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.

The film is done by the same person who did a documentary on Helvetica, Gary Hustwit. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make it to SXSW, but until then there’s always the trailer:

Download the Slides

Download the Source

This is my first MAX I’ve spoken at and the first MAX Europe I’ve attended. Overall I think the presentation went well and I look forward to the opportunity to speak at future MAX events. Tomorrow I’ll be speaking with Jason Hawryluk about Degrafa during lunch in the Community Lounge.

Tracey Varnell, a fellow Experience Architect at EffectiveUI, pitched me a link to Protoshare, a site for rapidly creating wireframes and collaborating on them with others. Even better, is that there’s interactivity, so people can see various interactions, rather than trying to describe them in text or over the phone. They have a tour on the site covering some of the features.

Other Options

There’s also Axure for wireframes, prototypes and spec creation. The bummer is that it’s PC only, however, there is a prebuilt library of design patterns you can use instead of having rethink the wheel. If someone tries this out, I’d love to hear their thoughts. Check out the tour.

iRise looks like it does a lot of the same stuff and is also a desktop application. There’s a bunch of different editions you can get depending on your needs. Check out the tour.

I’ve been getting more interested in data visualization lately, which came across in the presentation I did with Tony Hillerson at 360|Flex San Jose. Part of that presentation involved gathering and visualizing personal data as a means of discovery and insight into our day to day.

One example involved Tony and I running RescueTime for about a weak and a half to capture what applications we used, sites we visited, the duration of usage, etc. Unfortunately, we ran out of time during the presentation to demo the example, but it was interesting to see the patterns that bubbled to the surface an how we compared to each other.

I’m very interested in being able to easily capture and visualize personal data. There is so much that can be seen beyond a series of numbers. Part of the reason why I think data visualization as a medium hasn’t caught on is because it can be hard to do. Imagine being able to visualize any data set as easily as it is to upload an image to Flickr or a video to YouTube.

I came across this site called Many Eyes which was created by scientists at the IBM Research Center. The site allows anyone to upload a data set to be turned into a data visualization and made available for sharing. The goal of the site is summed up by creators, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas:

We want to bring visualization to a whole new audience, to people who have had relatively few ways to create and discuss such use of data.

Right on! I wanted to immediately start trying things out on the site, but it’s a work in progress and it ran pretty slow. As soon as the site is more accessible I want to upload the data Tony and I got from RescueTime and see what it creates. Until I can get an example of my own, here’s an example that was used in a NY Times article about the site, which shows occurrences of names in the New Testament:

Tony has more information regarding the source code on his blog. We’re thinking about evolving these samples as we have the time, so you may want to continually check back (no promises).

The video is now available here or through the 360|Flex feed for AMP.

We were able to pull together some amazing prizes and judges with help from Adobe and EffectiveUI. Prizes for first place include:

• (1) MacBook Air with SSD
• (1) Ticket to MAX North America or Europe
• (1) Copy of Adobe CS3 Master Suite
• (1) Copy of Flex Builder Professional
• And a Feature on the Adobe Developer Network

With those prizes you can picture yourself at Adobe MAX sitting at the keynote with your MacBook Air coding away while people point and ask, “Hey, isn’t that the guy featured on the Adobe Dev Net? You know, the one who won that contest?” We’ve got some great prizes for second and third place, as well as “spot prizes” for people who put forth a strong effort.

You might be thinking, “I’m no designer” or “I’m no coder”, but why not team up with someone? You can find a designer or developer to collaborate with and divvy up the prizes. It’s a great excuse to get up to speed with skinning Flex components and thanks to Andrew Shorten, Adobe Platform Evangelist, you’ve got several tutorial videos to learn from.

Get all the information about the ScaleNine “Skin to Win Challenge”

Also, I’d like to thank Patrick Hansen, UX Designer from EffectiveUI, for making that sweet logo for the contest; Paulo Rizkalla, Developer for EffectiveUI, for helping me with some website stuff; and Mike Potter and Andrew Shorten of Adobe for their help putting this all together.

Aurora is a concept video exploring one possible future user experience for the Web, created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept series.

Being able to directly manipulate content in the browser, have a seamless browsing and collaboration experience, and the methods shown for organizing user content are definitely somethings worth shooting for. Granted I’m a guy who uses key commands or gestures wherever possible to avoid the Finder, drilling down to look for files, or using the mouse to access menu items.

One of the designer’s at EffectiveUI turned me on to a magazine called “SEED“. SEED focuses on “Science is Culture” and it’s a really well-designed magazine that initially caught my eye with some nice diagrams and visualizations. It has a really great sense of design all-around with details that I enjoy discovering.

The best thing is that some has taken the time to go through issues of the magazine and post them on Flickr. The photos capture the magazine in a printed state rather than it being flat artwork which also adds a nice feel. The above image was taken from that Flickr photostream.

Check out SEED Magazine on Flickr

What’s interesting is I was just talking to some designer’s at EffectiveUI about creating a site very similar to this, but with some additional functionality. I’ll probably end up using this site a lot, but there’s some features I think would really make Scrnshots stand apart from something like Flickr.

I’d like the ability to post iterations and have them be connected. I’d love to be able to post a sketch, get feedback, post a refined mockup with revisions, get more feedback, refine, get feedback, etc. Then, at any point someone could review the entire process I went through from sketch to final execution. Being able to see the thinking that went into something is where most of the value lies.

Being able to have comments point to specific parts of the screenshot would be cool too, kinda like ConceptShare. Maybe even a comparison overlay view to to get down to the details.

I can really see this site used for a variety of things, like filing bugs, reviewing designs, concepting, etc. In some cases, maybe I’d like to make some things private. Then I can share designs for internal purposes.

Scrnshots is one of those site I could browse for hours, kinda like LogoPond. Now all I need is some time to find and upload a bunch of designs that never made it beyond the concept phase.

If you’re interested in some of the background of the design of the HUD and POV systems, the UI Resource Center (UIRC) has posted a great article based on an interview with Kent Seki (Pixel Liberation Front), the Visualization and HUD Supervisor on Iron Man. I actually had the opportunity to sit in on the interview and I think the dynamics of the interview carried pretty well into the article. It was great hearing the thinking that went into things like the evolution of the suit, the way the HUD was treated as a character in the film, and more.

Here’s a great quote by Seki describing part of their process, which I think can apply to a wide range of design:

When you can justify all the visual elements, then you know you’ve done your job because you don’t have to worry about anything being random. We took out all randomness and made sure we had a purpose to everything. That way, when we consciously decided to do something that is random, we knew we were doing it for a reason.

You can read the article in its entirety on the UI Resource Center website. If you haven’t checked out the UIRC before, it’s a great source for articles on a variety of topics surrounding the world of user interface technologies and design.