Steven Johnson: The Pothole Paradox

(via Steven Johnson’s blog)

There’s a distinctive feeling you get walking around a new city on your own — the guide books and review sites can tell you where the best restaurants and bars are, and give you the architectural history. But there’s always a feeling that you’re missing something, that the neighborhood is filled with another kind of data: all the debates and rumors and breaking news that make up the real social information of a community, from the true experts. Right now that layer is almost inaccessible to us — assuming we can’t always sit down and talk to an actual neighborhood maven. We can search a million servers scattered across the globe for a specific text string and get results within seconds. But we can’t do a search that tells us what people are saying about the street we’re currently standing on. It’s about time we changed that. Read More

The Future of Coney Island

(Via the NYC Department of City Planning Website)

The proposal would capitalize on Coney Island’s beachfront location and envisions the development of between approximately 4,000 and 5,000 new units of housing outside the amusement area, including roughly 900 affordable units. It would promote new retail uses and hotels to serve the year round amusement area. Through the application of the Inclusionary Housing bonus, the proposal would expand opportunities for the creation of affordable housing in the rezoning area.

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Papervision Killing It Some More

(via papervision blog)

The new site for the Canon EOS 400D camera is certainly one of the most impressive Papervision3D efforts so far.

It combines navigation and exploration in an immersive experience over three different playgrounds.

The entire piece flows beautifully, showing attention to detail and a good balance between creative and technical.

A good example of an experimental Flash site that works great as part of an advertisement campaign. It’s very refreshing to see agencies and clients going this way.

Created by mediacatalyst in Amsterdam and developed by multimedia designer Vincent Rebers.

I Want (to be) An Android


Wow – Google’s new Android phone OS runs applications written in Java. Hello OOP.

A Night Out With Liz

Cool Seal For Galicia Rowing Team

Cool Seal For Galicia Rowing Team

Future You


Meet My Future You – Find Your Own Future You

Been messing around with the Svedka Vodka Future You site. The interface is exactly the one we came up with at Firstborn for the Stride Gum campaign. Nothing crazy, but it’s kind of nice to see an interface and campaign idea we had, that was shot down, finally implemented. Our idea was seeing your future you after chewing Stride gum for 5 years straight and we were going to use some pixel morphing flash-bitmap stuff – so there was another layer of complexity added there – but its close enough.

flickrbrowsr.com

So here is my first pass at www.flickrbrowsr.com (I just bought the URL). The idea is that the user starts with their photos. They drill-down until they get to a single image of theirs. When they get there, that is the sarting point for their browsing experience. Of course they can continue browsing their images – but that’s what flickr already offers. The cool part about this project is the ease by which a user can browse other people’s similar photos while browsing theirs. See the post: “Flickr Mashup Idea”. The idea is that if I’m admiring my African sunset photo, I can see how other users shot a similar photo to get ideas for the next time I’m in that situation. Using Kelvin Luck’s toolkit, I plan on using photo tags, file names and set names to achieve the similar results presented to the user. It’s all still a work very much in progress, but here’s where I’m at:

Newsknitter Generative Knitting

(from generator x)

While the generative potential of knitting should be obvious (it has pixels, it follows rules), a new project by Turkish artists Ebru Kurbak and Mahir Yavuz shows the full computational potential of the medium: Newsknitter combines computerized knitting technology with live internet feeds to produce the ultimate in customized sweaters. Using the daily news as a data source, a software generates different visualizations which are then finalized as patterns ready for knitting.

Flickr Browsr

(Role: Design Director, Original Concept.)

I have been formulating an idea over the past few months around using flickr’s search/tag system to create a browse-by-relevance experience. Meaning that the starting point for the user’s experience is an image of theirs, and from there they may choose to visualize other flickr users’ images that share the same tags/set/image names. So if I’m in my Africa set and I’m looking at “lion1.jpg” I can decide to flip a switch and see other images that get returned when a search for “Africa” + “Lion” is run.

This idea stems from an idea I had a while back for “capture-collective.com” – what was supposed to be a photo critique/continuing education experience – where users were given an assignment (i.e. “black and white portraiture”) and they could share their photos while receiving and giving critiques on other’s photos in one place. Shortly after I formulated that idea flickr hit the scene in a big way and their “flickr groups” kind of occupied the same conceptual space capture-collective.com did. This is an ongoing personal concept that is continually being refined and rebuilt.