9 interesting things we’ve seen in May
Some really terrible user interfaces, a machine for screaming and a trap for autonomous cars.
0.
“Software is messy because it reflects our evolving understanding of the problem as we wrote it.”
– Sarah Mei on software complexity, understanding and refactoring.
1.
– Kelly Dobson’s ScreamBody is a portable space for screaming. Use it to silence your screaming in public. Then later, when you’re somewhere more appropriate, you can let the scream back out. For some reason this project has come up a lot recently.
2.
– Menja Stevenson creates outfits from German transport seating moquettes.
3.
“The abundance of information technology in today’s society results in “Alert Fatigue” due to the overwhelming number of alarms and notifications that attempt to grab our attention.”
– Minjoo Cho and Daniel Saakes at KAIST have created Calm Automaton, a kit for making physical calm information displays.
4.
– What’s the worst possible UI for entering a phone number in a form?
5.
How do you move from a one-off made using an Arduino or Raspberry Pi to a fully-fledged commercial product?
– Alex Deschamps-Sonsino has written a checklist for moving on from an internet of things prototype to a product, covering funding, patents, manufacturing, and assembling a team.
6.
“Your systems are set up to judge me based on where I’m from, but like millions around the world, I’m not from one place. Yet you have chosen not to develop ways of computing multiple locations. Instead of adjusting your system to reflect reality, I’m forced to conform.”
– Zara Rahman on being asked Where Are You Really From and choosing nationality from a dropdown menu.
7.
– James Bridle has been building his own self-driving car, and in the process figuring out how to trap them.
8.
– What if designers used the new General Data Protection Regulation as a chance to design better interfaces, instead of repeating the Cookie Law kerfuffle? Projects by IF have created prototypes for how they could behave, which Sarah Gold expands on in her recent We Need New Patterns talk.
Originally published at tinyletter.com.
