1) The Arcade Fire’s interactive music video

SO. FREAKIN’. AWESOME.

2) Jonathan Yuen’s portfolio site.

This has to be one of the most beautiful sites I’ve ever seen. The whole interaction is just so calm and serene.

3) A LOLcats Bible? Really???

If you live in or near Philadelphia, you should go visit the new Perelman Building at the Museum of Art. When you go, you should especially check out the modern design exhibit, because there’s some neat stuff in there. (The sculpture room and some of Stieglitz’s photography were also quite nice.)

And you should do it before Dec. 31 of this year, because admission is free until then.

And after you visit the museum you should stop in at Brigid’s, which was my favorite neighborhood bar when I lived in the area.

And that’s what you should do.

So lately I’ve been trying to get better about money and budgeting and stuff. And I was thinking, one of the big things that gets people in trouble is that they use their credit card or debit card for everything (seriously, no one my age writes checks), and then lose track of how much they’ve spent. So I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to always be able to get an up-to-date view of your account balances? After all, the banks already have that information, and it’s available through any computer.

There are two ways that I could see it work. The first way is if some sort of small display were incorporated into the card itself, that displayed the balance and updated every time the card was used. The big advantage of this is that you wouldn’t have any separate thingy to lose, and you couldn’t avoid seeing the display every time you used your card. However, it also severely limits the display (if not making it entirely unfeasible) because the card still has to both fit into your wallet and be swipe-able with a current device.

The other way to do it is to have a device that’s separate from the card. I’m thinking, something like the keychain RSA token that I carry for work, so that I can access our systems from home. Something about that size, with a similar display, could easily display the balance of any credit card or bank account, or even toggle between multiple accounts. And it might be easier to integrate something like that with current systems, because you wouldn’t have to change all of the card readers or cards.

That way, it could start out by just working with people’s home computers, and then maybe spread to ATMs or merchants. (Merchants wouldn’t be as likely to offer it, in this case, unless some sort of incentive was built in, and right now I can’t really think of anything. On the other hand, ATMs would seem like a natural fit, as an extension of their current services.)

[EDIT: And smart phones/PDAs too. Yes.]

This would be a case in which design (of a product) could potentially affect people’s behavior, by making them more aware of their spending and less likely to go over budget or overdraw their account.

Just a thought that I had.

ACCIDENTALS

Don’t ask how he found her. He just did, okay?

It was the type of bar that you’d expect, and she was there. Sort of punk. He liked that. Went up to talk to her. She blew smoke in his face, and he bought her a beer.

He was in the mood for tragedy. He wanted something that he could sell, or inject. He had a guitar, blah de blah. Cliché. He didn’t care though, he just wanted to write a goddamn song about something and maybe get on with his life.

At first he thought they were flies. Those dark tracks on her arm. She looked away, and got up to leave. He saw then that they were music notes.

Her skin was a staff, with spidery lines wrapping around eighths and sixteenths. It was beautiful, a counterpoint trailing off onto the soft part of her inner arm. Scattered with accidentals.

All of a sudden, he couldn’t think. Asked if he could take a picture of her tattoo. It was so beautiful, like nothing he’d seen. She actually smiled, like the act was unfamiliar. She said it was okay, so he did.

He went home clutching his camera in his arms, a picture a song, alone. He didn’t need anything else.

Already forgotten her name. This would keep him distracted for awhile.

THE END

First short story in awhile. Did I delete words mercilessly enough?

This interview is awesome.

There were three reasons why I found it fascinating:

1) One is the fact of applying design tools such as ethnographic research in a medical environment, where one might not normally expect to find designers at work.

2) The second is the widely diverse nature of the problems they study and the solutions that they recommend. “Our solutions focus on the areas of people, process, content, space, and technology.” Sounds like it goes beyond look-and-feel to me. (Not that look-and-feel isn’t important, at all.) The type of design they’re doing is fascinating to me for the breadth of its scope. I mean, it sounds like their job is to look at practically any aspect of the Mayo Clinic and figure out ways to make it better. Damn, that’s awesome.

3) The third is their overtly stated interest in “designing for emotion”.

Emotion is such an important element to talk about in relation to designing compelling service experiences. In a healthcare environment, emotion is often at its peak levels, mostly because of the nature of the situation that patients are in when they seek healthcare services.

It seems like this is a huge difference from most hospitals and healthcare facilities I’ve seen, where the environment and processes seem designed to suppress or ignore emotion as much as possible. I’m not even quite sure what he means by “designing for emotion”, but it sounds like a good idea to me.