Es ist wieder soweit. Die neue Januar/Februar-Ausgabe des WEAVE Magazin ist erhältlich. Dabei widme ich mich auf Seite 94 einem wichtigen Bestandteil eines jeden User Interfaces. Dem Text.

Was muss ich bei der Beschriftung von UI Elementen beachten? Welche Arten von Meldungen gibt es und wie formuliere ich diese so benutzerfreundlich wie möglich? Dazu habe ich zu Beginn ein kleines Experiment aufgestellt und alle textuellen Inhalte des WordPress-Backend entfernt. Stellt sich nun die Frage, wer kann das noch bedienen? Wie kann ich z.B. den Blogpost an einem gewissen Datum veröffentlichen? Fast unmöglich, ohne die Hilfe des Textes. Nur Umrisse der UI-Elemente und Icons können noch einen groben Anhaltspunkt liefern, sofern der Benutzer mit WordPress bereits vertraut ist.

Mehr zum Thema gibt es wie bereits erwähnt in der neuen WEAVE. Zum Artikel gibt es noch eine Linkliste mit relevanten Seiten zum Thema Text im UI sowie eine kompakte Checkliste, die jeder bei der Umsetzung eines User Interface Textes einmal durchgehen sollte.

Jedes Jahr finden im Herbst über 400 Kreative ihren Weg zur decoded conference nach München. Im Rahmen der Munich Creative Business Week wird nun von 08. – 10. Februar die Fachkonferenz decoded@mcbw in der BMW Welt München veranstaltet.

Unter dem Motto »Discover Interactive Opportunities« richten sich die Organisatoren dieses mal an Manager und Unternehmer, die über drei Tage hinweg exklusive Einblicke in digitale Trends der interaktiven Branche erhalten. In 15 Vorträgen stellen 17 Experten aus den Bereichen Design, Entwicklung, User Experience und Marketing ihre Projekte und Arbeitsweisen vor. Einen Überblick über das Programm gibt es hier.

Unter den Sprechern finden sich unter anderem namhafte Vertreter von Branchenführern wie Google, Adobe Systems, BMW, DATEV oder BurdaYukom (Sprecherübersicht). Das Ambiente der BMW Welt München liefert dabei einen würdigen Rahmen. Dabei wurde die Teilnehmeranzahl exklusiv auf 110 Besucher limitiert. Seien Sie dabei, wenn wir einen Blick auf neue Strategien und Trends werfen.

6 Monate Praktikum als Interaction Designer
bei envis precisely ab September 2011

Wir sind
ein Studio für Interface- und Interaction Design in München. Wir gestalten all das was ein Benutzer sieht, hört oder fühlt, wenn er mit einem Produkt interagiert – egal ob dieses Produkt ein UI, eine mobile App oder eine interaktive Installation ist.
www.envis-precisely.com

Wir bieten
- Einblick in alle Bereiche des Designprozesses von Konzeption bis zur prototypenhaften Umsetzung und fertigem Interface
-ƒ verantwortungsvolle Aufgaben und Mitentscheidungsrecht
- ƒKontakt zu Kunden, Lieferanten und externen Kräften
- ƒjunges Team mit viel Freude an der Arbeit

Du kannst
- ƒdeine kreative Ideen einbringen und prototypisch umsetzen
- selbstständig und strukturiert arbeiten
- ƒProbleme lösen und Verantwortung übernehmen
- ƒklassische Werkzeuge wie Photoshop & Illustrator
- ƒGrundkenntnisse in der Programmierung vorweisen (z.B. Processing, AS3, objectiveC)

I‘m proud to say that there is a new issue of WEAVE magazine out there. This time myself and our electronic guru Chicco contributed an article about the possibilities of the Tinkerbox.

The Tinkerbox describes all elements for your Arduino Tinkering activities. We grouped all 74 elements into categories like tools, material, input (digital/analog) and output (digital/analog) and rated them from basics to useful and nice to have. If you want to find out more about the Tinkerbox grab yourself a WEAVE.

