Seit heute liegt die neue WEAVE auf unserem Schreibtisch und wiedermal sind wir dabei. In der Ausgabe 03.12 Juni/Juli geben wir euch einen Einblick in die Welt von Punze, Laufweite und Co. am Bildschirm (Seite 92-96). Das dazu passende Tutorial “Typo mit CSS3″ befindet sich auf den Seiten 76 bis 78. In diesem zeigen wir euch neben Text-Shadow und Rotation die vielfältigen Möglichkeiten von CSS3 auf – am Beispiel eines Blog-Artikels.
Eine Termin den Ihr euch merken solltet, ist die push.conference am 23.November 2012. Auf Seite 112 gewährt Christian Perstl einen Blick hinter die Kulissen der Konferenz-Organisation. Die neue WEAVE gibt’s jetzt am Kiosk oder hier als Abo.

One of the most ambitious attempts to do that is AutoCAD WS. It is nothing less than the huge CAD application from Autodesk, cooked down for mobile devices. I was curious if that could ever work. So I grabbed an iPod Touch and a Samsung Galaxy, created an Autodesk.com account and started to try CAD on the go.

First of all, the prerequisites: to use the app, you will need a phone or tablet with at least a 1 GHz CPU and an Autodesk.com account. The features of the application include not only drawing functionalities, but also interactive 3D visualization. Furthermore, you can plot and share your drawings and even use the GPS antenna of your phone to navigate construction sites. Sounds like a great tool for a busy engineer!

When you open the first DWG from your Autodesk account, you find yourself looking a small viewport along with tons of toolbars. Editing tools appear when you tap the screen. Other tools are located at the bottom of the screen. AutoCAD WS gives you all the basic drawing tools along with functions for measurments and text input. Unfortunately, the drawing tools appear pretty inaccurate. This is also due to the missing command bar (you can only define coordinates once a point has been set).

But hardcore CAD editing is probably not what this app has been designed for anyway. The screen size alone makes that impossible. I remember working on CAD on a 15″ laptop, which was horrible, so you can imagine how much fun it is to try the same on the 3.5″ screen of the iPod Touch. It might work better on a tablet, but even there the lines easily blur together due to the massive scaling that has to be applied.

So on we go. AutoCAD WS supports a 2D top view as well as 3D wireframe and solid views. 3D did not work on my iPod Touch, probably because it was an older model and didn’t have enough RAM. Memory is a big problem altogehter. The application often feels sluggish, hangs or crashes completely while working.

In my opinion, AutoCAD WS only makes sens if you want to present your drafts quickly or compare drawings to the original model without printing the construction plan. But I honestly can’t imagine editing complex DWGs in this application.

Confidentiality is another issue. When you want to use AutoCAD WS, you have to use Autodesk.com. This could present quite a problem for companies with restrictive non disclosure policies.

So I can safely say that this app is not for me. It doesn’t add value to my workflow. It illustrates perfectly that not every application is made for being adapted for the mobile world. Not every task is suitable for being done on the small screen. And CAD is definitely one of those tasks.

Und wieder sind zwei Monate ins Land gestrichen, seitdem wir in der letzten Ausgabe des WEAVE Magazins über UI-Wording geschrieben haben. In der Ausgabe 02.12 April/Mai sind wir wieder vertreten. Einmal auf Seite 11 mit meinem Statement über eine gute User Experience und auf Seite 70 – 73 zeigen Andreas Santoro von Pentland Firth und ich auf, wie man relativ schnell iPhones Siri hacken kann, um via Sprachsteuerung und Arduino eine LED fernzusteuern. Alle notwendigen Dateien gibt es wiederum als Download auf weave.de. Die WEAVE gibt es an jedem gut sortierten Kiosk oder hier als Abo. Viel Spaß beim Lesen!

Text! 3D! Exclamation marks!

We just created a little app that allows you to turn any text on the web into a piece of 3D art. Unleash the text-shadow CSS property and layer as many of them as you want behind your text.

