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“ But we’re about to enter an age of surplus pixels – screens sitting there, resting, not showing much, perhaps the odd slide show, screens that aren’t the thing we’re doing. In public spaces, in offices, in our homes. iPads and iPad-killers are going to be sitting around our living rooms, next to our desks, next our beds. And we’ll soon want more on there than our picture libraries Ken Burnsing slowly away to themselves. But we’re going to want less than most designers are inclined to design. We’ll need a restful, slow, quiet sort of information/entertainment design. Stuff that’s happy not to be looked at that much. That’ll be interesting. ”

Russell Davies in in his post Ideas whose technology has come, musing on the increasingly relevant lessons of Nicholas Negroponte’s 1995 Being Digital.

A few times over the past week or so, “information architecture” has been brought up in meetings, referenced on the new site design, or just bandied about as a function when selling. And when someone didn’t know what we meant, we… had nothing to point them to. It’s so baked into our understanding as interactive designers, we’ve never actually defined it from our point of view. Even in my book, where I discuss pretty much everything else to death, I talk past IA several times, but never look at it head on.

First of all, it’s like a lot of things in this new interactive world, and has multiple meanings. As interaction designers, doing generally user-centered things, we’re not generally talking about the technical structure of a system; though it may be related and you really should be aware of the organization of data stores, and how information moved between systems, other people do that.

Origins are useful. The term is generally attributed to Richard Saul Wurman, who meant architecture as “used in the words architect of foreign policy. I mean architect as in the creating of systemic, structural, and orderly…

“ Imagine having to swipe your credit card before you can walk into a retail location. Imagine giving them your email address before picking up a catalog. That’s what Pottery Barn hopes you’ll do when you download their free iPad catalog app.

PixelMags may make a great catalog engine for iPad, or then again, they may not. I didn’t bother to create the mandatory account in order to find out.

Pottery Barn’s mistake is not in selecting a platform like PixelMags. Their mistake is requiring account creation as an entry-point for the experience. This needs to come almost last, just before a user orders something through the catalog.

Clearly business requirements trumped user requirements. ”

Joe Pemberton posting his observations on the new Pottery Barn catalog app for the iPad in the post Brands in the Mobile Space: Pottery Barn, Your Business Requirements Are Showing, at Idlemode.

During my Industrial Design studio class last spring our professor broke us into groups and had us create entries for the James Dyson Award design contest.

Partly because I have been interning at Little Springs for a while, my group’s project was something to prevent texting while driving. While this issue has been big forever, and was covered at last year’s D4M conference, but our project came out before Oprah made her appeal for driving safety. So we were very progressive.

Anyways, entries were posted earlier this summer and I had almost forgot about it until I got a text message from one of the group members yesterday. It turns out we’re actually fairly competitive in this thing. While it’s a bit late to be asking – voting ends tomorrow at midnight! – I’m asking everyone to check it out, and if you like the concept, please vote for it.

Since math and astronomy conspired to put a national holiday on a weekend, Little Springs took Monday off instead (not that it really helped, with rain the whole weekend). But mobile is a global marketing phenomenon, and Tomi Ahonen of Communities Dominate Brands, is currently in Hong Kong so doesn’t celebrate the 4th of July. His posting for the Carnival of the Mobilists went up late yesterday, and we’re proud to be included again.

The Carnival is a weekly collection of the Web’s best writing on mobile and wireless, hosted and collected by a different site each week. If you are already reading our blog, or Tomi’s, or anything else mobile, you should add this collection to your subscription list as well.

This week, my link in the Carnival is a followup to the always popular mobile design templates so if you need screens, widgets, phones …

Reaching new heights – literally

Close your eyes. Picture this. It’s summertime. And I mean summertime. Blazing hot temperatures, record high heat indexes, and humidity levels so intense, a wet sponge is given an inferiority complex. Now, picture you’re stuck on an a frying hot roof 25 feet high that’s swarming with yellow jackets and biting flies. A simple slip and you meet death either by concrete or rosebud trees. That’s what I was experiencing just the other day while outside helping Steven Hoober, a Senior Designer, paint his house. Call us champions I suppose. We managed to survive the severe heat warnings for 8 hours that day and make a 1940’s house look a bit more fresh.

The most memorable moment occurred when Steven is helping me paint a small section below the second tiered gabled roof. While I struggled to balance myself and paint a window trim 20 feet up, Steven is holding the paint can for me to use. Yes, that seems very nice to you, I bet. But wait. Is Steven on the roof with me also risking a fate of death? NO! In the comfort of his air conditioning, sitting composed and comfortable on a stool, he is passing the paint can through a bedroom window! Even worse, he took out his SLR camera and took photos of me…

So, I am finally done with the long-promised revision to our previous mobile templates, converting them to InDesign, and revising a little.

