Check In

Does anyone know where I can pick up some free time? I mean really a few hours or so a week would change my life.Indeed I am alive, designing my heart out and enjoying my first legitimate autumn (you know, red and golden leaves and the like) as it unfolds before me. Living in Texas my whole life it never occurred to me that I was missing such pleasant weather and that trees truly are engineered to morph beyond green and dead.

Onto bigger and better things. Apple has reported the sale of over 1 million movies in less than two days in their iTunes store. What does this mean? Well, for one it means people are adding to the variety of media carried on their person and moved through different physical environments (such as the home, work, businesses, vehicle). It also means that people are adding to or updating their personal devices – indicating there is a market to support personal technology.

For those of us interested in the proliferation of information and information devices into the world, movement towards people carrying his/her own media with them to refer to and share comes as no surprise. My question is whether technology will move towards more complicated interfaces and functionality as has the cell phone with the addition of calendars, contacts, integrated still and video cameras, games, etc. or items such as the iPod which performs a limited set of tasks well will set the precedent.

Another item of interest to me is how physical environments adapt to the information introduced by devices carried on individuals. Will computing truly be compartmentalized into rendering, processing and storage devices? Will the technological environment overlaying the physical environment we are in adapt to the information/task introduced to it?

Currently I am doing some extremely interesting design work for a major consumer electronics company looking to have answers for how the proliferation of information devices and media types should be managed through physical and virtual interfaces. It is amazing how, when approached from an info-centric perspective, technology can enhance people’s lives not through useless or mediocre features but with rich tools to manipulate and view information, share one’s discoveries, or simply be creative.

The exciting aspect to all this for visual designers is of course we can assure the interface to this complex world is beautiful and useable.

Does any of this resonate with you? Are there other examples of what one may refer to as movement towards “pervasive computing” I have missed?


Let us hear it

  1. clearly nathan’s right, the boys that brought us itrip and the snap on microphone (griffin technologies) will surely have a snap on camera head for the new ipod by christmas and we can finally say goodbye to the dvtape. I think hiroshi’s stuff at media lab is playing pretty hard on the edges of the tangible bits thing and as soon as actual consumer electronics companies start paying attention stuff is gonna explode (batteries will remain the harbinger of doom for these things for at least the next 7 years though).



    The new pen from leapfrog is pretty damn inspirational too.

    mick

  2. i think we are going to see a lot of new products step away from their dependence on the pc. for example if i could download songs on my ipod while i am riding in an elevator or share music with someone in a public space – then things start to point towards a more pervasive world. and if my kids get that pen from leapfrog before me, i gonna be upset.

    Marc