design
ReadWriteWeb wrote a recent article called ‘I Don’t Know Much About Art But I Know What’s Online’, in which they reviewed the different online offerings of art museums, and concluded that there weren’t yet any stand-outs…
Something I find interesting about design is how patterns often emerge that then get rapidly copied and widely adopted. The ‘like’ button, which I moaned about in my last post, is one of these. Another is what I’m calling ‘notification numbers’ [...]
Something that’s stuck with me in social software design is the importance of selecting verbs. This notion appeals to the linguist in me, but I truly believe that it’s a really significant step in the process of design. In Jyri Engestrom’s superb, and in some ways canonical, work on social objects, defining verbs is one [...]
Hello. I’ve just updated the design of my website/blog. It’s something that I’ve been tinkering with for ages, and so actually having made the changes live feels like a minor achievement in personal getting-round-to-it productivity. [...]
I visited Brunel University yesterday, out in the Uxbridge suburb of London, in order to visit Dan Lockton and take part in one of his workshop research sessions. Dan’s been studying and writing about an area of design he called ‘Design with Intent’ – which in a nutshell is how design can be used to [...]
I love the list of ‘fictional universes’ on Wikipedia. It contains everything from The Simpsons to Star Trek to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. The Fictional Universes database on Freebase is even better, as it contains thousands of details about the universes, such as species, objects, and even ethnicities. However, one universe neither site [...]
Loyalty schemes seem to get constantly re-invented. You could argue that it all started, in the UK at least, with green shield stamps, which were apparently phenomenally popular at its peak in the 60s/70s, and were issued by all sorts of shops. You could ‘spend’ the stamps in a chain of Green Shield catalogue shops [...]
This is a bit of a cross-post, but it’s something I’m excited about, so I hope you’ll forgive me. Over at Rattle, where I work, I’ve introduced a new scheme called ‘Design Mondays’. The idea is that every other Monday the whole office works on a design challenge that’s a little outside of our regular [...]
There’s something that’s bugging me every day on the commute to work. As I approach the train station, at about 7:30am each morning, I have to walk past this set of posters advertising railcards: Naff eh? What they’re advertising is pretty worthwhile. I’ve always had a ‘Young Person’s Railcard’ (now bizarrely renamed ’16-25 railcard’ – [...]
My newsreader picked up the press release this morning of the Mayor unveiling his cycling and walking programme for London. It’s quite a long package of initiatives, but stems from the recommendations from a strategic review of cycling and walking by Transport for London, so comes from Ken Livingstone the incumbent Mayor, rather than Ken [...]