Behaviour Change
I have been enjoying the Brain Culture: Neuroscience & Society series via BBC Radio 4’s podcasts recently. In the series Matthew Taylor looks at how …
Pre-digital versus digital services
Seth Godin has written an interesting observation about a common experience of hospitals in a piece titled Pre-Digital: A brief visit to the emergency room last …
End User Development and more from Interaction-Design.org
Mads Soegaard and his wife Rikke Friis Dam have been hard at work over at their Interaction-Design.org site, a free and well put together resource of …
On Insurance Lying
(Photo: Steve Rhodes) I have a friend whose father used to be an insurance underwriter and he used to always complain about people lying about their insurance …
Nest – Why Product Designers Don't Design Products Anymore
By now most of you will have already seen the learning thermostat, Nest, designed by Tony Fadell, who led the team that created the first 18 generations of the …
Onlab's Animated Infographic for the Audi Urban Future Summit
onlab produced a lovely animation for the Audi Urban Future Summit at the Frankfurt international motor show. It’s often hard to get across abstract …
Antirom Tops the Digital Archeology Leaderboard
I’m totally late blogging about this, but I was very happy and proud to see antirom top the votes of the Digital Archeology project leaderboard while the …
Matt Polaine & the Ellen MacArthur Foundation Project Re-Design interns
Good to see my brother Matt, Sustainable Development Researcher at BT, making an appearance in this video for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation Project Re-Design …
Design Research - A Failure of Imagination?
Have design education and design research failed to fire up the imagination in public discourse? I believe so and I believe the STEM (Science, Technology, …
Louis Poulsen PH5 Lamps For Sale
[Update 18th Nov 2012: I’m pretty much sold out of these now. I have a couple still with dents and dings and may be able to create one decent lamp or …
Talking Service Design at Parsons NYC
On my way back from the (very good) Interaction ‘11 conference in Boulder I’m stopping by in NYC and giving a talk on service design at …
Understanding Interactivity Through Play
Some months ago I officially became Dr. Polaine (Andy Polaine, PhD. for you Americans) and have been planning to write a series of posts about the main themes …
Simon Rattle on Education
“We have been educating people for many years to be a certain type of person. We have been educating for a society that maybe is gone. We need more and …
Desktop columns online - onlab
Desktop magazine are republishing some of my previous Foreign Policy columns for their website. It’s good to see these get a new lease of life. The first …
Learning to Teach Online - a great new resource
COFA Online has just launched an excellent new resource for lecturers getting into online teaching and learning. I have taught in several other institutions in …
Hello Dave. I'd like to interview you.
Hi folks – can you help me find some interviewees? I’m working on some initial research into Ambient Assisted Living with the iHome Lab here in Luzern. …
COTEN Project Presentation at SDNC 2010
Thanks to everyone who attended my presentation on the COTEN Project at the Service Design Network Conference in Berlin. Here is the direct link to my COTEN …
Writing a new book on Service Design
I’m thrilled to be able to announce that myself and live|work’s Ben Reason and Lavrans Løvlie have signed with Rosenfeld Media to write our book on …
DeSForM 2010 - 6th International Workshop on Design Semantics of Form and Movement
It seems it’s conference season. My colleague, Dagmar Steffen, is organising the DeSForM 2010, the 6th International Workshop on Design Semantics of Form …
Interaction 11 Student Competition
All you interaction design students out there get ready to show us your goods. This year I’m co-chairing the Interaction 11 Student Competition with Liz …
The Virtues of Imperfection
I have enjoyed all of Jonathan Franzen’s books, in particular The Corrections, his novel about the complexities of family relationships, careers and, for …
Crowd-sourced insights into the Victorian workhouse
The UK National Archives have just released the 19th Century Poor Law Union and Workhouse Records. The history of workhouses in the UK is a typically Victorian …
You Don't Know Jack lives again
A long, long time ago in the early days of ‘multimedia’ most games available were stilted click-throughs of badly rendered 3D images. The exception …
Core77 Columnista
I’m very pleased to have been asked to be a columnist for the Core77 blog. It’s been in the works for a few weeks, but my recent trip to Ethiopia …
Mentoring Creative Minds
The current issue of COFA’s Incubate magazine has a piece by me in it called Mentoring Creative Minds, which is a reflection on 15 years of teaching (that …
Interdisciplinarity vs Cross-Disciplinarity
(Picture from Aquent’s E-Fail service) Interdisciplinarity vs Cross-Disciplinarity Interdisciplinarity and cross-disciplinarity have been buzzwords for …
Teaching, Learning and Mazes
The COTEN project is gaining momentum and there are some excellent discussions going on. A lot of the conversation is about different teaching and institutional …
Archetypes and Metaphors
There is an interesting piece over at Johnny Holland by Rahul Sen titled Archetypes and Their Use in Mobile UX. It’s probably worth reading it and coming …
Higher Education is about to crash and burn, says Seth
I couldn’t help but agree with Seth Godin’s summary of the coming melt-down in higher education – it’s an almost perfect echo of the themes I …
In the Event of My Death
For my mother’s 70th birthday celebrations, my sister-in-law, Naisha, put together a book of family photos ranging from my mother and father’s …
Come and Study in Luzern, Switzerland!
If you are interested in studying service design or product design, textiles or animage and living amongst some of the freshest air around, we’re …
Not More Products - Uncovering Local Networks
I spent a day last week with Lavrans and Ben from Live|Work putting our brains together for a project we hope will help spread lots of ideas about service …
Creative Waves - COTEN - Call for Participants
When it comes to thinking about higher education designers – or perhaps just design academics – seem to suddenly forget everything they know. We teach the value …
CRT Suicides
There has been a rise in CRT monitor suicides due to the ever growing popularity of LCD screens.
Dial4Light
There was an interesting report on 3Sat here in Germany the other day about street lighting. Many cities save on energy costs by cutting the amount of time …
PaperC - Replacing the Library Photocopier
A recently launched service in Germany called PaperC (Twitter: @Paper_c) looks like it might become a pretty handy resource for students and researchers. It is …
Interviews with Jona Piehl and Tom Roope
The latest set in the series of interviews I did for COFA Online have now gone online. Jona Piehl from Land Design Studio talks about the challenges and role of …
Does Graphic Design Have Superpowers?
(Photo: ndinneen) Rich Smith, a graphic design student in the UK wrote to me about the presentation I gave at AGDA’s Design A Better World event. He asked …
Is Design Research Useless for Innovation?
Don Norman has just posted a very provocative and thoughtful piece about the value of design research, or not. “I’ve come to a disconcerting …
Time-shifting payments with Sprize and Swiss Rail
Gap’s new pilot service, Sprize, deals with an age-old irritation. You buy something at full-price only to find it reduced in a sale a few days later. It …
Printing Your Toast
Congratulations to one of my MA students at Luzern, Othmar Mühlebach, who has just won the second prize at the Berner Design Awards for his toaster re-design. …
Interviews with Nik Roope, Troika & Mark Hauenstein
Most of the interviews we shot for COFA Online have now gone online. A few others with Jona Piehl from Land Design Studio and Nik’s brother, Tom Roope …
Interviews with Brendan Dawes and Simon Waterfall
A few months ago I trekked around London with my filmaker and editor friend Rachel to shoot a whole load of interviews with designers and artists for …
Your Failure of Service Is Another's Opportunity
Some of you have no doubt read Dustin Curtis’s post about the incompetence of American Airlines & The Fate of Mr. X. American Airlines fired Mr. X for …
Photosketch
Photosketch: Internet Image Montage provides a simple way to make image composites by doodling a picture, adding labels and then letting the engine scour the …
How much is good service worth? £25m for Amazon UK.
(Photo credit: xrrr on Flickr) Amazon’s entire offering really boils down to two things. The first is to facilitate a person in a warehouse somewhere …
Teaching Service Design at Lucerne School of Art and Design
Regular readers of Playpen may have notice things have been somewhat quiet around here recently. There are two reasons for this. One is that Twitter has made an …
How Can Graphic Design Help Save The Planet?
I’m very pleased to have been asked by AGDA to speak at the first Design A Better World conference in Sydney with the tricky topic, “How Can Graphic …
Sparks - Playful Innovation
Philips Design has created a boardgame called Spark to help generate insights. It looks like it is a pretty simple premise – there are a set of characters …
Confusing Information with the Form
Lovely video from design and research consultancy MAYA on the difference between information and the form we give it. I came across this on David …
The Little Man in the Box
All of us anthropomorphise our machines, perhaps no more so than the car and the computer. Hi, A Real Human Interface from Multitouch Barcelona (an interaction …
Schematic and Public Multitouch Social Interaction
Joel Johnson’s exclusive (on Vimeo?) video and interview with the folks at Schematic about their new touchwall shows them dealing with some interesting …
Social Play
I’ve just finished up a chapter in my PhD about social play. Most of it is about online interaction, but quite a bit is about how to bring strangers …
Don Tapscott on the Demise of the University
Don Tapscott has a piece in Edge today called The Impending Demise of the University. In it he takes the same line that I have been for some time in Designing …
Time Bomb - Interactive Graffiti
Graffiti and technology are all the rage these days. Holler’s Lukasz Karluk and Sydney sculptor/painter Maddi Boyd (KissKiss) have created a work for …
Interaction Forum '09
I’m going to be giving a talk over at Interaction Forum ‘09 at the Design School in Hildesheim next week (Tuesday 26th). If anyone is in that neck …
The Art of Isolated Thousands
Information used to be scarce, held by the rich and powerful and carefully guarded. Now we have and overwhelming amount of the stuff and each leave huge trails …
New magneticNorth web site
Great to see magneticNorth’s new website live. Brendan gave me a sneak peek of it yesterday and I love it. The navigation is very playful and intuitive. …
Chrome Experiments
Josh Nimoy has made a version of his (unpleasantly named) Ball Droppings piece for Google’s Chrome Experiments site. Simple and addictive, you basically …
The Carbon Footprint of Spam
(Photo credit: net_efekt) My brother, Matt, just mailed me this report on the Carbon Footprint of Spam. It makes pretty shocking reading and made me re-think …
Tonematrix
Inspired by the Tenori-On, Andre Michelle put together Tonematrix. Each square creates a wave force that spreads across the grid (I don’t think that …
IDEO Play with VR
Regular readers will know I’m pretty cynical about VR and I’ve never been much of a fan of the CAVE system. The last time I used one at iCinema I …
WiiSpray
WiiSpray is Wiimote hack and piece of work by Martin Lihs – a student of my ex-colleagues over at the media faculty at the Bauhaus. I like the addition of …
Baker Tweet. Another hot pun from Poke.
The good chaps and chapettes at Poke love a pun, but they love a hot bun even more. So they have created Baker Tweet, a simple way for bakers to tell the world …
How To Get...
It all started with someone just Twittering “Type ‘How to get…’ into Google”. Google has a pre-search auto suggestion system …
Little Red Riding Hood, Infographics Style
You have to admire the Swedish ability to indoctrinate their students with brilliant design skills. The above Little Red Riding Hood piece by Toma Nilsson was …
Open Frameworks on the iPhone
OpenFrameworks, the “C++ library for creative coding”, is starting to get a lot more use in interactive installations. I haven’t had the time …
Sixth Sense. Only Slightly Lamer than VR.
Pattie Maes is a smart woman. She’s behind some research projects that I wish I had been part of. But the above presentation at TED of Pranav …
Flash on the Beach 2009
I am thrilled to have been asked to present again at Flash on The Beach again this year. The info about my talk isn’t up yet (and fortunately that highly …
YouTube remixed by Kutiman
There have been a whole load of YouTube musical mash-ups, including the YouTube Orchestra, but this is one of the better ones I’ve seen that’s a bit …
Mouth Off
Audio interaction. It’s one of the first things I show my students when teaching them about input beyond the keyboard and mouth mouse because it’s …
Kinetic Design
Alongside the surge of interest in gestural interaction, there appears to be a rising fascination with kinetic works too. Some of this comes out of the …
Feel the rabbit's brain
My mate and illustration and animation supremo Steve Scott just finished the last third of this Boing Boing Legends of Exos animation. You can’t miss his …
A Fax is too complicated GoDaddy
I’m just in the process of moving all my domain hosting from GoDaddy because, frankly, it’s like being ambushed in a shopping mall by salespeople …
Holographic Worlds and Gestural Interfaces
The Holodeck remains a fantasy for Trekkies and we’re still not yet jacked into The Matrix (or are we? Oooh.). Guys going to enormous lengths to build …
Beyond the Fold, Print Lives On.