Try the Awesome 3D text generator here!

Examples

After a Friday with initial lectures, some mixed grill plates and Serbian beer, we headed into a Saturday which was fully packed with 19 speakers spread into two parallel tracks. With a lineup so great, it wasn‘t always easy to choose…

Greg J. Smith

Greg J. Smith is a designer and educator based in Toronto. Talking about city systems and forms of urban navigation, he presented work dealing with the intersection of spatial and informational systems.

As a very interesting example, Greg explained the idea behind the “counterveillance” app called sukey. Sukey is a smartphone app to enable demonstrators to avoid the police tactic of kettling by collaboratively feeding the system with up-to-date information. Basically, as he pointed out, smartphones are a bundle of sensors. People subsequently become moving data collectors, by carrying around these phones and sensors. Using this mass of data can be the base for new ways of gathering information in a collaborative and dynamic way.

Further projects included BKME, a platform that channels the power of cyclists to reclaim bike lanes from vehicles, and the Urban Sound Ecology, a research initiative dedicated to recording, archiving and mapping the soundscapes of Canadian Cities.

Lab[au]

The next talk was given by a member of Lab[au], a Belgian studio which creates interactive artworks, audiovisual performances and scenographies. Very important for them is to do all the steps involved by themselves, including developing their own software, hardware and assembling the parts to form the whole.

In their work Signals to Noise, Lab[au] describes how valid information is related to irrelevant information. Furthermore they featured a Game of Life version made of Mosaics and RGB LED patterns for a performative facade of the Tech Tower in Brussels. Lab[au]s portfolio featured some highly conceptual work. A question that emerged for us, is what remains of the product if you take away the process?

 Karsten Schmidt

Karstens talk was one of the most inspirational here at resonate festival, as he both shared views and opinions on his approach of working and how future developments of creative coding may look like.

Right at the start, he pointed out that he is an open source believer and that everyone should have access to all possible tools. He certainly goes ahead as a good example as the publisher of the amazing toxiclib for Processing.

When given access to tools, people have the opportunity to become more creative and active, Karsten is certain of. We tend to see our environment and think everything are final objects. But in fact, everything is the result of a process, was created, designed by somebody and can be shaped. »Create something that didn’t exist before«, he said, »If you believe in this world view, you will see new possibilities everywhere.«

Moving on, Karsten talked about how he believes creative computing, both hardware and software wise, will develop in the near future: Projects like Arduino, MBED, Raspberry PI are describing a new kind of hardware. With e.g. the mobility of smartphones, the graphical processing power of the Raspberry PI and the democratic approach of Arduino, computers will become even more ubiquitous than they already are. This reminded us of Greg J. Smith’s earlier analogy of seeing people with their mobile sensor-loaded devices as walking data collectors.

Concerning software, he addressed the fact that while processing power still roughly follows Moores law (doubles every 18 months), this is now achieved by spreading the workload on multiple cores. To make use of the power, software needs to support multi-threading. While unfortunately e.g. Processing doesn’t do that (yet), Clojuire is the developing environment which Karsten presented as a possible future tool for creative coding. Also, toxiclibs version 2 will most likely be developed for Clojure, so keep an eye on it!

United Visual Artist (UVA) – Alexandros Tsolakis

Representing the area of interactive installations, Alexandros Tsolakis gave an introduction to the work and the interdisciplinary approach at UVA. Based on the different backgrounds of the three founders, the team at UVA is comprised of around 20 people bringing together visual design, technology and architecture. They see themselves like old alchemists and story-tellers, as they try to »design for social response«.

Thinking of their work, UVA is splitting their projects into three different fields: music performance, living machines and nature & technology. The first project was a stage set for Massive Attack. For the last tour in 2010, a contemporary, modular and highly mobile (think setting up & breaking down over and over again) was needed.

