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…

When people say things like “it changed my life” or “it was the greatest experience ever,” I tend to distrust them. I guess I don’t trust superlatives in general; they seem like placeholder descriptions that preface what people are really trying to say. More…

I’ve been invited to participate in the new tradition of CanUX 2006, the Canadian User Experience workshop. Not only is it about good things like user experience and interactivity, but it takes place in Banff, Canada, one of the lovliest places on the continent.I’ll be exploring the new role of editors and readers in a presentation, “Part Today, Sum Tomorrow” and just tickled about digging into the ideas with a small group. More…

Boxes and Arrows is devoted to the practice, innovation, and discussion of design; including graphic design, interaction design, information architecture and even business design. Since 2001, it’s been a peer-written journal promoting contributors who want to provoke thinking, push limits, and teach a few things along the way.
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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…

In the heart of the meatpacking district in New York City, a simple glass storefront stands against its unheroic warehouse neighbors—the first in a series of juxtapositions from Vitra, the internationally renowned furniture manufacturer. Walk into the store and you see the second big juxtaposition: Vitra’s new HeadLine chair, the company’s fresh entrant into the office chair market, sitting side by side with a plywood Eames chair, one of the first designed by Charles and Ray Eames in the 1950s. The contrast defies expectations. The world has clearly changed a lot since the Eames classic; Vitra, however, seems to stay the same. More…