Trend: Hyperlocal Information
Before everything became virtual, most of the things we interacted with were local. We bought books at Barnes & Noble, not on Amazon, we read the NY Times, not The Huffington Post. Finding an apartment was a drag before Craigslist. Then came Dot Com and Web 2.0 and we could find every piece of information, every product and even most of our “friends” online. The local turned out to be irrelevant – the virtual was what we wanted. But then the world wide web became bigger and bigger. Relevant local information got lost in the long tail. We realized that local is still important and thus the demand for hyperlocal information began to grow.
To see what that means, let’s have a look at three online categories that utilize hyperlocal information:
Hyperlocal news
One of the first hyperlocal applications were local news websites, which filled in the gap the dying print industry left behind. Often these news site/ blog crossovers are specific to a certain neighborhood. There are quite a few of these blogs around in New York, such as the Gothamist which is now also available in many other cities, or the Brownstoner, which focuses on real estate specific news. But lately there are more and more start-ups that offer a platform for hyperlocal information, mash-ups that gather data from different sources about a neighborhood or town. For example, Everyblock lets users create a newsfeed for a specific address or ZIP code and collects information such as news, photos, reviews and governmental information (e.g. crime rate). Outside.in and Placeblogger offer similar services while Patch puts together sites for you and adds more categories plus an editorial process to the collection.
Hyperlocal social networks
Although it seems counterintuitive to build ones social network on virtual encounters, the most successful sites in this arena, Facebook and MySpace prove the contrary. However, with the ubiquitous availability of local-based services and devices (from Google Maps mash-ups to GPS enabled phones), hyperlocal social networks are beginning to grow and become more important.
The ultimate goal for any hyperlocal network should be to get people together who share a physical location, temporarily or permanently. There are few purely web-based applications such as STACKD (a SUPERMETRIC project), which aims to connect people within and around office buildings. Most players in this game offer location-based services through mobile phone applications. The top four are FourSquare, Gowalla, BrightKite and Loopt. They all work somewhat the same: you check in at a location (e.g. a café, bar, store) and share the info with your friends (via the app, Facebook or Twitter). You can see who else is around and might get in touch. Most apps will reward check-ins with virtual gifts/ prizes which will make you climb up the ladder within your community. Some applications feel more like a game (Gowalla) where others focus on the social component (FourSquare).
Hyperlocal advertising
Online advertising has revolutionized the market and Google is the incarnation of this phenomenon. The method and reason for success lies in content sensitive information or ads in this case. Google found the matching algorithms to display the ads that are most relevant for a website or search engine visitor.
In many cases local information makes an ad even more relevant. If you think about products you use and buy on a daily basis or multiple times per week or products you consume right away (food and drinks), local-based advertising adds a lot of value. In an article for FastCompany, Michael Gluckstadt evaluates the hyperlocal advertising market at $100 Billion. There seems to be evidence that he might be right: DataSphere just raised $10.8 Million in series B funding to expand their software offerings in this area. Where (a uLocate service) just launched a new hypelocal ad network to connect local merchants with customers (e.g. via coupons on augmented reality apps). There seems to be a lot going on right now but the market is still young and it’s not clear what will work yet. Ultimately, services must focus on the value for users. As long as ads are fun, relevant and somewhat unobtrusive there is a true potential to become the next generation AdWords.
My Bread
All three Germans in the office have started baking their own bread. The one above is mine from this past weekend. It has bacon in it. It’s so good even the camera couldn’t focus on anything after it was cool enough to eat. We got started just after the winter holidays with Jim Lahey’s book The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method. In a nutshell, you mix the ingredients the day before you plan to bake. Water, flour, yeast and salt ferment for 18 hours and produce a sticky dough that you shape and let rise again. You bake the loaf in a cast iron pot and out comes a crust that is so crackling good that it reminds me of home. It’s kind of hard to convey how exciting it is without letting you take a bite. We shared one of the first loaves with some favorite clients when they came in for a meeting. I’m pretty sure that’s why the project is going so well. Here’s the original recipe from the Sullivan Street Bakery.
Let’s win the Pepsi Refresh Contest
We need your votes! We submitted STACKD to the Pepsi Refresh Project in order to apply for a grant. We’re proud to say the idea was accepted and we are in the running to win. The grant will enable us to devote real time and attention to STACKD so that we can improve what it does best: connect businesses to each other that are in the same building or neighborhood. It’s our idea of where the internet is heading – hyperlocal. Please take the time to cast your vote, there is a lot of competition and we can’t do it without you!