UVA met these requirements with a modular approach starting from an actual typeface comprised of horizontal rows. These rows on the other hand were actually a physical feature of the collapsing displays panels.Years of work for Massive Attack let UVA become a specialist in the event business. Meanwhile they created performance installations for musicians like U2 (360 Tour) or Jay-Z.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky – first act

Ending the morning session, we attended the talk of DJ Spooky, who was also supposed to perform as the final music act later that evening. What particularly got us interested beforehand, was the fact that he as an artist and musician was invited to speak at this design conference.

After a brief excerpt, in which he made a stand for looser copyright regulations especially having Hip Hop in mind, and compared musical sampling to early experiments of film makers, he went on to his main current project: The book of ice.

In 2009, DJ Spooky packed up his studio and took a film crew with him to Antarctica. Inspired and influenced by the surrounding environment there, he wrote an album as well as a book. He succeeded in creating both a work of (visual and auditory) art, as well as raising awareness for climate change.

Sound as liquid architecture, architecture as frozen music, the geometry of snow flakes – DJ Spooky presented his visions and thoughts in gripping words. Recorded sonic data from Icebergs made him think of a dying landscape and changing environment. Not forgetting to repeatedly point out that all this was made into music, he built up great expectations by refusing to play a single note of his album before his night performance.

With high expectations and wild imaginations, we went into the lunch break.

Last week we decided to take 2 days off to head to Belgrade and visit a new conference on art, technology and digital culture. It was time for resonate festival. As co-organizers of the decoded conference in Munich, we have been media partners and share a good relationship to Filip Visnjic (organizer of resonate festival and the man behind creativeapplications).

The conference had an impressive start right in its first year. We saw inspiring talks, met interesting people and, not to forget, enjoyed the city of Belgrade.
For those of you who could not make it to resonate, we want to share a resumee of the talks and our personal highlights here at our blog. Due to the big extend, we decided to split the review in three parts.

Part 1: Friday

Friday was primarily the workshop day, accompanied by film screenings and talks in the small club room. All of the nine workshops took place in one big room, and even though the number of attendees was limited to 10, everybody was invited to walk around and listen in and see what people were doing. For example Karsten Schmidt, media artist and creator of toxiclibs, who gave people an introduction to his library. Andreas Müller explained how to interact with light installations via DMX protocol and openFrameworks applications. One group hacked old Nintendo game systems while other were experimenting with 3D film making using Kinect cameras. All in all, an incredibly wide range of topics was covered.

Martin Fuchs & Peter Bichsel – Writtenimages

The first talk of the day took place at the fully packed club room. Martin and Peter presented their project Writtenimages: A »programmed book« which features selected generative artworks from 42 media artists like flight404, Casey Reas, Marius Watz, Lia, Golan Levin and many more.
The two creators took a radically new approach to the established medium of a book: For every single copy of the book, a workflow program created by Martin and Peter will one by one run all submitted generative applications, creating unique outputs. Then, the resulting images along with the projects description are arranged in a generative layout. Even the order of the chapters is generated newly every time, before a final PDF is delivered for printing.

The ultimate goal of the creators is to provide on-demand-printing, so that every time somebody orders a copy, their setup will create an entirely new and unique book.

An interesting question that Martin and Peter said came up in discussion with their printing company, was whether the copies are now part of one edition, or if every single copy of the book is actually its very own edition. Who can tell?

Jonny Richards – The Guardian Interactive Team

Next up was Jonny Richards from the UK newspaper The Guardian. He talked about the omnipresent “Flow of Information” – the consistent stream of news and information generated by our media environment. This includes not only classic news, but especially channels like Twitter and Facebook, which generate continuous flows of messages. Around these social media networks, an ecosystem of applications is building up. Apps cross with these info streams like pinterest and spotify do, inspiring others such as storify, a platform for publishing news stories.

