I’ve been waiting a pretty long time to write the words “press embargo lifted” since it sounds so important. Our latest project, VIP Art Fair is publicly available after nearly a year of work– sort of. The registration phase started and it’s now possible to request invitations to the week-long event that will go live in January.

We worked very closely with art dealers James and Jane Cohan and  Internet entrepreneurs Jonas and Alessandra Almgren to design and develop the first art fair to take place exclusively online. Some of the biggest names in the gallery world (Zwirner, Gagosian, White Cube) are on board and the New York Times and Art Info have already covered the project.

We’ll discuss the thinking that went into the interface here in an upcoming post.

Last week I found an article in the New York Times announcing that GOURMET is back as Gourmet Live! I loved that magazine and was heartbroken when Conde Nast pulled the plug last October. This is the first example I’ve come across of the iPad prompting a magazine relaunch. The magazine, that according to the publisher, is no longer a magazine will launch in the fall of 2010. I for one am more than curious to see whether they will have the fortitude to pull off something that uses the medium  rather than dumping existing approaches to content and layout onto a new platform. Fingers crossed.

We may not know who won the World Cup yet but we launched an iphone app this week that screams “Gooooooaaaaaal” every time a team you follow scores. You then get a push notification that tells you the score and gives you the option to taunt a friend by posting a message to their facebook page.

Get it here before the cup is over! The six week turnaround time was tighter than tight but FIFA wasn’t about to delay the start of the Cup just because we would have wanted more time to design, develop and test. This is the first of a series of apps that we will create under the brand Scoretones together with a great team at McCann Worldgroup.

One more note on taunting: there is an amazing amount of mobile traffic that occurs during real-time events tied to specific event details such as a goal. The volume of TXT traffic during the Cup games has been written about on Flowing Data. We’re looking forward to parsing our own data for trends in a few weeks. On that note here is another post, this time showing water usage during the Olympic Gold Medal Hockey Game of Canada vs. USA. Water usage? Yes, every period end was punctuated by a spike in water usage attributed to millions of Canadians peeing simultaneously.

Over the last 10 months we worked with the Y Water brand to design packaging for their broad market launch. The first products to arrive in stores within the next few weeks are pouches sold in cartons of 5. We generated all design from the core concept that engaging a consumer has to go beyond applying design styles to a product. We put ourselves into the mind of a 7 year old and came up with as much fun stuff to make out of the packaging as we could. Each pouch has a “lens” in the center. This shows off the color of the organic, low calorie drink but also acts like a magnifying glass. We printed tiny bugs and ants on the cartons so kids can take the magni-pouches and try to find them all. The cartons become thumb wrestling mats when you and a friend stick your hands inside. We’ll show you those next time.

The brand launched to much fanfare as a new concept in children’s beverages in 2007. Yves Behar of Fuse Project designed the first bottles. Kastner and Partners supported Y Water with communications and advertising.

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.

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!

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.

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?

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!

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)

]]> http://supermetricity.com/2009/07/17/business-design-meets-interaction-design/feed/ 0 http://supermetricity.com/2009/07/11/designing-for-interaction/ http://supermetricity.com/2009/07/11/designing-for-interaction/#comments Sat, 11 Jul 2009 19:08:27 +0000 sidney http://supermetricity.com/?p=668

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.

Only 24 days left to apply for this year’s Macktez Summer Stipend. For the fifth year in a row the tech consultancy has been offering $500 to support creatives and their ideas: those just taking shape and those gasping for oxygen with the finish line in sight. There have been some really great nominations and winners.  In 2007 Macktez helped Andrew Sloat finish his video project A More Perfect Union and just last year support was given to Nicole Kenney and her wildly successful Before I Die I Want To. How did we find this one? Because we’ve been Macktez’ ideas and illustrations partner on the project since it started.

We have been working with Van Alen Institute for the last two years on a variety of web site related assessments and projects. 6 months ago we launched the first version of their current web presence. We are happy to report that on Friday, we launched an improved version of the calendar – a key interactive feature of the site. The calendar is now faster and more fun to use and displays multiple upcoming events at a glance. To a certain extent web sites are never finished. If you are really dedicated to creating a presence that will draw people back time and again then a site needs to evolve as users interact with it, provide feedback or new ideas emerge.