- Object Lessons — Bogost and Schaberg edit a series about the hidden lives of ordinary things, from advocates to attendants, heresies to shares. For anyone who cares about products.
- A Data Programming CS1 Course (PDF) — We have found that students can be motivated to learn programming and computer science concepts in order to analyze DNA, predict the outcome of elections, detect fraudulent data, suggest friends in a social network, determine the authorship of documents, and more. The approach is more than just a collection of “nifty assignments”; rather, it affects the choice of topics and pedagogy.
- Cars and the Future (Ben Thompson) — This generational pattern of adoption will, in the history books, look sudden, even as it seems to unfold ever so slowly for those of us in the here and now — especially those of us working in technology. The pace of change in the technology industry — which is young, hugely driven by Moore’s Law, and which has largely catered to change-embracing geeks — is likely the true aberration. After all, the biggest mistake consistently made by technologists is forgetting that for most people technology is a means to an end, and for all the benefits we can list when it comes to over-the-top video or a network of on-demand self-driving vehicles, change and the abandonment of long-held ideals like the open road and a bit of TV after supper is an end most would prefer to avoid.
- CES 2016 Observations for Product People — The big challenge is no surprise. Software development is unable to keep up with the hardware. What is going to separate one device from another or one company from another will be the software execution, not just the choice of chipset or specs for a peripheral/sensor. It would be hard to overstate the clear opportunity to build winning products using stronger software relative to competitors. Said another way, spending too many cycles on hardware pits you against the supply chain for most products. The whole piece is solid.
"design" entries
Four short links: 13 January 2016
Object Lessons, Data Programming, Generational Adoption, and Product Observations
Four short links: 12 January 2016
Civilian Drone Market, Things Learned, Playful Things, and Bottom-up CS
- Overview of the Civilian Drone Market (DIY Drones) — Six categories: toy quadcopters; FPV/racing; consumer camera drones; prosumer camera drones; consumers, industrial, agricultural, NGO and Research drones; winged and VTOL drones.
- 52 Things I Learned in 2015 — very high strike rate of “interesting!”
- How to Turn Complicated Things into Playful Things (Tom Whitwell) — Children are the apex players, at the top of the hierarchy. Only when they’re absent will adults play. […] You know when play is working, because the room gets noisy.
- Bottom Up Computer Science — A free, online book designed to teach computer science from the bottom end up. Topics covered include binary and binary logic, operating systems internals, toolchain fundamentals, and system library fundamentals.
Four short links: 14 December 2015
Design for the Surveilled, Concept Learning, Media Access, and Programming Challenges
- Please Stop Making Secure Messaging Systems — how to design for the surveilled, and the kinds of tools they need BEYOND chat.
- Human Level Concept Learning through Probabilistic Program Induction — paper and source code for the nifty “learn handwriting from one example” paper that’s blowing minds.
- Access Denied (The Awl) — media had power because they had an audience, but social media gives celebrities, sports people, and politicians a bigger audience than media outlets. So, the media outlets aren’t needed, and consequently, they’re losing “access.” A reporter that depends on access to a compelling subject is by definition a reporter compromised. A publication that depends on cooperation from the world that it specializes in is likewise giving up something in terms of its ability to tell the truth about it. And nearly the entire media as it exists today is built around these negotiations.
- Stockfighter — a series of free, fun programming challenges […] suitable for programmers at all experience levels.
Four short links: 2 December 2015
Regulating Addictive Attention, Microservice Middleware, Better 3D Scanning, and Anti-Disassembly Tricks
- If the Internet is Addictive, Why Don’t We Regulate It? — an excellent look at behaviourism, gambling machine flow, design-for-addiction, attention, regulation. As Schüll puts it: ‘It just seems very duplicitous to design with the goal of capturing attention, and then to put the whole burden onto the individual.’
- Zipnish — using varnish as middleware for your microservices, with Zipnish to create Zipkin-style analysis of your API performance.
- Using Polarisation to Improve 3D Scanning (PDF) — The proposed technique can resolve finer detail than some laser scannners
- Anti-Disassembly Tricks Used in Malware — also “things I remember from trying to break copy protection in 1980s games.”
Mike Kuniavsky on the tectonic shift of the IoT
The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: The Internet of Things ecosystem, predictive machine learning superpowers, and deep-seated love for appliances and furniture.
Subscribe to the O’Reilly Radar Podcast to track the technologies and people that will shape our world in the years to come.
In this week’s episode of the Radar Podcast, O’Reilly’s Mary Treseler chats with Mike Kuniavsky, a principal scientist in the Innovation Services Group at PARC. Kuniavsky talks about designing for the Internet of Things ecosystem and why the most interesting thing about the IoT isn’t the “things” but the sensors. He also talks about his deep-seated love for appliances and furniture, and how intelligence will affect those industries.
Here are some highlights from their conversation:
Wearables as a class is really weird. It describes where the thing is, not what it is. It’s like referring to kitchenables. ‘Oh, I’m making a kitchenable.’ What does that mean? What does it do for you?