Richards used three categories to describe how to deal with the flow of information:

1. Aggregation:
   aggregation-based services like summify and news.me making more sense of a news string
2. Realtime:
   services like gnip or datasift helping to provide us with datasets, more will come
3. Contextualization:
   a discipine were The Guardian is really focused on, for example adding information about an article from a wider context like social media and timebased data. Johnny Richards showed an example of the Rupert Murdoch interview visualization were The Guardian visualized the twitter messages that came up around the live coverage of the Rupert Murdoch interview in court.

Furthermore, he pointed out that in his opinion many news sites are not yet really good in handling news streams within their web layout, while refreshable news feeds are already standard in mobile apps as twitter, facebook, xing, linkedin etc..
As an example, Richards presented the NY Times mobile app. He found it not to be a good solution, as it tries to stick to the old concept of a front page. This concept isn’t suited for the behavior of sequenced information, refreshable content and an unfinishable state of news information.

Jonathan Puckey – Co-founder of Moniker

Last speaker on Friday was Jonathan Puckey. His agency Moniker does generative artwork, but that doesn’t exclusively require computers. Sometimes a »human algorithm« or a »human renderer« produce even more interesting results.
Another fact very special at Moniker, is that for them the process itself is the product, following the formula INPUT + LOGIC = PROCESS. The most important parameters of such a process are time, relationship and change.

Especially to influence the aspect of change, Jonathan likes to experiment with humans as a factor of variation. A tool that he mentioned popped up in several talks at resonate: Amazons mechanical turk, an online marketplace that lets customers have small tasks performed by a large number of individual workers. Moniker started a little experiment, giving a short statement to one mechanical turk with the task to negate the meaning. This would then be done over and over again, negating the negation back and forth, producing sometimes very coarse but other times very poetic results.

Change and relationship are also important aspects in the Human Kaleidoscope project (above). Four people take seats around one piece of paper. In turns, one person at a time has e.g. 20 seconds to draw something using straight lines, while the others are asked to redraw it mirrored from their own perspective in real time. Over time, the variation and small mistakes add up, as someone might continue drawing from a line that others didn’t even have in their sketch, leading to confusion and even more variation.

For a poster project called Graphic Design in the White Cube, Moniker decided that the design has to follow a defined ruleset, but this ruleset is not interpreted by a computer but by humans which then render the poster according to their understanding of the given rules. The intention of this was to produce formations rather than forms.

10 people sit down in a circle, and are given an individual set of instructions each. The 1st worker starts drawing based on his rules, then hands over the poster to the worker next to him, who applies changes according to his specific rules. Every designer follows individual rules like »paint 3 bubbles next to a line« or »draw a line from one headline to the paragraph«.
By completing a complete circle with each poster, a set of different generative posters is created. They look like they could be generated by a computer, but they have their very own aesthetics.

Yet, Moniker is not only focused on print media. For the song »More is Less« by C-Mon & Kypski, a generative, dynamic music video was developed. The video is based on contributed webcam pictures of people each posing for one specific frame in the film based on instruction. Their image is taken, uploaded and the music video is rendered newly every hour at their website OneFrameOfFame.com. Feel free to participate!

That is a bad idea. You should not do it.

Asking a relative to test an interface means that you are conducting a usability study with just one test subject. To put that in statistical terms: it’s a sample size of 1 (in words: ONE). You don’t have to be a statistician to realize that this is not much and definitely not sufficient to draw any conclusions.

But it’s better than nothing, right?

Testing with one (or two, or five) people is not just »not as good« as a proper study — it can actually be worse than no study at all! The reason for this is, that smaller sample sizes, tend to yield more extreme results. Sometimes you will get the result that a design is awesome, sometimes they will say it sucks. You can’t tell if the data you have collected is an outlier or if it represents most of your users.

The graph above shows the sample size you need in order to achieve a 95% confidence with a 10% error margin for various user bases.

Not convinced? Then let me ask a different question: Would you take a medicine that has been tested on just one person?

Is it all futile?

