This new commercial from Nissan has me impressed. Using “innovation” as their tagline, they provide an inspirational vision for a greener, better future. Notice how they balance ergonomics (the step in the rear wheel) with environmentalism.

Inspired by this post from BLDGBLOG, I dug up some information on Friedrich Froebel, the founder of kindergarten. The first, and perhaps most relevant to design, is this snippet about Froebel from the Institute of Figuring:

Most of us today experienced kindergarten as a loose assortment of playful activities – a kind of preparatory ground for school proper. But in its original incarnation kindergarten was a formalized system that drew its inspiration from the science of crystallography. During its early years in the nineteenth century, kindergarten was based around a system of abstract exercises that aimed to instill in young children an understanding of the mathematically generated logic underlying the ebb and flow of creation. This revolutionary system was developed by the German scientist Friedrich Froebel whose vision of childhood education changed the course of our culture laying the grounds for modernist art, architecture and design. Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller are all documented attendees of kindergarten. Other “form-givers” of the modern era – including Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and Georges Braque – were educated in an environment permeated with Frobelian influence.

I’m ready to sign my daughter up at a kindergarten that practices it the old-school way.

To be completely serious, I love the idea of education via the observation, analysis, and creative interpretation of the mathematical aspects of our physical world. What better way than to teach both life’s most important subjects; mathematics and aesthetics. Your put the two together, and you get this quote.

In between reading email on my laptop, checking craigslist postings on my iPad, and periodically interfacing Facebook on my iPhone, I managed to sit still enough to read this 5 (ugh) web page article in the NYTimes about the dangers of multi-tasking.Here’s a summary quote:

A portion of the brain acts as a control tower, helping a person focus and set priorities. More primitive parts of the brain, like those that process sight and sound, demand that it pay attention to new information, bombarding the control tower when they are stimulated.Researchers say there is an evolutionary rationale for the pressure this barrage puts on the brain. The lower-brain functions alert humans to danger, like a nearby lion, overriding goals like building a hut. In the modern world, the chime of incoming e-mail can override the goal of writing a business plan or playing catch with the children.

Information overload, my friends. It’s something I’m sure you all have experienced, even if you do yoga, eat your vegetables, or meditate like a monk It’s a symptom of many screens, everywhere, and the constant pulse of information through them, then mainlined straight into your behavior.I, for one, have taken a pledget to only compute when in the den, and always out of eye-shot of my baby daughter. I’ve also taken a pledge to not check my iPhone for updates, but only for text messages. I’m curious to see if this new pattern of behavior is sustainable, and whether the difference is enjoyable.

This stuff is so good, I may very well try to paint the walls of Adobe’s XD design space in rich, lustrous, IdeaPaint.

There are no limits to the amount of information the mind can hold. But when you’re confined to the space of a blackboard or typical whiteboard, you’re limited to how much can be shared. IdeaPaint can turn virtually anything you can paint in the classroom into a high-performance dry-erase surface, giving you and your students the space you need to collaborate, interact and discover new ways of learning. No matter where you use it, minds will open and fill with big ideas.

Awesome product, great brand, bold website.

Early this year Doug Bowman bailed Google leaving in his wake a thoughtful rant on Google’s data driven design culture. His words rippled through the UX community for a few weeks, the NYTimes picked up the story and filled in a few bits concerning user research and the validity of data, and then the waves gradually calmed.

Now, a new article from Tech Radar interviewing Irene Au, Director of Google’s design team, restarts the conversation. The article begins by addressing Doug’s complaints, but then veers off on it’s own path to describe Google’s data-driven design culture and the role of design within Google’s engineering hegemony. To summarize: engineers vastly outnumber designers, the design team establishes and applies common design patterns wherever possible, design should be minimal and objective to the extent that it feels machine driven, and all Google design is data driven by usage patterns.

Aside from the part about minimalism and machines, it sounds like the focus of most design groups in large software companies. Unfortunately, the part about minimalism and machines is exactly why although Google’s products are useful and usable, they are altogether not engaging. It’s also why, I suspect, Doug left Google for more fulfilling pastures.

Now, don’t get me wrong - I’ve got a ton of respect for Google’s products. They perform exceedingly well, and are a necessary part of my life. In fact, I consider them utilities. My use of Google Search, Gmail, and Google Finance, are to me similar to turning on a faucet or a light. I expect them to work, am thankful that they do, and get irritated when they don’t. Nothing more, nothing less.