There’s this slippery slope between service design and UX design. I think UX design is more digital and service design allows itself to include things like a poster that’s on a wall in a lobby, or a little card that gets mailed to people, or a human being that they can talk to. … Service design takes a slightly broader view, whereas UX design is — and I think usefully — still focused largely on the digital aspect of it.
Four short links: 13 November 2015
CEO Optimism, Fibbing Networking, GPU TensorFlow, and GUI Font Design
- CEO Optimism — CEOs always act on leading indicators of good news, but only act on lagging indicators of bad news. (Andy Grove)
- Fibbing — lie to your router table to get the most from your network. Clever!
- TensorFlow for GPUs — Amazon image of TensorFlow ready to run on their GPU compute cloud.
- metaflop — UI for metafont that makes it super-easy to design your own sweet-looking font. (via BoingBoing)
Panels and panel sets
Common patterns emerge from a variety of components.
Picture a modern web application. It almost certainly uses interactive controls, perhaps a carousel at the start, probably a set of tabs or an accordion, or maybe it is based on a coverflow or deck. These are common user interface metaphors: if you use these terms, designers know what you mean, and people recognize and know how to use them. At first glance these design patterns seem to have quite different characteristics, but we’d like to convince you that they really aren’t so different after all.
Ok, convince me!
The idea of a panel of content comes from the printing industry. In printing, a panel is a single page of a brochure, or one face of a folded leaflet. A print panel might be visually unique, like the cover of a leaflet, or be like other panels in a set, like the inner faces of the leaflet.
The concept of a panel has been applied to web design multiple times, generally becoming interactive along the way. Panels of content can be expanded or collapsed, removed completely, or presented in collections. Each of these design patterns has a common purpose: display a collection or set of things, generally one at a time to save on screen space. They may cycle vertically or horizontally, or peel off in layers, but these transition effects do not change the fundamental purpose of the thing – to navigate effectively through some pieces of content.
Four short links: 26 October 2015
Dataflow Computers, Data Set Explorer, Design Brief, and Coping with Uncertainty
- Dataflow Computers: Their History and Future (PDF) — entry from 2008 Wiley Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Engineering.
- Mirador — open source tool for visual exploration of complex data sets. It enables users to discover correlation patterns and derive new hypotheses from the data.
- How 23AndMe Got Regulatory Approval Back (Fast Company) — In order to meet FDA requirements, the design team had to prove that the reports provided on the website would be comprehensible to any American consumer, regardless of their background or education level. And you thought YOUR design brief was hard.
- Getting Comfortable with Uncertainty (The Atlantic) — We have this natural distaste for things that are unfamiliar to us, things that are ambiguous. It goes up from situational stressors, on an individual level and a group level. And we’re stuck with it simply because we have to be ambiguity-reducers.
Four short links: 21 October 2015
Technology Ideals, Saying No, Future Things, and a Sweet Article Format
- How Will We Live? — we tend to imbue technology with the ideals of the people who have created it, and the messages of those who market it. However, creators and marketeers only ever set the affordances and suggest a use case. A technology’s true impact will always be defined by those who use it. Whether that’s knitting groups or fascist regimes, technology becomes an amplifier and accelerator of the social, cultural, and political values of the groups who use it, not those who made it. And it will continue to be used in ways you can never imagine.
- Fortunate People Say No (Ian Bogost) — you have to say ‘yes’ for a long while before you can earn the right to say ‘no.’ Even then, you usually can’t say ‘no’ at whim. By the time you can say ‘no’ indiscriminately, then you’re already so super-privileged that being able to say ‘no’ is not a prerequisite of success, but a result of it. (via Austin Kleon) (via Cory Doctorow)
- The Thing From The Future (Stuart Candy) — a game for creating thought-provoking artifacts from the future. Design fiction idea generator, in other words.
- Sweet Article Format — big lede with shortcuts to relevant sections. As Courtney says, “while I don’t know what I’d use this for, I like it.” (via Courtney Johnston)
Four short links: 19 October 2015
Academic Robot Kit, Countertop Biolab, Generous Interfaces, and Universal Design
- Open Academic Robot Kit — A common set of parts, specifications, and software to catalyse the design, construction, dissemination, and re-use of robots in an academic and research environment. (via Robohub)
- Amino: Desktop Bioengineering for Everyone (Indiegogo) — a counter-top sized biolab that enables anyone to grow living cells to create new and interesting things – like fragrances, flavours, materials, medicine, and more.
- Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections (Mitchell Whitelaw) — Decades of digitisation have made a wealth of digital cultural material available online. Yet search — the dominant interface to these collections — is incapable of representing this abundance. Search is ungenerous: it withholds information, and demands a query. This paper argues for a more generous alternative: rich, browsable interfaces that reveal the scale and complexity of digital heritage collections. (via Courtney Johnston)
- The Universal Design (Christine Dodrill) — there need to be five basic primitives in your application: State – What is true now? What was true? What happened in the past? What is the persistent view of the world? Events – What is being changed? How will it be routed? Policy – Can a given event be promoted into a series of actions? Actions – What is the outcome of the policy? Mechanism – How should an event be taken in and an action put out? […] All you need is a command queue feeding into a thread pool which feeds out into a transaction queue which modifies state. And with that you can explain everything from VMWare to Google.