Fortunately, even those »tests« can provide some value as long as you treat the outcomes as opinions rather statistically significant facts. An opinion can provide you with something to think about, but it can never have the same imperative quality as a test result. Not for usability issues, and not for any other kind of design decision.

Don’t fall for the temptation to let statistically meaningless tests influence your thinking too much. If your mother is able (or unable) to use your design, that probably says more about her than about the design. And unless the target audience of your product is exclusively your mother – don’t trust her on that matter.

Bonus exercise

You can calculate the sufficient sample size for your test on this website.

Stellt man sich den archetypischen Designer vor, denkt man häufig an einen etwas eigensinnigen, schaltragenden Kauz, der in seinem stillen Kämmerlein sitzt, eine gewisse Weile über abgedrehten Ideen brütet und sich schließlich mit einer innovativen Gestaltungslösung  zurückmeldet – für den Normalsterblichen nicht unbedingt zu verstehen, aber immer zu lieben.

In der Realität angekommen stellt man doch recht schnell fest, das abgesehen von dem Schal nicht viel von diesem Bild übrig bleibt. Die Kernkompetenz des Designers ist nicht der eigenbrödlerische Kreativitätsrausch. Vielmehr stellt die Fähigkeit, mit den verschiedenen am Projekt beteiligten Parteien zu kommunizieren und die vielfältigen Anforderungen und Sichtweisen zu verbinden, eine ganz wesentliche Kernkompetenz dar. Der Gestalter muss sich gewissermaßen als Bindeglied zwischen Technik, Kunde und Nutzer verstehen und jede Schnittstelle birgt dabei verschiedene Herausforderungen.

Doch wieviel Kommunikation braucht es wirklich, ab wann beeinträchtigt zuviel Absprache die Produktivität und welche Wege bieten sich dazu an?

Der Haus- und Hofdesigner

Eine gerade bei Kunden sehr beliebte Variante der Zusammenarbeit ist der Designer vor Ort, rund um die Uhr verfügbar. Die Vorteile liegen auf der Hand: die Zugriffszeiten werden auf ein Minimum reduziert, auf jede Frage oder spontane Änderung kann direkt vor Ort eingegangen werden und mögliche unerwünschte Entwicklungsrichtungen können im Keim erstickt werden. In dieser Unkompliziertheit liegt allerdings auch die Problematik dieser Variante. Ist eine einfache Möglichkeit gegeben, wird diese auch genutzt und so wird der Techniker jede noch so kleine Frage oder Anmerkung an den Designer weiterleiten, anstatt sich selbst Gedanken zu machen. Letzterer dagegen kann endlich seinen Kontrolldrang voll ausleben und wird sich vermutlich ein ständiges Schielen auf den Nachbarscreen, gefolgt von wohlmeinenden Kommentaren und Verbesserungsvorschlägen, kaum verkneifen können. Die Produktivität leidet erfahrungsgemäß auf beiden Seiten.

Die wöchentliche Stippvisite

Das genaue Gegenteil stellt die vollständig autarke Arbeit mit regelmäßiger Rücksprache dar. Der Vorteil: Da die Arbeit vollkommen isoliert erfolgt, gibt es keine Störungen und Unterbrechungen. Man kann sich voll und ganz auf den Arbeitsprozess konzentrieren und die Effizienz wird auf ein Maximum gesteigert. Dafür ist hier eine spontane Rücksprache nicht oder nur sehr eingeschränkt möglich. Sofern nicht vorher präzise festgelegt wurde, welche Tasks auf welche Weise bearbeitet werden (was nur in den seltensten Fällen möglich ist), passiert es schnell mal, dass sich Design und Entwicklung in sehr verschiedene Richtungen bewegen – und die anschließende Überarbeitung auf einen gemeinsamen Konsens relativiert die vorherige Produktivität.

