Topic

technology

A collection of 71 issues

How Steve Jobs got me through grad school.

Will is an engineer. I am a designer. When we first got married, I was a Mac, he was a PC *. My goal was to change that. In February 2004 while I was finalizing grad school applications, he switched, ditching his ugly Dell for a 17″ aluminum PowerBook. He used

On what product designers can learn from the Velveteen Rabbit.

When Seth was little, one of his favorite audio stories was The Velveteen Rabbit, narrated by Meryl Streep and accompanied by George Winston. He listened to this cassette tape over and over and over when he was little. I found the album online and while listening to it again after

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

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

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

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,

Touchscreen Cartography.

This is soooooo cool.

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