USE DESIGN blog

A couple of days ago, while walking through Montmartre, I was thinking: wouldn’t be nice to take pictures of all the places we think are beautiful and put them on one big map, recreating the whole Earth by our photographs… well, it is already done. When you think you have an original idea, it turns out that you just have ’sniffed’ it in the air.
Do you know Panoramio? It looks like Flickr, but its main function is to show you this big Earth map with all the photos put on it by the users. It is impressively fast and impressively complete, especially when it comes to popular places like Montmartre. What possible use could we make of it? Well, you could plan your holiday trip, but it might take some surprise element out of it or raise unrealistic expectations. You could take a nostalgic after-tour. What else? Nothing really.
Since the invention of the digital camera we have been documenting our world in an endless stream of images. Somebody thought of connecting them to places and Google came with a map. Like so many new web ’services’, in which we connect things to one another (friends to pictures, pictures to friends, messages to places etc.) Panoramio is wonderfully useless. It is delightful. You can talk a walk on Montmartre during your lunch break or instead have a look at the sea beaches of, say, Sicily. Or at how your place of birth, left a long time ago, looks nowadays.
Something at once touching and purposeless is art.

A while ago I wrote a post on different search engines and different ways to represent search results, different being non-Google. Here is another fine example, using the currently-very-in-vogue Coverflow visualisation: Searchme. You can browse through the visuals of the websites without clicking on them and returning to the results list: at least one click less per result and a much better overview!

The speed and fluency of the images are quite impressive. Besides, the search key word is indicated on each page.

Il semble que les ingénieurs de Google aient bien progressé sur Android. Autant je n’avais pas été convaincu par les premières vidéos, autant cette nouvelle vidéo semble montrer un potentiel bien plus important.



J’aime beaucoup :

- l’écran de déblocage qui s’inspire de celui de l’iPhone en y ajoutant la possibilité de créer ses propres “patterns/schémas”. Cela ajoute un petit niveau de sécurité, moins rébarbatif qu’un code PIN pour ceux qui souhaitent limiter l’accès à leur téléphone.

- l’écran qui regroupe l’ensemble des notifications.

- le “bureau” personnalisable avec des widgets et des raccourcis (de type “contact” notamment, ce qui manque à l’iPhone).

- l’effet de loupe qui permet de mieux choisir l’endroit d’une page web que l’on souhaite agrandir (que l’on ne possède pas sur l’iPhone non plus).

A suivre…

Répondre aux nombreuses sollicitations de son mobile, ses mails, ou de sa messagerie instantanée dans toute les situations (travail, rendez-vous, au volant, etc.) est loin d’être toujours quelque chose d’évident. Pour palier à ce besoin grandissant de toujours vouloir garder le contact ; et ne pas être distrait ou dérangé aux moments inopportuns ; le cabinet de consulting en développement de nouveaux produits Kaleidoscope propose un concept nommé “Tame” (”dompter” en français).





L’objet se présente sous forme de cube, auquel l’utilisateur peut attribuer un message personnalisé à chacune des 6 faces. Dépourvu de bouton ou de clavier, “Tame” se configure entièrement via une interface web. Il suffit ensuite d’activer “Tame” et de positionner la face correspondant au message que vous souhaitez diffuser vers le haut. Grâce à sa liaison bluetooth (qui le relie à votre iphone qui bien évidemment est toujours connecté au net :-), il se chargera de mettre a jour votre statut sur l’ensemble des moyens de communication que vous utilisez (msn, facebook, mails, mobile, etc.).


Fini donc les interruptions intempestives au volant ou au travail, vous allez pouvoir travailler efficacement et être à la fois plus prudent en conduisant.

Mené par deux étudiants de l’université de sciences appliquées d’Augsbourg, Sensisphère est une interface innovante qui allie un écran hémisphérique d’un mètre de diamètre à une interface tactile.





