15 posts
You’ve left the station, you need a cab, who are you going to call? This lottery of eight choices, seen yesterday in Dinard, north west France, is a poetic demonstration of how lousy customer experience arises out of poor service design.
We’ve pushed the first ‘live’ release of Socialmod today. We think it has the potential to become the ‘Basecamp of moderation’.
Following up on Tim’s recent post on the new Protect The Human homepages, I’m going to write about the process I went through to create the final homepage designs.
I started with sketches. Sketching ideas on the paper helped me visualize quickly what we wanted to achieve through the new homepages and how we wanted to address current site’s issues.
It was an easy way to present the initial ideas to people involved in the project (client, creative director, developer, etc.), and made it easy to apply any changes required. It was also much quicker than creating the initial visuals in photoshop!
We’ve made a new release of ProtectTheHuman.com, the social media campaigning platform and activism community we launched for Amnesty UK in August 2008.
Read this post
New Media Age reports that ‘Times Online and theSun.co.uk are likely to start charging for content after News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch ‘indicated such a model could be in place within a year’.
And The Guardian is considering charging users to access specialist areas of its site to counter falling ad revenues.
(I’ll give you a link to the stories, here and here, but with sweet irony N.M.A. has a subscription-only model so you may not be able to read them.)
No surprises here. Their backs to the wall, display advertising collapsing under the weight of social media, traditional news organisations are retreating to a familiar industrial-era mechanism. Copyright, subscription, advertising: they’ve worked for 200 years or more, why won’t they work now?
Data visualization artist Aaron Koblin gave a talk at BBH London yesterday which, being in the same building, we were lucky enough to be able to attend.
Aaron took us through his work, from his student days at UCLA where he worked on projects including the visualization of US flight patterns, to his work at Yahoo! and now Google Creative Labs (I’m sure some of you have seen the collapsing Google page experiments, which can be seen at Chrome Experiments - there are tons more and some of them are a lot of fun to look at, so you should!). A lot of his work, which you can find on his site, uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as a platform to channel the participation of thousands of people from across the world, all working in isolation from one another and with very limited knowledge of the projects they were working on. As Aaron mentioned, the interesting thing was to see how crowdsourcing in this manner is a good example of the sum of the parts being more intelligent than the individual parts themselves – a principle expounded on by James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of the Crowds.
So Made By Many is growing, slowly but surely. It looks like the bursting at the seams prophecy I blogged about recently may very well come true soon.
Mark Boulton was one of the speakers at this years’ conference Future Of Web Design (FOWD) in London. His presentation ‘Typography’s not on the Web, it IS the Web’ was the highlight of the day! It was very well prepared and very informative talk on the state of typography today.
Here are the following highlights:
THE SEA-ROVERS AND CORSAIRS of the 18th century created an “information network” that spanned the globe: primitive and devoted primarily to grim business, the net nevertheless functioned admirably. Scattered throughout the net were islands, remote hideouts where ships could be watered and provisioned, booty traded for luxuries and necessities. Some of these islands supported “intentional communities,” whole mini-societies living consciously outside the law and determined to keep it up, even if only for a short but merry life… I called the settlements “Pirate Utopias.”
I’ve been re-reading T.A.Z, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism) by Hakim Bey.
