The animation is based on the first couple chapters of Barbara Ballard’s Designing the Mobile User Experience – and is targeted for students who are just getting into User Experience Design. This was a joint project together with Niek Dekker, Lemmy-Boy Hoogendoorn, and Gemma Vernooij.

Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

However Monica Bonvicini came up with a design with preserves our privacy without obstructing us from the environment around us. Bonvicini’s ‘Don’t Miss a Sec’ is a public toilet built with walls of one-way mirrors. From the outside it looks like a large silver box, but inside is a toilet with a 360 degree view of the street around you.

It seems this toilet is “touring” through different cities, and will now be in the center of Rotterdam (Netherlands) until some time in November. I’m sure many of you have read about this before, so had I. But the moment I saw it in person, walked inside and started urinating while watching people walk by it amazed me how directly design had an impact on my immediate environment. It was sensational, I felt like I was starring in “Hollow Man” as I could watch world while being completely invisible to them! There is not much else I can say about

Anyone in the neighborhood should definitely take a look, because peeing in public never felt so good. The toilet is in the center of Rotterdam in front of the Stadhuis, and shouldn’t be hard to find.

Don’t know how one-way mirrors work? Read this

How the World Really Shapes Up

The first example takes a map of the world and distorts each region size, relevant to the category it is in. For example, while viewing the map on HIV presence, Africa will be bloated compared to the rest of the world.

See more maps or read more about the project at the UK Daily Mail.

(These maps were produced together by the universities of Michigan and Sheffield)

Size of the Universe

Universcale is a very interactive example of helping us putting into perspective the size of the universe. We quickly can understand how small we are compared to the billions of light years which span across the universe, whilst still being millions of times larger than the building blocks which make up the universe.

(I found Universcale through a design website which I frequently visit, Position Absolute)

Here is a video which also helps us fathom just how large the universe really is

Great features like live image resizing make Apple Web Gallery really give Flickr and other foto services something to catch up to.

Although Apple did a great job thinning the line between offline and online photo viewing, it still needs some major work. All of the web2.0 goodness make just the home page clock in at more than 1.4MB, which even on my 6Mbit connection feels sluggish and irritating.

A table of download times from Websiteoptimization.com

Sure waiting a minute on a T1 doesn’t seem too bad, but showing these images to your mom on her ISDN line will take her more than 2 minutes just to download the index page! Pure blasphemy
Curious, try out Apple’s Live Web Gallery for yourself.

What I like most about this, is that instead of just showing us a new method of interaction, it tries to challenge our current default method of ‘click interaction’ and have us question whether it is necessary.

Although it is debatable to which extent a ‘clickless interaction’ is functional and ideal, it is nice to see people challenging our default methods of interaction, and showing us something new.

Anyone who is interested in Interaction Design, Information Architecture, or Visual hierarchy should visit Information Aesthetics a great blog updated daily.