How Apple and Microsoft Borrow From Smartphones In New Desktop UIs

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In an example of trickle-up interaction design, the computer giants are integrating features that work well on our tinier handheld screens.

WATCH EXAMPLES AND READ FULL POST – http://www.fastcodesign.com/1664020/trickle-up-interaction-design

Ever Wanted To Be A UI Designer? Now You Can, With UI Sketcher iPad App

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You may not necessarily be a designer if you’re reading this blog, but you at least care about design. Which means you — like me — may often feel an itch to improve the interfaces of your own stuff: your blog, or your wedding site, or your online photo collection. Still, actually figuring out how to do that is a daunting prospect. Well be daunted no longer, amateur interface nerds: UI Sketcher for iPad gives you the same simple, intuitive toolset that the pros at Box UK use to generate ideas for their big name clients. Give it a whirl and you’ll be giving unsolicited design advice to your friends in no time!

READ FULL POST – http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663816/ui-sketcher-ipad-app-brings-interface-design-basics-to-the-masses

This might finally be the beginning of the (probably long) decline of dead dinosaur* juice technology. Green gets mean with this new Nissan Leaf commercial!

*Technically oil comes from of single celled organisms, not dinosaurs, but referring to it as such is less fun.

Vahe Berberian is somewhat of a renaissance man. Paining, writing, entertaining, thinking, his work spans a variety of media. Successfully showcasing such a diverse range of art-forms is a daunting task.

Vahe’s new website manages to meet this challenge by housing a vast amount of work in an elegant, simple to navigate site, one with a strong design that accentuates his work, not distract from it.

This new site also features a blog section, adding yet another channel of communication and expression for Vahe and allowing him to interact with his followers more frequently and intimately.

CHECK OUT THE SITE!
http://vaheberberian.com/

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One day Iraq, our post-9/11 trauma and the divisiveness of the Bush years will all be behind us — and America will need, and want, to get its groove back. We will need to find a way to reknit America at home, reconnect America abroad and restore America to its natural place in the global order — as the beacon of progress, hope and inspiration. I have an idea how. It’s called “green.”

In the world of ideas, to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own the issue. One thing that always struck me about the term “green” was the degree to which, for so many years, it was defined by its opponents — by the people who wanted to disparage it. And they defined it as “liberal,” “tree-hugging,” “sissy,” “girlie-man,” “unpatriotic,” “vaguely French.”

Well, I want to rename “green.” I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century. A redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature and terrorism.

READ FULL ARTICLE – http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15green.t.html

Social Scientist Sees Bias Within

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SAN ANTONIO — Some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting.

Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

READ FULL ARTICLE – http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/science/08tier.html

Psychology Studies Biased toward Western Undergrads

Anyone familiar with psychology has probably heard a statement like this: A significant percentage of male & female undergraduates displayed X when prompted by Y. And typically the conclusion of the study is something like: So humans display X in the presence of Y. Taking the behavior of undergrads and extending it to all of humanity is an intriguing leap, right?

To be fair, for research purposes, undergrads are cheap and accessible. But, as noted by the blogger Headcase, such terms are better used to describe a hot date rather than good data.

READ FULL POST AND LISTEN TO PODCAST – http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=psychology-studies-biased-toward-we-10-08-07

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At the School of Visual Arts, Core77′s own Allan Chochinov challenged students on his 3D Design course to redesign the first thing they threw out after class. Finding herself chucking an empty tube of toothpaste, Lebonese design student Leen Sadder sprang into action, busily researching the history of toothpaste and its relationship to the toothbrush.

READ FULL POST – http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/this_toothbrush_twig_tooth-cleanser_by_leen_sadder_18440.asp

Over the holidays, I was Christmas shopping for a friend. She had mentioned the company TOMS, which donates a pair of shoes for every pair purchased, and how she admired the founder Blake Mycoskie. I did a little search online to see if I could get her something related to Blake Mycoskie (besides the shoes, which would require me to know what color she wanted them in and what size was comfortable). I found that he was writing a book about social entreprenuership. The release date was in September 2011, but Amazon was taking pre-orders, so I decided to order it. Not to be completely lame and simply tell her what she was getting as a Christmas present, I wanted to print out the cover and give that to her, but Amazon did not yet have the cover posted. I decided to design it myself and give her a print of it on cardstock. The title of the book (at the time) was One for One, A Manifesto for Conscious Capitalism.

The title must have been a working one, because it now seems to be called Start Something That Matters. Here’s the publisher’s page for the book – http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400069187

The look of it is based off of the website of TOMS Shoes. I revised it a little, but the concept is the same. Here’s the design!

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There is a moment during every branding presentation I give when I offer something enormously valuable–for free. I tell clients to write down what is essentially the formula for successful branding employed by the best brands in the world. With their undivided attention and pens in hand, I summarize this formula for them in three words: Unify. Simplify. Amplify.

READ FULL POST – http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663249/100k-of-free-branding-advice-in-just-three-words

Shorter E-Books for Smaller Devices

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WE’RE barely two months into 2011, and I’ve already crossed the main New Year’s resolution off my list.

It wasn’t a pledge to join a running group or to call my parents more often, though those are important goals and I’m sure I’ll get to them eventually. My aim was to read an entire e-book.

READ FULL ARTICLE – http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13ping.html

From IDEO: The Future of the Book

The Future of the Book from IDEO.