If you want to design for the iPhone or iPad it’s great to get your wireframes and early visuals off the desktop and into your hands as soon as possible. Live View Screencaster is a fee app for the iPhone and I just found another that works well for the iPad, Air Display.
Air Display allows you to use your iPad or iPhone as another monitor. One of the best uses I see here is prototyping a UI in flash and running it off the iPad. You have complete touch control from either device to what you have on your workstation.
You can find a download for Air Display over at Avatron.
Ideo Labs just released this great new (and free) iPhone prototyping application that mirrors your desktop on the iPhone. The great thing here is that taps on the iPhone register as mouse clicks. You position an emulator on your desktop to frame the active area on the phone.
“Infinite canvas” groundbreaking core technology that allows the artist to break free of the restrictions of typical drawing apps. You never have to pre-define the size of your canvas. You can zoom into your drawings with unparalleled precision and Scribbles will magically re-render your art so you never encounter a jaggy edge or blocky pixel.
Cristoph Niemann posted a beautifully simple pictoral expression of NYC in Lego. What I love about this is the level of abstraction that lego mandates. There is always that moment where abstraction and imagination join to form meaning from a set of basic shapes. When we communicate our ideas early in a design this activation of imagination is essential in encouraging participation and interpretation.
At the end of these images you want your own bin of Legos to add your own, the coffee cart, gum spots, water towers, anything you can imagine is in that bin.
Christoph Niemann’s illustrations have appeared on the covers of The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine and American Illustration. His work has won numerous awards from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Art Directors Club and American Illustration. He is the author of two children’s books, “The Pet Dragon,” which teaches Chinese characters to young readers, and “The Police Cloud.” After 11 years in New York, he moved to Berlin with his wife, Lisa, and their sons, Arthur, Gustav and Fritz. His Web site is christophniemann.com.
This sketch above is from Dan Roam’s book, Back of the Napkin, a book about solving business problems with pictures. He has a system that matches six ways of seeing with six ways of showing. Could this be a basic framework for approaching and sketching out design challenges?
Tim Brown over at Ideo recently posted an account of taking a prototype of a free time dispenser out for a round of user testing and observation. A couple of my students asked in the first session if you could apply prototyping to a “fantasy concept.” A prototype is in fact possibly the only way to explore fantasy. Tim’s post is well worth a read. Tim’s blog is Design Thinking.
We are presently in a technological mind set of innovation and simplicity being the ultimate goal. Eva Zeisel has been designing for over 70 years and offers a long-range vision that both counters and supports the present design mantra. In her book, The Magical Language of Things and this appearance at TED, she makes a case for emotional design as a guiding principal. Her work is an inspiration, a life-long exploration of shape and form.
A Documentary by Gary Hustwit (Helvetica)
Coming Spring ’09
Objectified is a feature-length independent documentary about industrial design. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the people who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability. It’s about our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them.
Through vérité footage and in-depth conversations, the film documents the creative processes of some of the world’s most influential designers, and looks at how the things they make impact our lives. What can we learn about who we are, and who we want to be, from the objects with which we surround ourselves?
Robert Lang is an artist working with Origami in a new way. He has combined western mathematics and process to centuries old eastern art. Lang demonstrates in his TED talk, the ability to replicate nearly any form with Origami. His method has influenced design solutions that range from Stents, artery clearing tubes, to solar arrays for NASA.