What would Borges do?
Jorge Luis Borges once wrote a very brief story about map makers who, in a quest to replicate the details of the original perfectly, created a gargantuan map the same size of the country they were illustrating. I’m always struck by how difficult it is to show an image of a website one a website. Should I make it small enough to show at once and loose the details in the typography? Should I crop in to a detail and loose the overall impression? Here’s my newest contribution to the problem: excitingly tilted in a a constructivist 2.0 kind of way. Terrible, isn’t it.
Oh, by the way, take a look at the new website we designed and built for Kliment-Halsband Architects. We did the first one four years ago and they came back to us to rejuvenate. That felt good. Portraits of the partners were shot by the amazing Francois Dischinger.
Get ready for the iPad!
The iPad is coming and whether you like it or not, whether you are under- or overwhelmed and whether you will get it or not: the iPad will be here soon! At $499 and the alleged savior of the print industry, it will most likely make as much of an impact as the iPhone did.
To help us to get ready for some iPad GUI design, we found this handy PSD template (via teehan+lax). It’s quite a collection (24mb) and it even has the blue cube icon that indicates a missing Flash plugin.
On Context and Scale
Staying in Sydney over the holidays, I had the pleasure of encountering the work of Japanese conceptual artist Tatzu Nishi.
Outside the Art Gallery of NSW, the two monumental bronze sculptures The Offerings of War and The Offerings of Peace (1923) that are flanking the museums entrance, have been put in a new, quite absurd context. Titled War and Peace and in Between, the artist has built a perfectly average looking living room and bedroom around the sculptures which visitors can access via two ramps. It’s a stunning experience to grasp the actual scale of an oversize bronze statue from so close. And beyond that it really makes you aware of the divide of public and private in the objects that surround us in our daily urban environments.
The Sydney project marks the latest in the series of Kaldor Public Art Projects, running since 1969 throughout Oz and including the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Gilbert & George, Jeff Koons, and Bill Viola.
Building domestic spaces around public monuments, artworks and streetlights has been Tatzu Nishi’s signature act for over a decade. The artist lives and works in Cologne, and you can see more of his projects at his website.
Graphic Language of Ecology
We are working on a project for a company that measures resource usage in buildings and then implements improvements in order to make the building more sustainable. As part of this project we did a lot of research into the visual language that is being used by competitors. I found it striking how related the vocabulary is. Regardless of the brand behind the communication, the language was illustrative and relied on bold color, diagrams and icons more so than photography. Maybe it’s because we don’t know what the future will look like yet?
Dattner Architects Monograph No.2
About two years ago we designed a new website for Dattner Architects. The second part of the job was to help the New York firm put together their second monograph, which took considerably longer but just hit the street and we finally hold it in our hands!
We liked the idea to create two pieces that would showcase the company’s work in the distinct nature of their medium, and at the same time allow them to reference each other through a mutual graphic language. Front and center, book and website refer to the wide range of public and private projects Dattner Atchitects has realized over the years — in lieu of a title, the full list of their their fields of action is stacked in large letters, filling the entire available height and marking the sections projects belong to.
Get “Dattner Architects” from amazon. Funnily enough, at amazon there’s an older design of the cover showing up for the book which they took from the publisher’s catalogue (and which we really really liked because it was a little more mysterious). take a look…
4 New Web-Typography Tips & Tricks
The other day I stumbled upon 50 Essential Web Typography Tutorials, Tips, Guides and Best Practices, an article on Speckyboy.com. It is quite an amazing collection of best practices for web typography. There are a few tools and tips that stand out:
Using a custom font as opposed to a system font has been a huge issue for web designers for a long time. Luckily there is sIFR and cufon, 2 methods we use to realize dynamic rendering of fonts on web sites. The latest browser generation (at least Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4) support the @font-face CSS rule which forces the font to download to the clients computer. The result is quite amazing but the results vary widely between browsers.
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Speaking of sIFR and cufon, there appears to be more fish in that pond: FontJazz and facelift both offer custom font rendering but in very different ways. While FontJazz appears to be a cufon clone (which appears to work on many, even old browsers), facelift renders images in real time. Not sure if I am tempted to try these approaches as cufon works pretty well for us.
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csstypeset is a nice tool that allows you to format small snippets of text using system fonts. On the left you have a WYSIWYG editing area and to the right your CSS code is generated. Bookmark!
