Topic

technology

A collection of 71 issues

NPR Soundclips.

I love Soundclips, a great segment on NPR. It’s like sound snapshots, which I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Is there really an audible equivalent to a snapshot? Perhaps, but there won’t be as much identifiable information therein because sound is so much more a product

Touchscreen Cartography.

This is soooooo cool.

Designers I'd like to meet.

John Maeda is one of them. What a great personality he has and what an engaging speaker! I’m using his book for my course on the Theories and Practice of Interactivity and finally watched this presentation he gave at Ted. Another good one to watch is by David Pogue,

On Microsoft Excel, Big Software, and Brazilian Favelas.

I often telling people designing for Excel is more like urban design than anything else. Because like a city, big software is a messy, chaotic system that is constantly evolving with millions of opinionated inputs by passionate, feeling, needy inhabitants and feisty, exuberant, competent and just as often, incompetent (but

On touching data.

Touch interface design guidelines dictate that the more simple and limited the gestural language used to control a system, the better. Use only these gestures when designing for touch devices: slide, pinch, zoom, tap, double tap. The reasoning goes that first of all, there are little to no affordances in

On the Great Works of Software and Detroit.

I have never been to Detroit, but as a lover of cities, I am interested in what happens to it. Interested to see how it transforms itself from ruin to revival. I did live in Baltimore for four years, though – a city facing nearly identical problems. I am interested in

The Secret Life of My Passwords

In 2012, it dawned on me that I had lived on the East Coast for four years. My promise to myself was that I would return to Seattle after five years. We had a beautiful house in Baltimore and life was very comfortable, even though I had a love/hate

Letters from Paris: Montmartre and the Digital Cabaret.

It was on the northern slope of the Butte Montmartre on a cobbled street that this enchanted house became a place for sing-alongs and folk songs around the year 1850. In 1875 a painter and caricaturist called Andre Gill painted a sign that had a rabbit jumping out of a

Letters from Paris: Flâneur as Voleur.

PARIS — Aggravated robberies are up more than 40 percent in the Paris public transport system, and the government places blame for the rise on the attractiveness of smartphones. See: Smartphones Lure Sticky Fingers in Paris The interior minister, Brice Hortefeux, calls it the “iPhone effect,” and the police talk of

On how engineers and scientists are like guardian angels.

“Wasn’t that a miracle? she remarked. Her guardian angels were with her that day.” Those were the words of my sister-in-law a couple of years ago after Will’s older sister walked away unscathed from a rollover collision. Stopping an object’s momentum requires force acting over a period