User Experience Design in context of Graphic Design

View more presentations from Jiri Jerabek.

UX on Everything - Reality Overload

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

I've decided to play for change

On the plane on the way back from 5 days in the mountains and teaching a course at the Banff Centre I finally watched the whole Playing for Change movie. Impressive and it got me thinking...

Listening to music has formed the basis of a mass market industry and a state of mind which discourages, minimizes and even ridicules those who would rather play than listen.

A mother singing in the kitchen, a child humming absent-mindedly while rearranging her toys, a construction worker whistling - these are the remaining signs of a musical soul that has been somehow displaced over time; lost in our culture's senseless indifference and the boring clamor for sameness and a mundane albeit practical order.

What stops us from making it, from listening to and giving in to our inner music, and takes us down the path of purchases, makes us fans of the freedom instead of the stars of our free lives; and finally plastic wraps our solace and faith, propping it up in the bestsellers list for as long as we continue to conform in mass quantities.

Through cover music we can easily avoid the ridicule and excel through emulation (often exact) of those who have somehow previously escaped ridicule for creating and through the careful assembly of notes and words constructed to extract value from a constantly fleeting market - formulaic rock, country, gospel, etc - almost every genre has its share of this in the discount bins of our consumer worlds.

Great music only makes it to the discount bins in the worst parts of the world - horrific places like big box stores, late night TV and the credit roll portion of DVD soundtracks - places with no real depth, roots or tradition of any kind. The discount bin collects the detritus of lost dreams, broken hearts and the bastard children of greatness mashed into a bland, mushy soup of professional karaoke - at best.

So it should be no wonder that this bizarre oxymoron referred to as the "music business" is failing. No wonder people steal it in mass quantities. No wonder there appears to be no centre except the iTunes store or whatever money collection machine has the best scale. It has no centre, no sense of being and the location and point of contact to the music has little if any intrinsic value to anyone.

In much the same way we take french fries from a bag instead of from a potato, we have reduced one of our most spiritual, beneficial and collaborative gifts to another credit card purchase and forgotten how to create and sing ourselves.

Its not so much the fault of musicians, although if you believe this you will quickly realize that there are different kinds of musicians - those who deliberately participate in this veiled circus of marketing and hype and far more importantly those pure true souls who only have the most legitimate distribution and listenership through the collective sharing force of the like-minded, friends, family and movements that they play a role in.

These musicians and those who listen to it know that to play it, to truly play it, is to feel it and understand the feeling, to be pulled by strings that wrap around our hearts and minds, planting seeds that last forever in our fondest of memories.

True music lasts forever. Greatness supersedes the marketing machine capability. Sadly, music that plays for change, plays for peace, that brings tears to your eyes and joy to your heart has hardly any more place in the western music world that surrounds us today.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - @bitpakkit

Now as for Playing for Change, watch the latest episode...

Pictures of Lily, Lily of Lily

Just found out about Lily, a Firefox add-on that enables users to create rich, complex applications within the browser. You create Lily applications by connecting functional modules that they call "externals" inside a document (program) called a "patch". Each object serves a single purpose, such as adding two numbers together, displaying an image or providing interactivity like a button. By connecting the output of one external to the input of another, it becomes possible to quickly build complex programs that do what you want. External objects are written in JavaScript (like Lily itself) and it's simple to write your own external to do whatever you want.

The Lily team have already built in over 180 externals objects:
- web service modules for APIs like Twitter, Amazon, Flickr, Wikipedia, Yahoo;
- UI modules that wrap web components from YUI, JQuery and Google Maps as well as the browser's built-in UI elements;
- modules that offer access to the network, SQLite storage, TCP sockets or the file system; modules to interact with the browser;
- modules to send and receive Open Sound Control messages or talk to the Arduino physical computing board;
- and, graphics modules that encapsulate the browser's SVG functionality and multimedia modules for playing sound and video.

Hello World from Bill Orcutt on Vimeo.

Now it's possible to use a browser-based program to make web or desktop mashups, allowing people with basic skills to visualize and animate data, modify webpages, play music, or connect to world outside the computer.

Another neat aspect is that your programs can be shared with other Lily users as text files or they can be run by anyone as Firefox add-ons or standalone XULrunner applications.

Math from Bill Orcutt on Vimeo.

Lily is free and open source, released under the MIT license. Lily runs on Mac, Windows or Linux, just like Firefox.

Find out more or get started at the Lily site - http://www.lilyapp.org/

The project is now available on Google code (recent change) - http://code.google.com/p/lilyapp/

The Invisible Man

Lou Bolin becomes the Invisible Man with no Photoshop or camera tricks - just stillness for a moment and some very careful paint work.











These images were emailed to me and I have not been able to attribute them as of yet.

Google Wave simplified

Great Creative - Ira Glass on Storytelling

Timeless video(s) with Ira Glass talking Storytelling...


"...just talk like a human being, talk like yourself..."

Video 1

Video 2

Video 4