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 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 [...]
Authors: Höök, K., Sengers, P., and Andersson G. The evaluation of the Influence Machine. Methods: anecdotal, co-discovery, video taped for analysis. Stresses that this evaluation is to inform artists as designers of interactive systems. The question is: Is this a good interaction? Artists are most interested in the detail of each unique interaction. Reports findings [...]
Authors: Maribeth Gandy, Blair Macintyre, Peter Presti, Steven Dow, Jay Bolter The paper is about an emerging idea from Augmented Reality research (AR is like VR, except that it uses head-mounted displays to place the virtual world on top of the real world — instead of a completely virutal world) to build AR Karaoke / [...]
Author: JCR Licklider This is a classic paper of human-computer interaction and it lays out the foundation of the currently operating paradigm of “human in the loop” computing. Licklider positions Man-Computer Symbiosis (MCS) between “Mechanically Extended Man,” the paradigm of the industrial revolution, where technology tools extend the arms, ears, and eyes of mankind, and [...]