Although newspapers are struggling to work out what to do about the decline of the printed sheet, the death of print doesn’t seem to be anywhere near …
Apple UI Counting Fail
I was just updating my Airport Express settings and noticed this rare Apple UI fail. Bad number sorting.
Writing is Design
“Verbalizing design is another act of design. I realised this while writing this book,” writes Kenya Hara in the preface to his book, Designing …
Service Means Survival
(Photo credit: dos2kx) Lauren posted a linke to BusinessWeek’s report, When Service Means Survival. The basic thrust is that in a tight economic …
Playful
Lovely work by Pablo Alfieri whose portfolio site is dubbed Playful – a name I can thoroughly relate to (and was thinking of using myself - bah!). Many of his …
Digital Analog Clock
I like this digital analog clock from Alvin Aronson. Each segment slowly pushes forward or recedes back as the minute changes, which creates a analog in-between …
John Cleese on Creativity
I hate being interrupted when I’m in the midst of writing a… sorry… hang on… Okay, I’m back. Now, what was I saying? Whatever, …
Windows UI is so broken
Windows UI is so broken. Look at the hoops developers have to jump through to get people to just install a plug-in.
Amazon Ass
Unfortunate but amusing combination of the subject line and Mail.app shortening the sender name from Amazon Associates.
The future, like the past only more expensive
One of the aspects of the job of interaction design and strategy research is being asked the impossible task of predicting the future. It is a fool’s …
One free (playful) interaction
Great collection of “free interactions” and insightful commentary from Chris Noessel on the Cooper blog. Basically these are little interactive …
Sir Ken Robinson talk at the RSA
The RSA have now added a link to download Sir Ken Robinson’s talk that he gave there last week called ‘The Element’ – “the point at …
Swearing on Twitter
Most people who know me in real life know that I have a tendency to swear too easily and too much. They are, of course, twats. Actually that last outburst is a …
New Clothes
If you are a regular reader (yes, you’re the one), you’ll notice that Playpen has had a spruce up with a new theme. If you’re thinking it …
Interview and profile of Dan Saffer
Core77 have just posted an interview and profile I wrote on Dan Saffer and hhis new book, Designing Gestural Interfaces. Dan talks about his vision for future …
Amazon Reviews
Oh the irony. Unfortunately you can’t post links on Amazon.com’s reviews, which is probably a good thing so that it doesn’t become overwhelmed …
ADC Awards Deadline 23rd Jan
I feel very honoured to have been asked to be on the interactive jury for the ADC awards this year. My thanks to Brendan Dawes for the invite. The deadline for …
Code, Form, Space Symposium
This Code, Form, Space symposium looks like it will be great. Is anyone going who will be blogging/twittering it?
Homeland Security - Worst Alert Box Ever
I’m on the interactive jury for the Art Directors Club Awards this year, which I am very chuffed about. Not least because I get the chance to go to New …
Jonathan Harris on the Creative Review Blog
I seem to have been writing about Jonathan Harris rather a lot recently. Following the piece on Flash on the Beach I wrote in Creative Review in November, an …
Amusing Fenec Preferences
Thought I had posted this weeks ago and found it loitering in my scheduled posts. Entertaining set of preferences descriptions for Fenec, Mozilla’s new …
Interaction Design for Behavioural Change
Interaction design is all about changing people’s behaviour. Without the action > reaction part, there is no interaction. Whether you click one button …
Interactive Video Object Manipulation
I have noticed I have been posting a lot of videos recently – I’m not sure if that’s me being lazy or that some things are simply a lot easier to …
Line-Drawings, Cameras and New Videogames
Karl reminded me of two new games for the Playstation that depart from the normal 3D extravaganza. The first is another EyeToy game called EyePet. Basically you …
Amazon Christmas Checkout
Just spotted Amazon’s Christmas-themed shopping cart. Sometimes it’s the little things that make all the difference.
Children Playing Video Games
The NY Times web site has a great video of children playing videogames from photographer and video artist, Robbie Cooper (you can watch a higher quality …
Humans Aren't So Bad After All
I twittered about this the other day and I know it’s been doing the rounds of the interweb, but wanted to post about it properly. The film has nothing to …
Robots Ain't Got No Body
Interaction with robots is the out-there end of interaction design’s spectrum. Far beyond just designing an interface on a screen, you need to design a …
Playing Word Games in Blog Comments
I just noticed a whole series of word-association and other games going on in the comments of Fail Blog posts. I have no idea if this is a new phenomenon, but I …
Google SearchWiki
Google have just launched an additional service called SearchWiki for those with a Google account. Basically you get to add notes to search results or move …
The Designer's Review of Books Launches
If you haven’t already heard from me about it, I launched The Designer’s Review of Books at the end of last week. I’ve been so busy reviewing …
G-Speak - Back to VR Gloves Again?
It’s the gloves again. Part of me wants to believe G-Speak is really is a fantastic “spatial operating environment”. The mouse and keyboard …
I Don't Know What This Is, But I Like It
If anyone knows what this is all about, please leave a comment and let me know. In the meantime, enjoy the surreal interface. [UPDATE: Apparently it’s the …
Sprint's Now Machine Data Overload
In keeping with the seemingly American obsession that more data one has the better (especially on TV), Sprint have launched a viral campaign called the Now …
Code Beneath the Surface
This developer from Infusion is showing off some of his modifications to Microsoft’s Surface at I Live To Code. The table has several cameras underneath …
Troika - Digital by Design & Interview
Troika have a new book out called Digital by Design: Crafting Technology for Products and Environments . It is a wide-ranging survey of works that use new and …
The Rules of Currency
Image: J0nB0n Stephen Sniderman’s excellent 1999 essay, Unwritten Rules, in The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology talks about the tacit …
Random is Good - Biscuit Tin
The good folks over over at magneticNorth have just made another typically mN piece called Biscuit Tin (that’s ‘Cookie Tin’ to you American …
Tim Brown on Serious Play
I would have loved to have gone to the Serious Play conference, but seem to remember it cost serious money too. This talk from Tim Brown of IDEO sums up a great …
The Network Generation is in The White House
Photo: barackobamadotcom on Flickr It is hard to overstate just how different these US elections were and what a shift in thinking Obama and his campaign …
AC/DC ASCII
AC/DC’s Rock ’n’ Roll Train created as ASCII art in an Excel spreadsheet “smashing through the corporate firewall”. I’m …
Night of the Living Maps
Apart from last night’s making of history it was a night of interactive maps gone wild. The BBC’s virtual studio 3D environment was replete with …
BMW Motorbikes GPS drawing
Great Google Maps created by friends of mine at Ubilabs for BMW Motorbikes GPS Drawing. Take a look at the intro video - the guys are riding through buildings …
Gruber on iPhone-Likeness
Good piece from John Gruber on iPhone-Likeness and why many developers don’t get it when it comes to creating apps that feel iPhone-like: I’ll put forth …
Voting Machines - The Ultimate Interface?
Photo: binkley27 Dan Saffer just wrote an alarming piece about electronic voting over at Kicker Studio and it reminded me of a great article I read recently in …
Taxi Driver With Storyboards
There’s a discussion going on over at IxDA about whether an interaction design can create great interaction without great visual design skills. My answer …
Peter Polaine
Just a quick note to say if you are here because you are looking for the work of my father, Peter Polaine, the newspaper covering his portrait exhibition with …
The Unfinished Swan
The Unfinished Swan is a still in-development game set in an entirely white world. Instead of splattering the blood of monsters around the walls, the player …
Twittering Mad Men
What a weird meta media world we live in. I tweeted that I was off to watch Mad Men only to find this morning that I am being followed on Twitter by Peggy Olson …
Energy Shoes
NTT’s energy-generating shoes (above) are amongst the many similar ideas I had and never did anything about. Sigh. Here’s the proof from 9 years …
Bandai Pedometer Games
Get off your ass. Assuming that is a donkey there, you’ll need to walk to move through the levels in these new handheld pedometer games by Bandai …
Take on Me. Literal interpretation.
I could resist this. This song seems to be stuck on loop on every single German radio station.
Palin Bingo
A variant of bullshit bingo, Jesper Juul played Palin Bingo during the vice presidential debate (did she really never mention her family?). I like “Air …
The New Macbook Blow
Looks like a great machine, but the new Macbook Pro starts at US$1999 in the USA but is € 1799 here in Germany, which is $2,444. Imagine that loaded up with …
Exploring Near Field Communication with Touch
A selection of RFID tags from Timo’s Flickr set. Touch is a research project examining Near Field Communication that enables connections between mobile …
Nodebox
Nodebox is a programming and visualisation tool using Python. Like Processing it allows you to product animations, still, interactives as well as exporting to …
Lost in Text
I managed to catch a few people lost in texting whilst I was in Brighton, so I made a Lost in Text Flickr group. I find the look on people’s faces, both …
An Audience of Mirrors
Audience is a new installation from rAndom International, with software by Chris O’Shea, for the Deloitte Ignite Festival at the Royal Opera House. 64 …
Enhancing Videos with Spacetime Fusion
This technology from Pravin Bhat over at the University of Washington is pretty impressive. It uses high resolution still images to enhance video footage. It …
Jonathan Harris at Flash on the Beach 08
Jonathan Harris’s talk at Flash on the Beach caused quite a stir this year. Originally titled The Art of Surveillance and Self-Exposure, he altered the …
Last one in the water buys the drinks
Nothing like a bit of animated GIFola. I’ll be at Flash on the Beach this week if anyone fancies catching up to say Hi. I’ll be writing a round-up …
Hector Serrano's Waterdrop
Hector Serrano has finally presented his Waterdrop installation for Roca at 100% Design London. I wish I was there to see it myself. It looks like a stunning …
Art is the tonsils of education
I interviewed the renown fantasy illustrator, John Howe, for Desktop last week. I had a great chat with him and he talked about design and art education, some …
Why is so much New Media Art so shit?
I’ve been pondering this question a lot recently whilst writing my PhD stuff recently (it covers this area a lot). Fortunately the Near Future Laboratory …
Designing Education's Future
I gave a presentation yesterday at Northumbria University’s School of Design’s staff conference called Designing Education’s Future: online, …
Sponsor my brother for cancer awareness
Matt (insanely) cycling up Mont Ventoux, Bedoin in 2hrs 13mins My brother, Matt, beat cancer back in 1996 and is, thankfully, still with us. On the 26th July …
Paleo Future
Image: Paleo Future The future isn’t what it used to be. Whilst looking around for an image of a flying car for a presentation, I stumbled across the …
Do you shutdown or sleep?
(Photo: Paul Watson) What’s the emotional difference between shutting your computer down and putting to sleep? Or turning your phone onto silent mode …
The MultiTouch Cell
MultiTouch have just launched the “world’s first modular multi-touch LCD screen that can be used to create large tables and wall screens.” …
Physical interface design gone wrong
Instructions Originally uploaded by Paul Hagon. It’s a tap. It can’t be that hard, but it is. And the instructions make it even more of an …
Flap to Freedom
Flap to Freedom from Chris O’Shea on Vimeo. Battery hens flap to help battery hens in the Flap to Freedom installation that Chris O’Shea and …
Coffee Infographics
It’s pretty hard to find a decent cup of coffee sometimes here in Germany. It’s one of the things I miss from Australia. And forget any of your …
New Tracker for OpenFrameworks on its way
Seth Sandler, one of the students that snagged a Google Summer of Code place at the Natural User Interface Group, is developing a port of NUI’s …
A List Apart Survey
You might not believe it from the state of Playpen, but I do make websites from time to time. If you do, go take the ALA survey.
Omnium. The Conversation on Notes on Design
Notes On Design invited Rick Bennett and I to talk about our experiences of long-distance and global online creative collaboration within the Omnium Research …
Time Smear Download
Photo by Greg Turner Whilst writing up my Time Sketches work I realised I never put it up for download anywhere. Now I have and you can download an OS X version …
Rubik's Cube. Magic.
During some research into the history of Rubik’s Cube for my PhD, I stumbled across this video of freaky mind control an amazing trick by Keith Barry …
Kunz
Spotted this ad on my supermarket trolley at the weekend. In my English head I immediately read the ü without the umlaut. I don’t think ‘Künz’ …
LastGraph
LastGraph has been updated. If you’ve not seen it before, it’s a data visualisation tool for your LastFM profile. I stopped scrobbling for a while …
Interactive Dangerous Australians
Let’s face it, all Australians are dangerous on the sports field, but the the Australian Museum has a new interactive installation called Dangerous …
For Education The Future Isn't What it used to Be
A few weeks ago I gave a talk called The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be to the Associate Deans over at Northumbria University. I thought I’d …
Podcasting is Broadcasting
There’s an interesting paper called The Politics of Podcasting by Jonathan Sterne, Jeremy Morris, Michael Brendan Baker and Ariana Moscote Freire over at …
Lucha Libre London - from Ray Lewis
Lucha Libre London Originally uploaded by fleabilly. Just had to post a link to this great set of photos from Lucha Libre in London from my mate Ray Lewis.
