We’ve all seen arguments in the design community that dismiss the role of beauty in visual interfaces, insisting that good designers base their choices strictly on matters of branding or basic design principles. Lost in these discussions is an understanding of the powerful role aesthetics play in shaping how we come to know, feel, and respond.

Consider how designers “skin” an information architect’s wireframes. Or how the term “eye candy” suggests that visual design is inessential. Our language constrains visual design to mere styling and separates aesthetics and usability, as if they are distinct considerations. Yet, if we shift the conversation away from graphical elements and instead focus on aesthetics, or “the science of how things are known via the senses,” we learn that this distinction between how something looks and how it works is somewhat artificial.

After introducing a couple of smart objects and noticing that the audience is uncool as nobody has a Poken, Dominique asks how we are going to deal with the 1000+ smart objects each person is going to have within the next 5 to 10 years. Communicating with these objects could be made easier with Mash-ups.

The agenda will consist of a discussion of the Web of Things, the introduction of a Web-oriented architecture of the real world, the demonstration of two prototypes one of which is going to crash, and finally real-world Mash-ups.

Inspired by Yahoo's Pipes, DERI Pipes is an engine and graphical environment for general Web Data transformations and Mashup.
* Supports RDF, XML, Microformats, JSON and binary streams.
* Use it as a "Web Pipe" or embedded in your applications
* Works as a mashup command Line tool
* Supports SPARQL, XQUERY, Several scripting languages.
* Extend it as needed

We’ve talked in the past about the idea of user interfaces and visual output merging. Instead of a UI on one screen and visuals on another, the idea is that the interface itself melds into the output. I can think of few better examples of how this begins to evolve than a video recently posted on Vimeo by user nucode. Working with a projected, camera-tracked multi-touch interface and audiovisual loops in custom Flash-based software, nucode manipulates samples as though on an alien, futuristic interface.

Steffen Haak is providing us with some blueprints for RESTful apps. He starts with a number of principles:
1) Resource oriented architectures -> services should expose data instead of functionality
2) Lightweight composition and flexible binding -> services should be re-composables
3) Mass collaboration, customization and perpetual beta -> ability to share the compositions.

Mobile widgets are very lightweight applications similar to mashups. They offer to use content on the web, just like mashups, but also content from your mobile phone such as data coming from on-board sensors, address books, messages, etc. Unfortunately mobile widgets platforms are rather proprietary and incompatible amongst the vendors. Efforts at the W3C are going towards a standard for mobile widgets which could really help towards more homogeneity.

There is no clear definition of what a mashup is. It’s about data processing, reuse, Web 2.0 (especially the do-it-yourself part). Victoria
provides an essay of definition: “Web-based applications that is created by combining and processing on-line third party resources, resources that contribute with data, presentation and functionality”.

# Start-ups are always short on time
# Here are some tools that might avoid you reinventing the wheel and save you some valuable time
# Tools can include products, frameworks etc
# Often we (Songkick) have found that the most useful tools, are introduced to us by other start-ups
# This wiki is an attempt to collect some of that knowledge and experience in one place so that companies getting started on new problems have a useful reference
# With each tool, we've added a list of start-ups known to be using that tool, so there's a sense of how well tested they are by the community. If no start-up can vouch for the tool it doesn't make it onto the list
# This list is maintained by Ian at Songkick but will be a lot better for your additions!
# Start-ups that have contributed to this wiki: Songkick, Playfire, TinyCoupon, Habit Industries, Poll Everywhere, GroupSpaces, Huddle, Webjam

One aspect of designing for the web that almost immediately offends designers is the lack of fonts that are considered safe to use. While it is true that there are only a handful of web safe fonts, the ones we do have at our disposal can be quite powerful and diversely useful. On top of that, CSS gives us a nice little thing called a font stack.

As you probably know @font-face already works in Safari 3 via WebKit and is supported in the latest Firefox 3.1 beta. With IE, that means around 75% of the world audience could see custom typefaces today if their EULAs allowed it. Fortunately, there are good free faces available to us already, as well as some commercial faces that permit embedding.

If you have started with drupal and want to expand your knowledge, you either need to sit and spend time on Drupal Handbooks or buy some Drupal books.

This post covers essential resources related to Drupal — the basics, modules, Drupal design inspiration, Drupal themes, tutorials, starter themes, blog editors and Drupal-projects.

Whether you're a novice or pro, user or developer, these handbooks offer a comprehensive guide to every aspect of installing, using and extending Drupal. All content is written and edited by volunteers, so please contribute where you see a need. If you have a Drupal.org account, you can edit a handbook page by clicking the "Edit" tab at the top of the page. You can also add new pages by using the "add a child page" link at the bottom. For more information on helping with the documentation, see quick ways to improve documentation.

Project New Media Literacies (NML), a research initiative based within MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, explores how we might best equip young people with the social skills and cultural competencies required to become full participants in an emergent media landscape and raise public understanding about what it means to be literate in a globally interconnected, multicultural world.

