How Google Taught Itself Good Design. Happy Thanksgiving!
To keep you busy while you recover from turkey coma, we're republishing some of our favorite stories from 2013. Enjoy. --Eds "I had just assumed that Google was hostile to designers," says Matias Duarte one afternoon this summer. We're in a drab Google conference room at the Plex, and Duarte sports a red-and-yellow floral-print shirt, skinny khaki pants, and a pair of white sunglasses. Throughout his career, Duarte has won 37 mobile device patents. Three years ago, Google came calling. Then Duarte had a surprising conversation with cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Duarte took the job; he is now Android's design director.
This is the story of how Google taught itself good design. And within the firm, all credit goes to Page. The implications of this transformation are enormous. We saw the first glimpse of this potential last winter when the search company capitalized on the failure of Apple's map app with an iOS map app of its own. Innovate is Statoil's channel dedicated to open innovation. The 3 Future Waves In Design, And How To Ride Them.
As a product designer and a part of frog for nearly 20 years, I have seen our industry change quite a bit.
But what I’ve experienced is nothing compared with the changing landscape I see coming. Our industry will have a choice to make: adapt, or be relegated to decorating the surfaces of the world. Our challenge begins with our history. Product designers have historically been focused on creating the things we can see, feel, and operate. It's still that way today. Twenty years ago, computing was just coming into its own as a medium to which designers could usefully contribute.
The first wave: Experience design Although designers have always sought to visually and conceptually draw a connection across a product line, we were free to approach each product as an individual design and engineering challenge. What it has meant for design is a massive expansion in what it takes to make a great product. The second wave: The Iceberg The third wave: Organic Products Products will evolve to evolve.
Startups - Tech in Asia. In Google We Trust - Four Corners. Every hour of every day, our digital interactions are being recorded and logged.
We live in the age of 'big data', where seemingly mundane information about how we go about our lives has enormous value. Next on Four Corners, with the help of expert data trackers, we follow the information trail of an ordinary Australian family. We follow their data over a typical day, watching as it is surreptitiously recorded by government agencies and private organisations. Who gathers the information, what are they doing with it and what are your legal rights?
The internet has brought us conveniences once unimaginable. That sometimes intensely personal data is either used or sold to make money. At one level this could be to your advantage. "The sort of products you're buying can tell a marketer an awful lot about what else you're likely to buy, you know, what model of car you're likely to buy, the political party you're likely to vote for, you know, what sort of job you're likely to have.
" Smartphones try fashion makeovers to stand out from pack. Video game legend Nolan Bushnell: Virtual reality poised for comeback. Last time around, virtual reality literally made us sick.
And that was that for the technology that was going to overhaul electronic gaming and have wide implications across everything from military to healthcare to educational and business uses. But now an Irvine, California company called Oculus VR has the cure according to none other than the father of the video games industry, 70-year-old Nolan Bushnell. You remember virtual reality. Put on some goggles and suddenly you're immersed in a three-dimensional world of tanks, terrorists, luscious ladies or whatever the games developers created. Off you went on adventures with these characters.
Oculus is cracking this problem with a headset called the Oculus Rift says Bushnell, the man who back in the 1970s founded Atari and gave the world Pong, a seminal video game hit. Sony to reveal PS4 Virtual Reality headset at TGS. Sony is preparing to reveal the final piece of its PS4 hardware strategy at TGS by showcasing a PlayStation-branded virtual reality head-mounted display, CVG has learned.
[Update: Following the publication of this article, CVG has been told by people connected to the matter that there are no longer any existing plans to publicly showcase the virtual reality headset at the Tokyo Game Show. In August, when Sony abandoned its initial strategy to reveal the device at Gamescom, CVG was told at the time that the reveal had been be pushed back to the Tokyo event. Now the expectation is to showcase the headset in 2014. Executives at Sony have demonstrated the VR display to a select number of developers at E3 and Gamescom, and will also conduct closed-doors meetings at TGS. /Update Ends] Sony originally intended to reveal the headset at Gamescom but plans fell through at the eleventh hour. The matter has been slightly complicated, but not derailed, by the growing industry support for Oculus Rift. Tech news and gadget bits.
גיקטיים. Patents. Innovation.