Clear for iPhone (Coming Soon!) on Vimeo

A Digital Tomorrow on Vimeo

A design fiction video depicting technology that helps and hinders in equal measure.

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop on Vimeo

One potential nightmare vision of the future …that looks kind of cool.

Productivity Future Vision

Any sufficiently advanced vision piece is indistinguishable from Black Mirror.

Folk Interfaces

Folk creations fill a gap. They solve problems for individuals and small communities in a way that that centralised, top-down, industrial creations never can. They are informal, distributed practices that emerge from real world contexts. Contexts where individuals have little or no control over the “official” means of production – of furniture, urban architecture, crockery, artwork, media stories, or taxonomies. In response people develop their own unpolished, unofficial, and deeply practical creations.

Now apply that to software:

Only professional programmers and designers get to decide what buttons go on the interface, what features get prioritised, and what affordances users have access to. Subverting that dynamic is the only way people can get their needs met with the computational tools they have at hand.

Less… Is More? Apple’s Inconsistent Ellipsis Icons Inspire User Confusion - TidBITS

The ellipsis is the new hamburger.

It’s disappointing that Apple, supposedly a leader in interface design, has resorted to such uninspiring, and I’ll dare say, lazy design in its icons. I don’t claim to be a usability expert, but it seems to me that icons should represent a clear intention, followed by a consistent action.