Industry News

Joshua Tanenbaum, Audrey Desjardins, and Karen Tanenbaum take an in-depth look at Steampunk sub-culture, and specifically what it means for the future of Interaction Design, in their article Steampunking interaction design. It’s a dense piece, but really interesting. They discuss design fiction as a form of envisioning the future, and how Interaction Design could adjust to that possible future:

Steampunks have imagined a whimsical neo-Victorian fiction to frame their design practice: an...

For the 20th anniversary of CERN making web technology available to anyone royalty-free, the European science lab has restored the very first web site to its original location. Could today’s search engines of Google and Bing, which didn’t exist when the site was first posted, find it now? Time for a test. The answer turns out to be tricky. Searching For The Page By URL

The easiest test was to see which of them had the page listed by searching for it by its URL, which is:...

Google doesn’t always use the HTML title tag of a web page, choosing instead to make its own title for a page, if it thinks it can do a better job. Here’s an example of it getting this completely wrong.

I was searching for Dana Point Jet Ski, which is a real business in Dana Point. Google instead listed the official page for Dana Point Harbor first:



Listing the wrong site first is a relevancy problem. But changing the title of the page to “Dana Point Jet Ski & Kayak Center” is a...

Google announced that Google Now, the predictive search feature from Google, is now available on iOS devices. You can download it by just downloading or upgrading the Google Search App via iTunes App Store.
Once you do, to activate it, you need to load the app and agree to the prompts. Note, when you do that, you will notice that the GPS indicator is always on.

That phone in your pocket is filled with applications, with sensors to measure movement and the world around us, with communications tools that put us in touch with work, home, family, friends, service providers and strangers.

That phone in your pocket is poised to teach itself how to work better, based upon how you use [...]

The post Google Granted Patent on Mobile Machine Learning appeared first on SEO by the Sea.

John Pavlus in Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface:

The assumption driving these kinds of design speculations is that if you embed the interface — the control surface for a technology — into our own bodily envelope, that interface will “disappear”: the technology will cease to be a separate “thing” and simply become part of that envelope.

The trouble is that unlike technology, your body isn’t something you “interface” with in the first place. You’re not a little homunculus...

Ivan Hewett did a write-up on some very interesting neuroscience research in Why your brain loves music:

When [participants] were willing to pay [for a song] there [was] a strong correlation with one brain region in particular, called the nucleus accumbens. This is the area responsible for the sensation of “pleasant surprise”.

It might seem surprising that people should enjoy having their expectations contradicted. But these results only reveal the physical basis for something...

With Google Now coming to iOS, a whole new audience using iPhones and iPads are about to meet Google’s predictive search service. It’s a feature that’s gone from interesting novelty to being downright amazing, in less than a year. Here’s a look at how the “predictive search” service has evolved and where it may head next, including perhaps to desktop computers. Wow, It Really Does Work

Google Now, showing time to airport and navigation option

Google Now, showing translation and currency...

Matt Alexander wrote a guest post on 512pixels while Stephen Hackett is away on vacation with his family. It’s called Community, and it really hit home for me:

Perhaps we’re brought together by a foundational love of design or genuinely good products — often embodied by Apple — but I believe we remain, regardless of evolving opinions, because of a visceral sense of community.

I encourage you to read the whole post, as well as Stephen’s letter to his son, which Matt links to at the...