Der gesunde Mittelweg

Die beste Lösung für eine reibungslose Kommunikation liegt in der Regel also wie so oft irgendwo dazwischen. Häufigere Treffen mit zwischenzeitlich unabhängigem Arbeiten, seltenere Treffen mit permanentem Austausch via Chat/Mail, autarkes Arbeiten mit gemeinsamem, zentralem Datenaustausch – welche Methode da die effektivste ist, hängt von vielen Faktoren ab: In welcher Phase befindet sich das Projekt? Gibt es eine interne Hierarchie? Ist der Projektablauf klar vordefiniert? Die Pauschallösung wird es in dem Bereich nicht geben und auch für die einzelnen Fälle scheint noch keine ultimative Variante gefunden zu sein.

We are living in a digital World, were we post notes on our Phone and write eMails instead of real letters. But when it comes to visualizing some screens or a whole screen flow of your concept, you are much faster with sketching like Philipp pointed out on his post. While we are designing the interactive Experience for mobile as well, it‘s pretty cool to have a template for your sketches.

So we made one for our everyday work based on the iPhone 4S. Afterwards we thought: »Let‘s give it away for free for people.« We did the Illustrator work and you can focus on sketching your Experiences. Enjoy and spread it around!

Download: iPhone Sketch Template for free (Scaled 1:1,4 as PDF, 266 KB)

Download: iPhone Sketch Template for free (Original Size as PDF, 270 KB)

Last Update: 29th Feb. 2012
- Grid is now 80 px which fits better to iPhone proportions
- Additional version with the original size of the iPhone 4S (115,2 x 58,6 mm)

Im Anschluss an meinen Talk über Sci-Fi Interfaces auf der decoded@mcbw möchten wir unseren Zuhörern und weiteren Interessierten eine Liste an Filmen zur Hand geben, die sich aus technologischer und ästhetischer Sicht lohnen gesehen zu werden. Chronologisch geordnet finden sich sicher ein paar »alte Bekannte«, doch auch ein paar Juwelen sind darunter, die darauf warten entdeckt zu werden…

Bis 1960

Die Reise zum Mond
OT: Le Voyage dans la Lune, 1902, Frankreich, Regie: Georges Mlis

Metropolis
1927, Germany, Regisseur Fritz Lang

Alarm im Weltraum
OT: Forbidden Planet, 1956, USA, Regie: Fred M. Wilcox

Raumpatrouille Orion (TV-Serie)
1956, West-Deutschland, Regie: Rolf Honold

1960 – 1980

Colossus
OT: Colossus – The Forbin Project, 1970, USA, Regie: J. Sargent

Andromeda – Tödlicher Staub aus dem Weltall
OT: The Andromeda Strain, 1971, USA, Regie: Robert Wise

Dark Star
1974, USA, Regie: John Carpenter

Zardoz
1974, Irland/UK, Regie: John Boorman

Mondbasis Alpha 1 (TV-Serie)
OT: Space 1999, 1975-77, UK, Idee: Gerry & Sylvia Anderson

Logan’s Run – Flucht ins 23. Jahrhundert
1976, USA, Regie: Michael Anderson

Krieg der Sterne
OT: Star Wars, 1977, USA, Regie: George Lucas

2001 – Odyssee im Weltraum
OT: 2001 – A Space Odyssey, 1978, USA, Regie: Stanley Kubrick

Kampfstern Galactica
OT: Battlestar Galactica, 1978, USA, Idee: Glen A. Larson

1980 – 1990

Per Anhalter durch die Galaxis
OT: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1981, UK, Regie: Alan Bell

Blade Runner
1982, USA, Regie: Ridley Scott

Tron
1982, USA, Regie: Steven Lisberger

Wargames – Kriegsspiele
1983, USA, Regie: John Badham

Projekt Brainstorm
1983, USA, Regie: Douglas Trumbull

Star Trek IV: Zurück in die Gegenwart
OT: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, 1986, USA, Regie: Leonard Nimoy

Raumschiff Enterprise: Das nächste Jahrhundert (TV-Serie)
OT: Star Trek – The Next Generation (TNG), 1987-94, USA, Idee: Gene Roddenberry