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Today everything is about em in CSS, no px anymore. Yeah, I know, how nerdy can it get. But seriously, this online tool helps you convert to em easily and thus enables you to create better stylesheets.
Kim.Wendell Design is live
Our latest development KimWendellDesign.com just went live this week. We created this slick portfolio website with blog navigation in mind. Content is clustered into three different categories which can be switched on and off in real-time without re-loading. Content boxes can be re-ordered and – on click of a button – reveal detail overlays featuring a multi-media viewer (image slide shows or video clips). The team at Kim.Wendell Design, a rendering and animation firm, uses a custom CMS tool to manage content. Enjoy and let us know what you think.
STACKD article in Urban Omnibus
I’m proud to announce that STACKD is featured in an online publication called Urban Omnibus that intends to “increase understanding of the city we have and encourage ideas that can lead to a more inclusive, more sustainable, more beautiful city that could be.” We’ve worked hard in getting some of the kinks out of the system in time for the article’s publication and are keeping our fingers crossed that people will sign up and start using STACKD to build relationships with others in their building – or nearby. The article gives a bit of conceptual urban theory background to the project, how we originated the idea as a way to meet other businesses and where we think it could lead. Please let us know what you think, even the bad stuff!
Building a Digital Archive
Almost 3 years ago we started a project with the Asian American Art Centre (AAAC) in Chinatown to develop a digital archive. Impacted by 9/11, the AAAC received funding from the LMDC to help preserve and document the history of Asian American art in the US over the past 60 years. More than 1,500 files from over 170 artists form the basis of the digital archive. Together with AAAC’s team and professional archivists, we developed and implemented the archiving and cataloging software. Once the back-end was in place, archivists added content such as photos, scanned images, letters, and press articles. Finally SUPERMETRIC designed and implemented the front end of artasiamerica.org to make the largest digital archive of Asian American art accessible for everyone to learn and enjoy.
Business Cards for SUPERMETRIC
It took us a while to come up with a new design and eventually we decided to keep a lot of the things we liked about our old cards.
—Turns out we like Cyan a lot.
Business Design Meets Interaction Design
Duane Bray and Ryan Jacoby of IDEO spoke last night at an IxDA New York event. The venue was Bloomberg HQ on Lexington and 59th. In case you are unfamiliar with IxDA, it’s the grassroots equivalent of a professional organization for interaction designers. The website serves as a forum to pose questions and answers. The group organizes great talks by influential people who are broadening the understanding of what interaction design is. This was the first event I attended and I’m glad I went for a few reasons.
1. I got a glimpse inside the Ceasar Pelli designed Bloomberg building – an overpowering but exciting onslaught of information design and a great example of an open plan office.
2. The food was great.
3. I bumped into at least 4 other faculty from the Design&Management Department at Parsons. It was great to see that they care about their subject and attend events like this.
4. The talk was fun and pretty inspirational in a very pragmatic way. The IDEO process of combining business people and designers on one team in order to create a market ready product just makes a lot of sense, so no surprises there.
Here are my notes (and like I said, no big surprises just a lot of things that clearly make sense)
- Go where people are rather than expect them to come to you
- Consumers expect a conversation with brands not just a monologue.
- The big question on clients’ minds today is “How do we grow without alienating the existing client base?”
- Incorporating the human perspective opens the room to a new approach
- In the current climate companies want to know how to leverage existing assets
- Map the business impact
- Follow the money (value chain and user experience)
- Map the competitive set from a user experience standpoint and from a business standpoint
- Draw the income statement (variable costs, fixed cost, income)
Designing for Interaction
Yesterday, I spoke on “Designing for Interaction” in the Urban Design Studio that Kaja Kuehl is coordinating this summer. The quicktime above is without any of my commentary so it may be a bit cryptic. The gist of the talk is that our surroundings can be understood as an intricate system of information. As designers we can have an impact on how people understand their surroundings. For example, subtle visual cues such as color and typography can help to find the right gate at an airport. The example I used in the video is in Madrid. The second part of the talk showcases four of our projects in which we designed how people experience information in a physical environment. The first two projects are exhibitions. One at Van Alen Institute and one at the Architectural League. Both of those are a few years old. The third project is a permanent installation in the Maria Mitchell Observatory at Vassar College. It is essentially wallpaper that completely envelops the entrance space with a large image. The closer you get to the image the less detail you can perceive. The last project is an installation at Rockefeller University acknowledging the Nobel and Lasker Prize winners this institution has produced over the decades.