The Joys of Cross-Browser Testing
Actually there are a couple more versions of IE hidden in that set of icons thanks to the multiple IE installer.
LinkedIn's Weird UI Shadows
Is it just me or does anyone else find LinkedIn’s new design tweaks weird on the perspective front? This rounded-corner box has a couple of random shadows …
Flash On the Beach 2008
Flash on the Beach 2008 is coming soon: September 28th - October 1st in Brighton. I’m not speaking this year, but plan to be there to write about it for …
Rolando for iPhone
This trailer for Rolando looks like it might be a great iPhone game and it’s interesting to see the interfaces constraints/possibilities shape the kinds …
Smart German Supermarket
The BBC has a video report about a German supermarket Future Store from German supermarket chain, Real. Rather than use RFID tags to do the scanning of all the …
Peter Polaine at The Pin Mill Studio
Christmas Dinner by Peter Polaine Quick plug for my dad, Peter Polaine, who has an exhibition of his woodcut prints on at The Pin Mill Studio in Suffolk at the …
Little Bits of Electronics
littleBits is an open source library of small electronic components that are already pre-assembled. The very clever and cool thing about them is that they snap …
Cat and Mouse
Cats lack a knowledge of willing suspension of disbelief. When cat’s interact is that a cataract?
Is Twitter just a giant MOO/MUD?
Lambda MOO The development of technology is more like a spiral than the upwards arrow we often think of. The same ideas come around again and again with slight …
The Future of Broadcasting and the BBC
Although I still agree with much of Mark Pesce’s take on the Future of Television, Stephen Fry neatly sums up the worth of the BBC in an interesting …
The Paper Web - Sketches of Web Services
Vimeo sketches by Sockyung ‘Sox’ Hong If you read my post about wireframing and prototyping with paper you’ll love Sean Flannagan’s collection of …
Pinger - Voice-based Twitter?
Pinger is doing the rounds of Twitterland at the moment. It’s a service that allows you to send voice messages to one or a group of people anywhere from a …
Give my balloon a boost
I’m taking part in Orange’s Balloonacy internet balloon race. I’m not doing too badly at the moment, but you can give me a boost by clicking …
Google isn't making us dumb, but 'smart' is changing
It started with Asi’s comments on Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid? article. Forty-five minutes later I had Googled through …
Play as you go - hijacking public spaces
A quick reblog of Pixelsumo’s post about Bruno Taylor’s work hijacking public places to make playful spaces, which explores the notion that play is …
SVA to offer Interaction Design MFA
New York’s School of Visual Arts has just announced that they’re offering a Masters of Fine Arts in Interaction Design as of Fall (or Autumn as we …
Design is Money - ATM Design
ATMs in Germany are lame, I have to say. They’re slow and clunky and appear to be designed by software engineers rather than UI designers. So I wish …
Prototyping and Wireframing on paper
There are a couple of great shots of prototyping on paper over at at Cultured Code’s blog for Things, their task manager app that they’re bringing …
Why Good Looking Error Messages Matter
Almost anything involving computers falls over once in a while, but it’s how you handle it that makes all the difference. I spotted this in Newcastle …
Keep Thelonius Monk Off Your PowerBook
(C) Bibliothèque et Archives Canada Since we’ve got a couple of MacBooks now I noticed my old 2GHz iMac G5 gathering dust, which seemed to be a shame with …
Hypercard lives again
Hot on the heels of my post about Director 11 there’s now a web-based version of Hypercard called TileStack. It’s still in beta (aren’t they …
Information Design for NGOs
The Tactical Technology Collective have released a great little PDF booklet online called Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An introduction to information …
Director 11 Released - R.I.P. Director
ed. Director 11 was released a couple of months ago apparently, though I hadn’t seen the press release. If this was a new version of Flash, the web would …
Iron Man's HUD and interaction design
The current issue of Desktop has a snippet from my interview with Dav Mrozek Rauch from The Orphanage talking about their work on the HUD for Iron Man. If you …
IMAP folder subscriptions with GMail and Apple Mail
If you’ve read 5ThirtyOne’s post about setting up Apple Mail with GMail’s IMAP you may be enjoying iPhone goodness and be all happy. But you …
Multitouch with a cardboard box
Whilst we’re on the multitouch subject (is it multi-touch or multitouch yet?), here’s a short vid from Seth Sandler showing you how to make your …
3M Interface - Reverse Multitouch
My brother, Matt, just e-mailed a link to this interface on the 3M website. Given the multitouch hype at the moment, it’s quite a clever little riff on …
From the Archives: Interview with Daniel Brown
Daniel Brown – Flower Power (In an earlier unpublished draft of this I so wanted to title it “Dan Brown - The Da Vinci Coder”, but good taste …
The Designers Review of Books (Nearly)
Playpen has been a little quiet recently because I’ve had my folks over from the UK and a heap of work on, one of which is The Designers Review of Books, …
Core77 Broadcast interview with Troika
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Sebastien and Eva from Troika, the studio behind the Cloud and All The Time In The World installations at new …
Photojojo's Time Capsule
I like these e-mail-yourself-from-the-future things, and Photojojo’s Time Capsule is a brilliant one that takes a selection of your Flickr photos from the …
Playful Revolutions Presentation
After my Flash on the Beach talk last year I promised to put the recordings online of my talk and the others that I had listened to. I completely didn’t …
Sweet English Suburbia in Hamburg
I quite often teach COFA Online’s course, Graphics and Contemporary Society, which I find more interesting now that I’m here in Germany. A lot of …
Collabor8 - Creative Waves 2008
The Omnium Project will be running another global online creative collaboration project under the Creative Waves banner from 28th April - 20 June, this time …
MacUpdate Promo Bundle includes Parallels
After the disaster I had with MacHeist I decided to go for the new MacUpdate Promo Bundle, mainly because of Sound Studio and Parallels. The last MacUpdate …
I Want You To Want Me by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, who created one of my all time favourite interactive pieces, We Feel Fine, have a new piece called I Want You To Want Me …
Podcast interview with Jason Bruges
My latest Core77 Broadcast interview with Jason Bruges from Jason Bruges Studio is now online. In a slightly echoing room in Jason’s studio, accompanied …
Playpen Broke. Now Fixed. Sorry.
Apparently Playpen has been broken since yesterday and I didn’t notice (I was on a train from Hamburg most of yesterday). The robot running it got all …
Programming for children
Following on from my post and Nigel’s comments about Clicktoy, I just found Scratch, which is a simple multimedia authoring environment for children. It …
Public Bench Camera Play
Jay tied a disposable camera to a public bench with a note asking people to play. Amazingly it didn’t get nicked and the whole roll was shot by the end of …
Maze Frenzy
Some little games, like Line Rider are simple and instantly addictive. Quite a few of my students have tried to build something like Maze Frenzy in the past, …
ClickToy - A game for two year-olds
Image: ClickToy Interactive Inc. Old skool interaction designers will remember Grandma and Me and the rest of Broderbund’s Living Books series. Those …
Jackson Pollock Interactive
Once again proving that the simple interactives are often the most engaging and playful, this Jackson Pollockpiece by Miltos Manetas and Stamen has apparently …
Game Controller Family Tree
From the old, beloved Atari 2600 joystick to the Wiimote, how did we get from there to here? The “Sock Master’s” family tree of controllers …
Website Navigation Via Camera Tracking
The website of Publicis & Hal Riney uses camera-tracking in Flash for the navigation - the first website to use it as far as I know. Although described by a …
No Agencies Please, You're Not Nice
Wandering off from a post by John Hicks about staff photos I ended up on the jobs page of my mates at Poke. They have a good tip for recruitment agencies …
Parents to be educated about the Interweb
There’s a well-balanced piece from Patrick Wintourin the Guardian today about parents being shown how to protect their children online. It reports of a …
Playful Measuring Jug
Metric is so passé. Just how much is a hill of beans? I’m not sure, but I know the problems of three little people don’t amount to one. On the other …
Every (Nintendo) Video Game Online, Free
Everyvideogame.com is an archive of “all the Nintendo games you grew up with - online and free”. I was more of a Atari, ZX Specturm and Sega man …
Photographer's Rights
I’ve long been uncomfortable and unclear about the law when it comes to taking photos in public places and have read of several situations when …
R.I.P. Leo - 8.30AM, 22.3.2008
Our cat, Leo, who travelled with us all the way from Australia, died this morning having struggled with FIV (the feline version of HIV) for the last year. For …
Creative Play helps children's self-control
There’s an interesting piece about Creative Play on NPR at the moment that looks at a school running the Tools of the Mind programme. One of the findings …
iSmoke - How wrong? Very.
I walked past this ‘iSmoke’ ad for Lucky Strike cigarettes the other day. How wrong? Let me count the ways… It’s lazy creative. This is …
37signals versus Don Norman
If there was ever a clear example of the generation gap between those who have been steeped in digital culture from the start and those who have had to adopt it …
Film Friends Forever Oscar & Bafta Screening
I don’t normally do straight plugs for things that aren’t interactive and that I’ve never heard of, but this screening at Film Friends Forever …
Mac Virus with Gravitas
Troika, the folks behind the cloud sculpture at Heathrow, have created a virus on a USB stick, called the Newton Virus (for manual infection) that makes your …
Social Profile - I'm interesting and boring
Disraeli’s quip, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” could do with “and Facebook” tagged onto it, …
Philosophical 404
I know there are plenty of 404 pages out there, but I stumbled across this one today and quite liked its minimal, haiku style. That’s all. (This one is …
OLPC - I take it all back
Some will argue that I’m weak-willed, but I have made a 180-degree change of opinion on the merits of the One Laptop Per Child project thanks to Tom …
iPlay - interactivity without the flab
Chris just posted an interesting find called the iPlay. It’s basically an interactive playground frame game, which means that children have to run around …
LED Toilet Door Mix-Up Signs, Denmark
Those crazy Danes. (Image stolen from djaphrael) Amusing project over at Halfmachine which involved making toilet door signs from LEDs in a club. Of course, …
Share The Mouse on a Web Page
That’s My Mouse allows you to see share a web browsing experience with other people. You see their tag moving around as they move their mouse and any …
Podcast Interview with Hector Serrano
My interview with Hector Serrano is now available on the Core77 Broadcasts page. My thanks to Hector for an entertaining chat about his playful and insightful …
The Seven Stages of Falling in Love with Web Applications
Photo: eek the cat The other day I was trying to explain the emotional relationships people have social utilities and other read/write web applications …
IKEA Complete Bedroom
I seem to be having a bit of an IKEA theme going on at the moment. Following on from the Dream Kitchen site there’s a nice new piece called The Complete …
Outside of the Internet there is no Glory
I liked this and the sentiment. It’s a poster for the Biennial in Greece from Manetas. (Via Thomas).
From the archives: Dialogue with IKEA's Monika Mulder
Continuing the From The Archives series, here is an interview I did a while ago with one of the IKEA designers, Monika Mulder. Monika was really interesting to …
BlinkM - RGB LED Projects made easy
If you read Russell’s great post, Reskilling For An Age of Things and sympathised with his woeful soldering skills, these BlinkM programmable RGB LEDs …
Got ripped off in a MacHeist? It's a UI failure.
No, not a hold-up in McDonalds, but the MacHeist Mac software bundle sale/game. Like many, I got charged ten times and received nothing and also heard nothing …
Troika is on Cloud, er, Five
If you haven’t already explored the background behind Troika’s cloud for BA’s Terminal 5 - “a five meter long digital sculpture whose …
PayPal, A Customer Service Nightmare
Companies like PayPal are basically all service and no product, so it makes sense that they should spend a lot of their time on it as do First Direct. Sadly, …
Is your cellphone company evil?