The new issue also features some cool content from authors like Cedric Kiefer, Jens Franke, Danny Franzreb, Stefan Wölwer and precious forever. It‘s worth buying…

vinyl+ (Jonas Bohatsch)

This is an interactive installation, experimenting with the expansion of the old turntable. The vinyl acts as a screen, interface and apparent carrier for generative audiovisual software pieces, to somehow augment the music on it.

Noteput (Jonas Heuer)

Another exciting interactive installation, that also centers around music is Noteput. It educate the user on how to read notes, by letting them play with tangible representations of tones and pauses.

Cut and paste (Stefan Schwabe)

A physical representation of the old windows copy dialog takes paper from one stack to another, while rotating the paper aesthetically.

dear hunter (Florian Egermann)

A helpless looking roboter tries to crawl towards a monitor, but is held back by chains that protect it from cutting its own power supply.

Mesh RGB (Traxon Technologies)

Not as an Exhibit itself, but as a canvas for various artists, a nice LED-Wall is showcased in the first floor.

As part of the exhibition at the MA* our Quasar Interactive and some other amazing installations are awaiting you to come play with them.

The main focus of NODE10 are Workshops. They range from tinkering with Fritzing to physics-based animation and projection mapping. Of course most of it based on the graphical programming environment vvvv, which makes it real easy to generate amazing media environments. So if you are in the area, make sure to drop by and enjoy some workshops.

Tomorrow I’ll go into more detail about what is shown here…
But for now I’m off to enjoy the opening event.

Today I stumbled upon an entry at UX-Blog which reported about a review of the upcoming book of Steve Johnson. It‘s about the process of innovation and how people and companies can create a process for innovation. He says, that innovation isn‘t one mysterious thing popping out of nowhere. Every innovation is a sequence of small novel steps with many people involved. There isn‘t a lonely creator having the genious idea. Real innovation happens when different visions come to life, collide and result in a bigger breakthrough. The medium internet has tons of information and offers you a big network of innovative thinkers and makers (though, it also can be very distractive). If you are able to connect the advantages of various media (like books, web, movies, etc.)  you provide a basis for innovation.

One last note: Besides the fact that Steve Johnson is a great thinker, the sketching style of his videos is really enjoyable.

I spent a great inspiring long weekend at this year’s Ars Electronica Festival in Linz. Together with my project partner Jochen Winker we had the great opportunity to be part of it as artists by contributing with our bachelor project.

But of course there was much more to see during the festival (some exhibitions are actually still open until 09/11 in case someone want’s to go there spontaneously). The thing I like most about that exceptional festival for media arts, is the mixture of exhibitons, conferences and events. You can both see impressive artworks and learn amazing things from specialists of all areas of arts and science.

This year the topic was “Repair – ready to pull the lifetime” (or in German: “Repair – sind wir noch zu retten”) so it was all about brining our word forward and helping it to solve the major crisis we had or we are heading to. A big diversity of different speakers and topics provided the audience with knowledge from areas of design (e.g. a talk from munich based train-design-pioneer Alexander Neumeister about mobility) to science (e.G. an outstanding and exciting talk about neuroscience from LMU Prof. Ernst Pöppel) and many many more. Fortunately all of the talks were recorded and should be online at Ars Electronica’s vimeo channel soon.

Of course the festival also stands for one of the most important awards in media arts – the golden Nica. This year’s winner in interactive art was a group around open-frameworks inventor Zach Liebermann who developed an inexpensive eye-tracking solution for a paralyzed graffiti artist – The Eye Writer – which is not only one single product but also an initiative to help that artist and many others to express themselves again. A great work wich totally deserves the price and also fitted very well into this year’s topic “Repair”. For more informations about the awards, winners and categories just head to the Prix Ars Electronica website.