Zurück in die Zukunft II
OT: Back to the Future II, 1989, USA, Regie: Robert Zerneckis

1990 – 2000

Total Recall
1990, USA, Regie: Paul Verhoeven

Bis ans Ende der Welt
OT: Until the End of the World, 1991, Deutschland/Australien, Regie: Wim Wenders

Demolition Man
1993, USA, Regie: Marco Brambilla

Vernetzt – Johnny Mnemonic
OT: Johnny Mnemonic, 1995, USA/Kanada, Regie: Robert Longo

Das Netz
OT: The Net, 1995, USA, Regie: Irwin Winkler

Hackers – Im Netz des FBI
1995, USA, Regie: Iain Softley

Mission: Impossible
1996, USA, Regie: Brian de Palma

Alien – Die Wiedergeburt
OT: Alien – Resurection, 1997, USA, Regie: Jean-Perre Jeunet

Gattaca
1997, USA, Regie: Andrew Niccol

Das fünfte Element
OT: The Fifth Element/Le Cinquiéme Élément, 1997, Frankreich, Regie: Luc Besson

Der Staatsfeind Nr. 1
OT: Enemy of the State, 1998, USA, Regie: Tony Scott

Futurama (TV-Serie)
1999 – 2003, seit 2007, Idee: Matt Groening & David X. Cohen

Galaxy Quest – Planlos durchs Weltall
OT: Galaxy Quest, 1999, USA, Regie: Dean Parisot

Matrix
1999, USA, Regie: Andy & Larry Wachowski

2000 – 2005

Paycheck – Die Abrechnung
OT: Paycheck, 2000, USA, Regie: John Woo

The 6th Day
2000, USA/Kanada, Regie: Roger Spottiswoode

X-Men
2000, USA, Regie: Brian Singer

Passwort – Swordfish
OT: Password, 2001, USA, Regie: D. Sena

Startup
OT: Antitrust, 2001, USA, Regie: Peter Howitt

Raumschiff Enterprise (TV-Serie)
OT: Star Trek – Enterprise, 2001-2005, USA, Idee: Rick Berman, Brannon Brage & Gene Roddenberry

Die Bourne Identität
OT: The Bourne Identity, 2002, USA/Deutschland, Regie: Doug Liman

Minority Report
2002, USA, Regie: Steven Spielberg

Star Wars: Episode II – Angriff der Klonkrieger
OT: Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, 2002, USA, Regie: George Lucas

Time Machine
2002, USA, Regie: Simon Wells

The Matrix Reloaded
2003, USA, Regie: Andy & Larry Wachowski

I, Robot
2004, USA, Regie: Alex Proyas

2006 – 2010

Mr. & Mrs Smith
2005, USA, Regie: Doug Liman

Die Insel
OT: The Island, 2006, USA, Regie: Michael Bay

Déjà Vu – Wettlauf gegen die Zeit
2006, USA, Regie: Tony Scott

Mission: Impossible III
2006, USA, Regie: J. J. Abrams

The IT Crowd (TV-Serie)
2006-2008, UK, Idee: Graham Linehan

Das Bourne Ultimatum
2007, USA, Regie: Paul Greengrass

The Big Bang Theory (TV-Serie)
Seit 2007, USA, Idee: Chuck Lorre & Bill Prady

James Bond 007 – Ein Quantum Trost
OT: Quantum of Solace Bond, 2008, USA/UK, Regie: Marc Forster

Iron Man
2008, USA, Regie: Jon Favreau

District 9
2009, Südafrika/Neuseeland, Regie: Neill Blomkamp

Star Trek
2009, USA, Regie: J. J. Abrams

Avatar – Aufbruch nach Pandora
2009, USA, Regie: James Cameron

Caprica (TV-Serie)
Seit 2009, USA, Idee: Remi Aubuchon, Ronald D. Morre & David Eick

Tron Legacy
2010, USA, Regie: Joseph Kosinski

Hinweis: Die Liste basiert auf „Stephen Intille’s Concept Video Clip List, Resource for panel at CHI 2004 in Vienna“ und „A Survey of Human-Computer Interaction Design in Science Fiction Movies – Movie References“. Weitere Filme (alphabetisch geordnet) gibt es hier.