Mine certainly is. No Evil is a great viral microsite for Net 10 that plays on the idea that cellphone companies are a bunch of money-grabbing evil madmen. …
re/act 4th International Student Festival for Media Art
Monika tells me this is a great festival for student media-arts work. It looks good to me and I think I saw some work from it last year. It’s a good …
Track Yourself and Friends with SportsDo
Ever wanted to track your training route and activity or just remember where you skied? My brother, Matthew, was given a SportsDo account and kit for Christmas …
BeatBearings and the Wisdom of the Tube
This BeatBearing project on YouTube by Peter Bennett is one of those physical interaction ideas that sounded great on paper, but is a bit useless in the flesh. …
Jiggling Icons on the iPhone
There are plenty of big announcements and coverage of Steve Jobs’s Macworld keynote. I’m happy to see the new AppleTV, movie downloads and rentals, …
From the Archives: Jonathan Harris - Man of the Hour
I have been promising that I would like to upload all of the articles I have written over the years so that they might be of use for people rather than them …
Hulger Sale
My mate Nik, the man behind Hulger, just mailed to say that they’re having a sale and phasing out some of the older colours. So if you want the super cool …
Moving Between Consulting and Academia
Jon Kolko’s article, Out of the Frying Pan, into the Fire: Life lessons from consulting to academia, and back again over at Core77, was a particularly …
OLPC versus Nintendo DS
Alexander Stojanovic makes an interesting comparison between the Nintendo DS and the OLPC. Having bought both for his five year-old daughter at Christmas he has …
Wii remote for a head tracking display
Here’s an interesting video of inverting the Wiimote and infrared sensors to create a surprisingly realistic optical illusion for a single user. A lot of …
20,000 Processing Particles
I’ve played with Processing a fair bit over the years, but never really got stuck into anything solid - most of my time has been spent fixing up my …
NetX Digital Cardboard Christmas
It’s nice to see digital agencies do non-digital (sort of). My German pal, Tim Buesing, who now lives and works in Sydney at NetX just sent me the NetXmas …
Social Learning Masterclass
A few of weeks ago I presented at a Social Learning Masterclass at Northumbria University to an invite from Stephen Farrier from the e-Learning Innovations …
Manamana
Here’s something nothing to do with interactivity, quite a bit to do with play. It’s Christmas after all. I still find this funny for some …
The Whale Hunt by Jonathan Harris
Whatever your opinion on commercial whaling, substance whaling is a totally different affair. It’s been part of aboriginal Eskimo life for thousands of …
Benettonplay's Video Grid
Proving that the oldies are indeed the goldies, the Fabrica have re-made their video grid idea in Flash for your online interactive enjoyment. Amazing how …
Dear Rockers and Get a First Life
Iain posted posted a link to Dear Rockers, a website that encourages you to repent your music-stealing sins and send $5 direct to the musicians who have made an …
Greyworld's Monument to the Unknown Artist
Greyworld have unveiled their project, Monument to the Unknown Artist. Andrew Shoben showed me the maquette of it in Geryworld’s studio early last year …
Fireside chat with Brendan Dawes
I promised to put online the chat I had with magneticNorth’s Creative Director, Brendan Dawes, from when we were at Flash On the Beach 07. I’ve been …
Plumen - low energy, high style
My mate Nik Roope has been busily working up another smart idea to brighten up the lack of imagination in the marketplace again. This time it’s the Plumen …
Poke's Never-Ending Web Page for Orange
I meant to post this last week but was travelling and forgot. Take a look at the never-ending web page that Poke designed for the Orange Unlimited campaign …
Flash On the Beach Coda
I just returned from a fantastic time speaking at Flash on the Beach ‘07. I’ve been to quite a few conferences over the years and this was by far …
Purchasing Pleasure
I recently bought the very useful MarsEdit external blog editor from Red Sweater. I’d tried an earlier version and wasn’t so enamoured, but my …
Games, Play and Web Applications
[Dan Saffer’s](http://www.odannyboy.com/blog/new_archives/2007/10/presentation_ga.html] latest presentation called Gaming The Web: Using the structures of …
New magneticNorth website
Check out magneticNorth’s new website. As Brendan (mN’s Creative Director) says “Look beyond the site you see and you may discover …
Speaking at Icograda World Design Congress
I’ll be in Cuba this weekend (20th and 21st October) to give a presentation at the Icograda World Design Congress with my Omnium colleague, Rick Bennett. …
Use Designers Better
For several years I’ve been trying to express how design thinking can be used across a whole range of disciplines from sustainability to education to, …
Omnium need a Sys Admin
Just a quickie to say that the Omnium Research Group with whom I work in Australia are looking to hire a sys-admin. So if you’re a Linux, Apache, PHP, …
IKEA Dream Kitchen
The multi-camera technique that freezes a moment in time, but allows you to pan around in space (popularised as bullet time in The Matrix, but it has quite a …
Interactive Gestures Wiki
Multitouch screens of all shapes and forms are really all the rage, but with them come whole new paradigms of interaction. Do you wave like a Wii or do the …
Fix for Modifier Keys not working in Adobe CS2 Applications
It’s not really on-topic for Playpen, but I’m hoping this might help others out there who have had the same problem with modifier keys suddenly not …
Steve Scott - animator and illustrator to the stars
My mate and erstwhile work compadre, Steve Scott, has finally updated his website with lots of new goodies. If you’re a fan of illustration and animation, …
Podcast with Matt Clark from United Visual Artists
Following on from my last post about Hereafter, my podcast interview with Matt Clark from United Visual Artists is now online at Core77. We chat about a range …
Hereafter by United Visual Artists
United Visual Artists have a lovely new piece called Hereafter, which is very similar to elements of my Time Sketches in that it layers frames from a video …
This Happened, Once Again
As Knotty pointed out in the comments, Chris O’ Shea will be hosting This Happened in conversation with Crispin Jones, Rory Hamilton, The Science Of, …
Out of Bounds interview with Chris O' Shea
Chris O’ Shea recently completed Out of Bounds during his residency at the Design Museum. Chris also writes the very good Pixelsumo from which I …
Interactive Wall of 'Water'
Camera-tracking along with multi-touch seem to be unstoppable at the moment. This is an interactive wall of ‘water’ for Lenovo’s HQ in North …
Dan Saffer on Design Research Lies
Brilliant clip of Dan Saffer doing the start of his How To Lie With Design Research talk at the 2007 Design Research conference. If you’ve ever been to …
Light on Pixelsumo
Nice set of posts on playful, interactive household lights from Chris over at Pixelsumo. I’m particularly partial to Hector Srrano’s Superpatata …
Respect for Akismet
Akismet does an amazing job, it has to be said. Comment spammers do a terrible job.
Google Moon faked in a holodeck
I’m not actually a believer that NASA faked the moon landings but had an amusing moment looking through Google’s wonderful new Google Moon where …
The Changing Culture of Mobile Phones
In France at least (which is good, because we usually only get a very Anglo-Saxon view of these things). Experientia have translated the summary of a report by …
Evolution of Dance vs. Titanic
I’ve just been chatting with my online students in Australia about emerging media and it led me to do some quick sums on the merits of Titanic, the …
Podcast of Creative Collaboration and The Future of Education
If you have been missing the sound of my voice (or have no idea what my faltering, mumbling sounds like) the podcast of my seminar at Urban Learning Space about …
Search people in video
Interesting video search beta over at Reuters Labs that allows you to search for people in videos by just entering their name as a text query (obvious that part …
What is education worth?
Interesting piece in the Guardian about a new (but already out of date) British Council report (PDF link) on what education is worth to the UK. I’ve …
Sorry Goodby, Silverstein & Partners!
Thanks to Jim Coudal (I love the giant ‘Finally’ on Coudal.com at the moment too) and Sidney Bosley from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners for …
Interactive Banner Ad from Adobe
I interacted with a banner ad today, and actually enjoyed it. Adobe’s Creative License campaign is currently on display at Coudal Partners’ Layer …
Touchscreen implications for mobile gaming
Interesting piece by Stuart Dredge on the implications that touchscreens (read: iPhone) interfaces have for mobile gaming over at Pocketgamer. Of course there …
Tom Coates on Andrew Keen
If you don’t know who Andrew Keen is, Google him, I’m not linking because I find him and his views on the internet and the changing face of the …
More playful goodies from Jamie Wieck
I have just been taking a deeper look at the work of Jamie Wieck, who did the Don’t Play With Your Food plates in the previous post. Not only is his body …
Playful Plates
Witty, playful everyday things seem to be all over the place at the moment. Chris at Pixelsumo just posted about these embossed plates, called Don’t Play …
Speaking at Flash on the Beach
I’m very pleased to have been invited to speak at Flash on the Beach in Brighton. FOTB runs from 4th- - 7th November and my session is on the last day. I …
Dynamic resizing of image content
This technology developed by Ariel Shamir from the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science resizes the content of images in the same way that web pages are …
Playful Signage
Whilst at Urban Learning Space I noticed the lovely, playful signage all around the building at The Lighthouse (originally a Charles Rennie Mackintosh …
Creative Collaboration & The Future of Education
I presented my seminar on Creative Collaboration and The Future of Education at Urban Learning Space yesterday and very much enjoyed the Glaswegian hospitality …
Break-time at Playpen
I’m going to take a few days off for a break, so I probably won’t be blogging for a couple of weeks. But stay tuned, there is much more to come as …
Two-Way Tangible Interface: PICO
[](hysical Intervention in Computational Optimization) PICO (Physical Intervention in Computational Optimization) by James Patten is a tangible interface that …
Postful ripped off
[UPDATE: There are several updates to this post, which has made it a bit confusing to read. I don’t like deleting posts, so it’s mostly persevered …
Game and Watch
Whilst Googling around for some examples of Nintendo’s Game and Watch I came across the aptly-named Game and Watch site, which snapped me back to …
A balanced view of Second Life
I promised I would stop ranting about Second Life and I will. Putting People First (the experientia blog) have a balanced post called Second Thoughts on Second …
British Telecom's Lesley Gavin on Virtual Worlds
Okay, so the whole Second Life theme is getting rather a good going over on Playpen at the moment. I think I’m probably going to have to stop writing …
Data Visualisation Approaches
There’s a great post on Data Visualization: Modern Approaches over at Smashing Magazine. Some of them are pretty well-known, like Newsmap and (one of my …
Send Snail Mail via E-mail
There’s been quite a bit of debate (and strikes) surrounding the privatisation of postal services. Whilst strikes has been going on, private postal …
Creative Collaboration and the Future of Education Seminar
I’m going to be giving a seminar called Creative Collaboration and the Future of Education at Urban Learning Space in Glasgow who have a number of really …
Second Life is like an empty restaurant
I wrote a post a while back about how dull I thought it was that Adaptive Path were researching Second Life (along with many, far too many, media academics). I …
The 12 Kinds of Ads in the World
I don’t really blog about advertising or marketing, though it seems to be one the most popular blogging subjects. I usually read Iain’s Crackunit …
Etched in Time
In almost all of the course on interactivity that I have taught, someone comes up with the idea of making a screen-based Etch-A-Sketch toy. They’re almost …
The Playmakers
I’ve just been introduced to a wonderful book. It’s called Timeless Toys: Classic Toys and the Playmakers Who Created Them , by Tim Walsh and …
Facebook and Identity Theft
There has been quite a lot in the news about privacy concerns with Facebook as well as it being used for investigations. Living in a country that was home to …
Service Design with Live|Work
In another interview I’m re-publishing online, I talk with Ben Reason from service design agency, Live|Work. He explains exactly what service design is, …
Interview with Nik Roope from Hulger & Poke
My first Core77 Broadcast with Nik Roope about Hulger has just gone online. It should become one of a series of podcasts for Core77 and I’m really pleased …
StumbleUpon is the Antirom of the Web
Or - In Praise of Randomness Whilst thinking about writing a post in praise of randomness in interaction design, I realised that StumbleUpon is, in many ways, …
Director Lives Again for Retro Games
Like all of us at Antirom, Macromedia’s Director was a revolution because it allowed a bunch of non-coders to make interactive ‘stuff’. The …
Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design Opens
A year or so ago I heard about plans to set up the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) and I’m really happy to see that they are now ready …
The Dramatic Impact of the 'Silent Revolution'
I’m very chuffed to see that ChangeThis selected my thoughts on education to be part of their manifesto the Dramtic Impact of The Silent Revolution. …
The Art of Peter Polaine
Christmas Dinner - Woodcut I’ve been meaning to post a quick link to my father’s website and online gallery for a while. It’s not totally …
Where to now with multitouch?
I’ve been doing a bit of catching up with my blog reading recently and noticed Chris’s post on Pixelsumo about the HP giant Multi-Touch screen with …
Bad Remote
I saw this at Ray and Rachel’s house the other day. They had stuck the stickers on for Ray’s dad, but the point is that the interface should have …
Pixel popping on the phone
I just had an update from Karl Willis about a project called Twelve Pixels that he has been working on with Dr. Ivan Poupyrev at Sony’s CSL Interaction …
The playfulness of everyday things
As if they had been the perfect students of my Interactivity, Play and the Everyday project at the Bauhaus, art/design cooperative, BCXY have been working on a …
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer talk at the Tate Modern
One of my all-time interactive installation heroes, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, is giving an artist’s talk at the Tate Modern tomorrow. He is representing …
Leopard - death of the application?
