Great presentation here from Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. This was from Mix 09 a few weeks back. Silverlight is needed to view.
Bill does a great job articulating the value of experience in the context of design. Like myself, he’s also really big on the value and role of sketching during the design process. He’s even written a book about it.
Allegedly, he’s been brought on to Microsoft to elevate the role of design in the company culture. I have yet to ping a few of my old Microsoft clients to hear their take on this.
The presentation is 20 minutes, but well worth it.
I checked out a few minutes of Scott Guthrie’s presentation which immediately follows. There was a demo of Microsoft’s Expression Web SuperPreview - which had some cool features for cross-browser programming.
As an aside, I love how Bill’s site is completely, and I’m sure intentionally, stripped-down.
Dust off your old Van Halen I CD. Put on Eruption. Crank up the volume.
What you’ll hear is an innovative band, hungry to take over the world. When I listen to this album I’m always reminded of the first time I put it on. I had never heard or seen a band like this. And, to tell the truth, I never have since. While the bands today have become expert at recycling the sounds of yesterday - none have ever replicated Van Halen’s sound or explosive early live performances.
When they arrived on the scene in the late 70’s they delivered the unexpected. Their heavy metal predecessors played brooding under menacing dark clouds. Van Halen however, literally came smiling out of the sunny state of California with an acrobatic front man. Metal bands never smile. Actually, wait, they weren’t a metal band - they were too peppy. Their early arrangements were too complex to be defined as rock - and too simple to be described as progressive rock.
Really, there is no clean category that they fit into. They were just Van Halen.
My brother-in-law, an aspiring chef, recently gave us A Day at eBulli as a gift. The book is photo journal day in the life of this famous restaurant. To be honest it took me a while to pick it up. It quite literally weighs a ton, and the cover wrap that proclaimed “Best chef in the world” and “Best restaurant in the world” had me put off a bit.
What I expected to see what narcissistic food porn, but was surprised to find a story of authenticity, innovation and creativity disguised as a coffee table book.
EBulli is a restaurant nestled in the hills just outside Barcelona. They received about two million reservation requests per year for only eight thousand available places. For such an exclusive list the price is relatively affordable: €250 per guest including drinks.
In these challenging economic times the best companies stay their course with their commitment to innovate. I never thought that I’d count Kmart among them. This past holiday season Kmart re-introduced a concept that many thought past its time: Layaway. The move proved to be hugely successful for them.
When asked about the 25th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh, Steve Jobs replied “If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.”
Last week the news media and the blogosphere were all abuzz about Skittles new “website”. The quotations are around “website” because it really isn’t a website, it’s a widget that sits on top of a series of non-Skittles sites - a siteless site. The widget points you to various social sites around the web, most notably Twitter, where you can see the communities comments about Skittles in real, unedited -time. Critics have declared this everything from “breakthrough” to “idiotic”. But all seem to agree that this won’t sell more Skittles.
What interested me through this whole affair was the headlines and abstracts that were popping up in Google News as I searched for “Skittles” last week. A large majority of the stories mentioned the name of the agency “Moderista!”. Modernista! was not however the agency that created this experience, it was Agency.com. Modernista! was mentioned because they used this same siteless approach to their very own website which launched a year earlier.
While most of the chatter focused on this brave move by Skittles, all of the subtext felt like the creative wind was knocked out of Agency.com’s sails in “adapting” this concept. Maybe the Agency.com folks felt that enough time had past or that the Modernista! audience was too industry-inside for anyone to care. In any case I wonder if Modernista’s phones might be ringing more than Agency.com’s this week.
My brother-in-law, an aspiring chef, recently gave us 
Last week the news media and the blogosphere were all abuzz about