L’écran utilise notamment sa forme pour faciliter la navigation de google earth à travers une gestuelle qui nous est tous un peu familière. En effet, qui n’a jamais manipulé un globe dans son enfance… La vidéo nous montre également une utilisation comme un jukebox, ou encore la navigation dans ce qui semble être une structure hypertexte…

Sometimes search results are like bread buns - they’d better be fresh. Or, as we are in Paris, like French baguette: it should be baked just before you enter the bakery.

One feature I always liked about YouTube is that you can sort your search results by date. This way you can easily see what sort of totally useless stuff has been dumped recently about a particular subject. This useful feature has known some metamorphosis in the past year. First, it was inside a drop-down menu, which I didn’t like but couldn’t get around. Then, for just a short period, it had disappeared somewhere, to quickly come back on the highest level, as a simple link, right next to ‘Relevance’.I don’t know how they do design at YouTube, but here is an example of a design team who somehow listened to the users and deduced a choice list (drop-down) to two basic items: relevance and date. Probably this is what people use most. And they offered it in a more direct way because nobody likes drop-down menus.

The ’sort by date’ link is something I still want in Google. How often do I search and then jump into the first three-four results, only to discover later that the answer to my question was from 1999. Of course, for some questions this doesn’t matter. But for most questions the age of the information is very relevant.

To bypass this problem on Google and get, so to say, the freshest baguette, you need to go into Advanced Search and that is where strange things start happening. In the google.com Advanced Search the field ‘date’ is hidden behind ‘Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more’ group, which you have to expand to use it. On google.fr, however, the date field is the 5th in the form, directly at hand.

Do French people search more often by date? Were they complaining to Google about this? Was the English population of the planet willing to content itself with yesterday’s baguette?

Why have this difference? Google knows.

Lors des grandes conférences (MIX, WEB 3, etc.), il est coutumier de poster les compte-rendus des présentations de la journée afin d’en faire profiter l’ensemble de la blogosphère.


Lors des conférences TED, deux artistes Kevin Richards et David Sibbet, “capturent” ses événement à l’aide de dessins. Pour l’occasion, ces derniers ont ensuite été intégrés dans une interface spéciale sur un écran tactile.





Grand amateur de prise de note sous forme de sketch et croyant beaucoup à l’efficacité de prototyper rapidement des concepts d’interface sous cette forme, je dois avouer que çà serait bien sympathique de disposer d’un outil comme çà à l’agence.

D’autres ressources disponibles ici.

The difference between internet and shopping is that you cannot walk in and just gaze at things. Before you can do that, you are obliged to to search for what it is you want to gaze at. Internet used to be mostly text-oriented and so is every search. But there is more than just words out there.

Daily Slurp offers website search by color. When would you search a website by color? When you are a visual designer and want some inspiration. You can search by a combination of a main and an accent color. What is strange, however, is that the search itself is not offered by choosing a color on a pallet, but by choosing the name of the color in a drop-down menu, like ‘red’. Sooooo boring. Not only every visual designer knows that there are millions of colors of red, but scientific research has shown that every human being sees the colors slightly differently.



The discovery of Daily Slurp prompted me to see, if there are more ways to search than just by keywords. Retrievr offers an image search by sketch. However, my drawing of a red tulip gave me everything BUT a red tulip, so I suppose the engine can be improved.



FindSounds offers extensive help when searching for a sound.

There is a number of question/answer based search engines. An especially lively example is Ms. Dewey.

Besides, there is a number of search engines, which make an effort not as much as to offer an alternative search method, but to present the results in a more meaningful way. And when you try one of those, you find yourself thinking that Google results page is really nothing more than the stuff thrown in your face with the message ‘You figure it out’. For instance, Hakia presents the results in thematic chapters. If you type in ‘tango’, it will deliver you History, Founders and Innovators, Musicians, Venus and so on, including some illustrations. This is what I would call the encyclopedic search. However, if you type ‘interaction design’, it just gives you the plain old list of results. I wonder why.