I assume that most people interested in Apple, operating systems or UI design have seen Steve Jobs’s WWDC07 Keynote by now. He shows off lots of new …
Another Antirom RGB performance
I was clearing out some old CDs and found a Videobrasil XII one with this Antirom RGB performace on it. I think Gisela may have shot the footage as there are …
Photosynth
Nice to see Microsoft doing something truly groundbreaking, or at least acquiring something truly groundbreaking. The above demo of Photosynth and Seadragon by …
Wind to Light
A few of you may have already have seen the tiny LED wind turbines recently. Putting lots of them into action onedotzero and riba london have commissioned a …
Zach Lieberman interview on Open Frameworks
There’s an interesting interview with Zach Lieberman by Karl Willis on the Window.nz website. Lieberman talks about his work on the Open Frameworks …
Guardian site hacked or accident?
This story on the protesters at the G8 summit has a set of related links at the bottom of it. I noticed today that the one saying G8, which is meant to link to …
Len Lye biography
Sometimes the Internet really works. Shortly after I wrote a post about Len Lye’s films on You Tube (already bouncing off Dan Hill’s original post) …
Google's Streetview
So I’ve been a bit slow at blogging about Google’s Streetview as well as Microsoft’s Surface. I nearly didn’t write about either of them …
More Surface Information
Chris over at Pixelsumo just mailed me some more links to do with the background and technology behind the Microsoft Surface table. One is from Ars Technica and …
Microsoft Surface
I strangely don’t have a lot to say about the already well-blogged offer from Microsoft, Microsoft Surface. It’s obviously pretty and nice and …
Multitouch City Wall
The CityWall is a new work by the Ubiquitous Interaction (Uix) research group in Helsinki as part of the IPCity project. It gathers tagged images and video from …
Orbit on Creative Insecurity
Teaching is an interesting process of projection. Much like any other relationship you project your own fears, bad habits and insecurities onto your students …
Avant-Garde Tube
Nice post from Dan Hill over at City of Sound about finding a whole host of avant-garde films on YouTube, particularly Len Lye’s film, Free Radicals (see …
An image is worth 1,000 Twitters
Flickrvision, just so much more interesting than Twittervision. Via the Nic.
How children use the Internet
I found Richard Sarson’s piece, The Kids Are Alright Online, over at the Guardian interesting today. He interviews children about their internet usage and …
Joost Invites
So, I’ve been playing with Joost a bit and it looks like it’s going to become something pretty near to an alternative to television. At the moment …
Tiny phone. Not.
This e-mail flyer from Act Now contained this gem demonstrating not only a ridiculous fear of litigation, but also a lack of understanding of resolution …
John Gruber on the iPhone
John Gruber is one of the few Apple advocates that writes with intelligent consideration rather than just being an over-enthused fanboy. He has just written a …
Draw on Walls, with Light
A while ago Chris O’ Shea wrote about the Philips Simplicity Project, which had a number of mainly light-based inventions, several of them interactive. …
John Maeda exhibition
I wish I was in London for it, but I’m not. John Maeda has an exhibition called Maeda; MySpace at the Riflemaker Gallery starting today. Maeda and Toshio …
Tape It Off The Internet
Nice to see the article in the Guardian about Paul Pod’s Tape It Off The Internet being almost ready to roll. I worked with Paul at Razorfish and …
Polar Clock
Clocks and calendars seem to permanently popular as interaction/Flash design subjects. John Maeda arguably started the trend, then Yugo did a few. This one from …
Type it in. Hear it sung.
Read the graphic for Let them sing it for you below: I wish I had the patience to cut all those song snippets up.
Human Computer interaction in Sci-Fi
I added the link to Michael Schmitz’s Human Computer interaction in Science Fiction Movies to my del.icio.us account a while ago when one of my students …
Reclaiming the Role of Designers
I wrote some thoughts about the life of a creative person for my students a while ago, and recently commented on Rick Poynor’s article about the Soul of …
A new set of design principles
The latest issue of Desktop is out with an article by me called A New Set of Design Principles. It’s based on interviews with Stefan Sagmeister and Milton …
Reactable cacophony
Evidently Reactable has been around for a couple of years, but I hadn’t heard about it until one of my ex-students, Gabi, sent me the link. Undoubtedly …
Stealing the soul of design
There’s a great piece by Rick Poynor in Icon called The Soul of Design in which he de-bunks many of the management consultant myths and misunderstanding …
The Worst Windows Ad ever
This promo for Windows 386 is combination of a terrible product and hilariously awful creative. I suppose they thought a rap would make it all, you know, crazy …
Touchscreen Magic Mirror
The Big Space have added an ultrasonic system from Sensitive Object to their Magic Mirror to enable it to also be a touchscreen. Nice to see that collection of …
Cabaret Mechanical Theatre
I’m super happy to see Chris O’Shea’s post about his visit to the Kinetica Museum to see the retrospective exhibition of the Cabaret …
Desktop 2007 Create Awards
A quick plug for Desktop Magazine (the home of much of my writing) as their 2007 Create Awards are awaiting entries. So, if you were one of my ex-students or a …
Play matters. Do it first.
As you know I think and write about play quite a bit and am a big advocate of most of what Pat Kane writes about in The Play Ethic. My interests are a …
Big Switches and Panels
If you’re into interaction design you should already know of Dan Saffer, interaction designer at Adaptive Path and author of Designing for Interaction. …
Jonathan Harris Coolhunting Video
Following up on my recent post about Jonathan Harris’s new work, Universe, Mike alerted me to this video interview with Jon on Coolhunting. It’s …
Google Map anomolies and Twitter
Two posts in one, what a bargain. Karl sent me a link to Craig’s Flip Flop Flying blog because of his post about Google Maps anomalies. Basically as …
37 Signals interview
In keeping with my re-release of prior interviews and articles I have written, here is the one with the good folks at 37Signals. It’s a little out of date …
Reveal your Hidden Life
We all have inner thoughts, secrets and dreams that we fail to manifest and carry around with us like shiny gems hidden in our pockets. After a while they weigh …
Master of the Universe
I’ve written a few times about the work of Jonathan Harris and We Feel Fine remains one of my favourite combinations of data visualisation combined with a …
Interview on WorldChanging
A quick pointer to an interview about the Creative Waves VIP Project with Rick Bennett and I on the very excellent WorldChanging.com. If you’ve been …
Goodbye Lilian
It’s not been an easy year for deaths in the family. Although I rarely post personal things on my blog, for some reason - at least to me - it feels like …
Browser OS and applications from Xcerion
Information Week’s story about Xcerion, a Swedish software company building what is pretty much a browser-based (read: XML) operating system is …
Adaptive Path research Second Life. Yawn.
It’s been interesting (in that way that your mum says your clothes are ‘interesting’) to see all the hype excitement about Second Life build …
Company relationships are like a marriage
Kathy Sierra over at Creating Passionate Users just made a brilliant comparison of customer relationships to personal relationships. She points out that many …
Inane Searches
Sometimes I trawl through Playpen’s stats to see how people find me. (Yes, yes, navel gazing - don’t tell me you don’t do it too). Anyway, I …
Zeitguised Interview
I interviewed crazy animation duo, Zeitguised, for the last issue of Desktop. I’ll post it here once my three-month buffer from Desktop’s publishing …
Gerwiiatrics
Following on from those thoughts about the Nintendo Wii, I noticed an Engadget re-blog of a Chicago Tribune story about folks in a retirement home getting into …
Omnium software released as Open Source
Last night the new v4.0 Omnium software that runs all of the Omnium projects, such as the Omnium Creative Network and the forthcoming Creative Waves 2007 (as …
Periodic Table Table
Theodore Gray now has a whole range of the most beautiful Periodic Table posters for sale. Gray is well known for his wooden Periodic Table, erm, table. But …
Poke Wins With Cock
Thought that title might get your attention. Congratulations to Poke for their Digital Design - Commercial win at the Design Week Awards 2007 with …
Backup iTunes online with Bandwagon
I’ve been struggling with separate iTunes libraries on different machines for a while now and I also made a stupid command line error a few weeks back …
Magic Mirror
The Big Space have created a Magic Mirror for retail environments. It utilises RFID tags and a rear projection onto a mirror (and, of course, magic) to blend …
Interview with United Visual Artists
I wrote a little while back about UVA and onepointsix’s installation at the V&A; called Volume and it generated some discussion about the work. I …
70max - cheaper, safer, greener
Live|Work have just put together a new collective action website called 70max aimed at encouraging people to slow down and reduce accidents and carbon …
Macbook or Macbook Pro?
or I’m about to upgrade machines and it’s time to go Macbook or Macbook Pro (the 15"). It wouldn’t be a primary design machine, so the …
Têtes à Claques
One of my more brilliant ex-students, Gabi, just sent me this link to the very disturbing Têtes à Claques. It’s all in French and my schoolboy French …
Muscle Memory and the Wii
What with all the cool things people are doing with Wiimotes I nearly bought a Wii yesterday, but wasn’t terribly convinced by the games. This post from …
Djing with the Wii
There’s been a whole lot going on about the Wiimote as an interface to pretty much everything. It’s very flexible, relatively cheap and easy to use …
New Arduino Goodies
Following on from my previous post about the new Bluetooth Arduino boards. Chris O’Shea has already got his and has posted some first impressions. Picture …
Desire of Codes
Apart from David Rokeby’s talk and Stelarc and a couple of other things at Transmediale 07, I spent an entertaining afternoon checking out the open …
YouTube meets Azureus, Zudeo is born
So the folks behind the popular BitTorrent client, Azureus have launched a service which Wired has described as a YouTube for HD video. It’s called Zudeo …
Notes from Transmediale 07
In general the main exhibition of Transmediale 07 left me pretty unimpressed. But that may be due to my general cynicism (or arrogance - I prefer cynicism) - …
Creative Waves 2
Omnium, the research group that I am part of (now online) in Australia, has just launched its next ‘Creative Waves’ global e-learning project …
Drunk Deutsche Bahn Icons
](/images/2007/01/normal_dbsigns.jpg) [ Click to enlarge the images For a while I’ve been meaning to photograph this - unfortunately I only got them with …
The Computer Behind Playpen
Okay, it’s not really the server behind Playpen, but it is the machine on which I write most of it. Iain had the nice (and as it turned out simultaneous …
Bluetooth Arduino Boards
Chris O’Shea from Pixelsumo just mailed to remind me that the Bluetooth version of the Arduino boards comes out on Monday and are available here. The …
US Airforce or Videogame?
Not really the usual fare of Playpen, but through a strange Google Ad placement that I clicked on I ended up at the U.S. Airforce’s propaganda recruitment …
Bubble Sequencer
Adding to the ever-growing list of things that my ex-students now do much better than I, Karl D. D. Willis is working on a playful new project called Bubble …
Multiperson multi-touch interface
A while ago I wrote about Jeff Han’s multi-touch interface and of course it got a lot of attention off the back of the iphone’s similar interface. …
Dialogue with Malcolm Garrett
I have been writing articles for various design magazines for over eight years now, mainly for Desktop in Australia/NZ, and felt sad that many of the very …
Everything is a Toy with RFID tags
I’ve already posted some thoughts about this project by Yuichiro Katsumoto on the Bauhaus blog so I won’t repeat here save to say that I like this …
Art Haus
This skit from on a pretentious Big Brother-style ‘art haus’ full of pretentious artists (with German accents) had me chuckling. I have seen a …
Yes, it's five things.