Wir öffnen unsere Tore! Diesen Donnerstag (9.2.2012) steht unser Büro den ganzen Tag für Kollegen, Kunden, angehende Gestalter und Designinteressierte offen.

Und nicht nur das: um 11 Uhr, 14 Uhr und 16 Uhr haben wir Präsentationen vorbereitet. Sie erzählen von den Vorgängen hinter den Kulissen von Projekten wie dem ZNT im Deutschen Museum, von Methoden des Interface Design und von unserer ganz persönlichen Entstehungsgeschichte.

Wo? In der Morassistraße 18 (Rückgebäude) in 80469 München.

Dieses Open Studio findet im Rahmen der Munich Creative Business Week statt. Die MCBW bildet auch den Kontext für unsere zweite Veranstaltung: die decoded@MCBW. Die dreitägige Konferenz bietet einzigartige Einblicke in die Beziehung von Kreativität und Geschäftsleben. Tickets sind noch verfügbar.

Flat hierarchies become more and more popular recently, especially in the realms of design and software development. One particular consequence of this appears to be an increase in discussions and exchange of opinions in many situations. While this approach has its upsides, it can also cost valuable work time as well as create tensions within a multidisciplinary team.

As for pirates, they’re a little like these multidisciplinary teams of professionals we enjoy to work in: Differing skills, sharing the will to achieve something and united by the fact that they act outside of common rule sets and will all be equally persecuted for being part of the pirate crew.

Now imagine what would happen if every pirate insisted on their very own opinion where to sail to, or what booty to chase, or only how much rum to be given today. Not much except for long hours of discussion. And the same can be observed with project teams in loose hierarchies.

While the unity and self-determination of the team is one of the essential principles e.g. of Scrum, which we’ve read about here recently, it also creates a problem. Democracy is noble and valid by valuing every single member of a group. But it’s got a weak spot and that’s quick decision processes. When everybody has the possibility to give their opinion, everybody will do so. A set of confident personalities, set up as self dependent democracy will produce elaborate results, but only for a few problems. Eventually some egos will be hurt as well.

In my experience, flat hierarchies are very motivational but lack a moderator to force decisions. This leader must not necessarily be defined as superior boss. He may be part of the team only his profession not being a cannoneer, UI designer or back-end developer but a moderator and decider. Arrrr.

Es ist wieder soweit. Die neue Januar/Februar-Ausgabe des WEAVE Magazin ist erhältlich. Dabei widme ich mich auf Seite 94 einem wichtigen Bestandteil eines jeden User Interfaces. Dem Text.

Was muss ich bei der Beschriftung von UI Elementen beachten? Welche Arten von Meldungen gibt es und wie formuliere ich diese so benutzerfreundlich wie möglich? Dazu habe ich zu Beginn ein kleines Experiment aufgestellt und alle textuellen Inhalte des WordPress-Backend entfernt. Stellt sich nun die Frage, wer kann das noch bedienen? Wie kann ich z.B. den Blogpost an einem gewissen Datum veröffentlichen? Fast unmöglich, ohne die Hilfe des Textes. Nur Umrisse der UI-Elemente und Icons können noch einen groben Anhaltspunkt liefern, sofern der Benutzer mit WordPress bereits vertraut ist.

Mehr zum Thema gibt es wie bereits erwähnt in der neuen WEAVE. Zum Artikel gibt es noch eine Linkliste mit relevanten Seiten zum Thema Text im UI sowie eine kompakte Checkliste, die jeder bei der Umsetzung eines User Interface Textes einmal durchgehen sollte.

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