6-8pm at Horse Bazaar, which is just behind that car with the boot open:

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Should be outstanding – here’s the full details at the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia Inc. site..

Great bunch of mobile design references; I particularly liked Annika Brinkmann‘s mobile design ideas and explorations.

Interesting to note that most all of the visual design goodness in Mobile Awesomeness is iPhone.

The online extract includes some of the footnote links slightly out of context. Nonetheless, it’s kind of good that they’re there, because Punchcut and Barbara Ballard have always been great references for me.

Gerry Gaffney was a great editor; he patiently helped me forge something coherent and focused.

The dining room is never used. I’m writing from it, and my partner has a sewing machine and patterns strewn over the remainder of the table.

The house I grew up in had a similarly placed dining room, connected to the kitchen and lounge room, presumably this also allowed the flow of women back to the kitchen and men to the lounge room. But the main purpose was to cocoon conversation in a space safe from interruptions.

I remember it’s use getting phased out over the years when I was growing up. In fact, it eventually became the TV room. In my upbringing, the television set was marginalised: concealed by cloths, often unplugged to make us think twice about watching it, or put out of sight in the dining room.

So it seems to me that back in the day it was an important ritual to commune with the family in a dedicated room – possibly intentionally disconnected from the day-to-day infrastructure of the house. There children could be interrogated by parents about what they learnt at school that day etc. and parents could conduct coded conversations that protected the children from knowing they couldn’t afford the school fees. Or variations thereof.

This was, in my experience, a space intended to foster connectedness. Our family revived it for visits from my grandmother for a while, but we eventually migrated into the living room.

The living room permits differently to the dining room; it is multi-purpose and can contain technology. Most obviously this is a television, but it can also be a stereo, or a laptop, or in our case a sewing machine. Living rooms can double as workspaces in small houses.

So the potential interruptions are numerous, and the sanctity of the communal eat and converse is threatened. That’s why we need the connected house, where the dining table is brought to you by Microsoft Surface and there are desirous distractions from the mundanity of family first life.

And as a designer who was well experienced before proliferation of personal computers, he’s got a view of computers as tools that shouldn’t intervene in the creative process:

Today there are unlimited possibilities to change forms or make alternative weights — and they are sooooo easy to implement — it is no longer necessary to think first and design later. A designer can produce an endless number of variations and then choose what looks best. The problem seems to be that this process takes long and consumes a monstrous amount of time. Lost time, I call it. If you work that way, computers steal a lot of your time instead of saving time.

My feeling is that designers who’ve always worked with computers develop processes to focus their creative workflow, rather than letting the numerous tools intervene in that process. I sometimes wish I was one of them.

I also like reading about designers who’ve made a lifetime endeavour of it, it doesn’t always seem to be encouraged in the online industry nowadays.

Creative Characters, The Faces Behind the Fonts: Gert Wiescher

100 Design Book Covers

Well, now I do anyways. Loads of art and graphic design pics and links like the above from http://marcbally.ch/.

http://www.manystuff.org/

via Artskills

It almost seems like a good idea, in that you can custom your phone to focus on what you’re interested in – like web browsing / email. But if you’re interested in more than one thing, then this commenter probably has a point:

Does it come with a cool fanny pack to haul all those modules around? Not practical.

Ouch.

src. Mystery Verizon phone features 3-inch touchscreen, attachable function modules