king talk

The whole design concept of the decoded conference is based on a graphic coding of words. The code creates generative forms which represent the name of the speaker, mottoes or any text you want.

The visual coding concept consists of few specified rules for each single letter. The basic geometrie is based on a triangle, each corner stands for a letter within the prompted word. All characters are located on a specific angle of a circle depending on the last position. Triangles are always built on two existing corners together with the currently created vertex. Furthermore this means that new triangles always have a same side with the previous triangle. For shaping the generative appearance the triplets of letters are therefore more important than single letters.

Color and shapes are based on the letter frequency in german. The letter »E« (17,4%) occurs more often then the a »Q« (0,02%) for example. For this purpose the guiding principle is, that less frequent letters need a more noticeable graphical change. Coming back to our example the »Q« has a more saturated color than the »E« which is setting an emphasis within the whole generative structure.

If you want, you can try to type in your own name:
http://decoded-conference.com/generator

It‘s almost two days ago that we launched the decoded conference, an event which will interconnect people from the field of design and programming.

The decdoded conference is focusing at the development process of interesting projects within the limits of design and code/technology. The projects should be inspiration and build a base for further discussions. At this conference we will online show projects, that have been done or which have been prototyped already. Ideas and visions have to be brought into reality. The conference will foster the cultural interchange between the fields of design and tech. Topics and projects about generative design, gaming and human computer interaction will be presented by the speakers.

Our featured speakers are:
Mario Klingemann – Schönes aus Code
Moritz Stefaner – Ästhetik von Information
Benedikt Groß & Hartmut Bohnacker – Generative Gestaltung
Tilman Reiff & Volker Morawe – Games, Art & Testosterone
Massimo Banzi – Tinkering with Arduino

Like the decoded concept itself the the organisation team is a mixture of the fields of code and design. we as envis precisely, a design studio for interface and interaction design, are organizing and hosting this event together with our nerdy coding friends from reppa.net. We are looking forward to see you there…

You can find more information about the conference and ticketing at
www.decoded-conference.com

Our WordPress Article Count says this one ist number 250. Time to celebrate over one year of news and stories about Interface and Interaction Design mixed up with a little bit of envis. For the next 250 blog posts we wish that we can provide you with some information about hot and new and sometimes weird stuff again. At the moment we are preparing the relaunch of the envis-precisely website. We‘re confident that we will get it going the next weeks. The blog will be redesigned too, so watch out!

The new WEAVE is out since yesterday and it has plenty of envis in it!

This time, it’s all about Hollywood. The cover features four technological visions from the original series of Star Trek. Some of them even made their way into our lifes already.

The article we contributed is dealing with the same topic. It explores how interaction design influences interfaces in Hollywood movies and how movies influence modern interfaces. There is also an interesting interview with Marc Coleran who has designed various interfaces for well known Blockbusters. In addition to the article you can find a list with tons of movies and links about HCI and SciFi at the weave website.

Furthermore my bachelor project “Experiencing Abstract Information” is featured in the education section. Yeah!

Enough reasons to grab your Tricorder and your Communicator and beam yourself to the next kiosk to buy a copy of this fine magazine for interactive design!

Some days ago I hat the opportunity to check out Siri, an iPhone app which acts like your personal assistant and can be controlled mostly via speech recognition. It‘s really working pretty good, I have tested it and was really surprised. You can see a real test at this demo video. Unfortunately this App is US only. Siri acts like a real assistant, understands what you‘re saying, accomplishes tasks for you and adapts to your preferences over time. Today, Siri can help you find and plan things to do. You can ask it to find a romantic place for dinner, tell you what’s playing at a local jazz club or get tickets to a movie for Saturday night. Siri is young and, like a child taking its first steps, may be awkward at times. This app may occasionally misunderstand things you ask it to do even within its range of understanding.

You can converse with Siri through combinations of spoken requests, typed keywords and phrases, or graphical user interface requests. As you express what you want to do in the way most comfortable to you, Siri applies a patented algorithm to sift through multitudes of possible interpretations, applying what it knows about your location, the time, your preferences, and your task context to determine the most probable understanding of your intent. Nonetheless, Siri will improve quickly by getting to know you better and understanding a broader set of tasks. In fact, right now, Siri’s learning how to handle reminders, flights stats and reference questions. Our vision is that, over time, you’ll trust Siri to manage many personal details in your life – from recommending a wine you might enjoy to managing your to do list.

Siri was finally aquired by Apple two months ago. Now that it is an Apple property, I don’t expect the virutal assistant technology to make its way on to competing devices — especially Android phones. Maybe we will find this gadget in other future Apple devices?

As you might know, we built our own little schedule for the football world championship in South Africa. Of course, we needed a way to keep track of how many people are downloading it. So we quickly fired up TextMate and wrote a little HTML5 app for the iPad in order to stay up to date on the numbers.

As you see in the image, almost 13000 people have downloaded it, which makes us really proud. By the way, that number does not count the downloads from external sources like chip.de, where we have about the same number of downloads now, bringing the total count all the way up to 25000! Thanks to everyone who loaded the planner! Hope you like it.

Oh, and we recently also added a french version, so you can keep track of the world cup while having a baguette avec camembert!

We launched our very own Match Schedule for this years Soccer World Cup at South Africa yesterday.

The internet offers a huge amount of free downloadable schedules for the upcoming FIFA world championship. But it’s hard to find any simple, handy and good-looking timetable. Therefore envis precisely decided to offer a schedule, that everyone can download and print on only two standard A4 sheets of paper. And it is available in three different languages. It’s reduced to what’s necessary but still offers enough space to fill in the results and teams in the play-offs. With the timeline next to the games, you can always keep track of when they are taking place. And best of all: it’s free!

You can get it in three different languages. English, German & Spanish. Download & print it! Put it on the wall! Fill it!

And if you really like it… Spread it. Thanks!

Remember iScraper, our iPhone app? Well, it also runs like a charm on the new iPad – and the larger images really enhance the experience. Now I’m looking forward to see people on the street, waving their iPads in the air…

Two months ago I received a mail from André Menks a member of Multilogica Shop, a brazilian Arduino supplier. They had the idea of to producing an embroidered Arduino patch for handing it out to their customers. They were not sure, if they could have the right to use the logo for that. As the creator of the icon we had an agreement with David A. Mellis to publish it under Wikimedia Creative Commons. André told us about that they were planing, because this should be a »real« extension of our creation. We realley loved that idea and customized the logo a bit, so that the vector file was perfect for the stitchery. After that they only had to order the production at a specialized company and wait for the results. André and his guys from Multilogica Shop were satisfied.

Two days ago we received a package with three samples and we definitely like it. It‘s a good feeling to see something that was created for screen usage, getting to a real product, that can be touched. If you are in Brazil you have the choice to be one of the firsts to use the Arduino icon patch. It has approximately 6,5 cm and can be hot applied on T-shirts, caps backpacks or wherever you imagine. By this moment they recommend to take care in applying over synthetic fabrics. Soon they will publish a tutorial about application. If you want you can order it for 10 Reais (4,40 EUR) at their Shop.

Some 800 young people from the EU united at Madrid for this special event, bein held during the Spanish Presidency of the EU. People took part in forums, workshops and presentations relating to science, digital creativity and innovation. We had a nice time there at the Campus Future presenting Earthwalk and Quasar interactive.

They received a lot of positive feedback from the participants. Today is the last day and we‘re deassambling the installations. We will publish some photo and video material the next days. Thank you and we see us again at another Campus Party, maybe.