emily conrad

Happy New Year! As much as I enjoyed 2009, toward the end it began looking like we needed a little bit more love around us. Since it wasn’t known for sure if this need for love was something only I felt or a cultural phenomenon, it only seemed right to track the frequency in which the term “love” is used.  The Love Lights offer an ambient snapshot of how much love is passing through a few corners of the world at any given second. When love is expressed in one five different languages; swedish (kärlek), english (love), indonesian (mencintai), greek (αγάπη), and norwegian (elsker), a light will pulse on. The Love Lights are built off sentiments publicly divulged through Twitter, which has nearly 50 million users worldwide. I’ve been noticing that the lights for the non-english words stagger on as the day goes by, and are most active late at night. English, of course being the dominating language of Twitter, remains fairly consistent.

The Love Lights are made from LEDs, copper tubing, handblown glass bulbs, beeswax, and electronic components. Each bulb is etched with the word kärlek, love, mencintai, αγάπη, or elsker and then dipped in beeswax to give the light a natural quality. 15 x 9 x 21 inches. The only requirements to get the lights up and running are an ethernet (cable) connection and a power source.

The Love Lights are one of four light pieces I’ve created over the past year. Each one is made from similar materials with a different concept, such as the Belief Loop and War Lights. As an artist, it’s important to me that traditional electronic components are not the dictating aesthetic. Electrical parts like LEDs, wire, and pcb board are just a few of the tools needed to create these pieces. What is more important is how they reflect the human sentiments that go into making them work.

Contact me if you have any questions or are just curious about how it works. Many thanks to Jeff Gray for technical support.

This September the New York Public Library is celebrating the New York Harbor Quadricentennial (400 years!) with an exhibit of rarely seen maps, atlases, and cartographical delights of all kinds. Including an animated overlay of the shoreline in Google Earth. The exhibit Mapping New York’s Shoreline, 1609-2009 opens September 25th.

Where: D. Samuel and Jeane H. Gottesman Exhibition Hall (First Floor)
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, New York, NY 10018-2788

“September 2009 marks 400 years since Henry Hudson sailed into New York Harbor and up the Hudson River, almost to what is now Albany, performing detailed reconnaissance of the Hudson Valley region. Other explorers passed by the outwardly hidden harbor, but did not linger long enough to fully realize the commercial, nautical, strategic, or colonial value of the region. Once the explorers returned to Europe, their strategic information was passed on to authorities. Some data was kept secret, but much was handed over to map makers, engraved on copper, printed on handmade paper, distributed to individuals and coffee-houses (the news centers of the day), and pored over by dreamers, investors, and potential settlers in the “new land.””

Maybe it’s because this is the summer that isn’t in NYC, but I’ve had vacationing in serenity on my mind since April. And I finally found what the perfect vacation looks like- Floating Camping. Could it get any better? Off Almere Beach (near Amsterdam), this floating island is from the University of Amsterdam, apparently built by students participating in the course ‘Social Engineering in the Amsterdam Metropolis’. And it’s brilliant. Another project is the ‘floating market‘, an outdoor market built on foam blocks covered in sod where organic and local produce is sold. These structures have proven to be very stable and word is the creators want to take it commercial. To this idea Pop-Up City says it best-’I wonder if they will succeed, as it doesn’t look to be their style.’

Whatever the case, I wish them all the luck and hope they bring this whimsical but practical idea to the island of Manhattan.

I’m a little late to the party on this one, but Schematic (a company I worked for during 2007 & 2008) is developing a muultitouch screen for the Cannes film festival (I’m guessing 2010 since the 2009 festival has passed). The video is impressive, particularly in demonstrating the use of multitouch and RFID. They are calling it a “Touchwall” and my guess is that the interactivity is intended to be used by more than one or two people at once. The video shows two people, pretty much working together, so I wonder how this would behave with two or more people working (or playing) independently? Schematic is known for their great UX, so I’m sure this was thought through, but it’s still tough to deploy.

This is also on of those hyper-rational projects that just makes sense. Of course we’ll have huge multitouch screens in the future. And I like that this is one of the first iterations. It will undoubtedly be a paradigm shift, but perhaps unlikely, to use a multitouch wall instead of a paper subway map pasted to a wall in the station. Some may argue we have access to the same information on our phones, in a decentralized, accessible place. It’ll be interesting to see which paradigm is stronger, the experiential or the practical. Both have their own advantages, but this is one decision designers can’t make.

I thought this was impressive- reMap (bestario.org) displays and organizes the entire encyclopedia of visualizations from visualcomplexity.com.