I’ve seen the Five Things meme floating around and now Nik tagged me. If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, like Nik I’m going to …
Safari's experimental typography
When I was trying to access Apple’s website for the iPhone the other day Safari went all glitchy with its image rendering. I quite like the above smear …
Regine comes to the Bauhaus
I’m delighted that the very brilliant and extremely well-connected Regine Debatty from we-make-money-not-art.com is giving a talk at the Bauhaus on …
Apple iPhone
I’m going to join what will be an enormous club and blog about Apple’s iPhone. I nearly didn’t, just to not follow the crowd, but given my …
Invitation À Jouer
I was recently contacted by Yves Bernard who writes the ArtNumeur blog about a piece I wrote a for the Game/Play exhibition little while back called An …
Playpen on WMMNA
Just a quickie to thank Regine for the name-check on we-make-money-not-art.com. WMMNA is the source for all things interactive/new media art/design, or as she …
Games Studies Journal new issue
The new issue of the Games Studies journal, Volume 6, Issue 1 was published in December, just in case you missed it in the holiday rush. Here are the contents: …
Light Tracer wins Tokyo TDC Award
I’m a bit late with this announcement due to the holidays, but I’m very happy to see that an ex-student of mine, Karl D. D. Willis won the …
UVA's Volume on YouTube
I wrote a little while back about UnitedVisualArtists’ new work, Volume, that is being shown at the V&A; at the moment. Joel from UVA sent me a mail …
The Power of Red Buttons
Having just mistyped a domain name and been sent to one of those really irritating ‘parked domain’ search pages, I saw this pop-up. Normally, I …
Low tech accidents
Whilst looking through some old archives of work (and also the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive) I re-found a gif that I made for my very first …
The Omnium Blog
I’ve written before about my work with the Omnium Project and the Omnium Creative Network, but it has been needing another home… My colleagues from …
UVA's Volume at the V&A
A bit of cross-posting from my Bauhaus blog here, but worth it. Chris O’Shea over at Pixelsumo has written up a good description of a new work, Volume, by …
Analogue In, Digital Out
I just read Brendan Dawes’s new book, Analogue In, Digital Out, in one day. A day when I was teaching all day too. I even stayed up late to finish it. …
onedotzero MTV Bloom
onedotzero and MTV Europe are running a competition called Bloom in a bid to find fresh creative talent from across the globe. They’re looking for …
Yahoo! Mail Championships
A few months ago I spent a very fun couple of weeks doing some work for the folks over at Poke where my friend (and ex-Antiromer) Nik Roope is one of the …
Googlemap of Design Books
Markus Dressen has laid out a selection of his favourite books and created a Googlemap of them. Most of them are design and art books and provide an interesting …
The War on Blogs
Now that large corporations like Dell have started to ‘get’ blogs since the various Dell Hell blog posts started panning their stock price it …
Top Hat and a Tail
So of course Greyworld’s Andrew Shoben couldn’t let me name-check Antirom on YouTube without sending me one of his own. This one of him wearing a …
Funtain - bad name, nice idea
I hate the name, but Funtain is a nice idea. It plays with water and sound and plugs into those strong childhood memories of playing with water. Thanks to Karl …
Antirom Performance
I love YouTube, it really is becoming the archive of the world. Here’s a bit of the RGB performance Nic Roope, Joe Stephenson and I did when we were at …
Pixelsumo links
Rather than cross-posting from my Bauhaus blog, I just want to point you in the direction of a post with some very good links on interactivity, environments and …
The Black Box Interface
As most of us know, phones don’t make brilliant music players or games machines. Sure, they can do that stuff, but the 0 to 9 buttons, tiny screen and …
Playful Interactivity
I have just read great paper called Adding Playful Interaction to Public Spaces by Amnon Dekel et al. from The Hebrew University Jerusalem and The Bezalel …
What's in a name?
] Okay, this has nothing to do with the usual subject matter of this blog, but it was far too amusing not to post. A long time ago my family started looking …
Bauhaus Blog
Not really a post that may be of interest to lots of you, but I have started a new blog for those of you who are/will be my students from the Bauhaus (or anyone …
The Changing Nature of Play
I just stumbled upon Matt Locke’s post about play and technology, which is very much worth a read if you are interested in the intersection of play, …
Line Rider
Line Rider is possibly one of the coolest toys I have come across for some time since SodaConstructor or some of Fabrica’s toys. It’s a really great …
An Interface Too Far
I was interested to see this video on YouTube for the BumpTop interface that mimics a ‘real’ desktop. Interested but disappointed. The whole idea of …
Starting as Gastprofessor at the Bauhaus
I’m off to Weimar tomorrow to start a six-month stint as Guest Professor “Gestaltung medialer Umgebungen” at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in …
Online Educa Berlin 2006 workshop
My colleagues and I from The Omnium Project will be conducting a workshop at the Online Educa 2006 Conference in Berlin on the 29th November and it will be …
Google Mars
As most regular readers (yes, you there) will know, I have a fascination with Google’s mapping activities. So it’s such a pleasure to see Google …
Mobile and Home phone convergence
So, Orange just announced their new Orange Unique service, a convergence of home phone, mobile phone and broadband. The question is, will their customer service …
Why people hate mobile phone companies
It really can’t be that hard, smart customer service from mobile telcos. Have these people learned nothing? Here was my experience of Vodafone and …
The Brain Behind Del.icio.us
I’m not sure how old this interview with Joshua Schachter, inventor of del.icio.us, is but it’s a fascinating insight into the Wisdom of Crowds. It …
Google and UNEP Map Environmental Change
Google and the United Nations Environmental Programme last week launched an addition to Google Earth called the Atlas of Our Changing Environment, which allows …
Be A Good Friend
What a joy to discover Steven Blyth’s My Social Fabric project (thanks to Mike Coulter at Digital Agency). Essentially the My Social Fabric project gives …
Insights into Jonathan Ive
Businessweek have a great selection of in-depth articles about Apple’s Senior Vice-President for Industrial Design, Jonathan Ive and they give a real …
MTV vs YouTube
I’ve been catching up with my blog reading and thought Todd Dominey’s point about MTV trailing YouTube was worth a re-blog as it hooks into what I …
Steal This Film
I finally got around to discovering, downloading and watching the documentary, Steal This Film about the MPAA’s attempts to shut down the Swedish …
Hidden Gems in Apple's Announcements
Of course there is the usual commentary on Steve Jobs’ new Apple announcements and no doubt this will add to the slush pile, but I think there are a few …
Benettonplay Toybox
Whilst we are talking about all things Fabrica, go and play in the Benettonplay Toybox - lot’s of amusing little interactive pieces to prove the point …
Interview with Andy Cameron
The ever-brilliant and plugged-in Regine Debatty from we-make-money-not-art.com recently interviewed my previous lecturer and co-Antirommer, Andy Cameron, now …
Timescope
] ART+COM have just launched a project called Timescope, which is allows you to visually travel through time using a telescope like the ones commonly mounted on …
Vote for my manifesto
Having spent a long time thinking about and writing the Re-imagining Higher Education essay I am trying to get it published as a Change This manifesto. So, if …
Interactive Tedium from ISEA
I didn’t get to go to ISEA this year (not that I’ve been for ages) and I actually pretty pleased I didn’t. I really wanted to like the stuff I …
Cambridge University prove their stupidity
You don’t have to be stupid to be a Don here, but it helps. I really enjoyed Francis Beckett’s article in the Education Guardian regarding Cambridge …
10 Years of Flash
Is it ten years already? I really am getting old. I remember the days when Flash was a really awkward little ‘Director pretender’ animation package …
Google Flight Sim
Okay, so once again I’m so far behind the curve on this one I’ve wrapped around and am in front again (I reckon). Mark Caswell-Daniels’ …
Location Aware Ads on London Buses
I’m a bit late catching up with this one (I have been working… remember that?), but I just noticed this post in Ad Age about Yell.com’s plans …
Interactive Architecture
The Graffiti Research Lab (the folks behind the LED Throwies) have just launched another project called Interactive Architecture. Basically it involves leeching …
Re-imagining Higher Education
Recently I have been giving much thought to the structure and issues that most of us in Higher Education have been struggling with for several years. There are …
The Play Ethic and Sustainability
For a very long time now (since 2005 in fact), Pat Kane’s book, The Play Ethic has been on my Amazon Wishlist (hint, hint) along with several other books …
Invitation to play at the Game / Play exhibition
I recently wrote a catalogue essay called The Invitation to Play (thanks to Mark Pesce for that phrase) for the Game/Play networked exhibition displayed …
Fleabilly strikes again
Okay, so a pure vanity post here. A couple of wonderful photos from Fleabilly a.k.a Ray Lewis of me in London. Don’t ask about the mask. It was just lying …
Home Entertainment
colette_window.jpg The folks over at Fabrica have created a new interaction installation called Home Entertainment for the windows of “style, design, art, …
Time Sketches (2006)
Time Smear in action Time Smear and Time Slicer form part of a series of live video works called Time Sketches that experiment with interactivity and the …
Necessary Procrastination
Interaction guru, John Maeda suggests that procrastination might be useful after all (hey, I bet that’s what you’re doing right now right? Reading …
New BMW 'Say No' Ad
Whilst writing that story about You Tube I spied BMW’s new “So No To Compromise” ad and website. It’s a US ad and is aimed at giving BMW …
You Tube Advertising Dollars
Some enlightening “theoretical” figures being bounced around in Endgaget’s series about You Tube’s potential for generating revenue. …
Fake Beer in Germany
Fake beer? In Germany? Sacrilege! Slightly off topic for this blog, I know (well, okay, it’s about design and I live in Germany), but Deutsche-Welle have …
Get Smart with your metering
Quick post about the BBC’s story on Smart Meters - the meters, designed by More Associates show you exactly where all your energy is going. The theory …
Finland in Euro Monster Rock Shock
Once again I ‘accidentally’ ended up watching the Eurovision Song Contest. No really, I was reading and had the TV on in the background. Anyway, …
New theme
It’s about time I had a new theme I felt. Noodling around with themes is a great way to fritter away real working time. As usual I haven’t had time …
Warner Bros. to distribute via BitTorrent
I can’t believe I missed this story last week, but Warner Bros. have finally started to get their head around the idea that BitTorrents are the most …
Khronos Projector - turning back time
I’m having a depressing time for “things I wish I had made” right now. Karl just sent me the link to the Khronos Projector, which is a …
The Real World
Ever noticed that the usual world map you see in atlases doesn’t really reflect the land-mass of the countries (the Northern Hemisphere countries are …
Taking the emotional temperature of the world
I feel very jealous, but also excited. Every so often, okay very often, someone makes a piece of interactive work that I really, really wish I had created. More …
Launching the Omnium Creative Network
I am very pleased to announce the launch of the Omnium Creative Network (OCN), which is what I will be spending quite a bit of my time on from now on. The OCN …
Being honest about your company
It pays to be honest, even when it’s all going wrong. A while ago I bought the very useful application, Spamfire after I went on holiday and came back to …
Perceived value in creative industries
I’m embroiled in an interesting debate about the perception of value of creativity versus (in this case) lawyers over at Greg’s Blog. I won’t …
Throwies - LED Graffiti
I can’t believe I haven’t come across the Instructables website before - it’s a kind of collaborative How To for all sorts of things. These …
iPod Vending Machines
Run out of iPods at the last moment whilst you’re away on holiday? Enter the iPod vending machine. Like ForeverGeek I’m really not sure I would …
Jenna Jameson in new Adidas spot by Tronic
New from Tronic Studio is an Adidas viral spot starring porn star adult entertainer, Jenna Jameson. From Vivian at Tronic: Jenna Jameson flexes her muscles as …
Some thoughts about life as a creative individual
This is a piece I wrote and read out in a lecture a couple of years ago, just before I left my teaching job to move back to Germany. Lots of students have often …
Ray Lewis in Village Voice
Nice to see photographer par excellence, Ray Lewis, featured in New York magazine, Village Voice. The article examines the bike clubs of NYC. Ray and Rachel …
Digital media discussion after the horse has bolted
Anyone would think owning a TV station was a good idea. The Australian’s Mark Day wrote a couple of insightful articles today about Senator Helen …
Guardian launches 'Comment is Free'
Guardian Unlimited has just launched its new multi-writer blog and communtiy called Comment is Free. Not only are the writers of high calibre (which will make …
Retrievr
Check out Retrievr - it allows you to search the Flickr image archive by drawing a sketch (or uploading another picture) instead of by tags. A kind of visual …
My 'Time Sketches' on display at the Powerhouse Museum
I’m very pleased to announce that two of my interactive works are currently on display at the Powerhouse Museum thanks to the wonderful people over at the …
WP Lightbox plug-in
I have just installed Safirul Alredha’s Wordpress plugin version of Lokesh Dhakar’s Lightbox scripts to display pop-up images in a more pleasant way …
Flagr - tagging all over the world
It had to happen: Flagr is a combination of Google Maps, Flickr and Delicious wrapped up in a nice AJAX interface. Basically it allows you to …
Cock-A-Doodle new from Poke
Check out the excellent and hilarious new offering from my pals at Poke called Cock-A-Doodle. Great to see Flash becoming less vector-shash and great to see …
More viral beer ads
Not that the advertising world is totally lacking in originality or anything (ahem), but following on from the success of Carlton & United Breweries’ …
Me in Suffolk care of Fleabilly
Suffolk Originally uploaded by fleabilly. A wonderful, weird shot of me taking a photo at my parents’ place in Suffolk thanks to the ever-brilliant Ray …
More multi-touch interfaces
Chris O’ Shea over at Pixelsumo just mailed me with a great round-up of other multi-touch interfaces for those of you interested. (His blog makes good …
Beyond the single jab - the multi-touch interface
Robert just sent me a YouTube link to Jeff Han’s amazing Multi-Touch interface. It allows multiple points of contact, which means you can do things like …
Our VW Polo for sale!