Maybe “done” is too strong a word. As well as the phrase “a little.” I’ve put a lot more stuff in here, and we’re still learning the best way to use InDesign for our purposes. It took a few hundred hours to convert everything from Freehand, and come up with new ones, and browse every project for the past three years for other versions of designs, and show it to everyone, then add in whatever components or guidelines they find missing… and you see how it took me months of spare time, and might never be done.

“ A third of the new Japanese phones are waterproof now this summer. Not for the beach – to use in the bathtub and shower – because of course once you start to use that ‘mobile internet’ you mentioned before – the Japanese invented that in 1999 and have been surfing the mobile web now for more than a decade – next you want to take your phone to the bathtub to listen to music, play a game, surf the web – or just have the phone there in case a call or message arrives. But traditional phones don’t take kindly to falling into the tub by accident and drowing in water. Yes, a third of Japanese phones this summer offer waterproofing for bathtub and shower use. ”

Tomi Ahonen in in his post Serious reply to CTIA Steve Largent - he’s cruisin’ for a bruisin’, a response to the CTIA’s Steve Largent, itself a …

“ …the US industry is innovative because there were 100,000 apps at the end of 2009 and today 240,000 apps. Is this so? The US wireless carriers are somehow ‘innovative’ because Apple has bypassed them – and offered consumer side-loaded apps so they can enjoy services that the carriers would not bother to give them directly (or more to the point, made it prohibitively expensive to do). Lets see how “innovative” that is.

In Japan, on just one carrier, NTT DoCoMo, there are today over a million content partners, application and service providers. When did they pass that 100,000 level? in 2004! You think Steve Largent that this is a sign of innovation in America in 2009? You are literally 5 years behind Japan – a country only a third the size of the USA in population. Shame on you! But I know the app store argument is fun to …

“ The most useful bit of Here Comes Everybody, for me, was Mr Shirky pointing out that any blog that gets beyond a certain audience size stops being personal and starts being broadcast. As he reminds us, More Is Different. The easiest way to misunderstand Twitter and Facebook is to take them as a single type of network. Because there are celebrities on Twitter, with hundreds of thousands of followers, people assume that’s what it’s for. That it’s a broadcast, celebrity, mass audience tool. And while it is that, it’s also a small, personal, intimate one. Private accounts, small networks. ”

Russell Davies commenting on the books Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus in a blog entry Cognitive surplus - blog all dog-eared pages.

The Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted this week by Peggy Anne Salz at mSearchGroove. The Carnival is a weekly collection of the Web’s best writing on mobile and wireless, hosted and collected by a different site each week. If you are already reading our blog, you should add this collection to your subscription list as well.

Of course we’re promoting it because we got in this week with a follow up to my previously published entry on the Interactivity of Paper Design and the Smallest Perceptible Difference, getting into more actionable details on color, contrast, perception and type, and how to make those choices for your design.

“ Keeping with the focus on developers, Steven Hoober over at Little Spring Designs blog walks us through a detailed discussion focused (no pun intended!) on images, resolutions and new approaches that get good images to display even better on a mobile screen. ”

Check it out, and tell me what you think. Really, if you think I missed some key technology, or didn’t explain how this relates to design enough, post a comment either here or over at mSearchGroove. I promise I …

I type out a lot of blog posts these days because we have a pile of interns and junior designers, or even fairly experienced designers who just don’t have the same background.

For example, on Friday I presented my long post on The Interactivity of Paper to everyone, in case they’d missed the point.

Then I realized that I had laid out a perfectly good list of best practices, and explanations of enabling technologies, but had never really gotten to the point myself. So it’s time for another post. Start with this:

Recently I went to a local sports bar and grill for dinner, and while walking in I noticed a 2D barcode posted by the front door. It was unusual and interesting enough to catch my eye, but not enough to get me to stop and figure out what it was for. When we sat down, there was a tabletop display with the same 2D barcode (aka QR or matrix barcode) on it. It turned out to be an advertisement for a new iPhone application created by Langford Media to promote local businesses.