What’s so great about this site is the filtering behavior initiated from the tag nav at the bottom of the page. No tag cloud! Great solution. But you have to point your mouse to the bottom in order to trigger this function. Also, points for having each step it’s own URL, easy to backtrack and email a specific link. Well done.

By the by,infosthetics reports that, VisualComplexity is so impressive, that its author, Manuel Lima, is nominated by Creativity magazine as “one of the 50 most creative and influential minds of 2009″, while he also was chosen as a speaker at TEDGlobal2009.

My daughter is not one to typically sit down and watch a show for twenty minutes, nor am I one to encourage it. So when we were at Sea World San Diego last week and the in-laws wanted to see the Shamu show (sentimentally titled Believe!), I was a little skeptical. We went in and sat down as a video began to play on four screens above the whale pool. By now it was noon and a bright sunny day. I couldn’t believe how great the LED screens looked! Especially since I was always told LED screens are generally no good, and nothing works in direct sunlight. The assumptions were all wrong.

The show went on, and my daughter was singing and clapping without abandon. I watched the screens, and when they tilted it was a cue that something cute was going to happen, and when they dropped completely to the side, it gave room for the killer whales to jump from the backstage to frontstage. And it all worked really well together. And when I panned across the audience, everyone was so excited. Of course the whales are the center of the show, but the technology they used help to tell the story better, and create much more of an emotional impact. (Photos by Brian Bennett, as I kept my camera dry).

When I came back to NYC I researched the screens a little bit and found out a company called Act One Communications had made the screens. They have a quick little video on their site that somewhat explains their “Virtual Pixel Technology”. Which is essentially offering RGB pixels in a grid as instead of clustering them. The former offers a smoother image contour instead of pixelation that is common in LED screens, as shown here:

If it really is as simple as it sounds, it makes me think there’s so many more advancements we can make with LED screen, especially if we add Z-space and start showing video in 3-D.

The other day on the NYTimes website I noticed an interesting article about the Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo. What struck me about this was the gap between theory and practice being embodied in a building. The theory was to allow for modularity among the capsules, they could be added or removed based on need. Thing is, perhaps that need came about, but how would that really happen? A tenant would call the landlord who would hire a crew to add on a second floor to his capsule? What protocol was in place for the capsules to be added or removed? Theories without methodologies to carry them out prove to often be fruitless. Unfortunately, the tower is likely to be demolished despite earlier pleas by architect Kisho Kurokawa. The tenants hope to rebuild a more modern tower.

nano-cabin.com says:
The Nakagin Capsule Tower was the first capsule architecture design with the capsule as a room inserted into a mega-structure. This realized the ideas of metabolism, exchangeability, and recycleablity as a prototype of sustainable architecture. Located in the Ginza area of Tokyo, the Nagakin Capsule Tower, was originally designed as a Capsule Hotel to provide economical housing for businessmen working late in central Tokyo during the week.

The 14-story high Tower has 140 capsules stacked at angles around a central core. Kurokawa developed the technology to install the capsule units into the concrete core with only 4 high-tension bolts, as well as making the units detachable and replaceable. The one-man-room capsule, a modified (4 x 2.5 meter) shipping container, has a circular window, a built-in bed and bathroom unit, and is complete with TV, radio and alarm clock. The capsule interior was pre-assembled in a factory then hoisted by crane and fastened to the concrete core shaft.

An article from A List Apart that goes in depth about the importance of order and traditional aesthetics in web design. Great read that emphasizes the positive impact and trust gained from users when a site is attractive.

“A body of web user experience research shows that website users are powerfully influenced by aesthetics, and that positive perceptions of order, beauty, novelty, and creativity increase the user’s confidence in a site’s trustworthiness and usability. Recent design writing and interface research illustrate how visual design and user research can work together to create better user experiences on the web: experiences that balance the practicalities of navigation with aesthetic interfaces that delight the eye and brain. In short: there’s lots of evidence that beauty enhances usability.”

(Wouldn’t be complete without a diagram….)

The visceral (“gut”) processing level reacts quickly to appearances. It’s the visceral reaction to web pages that researchers measure when they detect reaction times as fast as 50 milliseconds. It’s crucial to understand that these instant good/bad visceral-level affective responses are largely unconscious: it can take seconds or minutes to become consciously aware of your first, visceral reaction to a stimulus—particularly a stimulus as complex as a web page.

Behavioral-level processing involves the more familiar aspects of usability: it responds to the feel of using the site, the functionality, the understandability of the structure and navigation, and the overall physical performance of the site. At this level, users are consciously aware of their attitudes toward the behavior of the system, and their reactions (pleasure, for example, or frustration) play out over seconds and minutes as users interact with a site. It’s at this behavioral level that techniques such as eyetracking are most powerful and trustworthy, because they offer detailed moment-by-moment evidence of what users consciously decided to look at and do to fulfill a given task.