I don’t normally use my blog for my daily personal stuff as I try to stick to the themes of play, online culture, technology and writing. But we’re …
BBC Annotatable Audio Project
And whilst we’re at in on the audio front, check this out. Very smart. The BBC are doing some exciting stuff with all that licence money.
Last.fm - a replacement for Pandora (already)?
Not long ago I wrote about Pandora the service that allows you to find music similar to your own tastes. It trawls through the Music Genome Project database to …
ONEDOTZERO_10: Call for submissions
Time for any of my ex or current students and general creative bods to send out their DVDs. onedotzero, the world’s largest digital film festival, is open …
New work from Binalogue
My friends (and ex-students) over at Binalogue recently re-vamped their site (though being the perfectionists they are it’s going to have even more done …
Placeopedia - linking Wikipedia with Google Earth
No idea why I didn’t blog about this a while ago, but I just pulled Placeopedia’s feed into Google Earth. Placeopedia links Wikipedia articles with …
Less Work, More Play - presentation at Neue-Digitale
I’ve just had a very enjoyable afternoon at Neue-Digitale in Frankfurt interviewing co-founder, Olaf Czeschner, for Desktop but also giving a presentation …
Ninja-Man hits the one million mark
Three of my ex-students, Adam Searle, Johnny Jei Le, and Jason Chow spent the last year re-building a Flash platform game called Ninja-Man that they originally …
Time Smear Demo
Along with the Flow paper I just posted I also showed a demo of my Time Smear piece, which uses a slitscan method that is rather popular in interactive circle …
The Flow Principle in Interactivity
The Proceedings of the second Australasian conference on Interactive entertainment 2005, Sydney, Australia November 23 - 25, 2005 have been released online. The …
'Birds' - the new clip from Pleix
Paris-based collective, Pleix have just finished their new clip called Birds for Vitalic. The clip features extreme slow-motion footage of dogs jumping and …
Google Earth now for Mac
If you are a (the) regular reader of Playpen you’ll know of my fascination for Google Maps and Google Earth. Google Earth is a downloadable application …
Hours wasted improving productivity
If, like me, you are one of those people who is forever wasting inordinate amounts of (enjoyable) time searching for tools, tips and techniques with which to …
WP 2.0 broken permalinks and 404 error
Ironically, the recent post I wrote about upgrading painlessly to [Wordpress 2.0](http://wordpress.org] had a broken permalink. This resulted in my trackback to …
Coldplay leave Mac users out in the cold
Arif over at Itch.in just posted the details of the DRM from Coldplay’s new album. Basically it looks like it won’t play in the following: MP3 …
Subscribe to Playpen with e-mail
If you’re fed up with visiting my site (boo hoo!) but still enjoy the content (yay!) then you can now subscribe via e-mail. Click on this link here or …
Playpen upgraded to Wordpress 2.0
Playpen has now been upgraded to Wordpress 2.0 largely without pain. In fact, without any pain at all, although I was particularly careful to back-up everything …
Wordpress 2.0 released
So, Wordpress 2.0 or “Duke” has been released. It now has a WYSIWYG Editing system using AJAX thanks to TinyMCE and a whole host new integrated …
Tried Pandora? Now try Tunatic.
I recently posted about Pandora, the online tool that looks for music that is similar to a track or artist name you enter. It’s great, by the way, and …
Kate Moss Interiors - vacuum those powders...
My COFA colleague, Simon Hunt, mailed me this very amusing pic today. He writes: Taken with my phone the other day, just off Elizabeth St in Surry Hills… …
Lost Pictures Found, Recoverd from Compact Flash
Like many idiots over the holidays I accidentally deleted a few pictures from my digital camera’s Compact Flash card. I was walking around repeatedly …
Best 50 All Time Gadgets
Okay, so I did blog on Christmas Day, but hey, it’s bit like reading the papers or watching James Bond movies isn’t it? As it’s Christmas I …
Christmas Zeitgeist news from Google
Gotta love Google. They’ve posted their 2005 Zeitgeist report noting our search trends around the world. The top Google News searches of 2005 are …
3D Graffiti
One of my (most brilliant) ex-students, Gaby, just sent me this link from a friend of hers in France who does graffiti. It’s a bullet-time style version …
COFA Annual (2005)
Role: Interactive Director/Producer The Annual CD-ROM for the College of Fine Arts is always a significant logistical and creative undertaking. With almost 400 …
Sony breach copyright to prevent copyright infringement
Per Johan Johansen, code reverse engineer par excellence (he reversed-engineered much of Apple’s iTunes Music Store DRM code) has discovered Sony have …
RDC theme
I got a bit tired of the old Kubrick theme and I still have not managed to find the time to design something different. So I’m borrowing the RDC theme by …
Lost for music? Try Pandora.
Okay lots of bloggers have been raging about Pandora recently. It’s come from the Music Genome Project and is brilliant example of collaborative filtering …
Xooglers
Ex-Googlers Doug Edwards and Ron Garrett have set up the Xooglers blog. It makes fascinating reading for anyone who has ever been involved in a dotcom …
How downloads will save TV
So, I’ve been ranting about the iTunes downloads killing off TV for a while. I’ve not been arguing that TV content will die out, but rather that the …
New Hulger phones.
Although I’m one of those Bluetooth headset jerks (I use it in the car, okay?) I’m very excited about the new Hulger’s from my friend Nic. …
American border police overzealous
I’ve just been reading Hossein Derakhshan’s (aka Hoder) account of being stopped at the border in Toronto about to go back to New York. It’s …
Interactive Entertainment 2005
I’m just here at Interactive Entertainment 2005 presenting a paper, The Flow Principle in Interactivity as well as a demo of my Time Smear piece. …
REFRESH! Conference - Lowbrow, High Art: Why Big Fine Art Doesn't Understand Interactivity
An archive of the REFRESH! Conference at the Banff New Media Institute is now online. You can download my paper, Lowbrow, High Art: Why Big Fine Art …
More TV vs Internet debate with Ian Methods
A friend of mine, who works for one of the major Pay TV networks, mailed me a comment as I had inadvertently turned off comments when I moved to Wordpress. He …
ACUADS paper - The Future has already Happened: Dispelling some Myths of Online Education
Recently the Australian Council of University Art & Design Schools finally published the papers from the 2004 ACUADS conference in Canberra. My paper, …
New Omnium site - an online haven of collaboration
My friends and colleagues on the Omnium project have just launched their shiny new site. It is the outcome of over six years of work and research and they have …
Snaps for my students
Nice to see one of my students, Tim Rudder getting some interest on Tween for the music clip, Alicia, he’s just finished for his final year project with …
Adolf. Not a popular name after 1940s.
We were looking around at the popularity of names the other night and amusingly stumbled across this graph. What’s weird is the change of heart around …
Finally moved to WordPress
Okay, I’ve finally moved Playpen over to WordPress (hence the default-ish) theme (see footer for credits) for now. I have set up Alex King’s mt-wp …
Where Old Media Go To Die
Take a trip down Memorex Lane with Cassette Jam ‘05. I remember these Teac cassettes well. I thought they were the word in their day. Thanks to Toby for …
Food, Fabrica, Cameron
I just stumbled across the Fabrica blogs mainly due to the link to the old antirom photo that I blogged the other day. Then, of course, I found Andy …
New iPod and iTunes movie downloads - is the TV party over?
A few months back I wrote a post asking whether Apple were coming to the BitTorrent party and when iTunes Movie Store might open. It now has. This, it seemed to …
More scary historical photographs
I also found this photo in the Videobrasil archives. Rather scary in places and we all look so fresh-faced. Check out the nerdy bloke with glasses sitting at …
Antirom at Videobrasil
I just got mailed by Videobrasil to say they have put together a database of all of their festivals. It was a very pleasant trip down memory lane to see the …
Baglight - never lose your keys again
Some time ago, when I first started putting my writing online, I started a series called Great Inventions Yet To Happen. (I’ll put them up again at some …
New writing section
So, I’m thinking of moving to WordPress (shock horror - after all that hassle setting up MT?) as I quite like the Page/Post structure of it. in the …
At the REFRESH! conference in Banff.
I’m currently in Banff in Canada for the REFRESH! conference. It looks like an interesting line-up of people here to dissect new media’s often …
New Feedburner Feed
I’ve changed my subscription feed to a Feedburner feed (see the link in the sidebar) in an attempt to tidy things up a bit. Subscriptions to the old feed …
Why Apple's iPod design is smarter than it looks
John Welch’s article about iDevelopers creating accessories for the iPod is enlightening. He makes a great case (no pun intended, and if you don’t …
High Speed Photography of Balloon Popping
Amazing high speed photography images of people popping balloons at Make Magazine’s session at Foo Camp 05. It’s incredible how much of the …
Guitar Shred Show
I have just idled away far too much time playing with the Guitar Shred Show. Very amusing animation, nicely woven into a story and the most rockingly rock …
Smart lightbulb sends SMS when blown
So now Fujitsu have developed a lightbulb that sends you a text message when it’s blown. Aparently it does this via some kind of code in the bulb that …
Why no research here?
Okay, so everyone seems to have been asking me why none of my work or research is published here. I wish I could say it’s because it’s so super …
Playing Superman
So, did my second skydive today and it was even better than the one a few years ago. This time I actually remember the first ten seconds - check out the vein on …
WEARHEAD*PHONE from Hulger
] Another great piece of headgear thinking from my mate Nik Roope at Hulger. the WEARHEAD*PHONES are part of a show called Hearwear at the Victoria & Albert …
Nice Viral Big Ad Campaign for Carlton Beer
Continuing a very amusing trend for sending up crap advertising, Carlton Beer just released this Big Ad campaign. Visual effects by my old-flame (geddit?) …
Comment problems
There seems to be some problem with comments on my blog. Some people manage it whilst others never get posted. They all go through an approval process as I was …
Optimus OLED keyboard - smart object of desire
Ah, good product design, I love it when it’s done so well. This OLED keyboard, the Optimus, from Russian design house Art. Lebedev Studio is a brilliant …
London Bombs
Phew. What a weird 48 hours that was. As far as I know everyone I know is okay, though I have many friends in London that I haven’t heard from, so I hope …
Google Scholar increases book sales
I work at a University as most of you will know and the issue of “Google culture” amongst students when researching comes up all the time. So …
Flying Carpet
At last a decent carpet in an airport. I’ve always wondered who chose the hideous designs for public spaces, but this one by Iranian artist Seyed Alavi …
Perception Website (2005)
Role: Creative Director/Producer Website re-design for Australian games development company, Perception In collaboration with Gestalt Productions.
BT Fusion - Fixed line and mobile convergence
This press release from Ovum looks like my dreams for using just one phone are nearer, though the convergence between the landline and mobile isn’t here …
Pokia becomes Hulger
My mate Nic Roope has finally found a backer and launched his Pokia range of classic handsets for mobiles under the name Hulger. We reckon there’s going …
Spam SMS
I just got my first true spam SMS today (the others have been from the network, so they sort of don’t count - I expect them). It was from a home loans …
Rexona Ad - brilliant idea well executed
Talking about advertising not selling but seducing, this Rexona ad is a brilliant example of a simple idea, well executed. It’s at the number 1 spot on …
BitTorrent Searching
An article over at Wired announces the development of a BitTorrent search engine developed by none other than BitTorrent’s inventor, Bram Cohen. The …
The New Laws of Television
The second part to Mark Pesce’s Piracy is Good? is now up on Mindjack. Bianca wrote a comment to my previous post that I thought I would pull out here …
Piracy is Good?
Just been reading Mark Pesce’s Piracy is Good? on Mindjack. They’re serialising parts of his forthcoming book, Hyperpeople. Those of you (all six of …
Needies - high maintenance toys
A brilliant but scary development from Amos Bloomberg, Daniel Perlin, and Brett Schultz at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, …
Forgive and Forget
This was English rain. Not the erotic tropical lashings from the movies in which the starlet gets improbably caught wearing only a t-shirt and no bra, but the …
America We Stand As One - real or not?
I so want someone to tell me for sure that “America We Stand As One” is not a spoof. If it is it’s brilliant in its double bluff, but I have a …
R.I.P. Web Pages and Browsers?