RFID is being adopted in a wide variety of industries, including aircraft manufacturing, consumer electronics, consumer packaged goods, defense, homeland security and retail. It's being used not only for tracking goods in the supply chain but also to reduce counterfeiting of high-end products, such as pharmaceutical drugs, to track baggage in airports and medical supplies in hospitals, and as a payment system. Virtually every company on Earth will be required to use RFID in one way or another to remain competitive in the global market.

Layout
- Occlusion (what content is blocked by hands or other people)
- Button size (Fitts' Law) – Text size create (legible from 4' away)
- Usable from multiple directions

Visuals
- Highly visual: The less words and the more specific the imagery, the easier it will be for a broad demogrphic to use the device.
- No irrelevant information (Anyone ordering olives in their Bailey's simply needs to be cut off)
- Transitions: When working on your state/transition diagram, Transitions should be planned carefully. The way content and controllers animate can do a huge amount to suggest what they do, how to use them, and whether touch events have been registered.

Interaction
- Strong progressive disclosure
- Modeless controls
- Privacy (what and when should various users have access to what information, private pin #'s, etc.
- Provide a visual cue that all touches have been registered…even when they don't trigger a state change.

Simple sinewave synthesizer triggered by an ordinary 16step sequencer. Each triggered step causes a force on the underlaying wave-map, which makes it more cute.
Based on the AudioTool engine thus no sources, I am sorry.
Press SPACE key to clear. Right-Click for Copy&Paste.

The computer and particularly the Internet have been represented as enabling technologies, turning consumers into users and users into producers. The unfolding online cultural production by users has been framed enthusiastically as participatory culture. But while many studies of user activities and the use of the Internet tend to romanticize emerging media practices, my dissertation steps beyond the usual framework and analyzes user participation in the context of accompanying popular and scholarly discourse, as well as the material aspects of design, and their relation to the practices of design and appropriation. I argue that participatory culture is rather a dynamic interaction of users and companies, discourses and technologies.

Blockbuster Hollywood movies can bring on the spotlight to lesser know disease and medical conditions. For example, After Rain Man we all knew what Autism was. That story told us how autistic people suffer from impaired social interaction and communication. In children the condition is heightened with sensory disorders and even minor noises can disturb them. A recent research suggests that stimulants like music, aromatherapy, and textured toys can help alleviate the condition. This where something like the Beagle scarf-hoodie can help.

This scarf includes speakers in the hood making it the perfect soothing wrap, around the child’s ears. Furthermore, customized aroma patches along with textured inner pockets can be integrated to the scarf. Coping with as autistic child can be trying at times and if something like the Beagle can bring the child some relief, then so be it.

Designer: Leo Chao

YD is a melting pot of varied cultures; we have Asians, Americans, Australians and British in our group. Luckily we all use English otherwise can you fathom the commotion if we all mailed in our respective mother tongues! Funny as it may sound now, language barrier can pose a problem when we can’t communicate effectively with locals on a trip abroad. For vegetarian like me, ordering a chicken dish out of a Chinese language menu would be awful! I’d need something like the ViewTrans to help me out.

It's kind of like a giant iPhone, but way cooler—and it can do so many more things. The TouchTable is an instrument that behaves like, well, a touch table—it's a giant LCD screen with light-emitting diodes on the edges and receivers on the side—and it’s used by the military and other governmental organizations for intelligence analysis, geospatial information, medical applications, and even crime tracking.

Choco Tacos can be hard to track down. The preeminent dessert taco makes cameos at select ice cream trucks and gas stations, but other times, you think, "did I dream that?" Since nobody should have to suppress a Choco Taco craving, or embark on a roadtrip to the magical Taco Bells that still stock them, follow these steps to make them at home.

Featuring surface computing pioneers Jeff Han and Microsoft’s Steven Bathiche, together with BMW, Synaptics, 3M and others, IntertechPira's Interactive Displays 2009 has become the must-attend industry event. The conference and exhibit will take place April 21 – 23, 2009 at the Hilton San Jose, in San Jose, California.

Interactive Displays 2009 will bring together the interactivity community to discover advances in technologies from multi-touch to holography, and haptics to gestures, offering a collaborative environment in which to tackle the challenges and hurdles of development and integration.

Interactive Displays 2009 is the must attend event for developers and end-users of interactive display technologies, along with the manufacturers that are utilizing, seeking or integrating those emerging technologies.

An ICT provider to educational purposes.

Educational software producer

Microsoft Surface and education are like peanut butter and jelly. Microsoft Surface is like that with a number of markets, but there's something about kids interacting with a computer in a very accessible way that seems right. Microsoft worked with Infusion and RM (who also worked with Lightbox Education) to create applications for schools. The video below is a video case study of what happened when they dropped it off for a day with teachers and students. You'll also see some of the Microsoft applications (puzzles) and VectorForm (Surface DJ) featured in the video below. You can also see more education concepts that we've covered in the past with nsquared. Both were at BETT with Microsoft Surface.

YMYI (You Move You Interact) is an interactive installation, where one is supposed to build up a body language dialogue with an artificial system so as to effectively achieve a synchronized performance between the real user´s body and the virtual object itself. The project aims at exploring a spatial sphere,where the user/performer is invited to develop his own creative inspiration based on his own body gestures and movements.