My dinner companion pulled out his iPhone to see if he could find an application to scan the 2D barcode with the phone’s camera. While he fiddled with that, I pulled up the app store on my phone and downloaded the application. (He eventually was able to scan the barcode and locate the application but it took …

In Part I of this blog entry, I described how people’s attitudes and behaviors don’t always correlate. This can be described as a cognitive dissonance. In this blog entry, I will describe more about how peoples’ behaviors and attitudes are embedded within different knowledge levels. As designers, we can appropriately access these knowledge levels to learn more about our user’s experiences, fears, aspirations, and latent needs. Using this new knowledge, we can design products and services with a more effective user-centric approach.

Part II: Understand the user’s experience domain

As designers, we must do a better job understanding how people shape experiences that they create from the outside world. We must become aware of how they collect, filter, process, store, and share information. In the article Contextmapping: experiences from practice (PDF), Elizabeth Sanders explains that user experiences occur in a context where memory and imagination meet …

Part I: Actions speak louder than words

Having packed my trunk to it’s limit with recyclables, I headed out to recycling center while battling the elements. As I arrived, it was really busy. People in all ages amusingly used creative ways to sort and dump their waste all the while trying to stay dry. To be honest, I was impressed with the level of effort these people displayed. Obviously, these people felt recycling was their duty, and acted on it without reservation – even in stormy weather. As I joined in on their efforts, I reflected on a particular situation unlike what I was observing: behaviors and beliefs don’t always correlate.

A while ago, I was driving a couple of friends back home after eating out. One, who just finished her leftovers in my car, was getting out and picking up her empty cardboard box and was about to …

I had tried to be nice, and limit my criticism of Peter Merholz’s Toddler Mode to people I was talking to, but it’s now become sort of a thing, without question, by entirely too many folks.

So I’ll go ahead and be the bad guy, as I often am. If you think I am not downright annoying about design, you don’t know me well enough. And as a full-time mobile designer, a number of things about this make my spine itch. Here’s just three:

1. “Being the only physical button on the device, and thus the only the that provides tactile satisfaction, toddlers press the [Home] button all the time.” But we’re otherwise supposed to believe that touchscreens are all powerful and kids love them as the only intuitive device ever. NUI lives! No. You have to pick ONE. I don’t even know if …

The Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted this week by Antoine RJ Wright at his eponymous blog. The Carnival is a weekly collection of the Web’s best writing on mobile and wireless, hosted and collected by a different site each week. If you are already reading our blog, you should add this collection to your subscription list as well.

Of course we’re promoting it because we got in this week. Actually, twice. My entry on th Interactivity of Paper, covering display types, printing technology, design principles and busting a lot of rumor and misconception, and… my entry on Interaction Fragmentation, and Avoiding It, from last week. They are catching up this week on some stuff left out from last week’s.

Check them both out, and tell us what you think. Really, if you think I totally missed the point, or got something wrong, comment away. I promise …

The various articles and posts complaining about (or offering suggestions to fix) the state of design and typography on the iPad, iPhone and other devices are pretty spot on. But they tend to skip rather too lightly over one key issue: that there is a baseline understanding of readability, layout, type and design.

Design is not new

This is a key problem I’ve been complaining about for at least ten years. Interactive design is not something totally new, that should be judged on its own merits, or for which we need to develop all new principles of design.

And I haven’t just been complaining. I spread information about, among my teams and in general periodically. This introduction to typography (also here) just as one example, is a complete revelation to everyone not raised as a print designer.

For too long, interactive designers have been taught that it’s …

An increasing issue I’ve been observing, and lamenting, is interface one-upsmanship that leaves interaction clarity behind. This NNG report summarizes the findings nicely; beautiful-looking but ultimately confusing and difficult to use products.

This is not just an iPad problem by any means. And it’s something we at Little Springs have been writing about for a while.

Interface fragmentation seems to be a somewhat desirable thing. Okay, let’s call it “interface uniqueness.” You set the look of the product to reflect (or create) a brand feel that is related to the device it lives on, but is clearly differentiated from other apps or sites available to the same device. This is valid, and we work on projects like that all the time. Right this minute I have a team working on new interfaces for a mobile web browser.

But interaction has to be grounded in the common device …

Naturally, I’ve been following the whole Facebook debacle (when congress contemplates hearings, it goes to “debacle” or worse). But I’m not particularly interested in the tactical issues, the privacy concerns and what this all means to the future of society.

I am instead increasingly horrified that this was supposedly the result of over a year of design. And not just a bunch of nerdy engineers — as much as the end products bug me, I forgive 37signals and similar engineering-driven cultures for this reason.

But Facebook claims to be getting design centric. They have a design channel on their blog, for example. They did user testing, and apparently enough of it to change the design as a result. And what bugs me is that I am also an interactive designer, and do everything I can to not fall into the traps they are currently in. These sorts of failures …