A few weeks ago, Putting People First profiled a project by Claritas to create personas for Americana. Demographic data was compiled to come up with a few dozen different kinds of Americans and situate them in the geography of the nation. These personas might be used as a great initial step in a design inquiry.
The Last Supper … now in High Definition
Last Saturday, HAL9000—a photography company offering services in art restoration, digital photo compositing, and scientific and macro imaging—released a 16-billion-pixel digital image of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” With it comes a tool to allow exploration of the great detail this project affords … including the hidden church scene outside of a window behind Jesus.
New APIs for Pownce and Meebo
It took a while, but Pownce—the pedigreed microblogging and filesharing service launched last summer—now has an API. Meebo, a unifying group chat tool, is also making some news with an announcement that they have released their own platform. Things are a’changin’.
More Open Tabs
So many links, so little time … Here’s a bunch of interesting ones left over from open browser tabs. I reference that last link as an argument why this counts as a valid blog post.
Tear It Down
Tearitdown.org aims to close down Guantanamo Bay by encouraging electronic signatories of a petition to claim one of 500,000 pixels in a photograph. I found out about the project from a tweet by Mark Dilley, a wiki guru associated with the wiki search engine AboutUs. When I visited Tearitdown, there were 82,776 pixels claimed (17%).
Designing in Ten Dimensions
A book by Rob Bryanton, Imagining the Tenth Dimension: A new way of thinking about time, space, and string theory, provides an explanation of how the ten dimensions might be perceived. Like Charles Eames’ Powers of Ten—which illustrates relative size by imagining a voyage from a view of the universe and down to the vibrating building blocks of matter—the insight that arises out of this thought experiment is in the patterns that form when moving from one state to the next. While we aren’t necessarily aiming to satisfy users in alternative universes, there may be some benefit in approaching design in a way that anticipates future change and acknowledges constraints in perception.
Connect2Elect says Mike Gravel is my candidate
The tools available to political junkies are starting to evolve in some interesting ways. No longer content to just bark into the e-wind to get attention to a particular side, the Internet is now bubbling with tools to help you find candidates with whom you are aligned. Earlier this month, I used Change.org to confirm I favor Dennis Kucinich. Dennis doesn’t make the Top 7 when I use Connect2Elect.