Kartoo offers a relationship-based results page.



And then there is personalized thematic search such as this demonstration. Aetna Healthline proposes a search concerning your specific medical symptoms, including pushing the information to the user to give him/her a complete picture of the condition and its consequences.

In the exhibition Design and the elastic mind in New York Nokia demonstrates the prototype of Morph, a mobile phone built with nanotechnology.


This design triggered me to do some quick research on what nanotechnology actually is and what it means for the future. In short, nanotechnology is professed to change our economy and society in a much more revolutionary way than any other technology so far. The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology lists the benefits of it as well as its dangers. In short, from the benefits point of view, nanotechnology will save the world, making it finally into that green leisurely utopia we have all been promised for so long. From the dangers point of view, nanotechnology will destroy the world structure and us with it.

Which brings me to my point, which is not about nanotechnology, but about the future as we imagine it - and the actual outcome.

When the escalator was invented, the intention was to transport people quicker from A to B. The inventors assumed that the people would continue walking, adding their own speed to that of the rolling stairs. But humans love being transported because it gives them the luxurious pleasure of doing nothing and still getting somewhere. So on the escalator people stop walking and wait till they reach the end, unless they are in a great hurry.

With digital revolution people expected all paper to disappear. But digital revolution has also brought along a vast amount of information and mass access to cheap printers. So we now use more paper than ever.

Telecommunication was thought to reduce travel, but as Tim Harford writes in the February issue of Wired: ‘Paradoxically, your cell phone, email, and Facebook networks are making it more attractive to meet people in flesh.‘ Along with mass access to telecommunication there also came mass access to air travel. So we now travel more than ever, also because it is so much nicer to have a business meeting in a sushi bar in Tokyo instead of on a video screen in your office.

Economical wealth and technological progress were expected to bring us also more free time, make us more relaxed, tune our activities to leisure and art. But technology enables us to do things faster, so we automatically do more things and are therefore in a continuous lack of time. What was supposed to make us happier, gives us instead such an enormous amount of choice in any domain of life that we constantly worry about choosing the right thing. And worried people are not happy people.

Whatever we predict, the future will be different. Fortunately or unfortunately.

Le concept Wizkid a été développé par Frederic Kaplan, ancien ingénieur chez Sony qui a notamment travailler sur le célèbre robot de loisir Aibo, et Martino d’Esposito, designer de meubles et d’objets pour des marques comme Ligne Roset ou Cina. Wizkid a reçu le soutien du laboratoire EPFL+ECAL Lab. Ce nouveau laboratoire a été créé entre l’Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne et l’Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne et vise a rapprocher ingénierie, design (numérique et produit) et architecture.


Wizkid a pour objectif de simplifier l’interaction entre l’utilisateur et l’ordinateur. Ici pas de souris, pas de clavier, ni d’écran tactile multitouch! Pour entrer en interaction avec lui, regardez-le, ensuite cela se joue uniquement par de simples gestes. Bien qu’il ne parle pas, Wizkid capte ces gestes grace à sa camera et réagit donc en conséquence. Son interface est le résultat d’une étude menée par Clément Gault, designer numérique diplomé de l’Ecole de Design Nantes Atlantique et doctorant sur le design et les interfaces tangibles. Baptisée “Halo”, elle renvoie l’image de l’utilisateur comme dans un miroir, entouré d’un certain nombre d’applications et de widgets . Il peut alors manipuler l’interface par une gestuelle très naturelle comme par exemple lui montrer un album cd pour le lancer.





Wizkid est une belle illustration du rôle que peut jouer la technologie pour simplifier l’interaction entre l’homme et la machine. Pour une démonstration, c’est au Musée d’art moderne de New-York (MoMA) dans le cadre de l’exposition “Design and the Elastic Mind” qui a lieu du 24 février au 12 mai prochain…