Thinky.org is the personal blog of Zach Pousman. I am a designer, researcher, and strategist at the intersection of people and technology. Here you'll find a collection of stuff from my travels around the internet. I like info graphics & visualizations, well-designed goods and services, effective advertising, and novel interaction techniques.
Introduction I got my Nike+ Fuelband more than a month ago. Nike, after their smashing success with the Nike+ hardware-and-software platform for running has developed ‘Nike+ Fuel’ and the Nike+ Fuelband. Nike’s product design department (I assume that this is a continuing collaboration with R/GA on their service design, and Apple for iPod integration) has designed the three-part [...]
One of the best things about the show Mad Men is how accurate the show is to it’s source cultural moment of the ‘golden age of advertising’ in New York. Unlike other period shows like The Playboy Club and Pan Am, Mad Men’s costuming, sets, styling, and even speech attempt to accurately reflect some deep [...]
Where are we watching video content? TV is still the juggernaut. Data is from a Nielsen report for the last half of 2011. And here’s a different source, but platform matters when it comes to watching video too. People love a big screen, but they also love the iPad screen.
There’s rhetorical uses of information visualization, and then there’s this. Just look at the scale on the left and then look at how well and poorly the values line up on the line chart. Especially over there at the end (9.1, 9.0, 8.6). Can’t. Make. The. Line. Go. Down. What a gem.
One really nice little piece of UI I saw this morning: Google Chrome’s print dialog. It displays, directly on top of the print button, a simple calculation of how many pages are to be printed. The team knew that pages mean two different things, so Chrome calculates both how many pages are being printed, but [...]
Many of the rumors about the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 included a claim that Apple was planning to increase the size of the screen, from its current 3.5 inches to 4 inches. And, while it wasn’t clear if there would be both a larger-screen and the standard size, or whether the newest iteration would [...]
Dear Apple, this would be an actual reason to have have a glass back on your phone models. Please consider adding a simlar grid of LEDs behind the glass for ambient updates (click on the ‘illumination demo’), notifications, and even ambient depictions of our activity and the activity of others. Thanks, Zach.
‘YEKPARE’ (monolithic) from nerdworking on Vimeo. This kinda beats the crap out of the Coca-Cola building wrap.
Here’s a quick now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t graph “fix” from Kevin Drum at Mother Jones. The graph on the left is how the original creator from the WSJ chose to divvy up the bins. Each bar represents the total aggregate taxable income for the group, but each bin is quite arbitrary (some span $10,000, others $5 million). But [...]
Owen Mundy, an artist and designer focused on data-driven works, created a facebook app to export all of your Facebook data: relationships (in graphviz dot format even!), posts, and other meta data. It’s called Give Me My Data and I’m going to scrape my Facebook data today. It works with Nodebox, which is a Python [...]
The Dunwoody Georgia Police Department completed a recent experiment: They tweeted each and every 911 call that came through their dispatcher from Friday 4/8 6:00 AM until Saturday morning at 6 AM. There were #111 tweets, spanning the gamut of traffic stops, domestic disturbances, robberies, and suspicious (read “gang”) activities. Even a sound complaint or [...]
I am torn about upcycling. The concept of upcycling is about creating “better” products from lesser ones, as opposed to recycling downward, or downcycling, where high-quality things are turned into lesser-quality goods. As a matter of principle, it’s great to see industrious people (and companies such as holstee and terracycle) take things that are destined [...]
I put my slides from my recent CSCW 2008 talk up on slideshare (thanks Joe McCarthy for *encouraging* us…) here. You can also see my slides from my Ubicomp 2008 presentation back in September. Hope you enjoy the slides… They’re not quite as good without me gesticulating wildly during the whole thing.
In the run-up to this year’s U.S. elections, I’m announcing my candidacy! I am now one step closer to my Ph.D., having successfully proposed my thesis yesterday. Go me. I have some clean up work to do, mostly regarding how I’ll be analyzing my data from the evaluations, and then it’s on to my list [...]
