While usability tests and focus groups are useful for specific phases of application development, they aren’t as useful for understanding cultural frameworks and practices because by the time an app is being tested. It has already accumulated so many cultural assumptions along the way in the design process that users are often asked to test something that functions in the programmer’s world, not the user’s world.

Sometimes, one size does not fit all.


Wang, Tricia. 2010. “GOOGLIST REALISM: The Google-China saga and the free-information regimes as a new site of cultural imperialism and moral tensions.” The Eigth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities. UCLA. Los Angeles, California, June 29.

This clip reminded of how we’re seeing many hardware interfaces turn into software interfaces and interactive platforms. Hardware is becoming smaller and more simple and software is now replacing many hardware components and applications.

In 1998 I had a Pioneer and Cambridge Audio Hi-Fi separates console and now it sits in my garage, like a relic, as iTunes and two tiny Bose speakers have replaced it all. This trend of software replacing hardware is growing and as result of this the importance of specialized interaction design increases. Interaction designers, up until now, have designed for two broad mediums: desktop software and websites. As the adoption of touch screens and gestural interfaces increases, interaction designers will need to specialize and focus on specific applications, for specific communities and groups of people.

I’m pretty excited by all of this

Video via @agilemediaware

We work as consultants, which means we work with a lot of different companies, in a lot of different fields. But really, our common interest is in understanding people and what their needs are.

Dan Formosa – Smart Design


Yes…I saw the film about the font.

Up until now I’ve been oblivious to the ubiquity of Helvetica. Having only noticed it in its pure and bold appearances, the film does a great job of passively displaying the use of Helvetica in our everyday surroundings. Bold, regular and Italic it often goes unnoticed because I think we’re becoming immune to it and its seamless way of blending into branding and communications.

I’ve recently been trying to find my own visual communication style, a style for my brand, brand Dhiren: A typeface and layout style that can become consistently recognised as my own.

Perhaps I’ll go for a serif, but will that exclude certain groups of people? The next presentation I do will be replicated be with a different typeface and layout style. The people will decide — whether it matters to me or not may well be a different story.

Will keep you posted.

Stole the thumbs.

Sorry.

Via Visual Loop

My lovely, limited edtion prints from Dephect arrived yesterday. Both are one of thirty printed and they’re hand signed by the artist.

Beautiful.

via flowingdata

These radios are just too kool for skool!

Some people say I was born in the wrong decade—and that I should have been a child of the sixties. Things made before my time look so damn cool, I don’t think we’re half as cool as our parents were.

via boingboing.