Bobulate

It’s 7 AM on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Bush is sending more troops to Iraq, Hillary is running for office, and New York is in for snow. We start out on a chilly 6 train toward midtown. Even though the subway trip is only a short 20 minutes, Paul (29, website director) wastes no time as he rides, reading and deleting e-mail that’s come in overnight. By the time we reach his office, only the e-mail “that matters” is left. More…

Justin Gignac goes out of his way to find garbage. Right off the street—from back alleys, from uptown, from downtown—he collects it late at night after his day job at an advertising firm. He boxes it up, labels it, then sells it for up to $100 via his company, NYC Garbage. Gignac has made trash trendy through a package design and marketing plan developed while he was a still a student at the School of Visual Arts. More…

If you’ve been delighted by your iPod, intrigued with your TiVo, or frustrated by your mobile phone, then you have encountered the work of an interaction designer. And an interaction designer, most likely, has crafted the experience we have with many of the products and services we encounter every day. Dan Saffer, a senior interaction designer at Adaptive Path, leads us through an exploration of this emerging discipline. Saffer’s book, Designing for Interaction, is a much-needed primer on the topic, helping us understand the design of interactive systems. More…

After handling the counter of Josie’s Java on Court Street in Brooklyn for two decades, Josie D’Esposito passed away in May 2004. (1) A few weeks of confusion followed, during which neighbors’ whispers (trying to predict the fate of the familiar counter) were quickly followed by the close of the coffee shop. More whispers were followed by a notably cool, yet out-of-place, Thai restaurant’s move in. The gentrification of the neighborhood had officially begun. More…

Ubiquitous computing—computing systems that are everywhere around us—are becoming increasingly part of our everyday. Smart appliances and interfaces that respond to gesture and voice are no longer just reserved for films like Minority Report; they are our new reality. Designing for systems we cannot see or anticipate suggests some significant shifts. More…

Intelligence is moving to the edges, flowing through wireless devices, empowering individuals and distributed teams. Ideas spread like wildfire, and information is in the air, literally. And yet with this wealth of instantly accessible information, we still experience disorientation. We still wander off the map. More…

I’d like to point out something that you may not have noticed yet. And though I’m quite sure many of you have seen it by now, its subtlety is worth mentioning here again. Go take another look at the FedEx logo — specifically, take another look at the white space surrounding the logo. More…