Notes & Links by Casey A. Gollan on
art, design, creativity and technology on
technology

 

“The question was not how to further automate the teller, but rather how to humanize the machine.” writes IDEO, on redesigning the ATM for Spanish bank BBVA.

A picture of this redesigned ATM blew through my feeds earlier this week and I wasn’t impressed because it just looked so stylish, but after watching the video I’m blown away by the machine’s subtle logic. The killer innovation for me is the cash dispensing animation that bridges the virtual and physical. The effect is unreal.

See also: Take the Money and Stand Still by Khoi Vinh

ATM designers should abandon their strategy of intimidating customers through technologically imposing yet incomprehensible forms. Instead, they should focus on simple constructions, fewer planes, fewer parts, and a healthy dose of visual logic. New ATMs should be intuitive in the way that appliances and common tools are; the best designed of these forms communicate what they do at first glance and without ambiguity.

Should they be beautiful? It’s perhaps too much to ask banks to strive for aesthetic beauty in this endeavor because nearly everything they’ve ever produced in the past few decades has been blindingly ugly. The bar for success can be somewhat lower though: a new ATM design need only be simple and succinct enough in its form that it becomes difficult for a thief to attach something as flagrantly malicious as an ATM skimmer to it. It’s not much to ask, but it would be enough.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.

Brian Eno, predicting the future, in 1995

(via tedr, glenda)
129,864,880

The number of books in the world*, as counted by Google. Their blog has an interesting post about how, to arrive at this number, they had to combine data from multiple sources and then whittle it down:

When you are part of a company that is trying to digitize all the books in the world, the first question you often get is: “Just how many books are out there?”

Well, it all depends on what exactly you mean by a “book.” We’re not going to count what library scientists call “works,” those elusive “distinct intellectual or artistic creations.” It makes sense to consider all editions of “Hamlet” separately, as we would like to distinguish between — and scan — books containing, for example, different forewords and commentaries.

One definition of a book we find helpful inside Google when handling book metadata is a “tome,” an idealized bound volume. A tome can have millions of copies (e.g. a particular edition of “Angels and Demons” by Dan Brown) or can exist in just one or two copies (such as an obscure master’s thesis languishing in a university library). This is a convenient definition to work with, but it has drawbacks…

* as of Thursday, August 05, 2010 at 8:26 AM
The future of the internet goes to whosoever is able to make all of this information work for the benefit of people out there who have all types of issues and are trying to find things. People who are standing out there on the corner of 44th st and 5th ave and it’s their mother’s birthday in two weeks and they know it, and their computer knows it and their addresses, and also knows that their tastes are such that there are three scarves that are actually in the inventory at Saks Fifth Avenue and if she just walks up five blocks, she can get that for her. If you are able to solve problems for people that will be immensely useful for people.
Caterina Fake, in an interview with Wired

Max Fenton writes poems in MindNode. The coolest thing about this is that entire branches of writing can be hidden or shown with a single click. I am decidedly less organized.

The book was always fundamental to me. One of the things I really liked was that the original logo for Criterion, which we designed in 1984, was a book turning into a disc. It was central. When I was writing the paper for Britannica, I felt like I had to relate the idea of interactive media to books, and I was really wrestling with the question “What is a book?” What’s essential about a book? What happens when you move that essence into some other medium? And I just woke up one day and realized that if I thought about a book not in terms of its physical properties—ink on paper—but in terms of the way it’s used, that a book was the one medium where the user was in control of the sequence and the pace at which they accessed the material. I started calling books “user-driven media,” in contrast to movies, television, and radio, which were producer-driven. You were in control of a book, but with these other media you weren’t; you just sat in a chair and they happened to you. I realized that once microprocessors got into the mix, what we considered producer-driven was going to be transformed into something user-driven. And that, of course, is what you have today, whether it’s TiVo or the DVD.

Bob Stein, founder of the Criterion Collection and The Institute for the Future of the Book

(via Snarkmarket)
The screen mimics the sky, not the earth. It bombards the eye with light instead of waiting to repay the gift of vision. It is not simultaneously restful and lively, like a field full of flowers, or the face of a thinking human being, or a well-made typographic page. And we read the screen the way we read the sky: in quick sweeps, guessing at the weather from the changing shapes of clouds, of like astronomers, in magnified small bits, examining details.
Robert Bringhurst, from The Elements of Typographic Style (via viafrank)
The final thing I’d say about optimism is this. If we took the loopiest, most moonbeam-addled Californian utopian internet bullshit, and held it up against the most cynical, realpolitik-inflected scepticism, the Californian bullshit would still be a better predictor of the future. Which is to say that, if in 1994 you’d wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you’d still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since.
Clay Shirky (via scraplab)
To the geeky or trained, the desktop is a fount of power and speed. Documents are side by side, text flies from here to there, IMs are answered and dismissed, mockups reloaded, batches processed, all with tiny movements of the fingers. For those of us who work all day on computers, touch interfaces are not an impending disruption.

Ryan Singer

(via stopdesign)

Moleskine Kindle Cover: a new analog-digital hybrid

…or just read a book.