Reflective processing of reactions is the most complex level, and typically involves a user’s personal sense of a site’s beauty, meaning, cultural context, and immediate usefulness. Reflective processing often triggers memories and encourages pragmatic judgments about the overall aesthetic worth and value of what a user sees. Eyetracking and traffic logs are irrelevant at this level, but user interviews can give you insight into your user’s reflective judgments.

In my family, we’ve had our eye out for the new Junior Tag Reader from Leapfrog since it came out in January. I’m often impressed with the design and capabilities of LeapFrog’s products, especially after such a wildly successful experience with Learn and Groove . I got that hideous thing at my babyshower and was so inclined to return it, but my mother discouraged me. Turns out to be my daughter’s favorite toy to this day. But now that she is starting to outgrow it, we’re happy to move forward too.

The Tag Reader is a book companion that can be tapped or dragged over pages to have the image or text be spoken outloud. It reinforces language skills in children and gets them excited about reading, at least in theory. We thought we’d test it out for ourselves.

How it works:
The Twitter version (Thanks @andrewmiller): “They use the Anoto pattern of tiny dots tracked by the pen’s camera. each combo is unique, so the pen knows which “page” it’s in”.

Also known as Digital Ink, the paper has these tiny 2-Dimensional bar codes (like mini QR codes) that are visible to the naked eye, but indecipherable. Each image or text has it’s own unique code that the pen reads. So it’s like a scanner at the grocery store, or even something like a phone reading a QR code, which makes me think this will all doable through mobile someday.

The Interaction:
Blue is fascinated with the pen, it’s white and bright green with two buttons. It even has two rubber nubs on top that look kind of like eyes. At first all she wanted to do was turn the pen on and off because it makes fun sounds. Buttons and fun sounds can entertain her for a good while, and did until I showed her what she’s “supposed” to do (lost points there).

Books and pens don’t mix in her mind, this is pretty much how we’ve trained her. So she didn’t immediately grasp it. And with books, she likes to quickly point and touch an image and say what it is, or even better what sound it makes, over and over (rib-bit, rib-bit, rib-bit). So she carried over this behavior and used the pen as a pointer to quickly tap the image. And it spoke, so she didn’t immediately. It was like watching her learn a new language pattern. But she quickly got the hang of it and then charged off to something else next.

I’m curious to watch her grow into this new toy. If she’ll have the patience to listen to it, and do more hovering over the pages and less jabbing with it. The book we got (there’s only a handful of them available, and the pen can only hold the information for 5 books) was Dora, so it alternates between Spanish and English. This was confusing to her because there’s no visual cue explaining that the pen is spaking about the same object. For example if the page could respond to the pen by outlining the mango, Blue might better understand the mango is being described in two ways.

And one thing that I don’t understand is why we have to listen to the anonymous and often annoying voices, why can’t I just record myself or other people familiar to Blue? I’ve been doing a lot of this sort of prototyping on my own . It just makes sense to supply this sort of capability in a flawless interface, which btw the website that you have to log into to initiate the Junior Tag reader is not. The more toys I play with, the wider the market seems to grow.

Tomorrow we have a plane ride and will see how it goes. I know at this point I’ve gotten more fun out of the Reader than she has, so hopefully that will change.

I think we all knew it was only a matter of time before a major electronics company would come up with a female targeted site, but what’s interesting here is the marketing and art direction Dell decided on. And it’s got a lot of people, men and women alike, a little irritated.

What could they have done better? Well the reviews and content both appear to be fake. Adding to the fluffiness and xoxo Susie Creamcheese feeling is the set of generic tips,
“1. Get organized: Sites like lifeorganizers.com give you tips on everything from organizing your home office to planning your next vacation.”

I’d rather an in depth “Hey, so this is the best way to set up a wireless printer.” Or a more objective look at how this would work for my needs.

If the content was more supported by the community, like the reviews, the selection, the criteria for why it’s being featured, it might not come off as so abrasive. But instead there’s a pedantic air that they are trying to conceal through the design. Truth is, this is going to be hard for Dell to pull off because it’s so obviously self serving, and a lack of product diversity supports this. Would you like this Dell computer in pink bubbles or green plaid? I want to see more nuts and bolts, more of the details that translate into benefits or drawbacks for me. Not just the benefits. This is one of the sites that you look at and can’t help but to imagine the whiteboard meetings.

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