As a result, “utility” has become the true meaning of the Google brand. In other words, when I experience Google, I don’t expect wonder, excitement, or deep engagement. Instead I expect my information to be served up in a cold, hard, objective, manner. The Google brand to me is similar to PG&E.

And I’m sure that to Google, being a worldwide utility is exactly what they want, and need, to be.

Which leads me to sympathize again with Doug Bowman. He is a classically trained designer, now the Creative Direction at Twitter. Like many designers I know, he strives to create engaging experiences that at least have some emotional impact. But if articles on the topic are an accurate portrayal, Google’s design culture is not permissive of such a desire.

Fortunately for designers there is only one Google; designers who inspire to create more engaging software experiences can find other great agencies or software companies to work at. And fortunately for the world’s computer literate population we have Google as our data utility only, and can find inspiring, humanizing software experiences elsewhere.

As reader’s of this site know, one of my passions is to make it easier for non-programmers to create rich interactive experiences - experiences that today require a programmer’s assistance. Recently, I spoke at the NPUC conference, at IBM, about the topic “Making Programming Playful.” I’ll hopefully be able to share the slides from that presentation soon, but in the meantime here are a links to projects that are making great strides teaching programming concepts to non-programmers.

Boku
Game programming platform, and visual language, for kids.

Little Big Planet
My favorite game in the world. Using the sackboy, his popit, and via super seamless gameplay, this game is taking the experience of creation to the next level. See the video below for an example of an 8-bit calculator built in the LBP level creation environment.

Scratch

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create and share Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.

Check out this video showing how to create a simply pong-game in scratch…

Jojo and I just returned from a 9 day vacation in Costa Rica. The first six days we spent surfing and hiking through dry tropics, and the last few days were spent in Monteverde, the Cloud Forest.

The break, spent either on the ocean in the waves or on the mountains in the forest, was a much needed respite from the typical experience in front of the monitor, deep in SOMA, San Francisco’s heart.

When we returned home, I found this article in the NYTimes by Paul Bloom, a psych professor at Yale, on homo sapien’s intrinsic tie to nature. After you read the article, do yourself a favor and get some nature. What the earth provides is the best ever experience designed.

Over the past few years we’ve witnessed web 2.0 design principles gain increasing popularity and influence. The most effective and foundational of these principles, in my opinion, is to “focus on a small set of features that solve a distinct problem in an efficient manner.” Now, due to this principle, every Web 2.0 era company worth its salt provides a clear and simple user experience.

As a testament to the power of this principle, its effects are making their way onto the desktop. Take, for example, Tweetdeck. Their tagline says it all: “A simple and fast way to experience Twitter.” Another example of a super-focused desktop experience is Mars Edit, my favorite weblog editor. Mars Edit gives me only what I need, in just the way that I need it.

This evolution of simplicity has seen its most recent, and most significant step, in the iPhone. Nearly all good iPhone apps provide a fast way to access and/or manipulate a very focused set of information.* In fact, the iPhone’s ergonomics and contexts of use reinforce simplicity of design as a means towards faster access to and editing of information. In other words, the iPhone’s platform necessitates the creation of simple and efficient applications.

The experience of computing is a continuum - most people blend their experiences across the iPhone, the web, their cable provider or TIVO, and their desktop apps. Most users don’t ask why one platform’s experience is different from another. Most aren’t even aware. With this in mind, my simple prediction is that as more users experience the efficiency and satisfaction delivered from iPhone applications, they will increasingly expect equal levels from all their realms of computing.

The evolution of simplicity continues.

* iPhone apps also allow people to play fun little games, but that’s beside the point.

Dance has always been a fascination of mine because it’s all about the form and style of communication expressed via human movement. The informational content of a butoh performance, or some kids turfing, or a Bollywood movie, is so deep and rich that at times it seems incomprehensible. It’s great to finally see some research into the visualization of it from the folks as Synchronous Objects. Check out their site for a range of interactive flash-based experiences that explore dance.

The Synchronous Objects team was recently features in the NYTimes in this article. It’s worth a read. In other interactive dance related news, the NYTimes also recently covered Nice Cave’s (not the singer) creations - insane wearable sculptures that create movements of sight and sound.

NPR with this great audio analysis of fair-use provisions as applied to Shepard Fairey’s Obama Hope poster. The image Fairy departed from to create the poster is copyrighted by the Associated Press.