king talk

The Economist has put up a very nice web special about the sources of people’s inspiration. While the content is certainly worth a closer look, what completely consumed me was the navigation. Fragments of images are projected on cubes that are arranged in space. The interesting part is that there are certain angles from which the fragments form images.

While this kind of navigation is impressive and great fun to use, I can’t help the feeling that I might have read much more of the content if it was presented in a more straightforward way. The site illustrates just how fine the line between great user experience and distraction really is.

I’m a huge fan of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers, which means I have tremendous respect for John Cleese. In this video, he is talking about how he started writing, what helped him and what hinders the creative process.

One of his main points is that interruptions kill creativity, especially when you try to do deep thinking. Now, I know that these days it is en vogue to  promote lateral thinking and group thinking as the golden way to be creative. And certainly that kind of thought process carries great value and produces interesting results – as a matter of fact it is how most projects here at envis precisely get started.

But in the end, it only represents a small part of the creative process. The rest is mainly deep thinking, developing narratives and solving problems (and of course pushing pixels and lines of code). And this is where focus and concentration are sacred. Cleese makes a compelling case here, as he has more experience in being creative than most people out there calling themselves designers. Writers like him are probably among the most skilled people when it comes to using creativity, simply because they have to create both, a problem and a solution and weave them together into a story.

I really hope that this way of thinking gets back some traction in the design community. It is easy to point at a pile of post-it notes and label that »creativity«. But for every post-it, there is a story of an idea yet to be developed – and those stories deserve more exposure.

As i love supporting good friends when they produce such awesome work, i thought i would post something that a friend has recently been involved with. The video responds to the Munich 2018 Winter Olympics hosting bid. The interface design and animations are by Marc Osswald.

Marc was approach by Schusterjungen & Hurenkinder and Technik und Design GmbH in München to produce an interface system that would coincide with making München stand out as a vibrant and inspiring city to host the famous winter games in 2018.

The interaction helps the viewer navigate themselves around the famous Germanic city of München. The user is able to explore around the ‘proposed’ sites that are being turned into Olympic and tourist hotspots. Many of us already know that München last hosted the games in 1972 in where the Olympia site still stands to this day; I hope that if München wins the bid that the old site will both reflect and being incorporated in a way that responds to its history.

The interaction was used as a showreel piece during the winter Olympics this year in Vancouver, Canada! Bravo to Marc for such nice use of interface design!

This blog post may not intentionally be an interactive or design based bulletin, but i found the idea behind its concept to be very interesting to follow especially from a creative standpoint because it uses technology to represent human form and this is what interactions do to their audiences. They attract attention.

The man behind the project is well known American music video director Spike Jonze. His latest short film entitled ‘Im Here’ tells the story of a computer based robotic man who lives an ordinary life but sacrifices it all because ordinary just isn’t good enough. The film consists of a love story with a twist. The power of giving what you have to someone else.

I found this film very interesting to follow as a viewer. Not many directors bring their true imagination to their artform. A very personal idea but presented with a formidable and audience enabled understanding. The short film last’s around 15 minutes and is well worth a watch if you enjoy great cinematography and a story that brings technology to life. The trailer does not give the film much justice so go ahead and watch the full film. Check it out online here.

Mark Baskinger is an interaction designer and associate professor at the School of Design Carnegie Mellon University in the US. He shares his views about how you draw up your ideas to communicate interactions. I agree with most of his points. One question that got me was do we rely on the iphone to outline interaction design principles for future devices? What do the Envis-Precisely community think of his statements??