One point I want to mention for people who have been at the Ars Electronica Festival before:
This year the festival organizers had the opportunity to hold the event in an old tobaco factory which provided an interesting venue for the artworks.
I guess the things that profited the most from the industrial surrounding where the Cyber Arts projects which really looked much better there then in some modern art gallery like the OK-Kunsthaus were the exhibition normally takes place.
Unfortunately the talks, lectures and conferences where the ones who really suffered from the venue. Obviously there was no real space that could be used for talks so the main area for the symposiums was located in a room which hat massive pillars that prevented the audience to have a clear sight to the speakers .They tried to fix that with a notable amount of hd-screens and projectors but it was still not perfect compared to the conference hall at the Bruckner House where the talks normally takes place.
Nevertheless the biggest advantage was to have nearly everything in one place and not spread throughout the city how it was done in the last year. Actually you only had to leave the factory for some special events or for the Ars-Electronica-Center. A point which made it much easier to switch from talks to exhibtions or to see everything in a much shorter amount of time.

For me the most impressing exhibtion was the Cyber Arts 2010 which showed most of the prix winners, destinction awards and honorary mentions.
There are three projects I really want to point out in the next days and which impressed me the most. Interestingly only one of them is interactive. Perhaps I am just to much inside that field now so that i am not that easily impressed anymore – which is really a pitty. But still: stay tuned for these 3 great pieces of art.

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

The people over at deviantART have a nice new HTML-Webapp called Muro. What does it do? It allows you to draw artwork using semi-generative brushes, that give any stroke a very unique appeal. Also, it has been done entirely without Flash, so it will also work on most mobile devices.

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!

Today I found out about a new community which is a driven site for Artists, Designers, Makers, Builders, or anyone interested in the world between electronics and code. Its name is bildr, at this site they are rethinking the ways in which DIY sites have previously approached this world like instructables or make:projects and so on. Typically, the approach has been to showcase an individual’s project, while including instructions that would enable a user to create a duplicate. bildr’s method is quite different. Instead of focusing on individuals’ projects, bildr features community-written, collaborative articles that can be used as the foundation of an individual project. The articles come in two forms: Components and Modules.

On the one hand you have Components – (for e.g. an ADJD-S371 Color Sensor) show you how to connect and use an individual component. These pages also include code when needed. On the other hand you have Modules as mini-projects. These are all about how to make one thing. Like making an electro magnet, or sensing distance.bildr is about simplifying information to help you get your ideas made as quickly as possible. If you want to join bildr, just log on to bildr.org an register your seat at the public beta.

If you want you can try it with invite code: bildrInvite76f3

via make magazine

As the year marking the 90th anniversary of the establishment of the Bauhaus, 2009 is an appropriate year for an exhibition dedicated to the examination of the social networks of the Bauhaus movement.
In preparation for this project, biographical details of all of the members of the Bauhaus, as well as their individual personal relationships with other members, will be systematically structured and entered into an online research database.
The impressive volume of information resulting from this effort will then be presented in three dimensions within this illuminated 4×4 meter cube at the Bauhaus University in Weimar.

The exhibition then becomes an immersive yet highly-structured digital archive rich with historical details. Complex interrelationships will be made more accessible through the implementation of an innovative graphical interface. All visualizations of the complex network are drawn directly from the research database and presented in an intuitive computer-generated form. At an interactive digital tabletop, spectators can furthermore examine individual parts of the greater network in more detail.

more information at Impuls-Bauhaus

If there’s one entertainment device that people know and love, it’s the television. In fact, 4 billion people across the world watch TV and the average American spends five hours per day in front of one*. Recently, however, an increasing amount of our entertainment experience is coming from our phones and computers. One reason is that these devices have something that the TV lacks: the web. With the web, finding and accessing interesting content is fast and often as easy as a search. But the web still lacks many of the great features and the high-quality viewing experience that the TV offers.

Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet. With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favorite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your television is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV — it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.

Google is working together with Sony, Logitech and Intel to put Google TV inside of televisions, Blu-ray players and companion boxes. This is an incredibly exciting time for TV watchers, for developers and for the entire TV ecosystem. By giving people the power to experience what they love on TV and on the web on a single screen, Google TV turns the living room into a new platform for innovation. We’re excited about what’s coming. We hope you are too.