I have always thought that browsers were a step backwards in interaction design. Just as designers were starting to explore and understand how to speak in this …
WebEarth via Google Maps
Amazing images from Google Maps new satellite imaging feature posted over at James Turnball’s Google Sightseeing blog. Jason Kottke has also posted a …
The Economist gets on the Hughtrain, Cluetrain and nails the coffin of advertising
Just caught the last issue of The Economist with their feature and survey on “Consumer Power”. It makes pretty interesting reading for anyone …
Creative Waves
I’m taking part in another online education project called Creative Waves - a collaboration between Icograda and the Omnium Project run by my friend and …
Piracy and Music sales
Interesting post about music piracy realities from Richard over at the Gadget Lounge (and also cross-posted on the Gadget Show on the Podcast Network). It …
Killing trackback spam with MT-Moderate & co.
Just installed Chad Everett’s MT-Moderate plugin in an attempt to cut down on Trackback spam, which has, let’s face it, been more than my real …
Fastest robot in the East
Hitachi have just created the “fastest robot” called Emiew. The inventors want it to be able to keep up with people, hence the wheels. Pal, one of …
The phone is dead, long live the phone
So, the telcos are still banging on about how voice over IP (VOIP) won’t affect their business or that it will and it’s unfair (poor darlings). Yet …
The thinking behind Growl
Great interview over at Drunken Blog with Chris Forsythe, the lead on the Growl project. For those that haven’t checked it out yet, Growl is a …
The King Has...
Great new project from Krister Olsson over at Tree-Axis called “The King Has…” We all carry secrets we cannot reveal. Taking its name from …
Have surfboard, will travel - A classic Aussie sight
This drop-top car with a surfboard in the back passed me the other day in traffic. I couldn’t resist a quick snap, it seemed such a classic Aussie sight.
Cameraphones as personal storytelling
Howard Rheingold has just written an interesting summary of a paper by Keio University researcher Daisuke Okabe. Okabe has made an ethnographic study of …
The Art of Experimental Interaction Design
Just a quick post to tell you to rush out and buy The Art of Experimental Interaction Design published by IdN. My ex-Antirom colleague Andy Cameron edited it …
Will Apple buy TiVo and create iTorrent?
Okay, so I’m a little behind on this story from Engaget about Apple possibly buying TiVo. But, hey, it’s the week before semester starts and …
Bike Kill
Great short film called “Bike Kill” from my lovely and talented friend Rachel Meyrick. It’s the Black Label Bike Club, Brooklyn NY doing weird …
The Undertaker
The Undertaker is a short story I wrote a few years ago. I won’t say it’s my best, but it’s entertaining enough: The Undertaker Nathan P. …
Mobile Journeys in Sydney and my bluejack
Still digesting some of the speakers’ talks from the Mobile Journeys forum in Sydney. Although many of the speakers from telco research groups had …
Cable guys looking in the wrong direction for Video on Demand
Ashley Norris’s article in the Guardian about the potential merger of NTL and Telewest in the UK and their plans to offer video on demand has Toby Hack …
Misunderstanding mobile phone cameras
Simon Castle’s rant against mobile phone cameras in today’s Sydney Morning Herald completely misunderstands new technologies and confirms his …
Understanding VORN and the work of Jon Harris
The article I wrote about Jonathan Harris is out in Desktop now. Go buy it! Harris was the creator of the brilliant 10x10 site, which gives a snapshot of …
Screaming Fans - New iMacs and Apple's tech support
My friend Toby (check out his audio work, it’s great) recently bought a new iMac for his audio work (he and his wife are expecting a baby so he …
Apple's Tipping Point
Paul Nixon has created a great bit of information design describing Apple’s product development/market strategy. The Mac mini and iPod Shuffle in the …
Bastardstone's - Waterstone's employee sacked for blogging
So, Waterstone’s bookshop have just fired Joe Gordon, an employee of eleven years, due to his blog. Pretty stupid move and another example of a …
Where and how to donate to Tsunami victims
Anders Jacobsen has laid down the challenge that he’ll give $1 per trackback to his post of all the aid agencies. Seems like a good idea to me. So here …
The raging BitTorrent
There’s a good story on BitTorrents over at Wired at the moment by from Clive Thomson based on an interview with Bram Cohen, BitTorrent’s creator. …
Tsunamis shatter celeb holidays
Following up from the previous post about Channel Ten’s reporting, CNN get a bit of Tsunami entertainment news out with their Tsunamis shatter celebrity …
Tsunami in Indian Ocean puts life in perspective
There’s nothing like a natural disaster to put things in perspective. When I heard about the earthquake and tsunamis I reacted in the way most people …
iTorrent - will Apple come to the BitTorrent party?
Now that BitTorrents account for around 35% of all net traffic (40%, shockingly, is spam) will Apple create iTorrent or implement it in iTunes eventually? It …
Flight cancelled due to snow. In Siberia.
Okay, another airline rant. This time my friend Sean coming over from London via Japanese Airlines (JAL). His flight was cancelled due to snow in Siberia. Now, …
Why Sony don't get it in so many ways
I’m a little late on this one but, hey, I’ve been offline in India. It’s always sad to see a big corporation like Sony completely …
Off to India
I’m off to India for about ten days, so no blogging for me. I’ll be steering clear of Internet cafés too! Photos when I return. (This one from the …
Voice from The Void - the Blogosphere is alive and well
Oh, the irony of it all. After my post about Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void not responding to my mails and posts, I got a comment from Hugh: “I suppose I …
Vice President Dogsbody - the rise of misleading job titles
I just saw a job ad today for “Vice President of General Duties”. Vice President? So what are these general duties then? They must be pretty …
Dog with flowers
] Saw this dog on some steps the other day. It looked like it was wearing flowers in its hair and posing. I couldn’t resist a photo.
The Void in Gaping Void - What to do when blogs become victims of their own success?
I’ve been having an interesting conversation with Euph recently in the comments of my previous post about the SoundPryer and it’s led me to ruminate …
3G Phones go Wi-Fi - so what's the future for mobile telcos?
Interesting to read this story from Wendy Grossman on Wired today about the British company, Cambridge Silicon Radio and their new Wi-Fi chip, UniFi, aimed at …
Fleabilly - the extraordinary in the ordinary
I have just written a new article for Desktop (Issue 200) about photographer, artist, compositor, Ray Lewis. The boyfriend of my lovely pal Rachel, he’s …
Connectivity, privacy, porn and the generational shift
I thought I’d post a new entry in response to the comment by Euph about not having any personal space any more with regards to the Sound Pryer post. So, …
Find out what the person next to you in traffic is nodding their head to...
Regine from ever fascinating and brilliantly titled We-Make-Money-Not-Art has just posted a story about the SoundPryer from the Interactive Institute in …
Boring 3D far from boring.
I’ve just been checking out Jimmy Maidens’s Boring 3D website which is far from boring and has some beautiful 3D “cartoons” I suppose …
Playpen renamed and rebuilt
I’ve just re-built the entire blog with MovableType now instead of Blogger and renamed it Playpen, which I felt was more apt and less pretentious than …
Amazon goes back in time
I just ordered and had an album delivered to my God-daughter via Amazon.co.uk. Everything went fine, as it usually does, but check out the order status - they …
COFA Annual (2004)
Interaction Direction and Producer for the Annual CD-ROM of over 320 collected student works for the College of Fine Arts, UNSW. This interface worked on …
The iMac G5, a simple wow.
Jeez Jonathan Ive and his team are amazing. The new G5 iMac is simply rocking. Nothing more to say until I get my hands on one. In the promo movie, Ive talks …
Designer fired for having an opinion about Bush
I just heard this story about a designer, Glen Hiller, from agency, Octavo Designs, being fired for heckling George W. Bush at a politcal rally. Apparently one …
Have fun with nuclear reactors
I just received this invite: Saturday, 21 August 2004 10:30am to 4pm New Illawarra Road, Lucas Heights Have fun and learn about the fascinating world of …
I, Robot - a very short review
I finally saw I, Robot the other night wondering what Alex Proyas might have made of the famous Asimov story. I had the interesting experience of working …
How to be Creative
Just saw this thread titled How to be Creative doing the rounds. As someone who spends his time trying to teach others to be creative, and lamenting my own lack …
Singapore Airlines air rage and the German Professor
Okay, I’m sorry to keep harping on about this whole thing, but being cooped up in a metal tube for 22 hours does things to one’s brain. So, …
Singapore Airlines fiasco continues...
I knew the whole upgrade hassle would come back to bite me. So, having finally sorted my flights I rang Singapore Airlines to check up on something and was told …
In the air and enjoying the Sky Bed
Finally in the air and enjoying the Sky Bed in the business class upgrade with Singapore Airlines after an incredible amount of hassle. The upgrade came through …
Turkey Bombing
Can’t say I’m too happy about the bombing in Turkey just on the eve of making my way over there. I’m sure it will be okay, I spent enough time …
Well this is finally up,
Well this is finally up, on the eve of heading off to Germany and Turkey for a break and the 2004 Design and Emotion conference. I’ll try and post a few …
Balmain Yoga School Identity (2003 - 2006)
Branding and identity for the Balmain Yoga School. Simple typography and beautiful photography (photos by James Bourne) combine to give a sense of serenity and …
Fin Design Website (2004)
Creative/Interactive Director and Producer for HTML and Flash website for Sydney post-production company, Fin Design. Created in collaboration with Gestalt …
Biennale of Sydney (2004)
Interactive and Art Direction of a prototype CD-ROM for the Biennale of Sydney, 2004 in collaboration with my students. The project was unfortunately dropped do …
zspace Website (2002)
Flash website and content management system for Sydney-based visual effects company zspace (N.B. the current site is a new version). Created in collaboration …
Dreamlight Imaging Print Material (2002)
Advertising and print material for Dreamlight Imaging, Sydney (utilising exisiting logo). Dreamlight are a film scanning and recording company - light is the …
Dreamlight Imaging Website (2002 - 2003)
Flash website and back-end content administration tool for Sydney digital-to-film recording company, Dreamlight Imaging. The brief was to create a site that had …
Mobile Spam
This is an article that I wrote a while back for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Australia. The original link and title is Protecting the extension of …
ABC FlyNet (2001)
Complete site design for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s youth portal, FlyNet (now in archive). Also included the development of Flash E-cards …
Animal Logic Website (2000 - 2001)
As Interactive Director at Animal Logic, one of the main tasks was to oversee the re-development of Animal’s extensive website, down to the very last …
Animal Logic Portfolio & DVD (2000)
Interactive portfolio and DVD for visual effects company Animal Logic where I was Interactive Director from 2000-2001.
Mystery Clock Cinema Website (2000)
Interactive Director for Mystery Clock Cinema website, an in-depth and experimental website developed for film director, Alex Proyas (I, Robot, Dark City, The …
Dark Mixer (2000)
An experimental sound and vision mixer created in collaboration with Steven Scott and Kazumichi Grime. A version of this work was also used on Alex …
Juxta (2000)
A random text and image generator, originally created for Alex Proyas’s Mystery Clock Cinema website. It plays on our abilities and desire to create …
NatWest Bank website (1999)
Interactive Director / Creative Producer for NatWest bank website re-design, whilst at Razorfish, UK. Apart from the enormous task of re-arranging the …
Levi Strauss & Co. Interactive Shop Window (1998)
One of several iterations of in-store projects for Levis Strauss & Co. Ltd. This shop window used sensors on the inside of the glass that allowed passers-by …
Easi-Breathe Interactive Exhibit (1998)
An interactive exhibit for Norton Healthcare housed at the Science Museum, London. The exhibit used capacitive sensors that work through glass and explored the …
RGB Performance (1996-1999)
A performance of interactive sound and vision toys with Antirom members, Nicolas Roope and Joe Stephenson. Using two to three computers, vision and audio mixers …
Levi Strauss & Co. Choose Fun CD-ROM (1997)
Interactive CD-ROM developed as part of a marketing project for Levi Strauss and Co. Ltd. The CD-ROM was essentially a sponsored artwork as it was entirely …
Levi Strauss & Co. Kiosk (1995-1999)
Several iterations of an in-store kiosk for Levi Strauss and Co. Ltd were created over a period of four years. Each season (twice a year) a new set of …
JAM exhibition (1996)
Nine screen video wall installation for the JAM Exhibition at the Barbican Centre, London. JAM was billed as a “walk-in magazine” and featured …
Antirom CD-ROM (1994)
Where it all started. The Antirom CD-ROM, from which the Antirom, the collective, took its name, contained a multitude of interactive experiments intended to …