Product/Design

I went to the penultimate day of the Matisse to Malevich exposition in the Amsterdam Hermitage for some visual inspiration.

The belated weeknotes for the last week. My apologies. Another inbetween week, with a ton of events.

Alexander and I attended the ARCAM lecture tonight where landscape architect Ronald Rietveld (Rietveld Landscape) sketched a future for Amsterdam that isn’t dormant and touristic, but somewhat ambitious even.

Last week was a short one and mostly spent in preparation of work writing proposals and quotes. I hope we can wrap all that stuff up this week and go back into grand scale production mode.

This week I had my yearly trip to the UK to attend the dConstruct conference in Brighton. Usually I add some time to visit London too and explore the things that need exploring.

Last week was concerned with finalizing stuff for the first presentation of guadalajara. The current concept was more exploratory, we do not seem to have found the point of relevance yet to move forward.

Others have done this, but these are my thoughts.

Last week was a quiet one.

From slide 47 on is the core of this presentation by Jan Chipchase:

‘Design Directie’ is een periodiek stukje van Alper over het raakvlak van design en technologie met de maatschappij 1.

This week was completely spent with work each day on project Ebi, better known as PLAY Pilots. The site is due to launch this week (it in fact launched yesterday night).

Post-mortems and design overviews will be posted by the appropriate people in due time, but for now the site is live and we are quite happy about it.

Here the first of my English translations of the design principles outlined in the Dutch book by Rathenau about the digitalization of society and its implications.

Niet zoveel aan te merken op dit hoofdstuk. Ook niet heel erg mijn interessegebied.

Project Ebi is taking most of my capacity and brain these days, so everything else is necessarily pushed to the back burner a bit.

I don’t know how I missed this job in my post this year on “New disciplines for a real-time data world” but this week the position for a Data Griot and Community Activator popped up at Last.fm and was brought to my attention by Chris Heathcote’s post who did some griotting into Grindr (an interesting app worth a post on its own).

Some conversations with Jaap Stronks for the terminology and the rifts between UX designers I am witnessing more and more on events (dConstruct, The Web and Beyond) sparked this model below.

Ik ben het boek “Check in / Check out” van het Rathenau Instituut aan het lezen.

Afgelopen dinsdag gaf ik een presentatie op Online Tuesday over de toekomst van het internet. Ik had me niet geheel beseft dat de brief van de presentaties subtiel verlegd was naar doe een pitch over de toekomst van je bedrijf, maar des te beter eigenlijk.

This week I biked past Zeeburgereiland on my bike route from the Eastern Docks to IJburg and all I saw was completely desolation and this billboard. I had wanted to bike along side the IJ but this part of the city is so unfinished larg pieces of it are inaccessible.

Haven’t got mine yet, but yes they’re Magic Tables.

Last weekend we released Dutchstats, an online interactive datavisualization of election results and local statistics for Dutch municipalities by Monster Swell, an Amsterdam dataviz agency.

I don’t think I disagree with anything Craig Mod writes.

Hier een hele leuke video over de val van het kabinet (via):

Last Monday we saw the sixth edition of This Happened taking place and —I haven’t seen all, but I’ve seen more than most— I think this was one of the best ones yet.

Last week we had this piece of news in the Netherlands: “Scholenranglijst van Trouw heeft effect” (School ranking by Dutch newspaper Trouw sorts effect): Trouw has a database on their website with the statistics from our board of education which they editorialize and republish on their Schoolprestaties site. The news piece reports on research that shows this ranking has a real effect both in prospective school choice and in school improvement.

With the upcoming Dutch elections the campaigns are heating up and we will be allowed to choose our parliamentary representatives yet again. It is interesting to see how statistics and their visualization are used to clarify and position issues in our complex world.

This entire weekend was taken up by Amsterdam Music Hackday for which Alex, Dirk and I had planned to build a prototype version of a surface table projector for music discovery.

Presentatie gegeven over open data en de obstakels waar je in de praktijk mee te maken krijgt. En passant ook een open data maturity model gemaakt wat wel enig hout snijdt.

Just saw this picture of the Wellington RFID farecard system at Adam Greenfield’s Flickr stream (CC-by-nc-sa photograph):

Snel een visualisatie in elkaar gedraaid op basis van mijn Europees Parlement visualisatie van vorige week. De huidige verkiezingen voor de gemeenteraad 2010 (klik voor groot):

De OV-chipkaart is een groot succes in de Amsterdamse metro. Het aantal zwartrijders is afgenomen en navenant ook het aantal geweldsincidenten.

Een overzicht van de uitslagen van de Europese Verkiezingen 2009 per gemeente:

Yesterday I attended the fifth edition of This Happened in Utrecht city. It was a great new iteration with more polish even though it was also a big step up moving the entire event to a new venue.

Today at an event called ‘What makes you horny?’ (#wmyh), I gave a presentation about my inspiration: Big Data.

Tuesday, December 8th, we had the first issue of the UX Book Club Amsterdam chapter.

Of course I agree with this article: “Why front-end developers are so important to the future of businesses on the web” pleading for t-shaped webdevelopers being treated as such. Though that would seem like a fairly obvious point.

Ben Hammersley poses the question which has been on my mind for a while (tweet) now after seeing the various concept demoes of rich magazines on high resolution tablets.

Ik schreef hier al eerder dat de ov-chipkaart kut 1 is. Het is nog steeds kut.

Ik ben eenduidig voor de ov-chipkaart. De cognitieve moeite die het bespaart bij het reizen in het openbaar vervoer (temminste als je simpele routes gebruikt en niet overstapt op de trein) is geweldig.

We hadden het pas nog in de kroeg over om de ov-chipkaart te hijacken en te gebruiken als unieke id voor interactieve digitale projecten. Ik had lang geleden een vergelijkbaar idee om hetzelfde te doen met bijvoorbeeld de AH-bonuskaart. Het zijn allebei machine-leesbare tokens met een uniek nummer die (bijna) iedereen altijd bij zich heeft.

Recently I worked together with longtime professional friend Kars Alfrink on a small side project. Now that we’ve finished it, it is time to show what we have done.

Vorige week een presentatie gegeven als ‘expert’ op het gebied van Content Syndicatie. Laten we er maar voor zorgen dat het beter gaat, dat scheelt voor heel veel mensen in de toekomst een hoop frustratie.

I’ve recently used my first OV-fiets and it was a fantastic experience 1. It’s a great way to bridge the last couple of miles on your transit experience and I think an important addition to the public transportation system.

Robert Scoble hits a point (two actually) that I’d been meaning to write-up as well about anti-features and privacy wich are very very important for mainstream adoption of your webservice.

I recently reread part I of Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton for UX Book Club Zuid-Holland and made notes during the proces. ‘Sketching’ is one of my favorite UX books and well worth a reread which I found reveals different layers and gets you to reflect differently with the experience you have accumulated since the last time I read it.

Jan Chipchase had asked this question recently in a post on this street scene which already had me thinking.

This week returning from my new haunt in Amsterdam back to Delft, walking the streets with an appetite for beer I felt strangely disconnected.

For any international readers, as the Dutch are probably already very much aware of our totalitarian parking policies.