Sarah Cohen, a Knight professor at Duke University and former reporter at the Washington Post, and Visual Hint bring you Time Flow. Time Flow:
rethink[s] timelines, striving to always show as much textual detail about the data as possible…
TimeFlow offers five different viewing options: timeline, calendar, bar chart, table and list. There is also considerable flexibility in filtering values, combining filters, and re-arranging points on the screen.
250 prepared electro hub magnets | Untitled Sound Objects
Pe Lang + Zimoun 2006
I love this artist. Not just the aesthetics of the work but the self-organizing and pseudo AI principles behind it.
Meta Mirror
Last night was a lot of fun. Liz says it was like back-in-the-day when you used to watch TV while on the phone with your friend. Only now you were on a conference call with 2 million friends.
Having a twitter stream going while watching TV isn’t new. But up until last night I hadn’t ever experienced it’s full enjoyment. Sure, firing off the random Smoke Monster quip during Lost yielded a few funny responses. Complaining about the Mets in real time always offers a misery-loves-company support group that gets me through one more game. But last night was different.
From the assault charges against Big Ben, to the Black Eyed Peas’ epic halftime fail, to some commercials of questionable taste, to the fact that last night’s game made for genuinely good football – there was a lot to talk about. And joke about. And laugh about.
I’d like to see more of this. It’s not every day that an event captures the attention of so many people that a large portion of your social circle will be going on about the exact thing you are, which is why last night was special. The way I see it, there are two variables that strike a balance (kind of like a supply-demand curve). If you have a sufficiently large enough circle of digital friends, almost anything you do someone else will be doing in real-time. Or if you have a sufficiently large enough event, no matter how small your circle of friends is (maybe one lone friend – Tom from MySpace) they’ll be experiencing it as well.
It’s food for thought as we try to replicate the fun-ness of chatting on the phone while watching Saved By the Bell. How can we increase friend-circles to cast a large enough net to catch someone meaningful to you doing something meaningful to you? Invoke smaller but many social circles? That’s kind of what Path is doing. Certainly MetaMirror is banking on creating the forum for something like that to happen. I think in the end adding social tools/APIs to our experiences isn’t enough in and of itself. It has to be at the sweet spot of that curve. Where social size meets event popularity.
I came across two very cool examples of bad-ass drawing toys.
One physical:
One digital:
Now I just have to get mine going again…
Not long ago I read about an engineer from twitter that left to start a bank. So i visited Bank Simple’s website and signed up to be a beta-user. I immediately received an automated response from their Creative Director to field suggestions and understand more about me (their prospective user). Here’s what I wrote:
Hi Bill,
I’m an interactive designer and spend a lot of time consulting brand and service design. I’ve worked for large financial institutions and am continually astonished at two main things:
1) how siloed their business units are which leads to dysfunction and lack of synergy across their entire service offering (to be fair, sometimes they need to be due to govt. regulation).
2) how diametrically opposed to their “friendly” branding the people who actually run things are. If banks were run like Netflix, Zappos or twitter the world would be a better place.
This is where you all (hopefully) come in :)
I’m totally psyched to see how you’ll (hopefully) use digital tools, LBS and a no-bullshit approach to make “banking” [and by banking I mean access to cash, checking services, PFM, small-time investments, lines of credit, etc.] an integrated, painless, cheap(er) and seamless part of my life.
I’d also like to see how peer-to-peer money-lending services can be brought to bear to make the lender frequent and small investments and offer the borrower a choice-filled marketplace to decide what rates/payment structures work best for them. I think connecting people and their personal stories to each other will help humanize the borrowing experience and provide behavioral feedback for people to make better spending decisions.
I’m probably coming across really passionate about banking, but the truth is I’m not. I just see this as an industry so ready to take a giant leap forward that I want it to happen already! I also live in the NYC-area and find high-flying i-bankers obnoxious.
Good luck with this venture and I hope I can be a part of it.
Best,
vb
It’s about time for this, isn’t it?
I was playing today with creating a brand texture out of icons. Currently this test uses a stock icon set called Whitespace and a palette I found on Adobe Kuler. I randomized the grid of icons using three sizes and randomized the colors within the palette.
Next stop is to finish the unique icons and apply the brand colors. Much like the Roundarch Idents I explored a few years ago, the output of this work is meant to programmatically (but within predefined parameters) generate unique brand textures for use in various collateral.
The choice is simple when it’s between a reverse-chron list or a magazine-like layout. Flipboard’s value lies in adding color, depth and a great user-experience to your social media-scape. If you haven’t already tried it (and you should), it does this by using a formatting algorithm to create page-layouts for your social media feeds AND their linked content.
Now Flipboard is offering it’s platform to digitally distribute select print articles in a richer, more purposefully designed way. I’d like to see the impact of this on the velocity of sharing/volume of commenting for these richer, better-designed articles.
