Today, Autodesk—the multinational software company behind AutoCAD and dozens of other design and engineering apps—announced that it is hiring Maria Giudice as vice president of experience design. A 30-year design veteran, Giudice is coming to Autodesk from Facebook, where she has been a director of product design since Hot Studio, her experience design company, was first acquired in 2012.
At Facebook, Giudice was responsible for what she calls the "connective tissue" of how third-party devs tapped into the service. If you've used a Facebook share button on an outside site, you've been touched by her work in a small way. With Giudice joining the team in a newly created position just for her, Autodesk plans on tasking her to unify the experience of as many as 100 different products. Here, Giudice talks about why she made the move and what's coming up at Autodesk.
Why are you leaving Facebook?
Facebook is an amazing place to work. I've been able to practice design here at a global scale. When you do that, you realize that even the smallest details can have a huge effect. I've come to realize, though, that I've really started craving to work in the physical world again, helping makers.
What were you big accomplishments at Facebook?
At Facebook, I mostly focused on enabling third-party developers to leverage the service as a platform, so I was responsible for a lot of the network's connective tissue. For example, when you're on a third-party site, and you hit the share button, I helped design what that looks like, and how it feels to use. Small things like that which end up creating millions and millions of user impressions.
AutoCAD
Why are you joining Autodesk?
I love Autodesk's mission, which is to help create the next generation of creative people. It's uniquely positioned to help unlock creative potential through its tools and products. I want to join the physical world again, and help makers.
What are the similarities between Autodesk and Facebook?
Both are mission-based. Facebook's mission, of course, is to connect the world, while Autodesk's mission is to imagine, design, and create a better world. Both are also operating at a global scale, so they make impacts that can be felt everywhere. They also both share a vision that design is critically important in business, and that they have a responsibility to their users to create great experiences.
What are you going to be doing at Autodesk?
I'm joining the company as Autodesk's vice president of experience design. I really want top focus on experiences here. You know, Autodesk has over 100 products, most of which have come in through acquisitions, so there's no consistent user experience across our products. I want to get Autodesk thinking about that entire chain of experience, and create a universal language for our UX.
How do you expect to accomplish that?
By focusing on holistic, people-centered experiences, but it's still a little early to tell what my exact game plan will be. Still, a holistic approach to user experience has been in my DNA for my whole professional life.
In Slåttevik, Norway, plum trees shade a patch of garden that overlooks a crystal lake. The view so enchanted Norwegian architect Todd Saunders that he helped the garden's owner complement his little slice of heaven with a 160-square-foot cabin—about the size of a small apartment's living room—as well as a bright patio for enjoying the outside view, complete with trees growing through the deck.
"We don't usually do these small projects, because it's impossible to make money on them," Saunders tells me. But when Saunders saw the site in person, he fell in love. Building even a small structure can be incredibly pricey in Norway, one of the world's most expensive countries. But Saunders decided to waive as many fees for the client as possible to work on the project.
In form, the structure is a triangle with a slice cut out of the hypotenuse side, like a wedge. This allows both a cabin and a patio to be integrated into the same simple geometric shape. Two holes cut into the patio allow a pair of plum trees to grow through, perfect for stringing a hammock between. Inside, the cabin has a bed, a kitchen, and a small sitting space. "Just the essentials," Saunders says. "A great place to spend the afternoon in the sun, a nice place to spend a night, and a great room to wake up to."
For Saunders, it was a chance to flex his creative muscle without committing too much of his time (the building was constructed in just a few months). "Designing a small, perfectly formed building just gives a tremendous amount of satisfaction back to the architect," Saunders says. "They provide a certain degree of freedom that larger buildings can not provide. Architecture doesn't necessarily lose its inventiveness when size and budget are reduced. Many famous architects, such as Toyo Ito, Alvaro Siza, Kazuyo Sejima, and others, started their outstanding careers with small projects."
You can see more Saunders Architecture projects here.
'Tis the season. Caps are flying all across the country as the latest generation of design graduates collect their sheepskins. Soon, they'll hit the pavement, looking for their first real jobs. Should they head to Silicon Valley? Should they toss their sketchbooks and learn to code? We asked designers from Huge, Sagmeister & Walsh, Autodesk, and more if they had any pearls of wisdom for design graduates as they start their careers. Here's what they had to say.
Gadi Amit, president and principal designer of New Deal Design
Design graduates must be able to show design clarity borne out of complexity. They must be able to form a clear concept and amalgamate many components and constraints into one magical experience of physical and digital design. It goes beyond any single object, process, or skill.
Tim Brown, president and CEO of Ideo
It is important to be thoughtful about the culture of the organization you are joining or building. Be mindful of how it might feed or constrain your creativity. Don't just think about what the organization does but also how it behaves.
Stefan Sagmeister, partner at Sagmeister & Walsh
A young design graduate should be able to do what most designers claim to not be important: to know how to make things look good. We can find lots of people with decent ideas, and lots of people who are proficient in digital crafts, and very few who really know form.
Jessica Walsh, partner at Sagmeister & Walsh
When you're young, you can more easily take financial risks if you don't have a family to feed or a mortgage to pay. So I suggest not worrying so much about making a huge paycheck right away, but focusing on figuring out what you're most passionate about. Find the studios or designers you really admire, and try to work and learn from them, even if it means an internship. Real work experience can be better than your education in some cases, and you should understand the value of that. Work hard, do the type of work you love doing, and stay passionate and persistent. Bring a unique voice and put your personality in whatever kind of work you are doing. Also: be nice, because no one wants to hire assholes or egomaniacs, no matter how talented you are.
Maria Giudice, vice president of user experience at Autodesk
If you're coming out of design school today, you're uniquely positioned to be an incredible leader. Tech culture is starting to be a commodity, but design experience can not be commoditized. You've already learned systems thinking, design thinking, how to analyze, how to use your intuition, and how to execute to get shit done. All of those skillsets can be directly applied to leadership positions in business.
Irene Au, design partner at Khosla Ventures
Keep making. Even if you don't get the job you really want, find excuses to design, so you can build your portfolio and build a practice of getting feedback and iterating. Learn to code; even if you don't intend to code, knowing how to code will make you a better designer and a stronger candidate. Remember that your attitude matters much more than what you know, so stay positive, be curious, and be hungry.
Kate Aronowitz, vice president of design at Wealthfront, formerly Facebook's design director
My advice to new grads in design is simple: Be deliberate. The idea that luck plays a big role in our careers just isn't true. You need to be extremely thoughtful about the kind of career you want and place yourself in teams that will help you achieve that overarching goal.
Aaron Shapiro, CEO of Huge
The most important question to ask about what you're making is not what it looks like, but what it does. For decades, designers have created elegant interfaces that make it easier for people to find what they're looking for, or to complete simple tasks. In the future, many of these interfaces will appear obsolete. Instead, designers will be called on to create products and services that anticipate people's needs and make decisions on a user's behalf. This fundamental change in design thinking is going to give young designers more opportunities—and more responsibilities—than ever before.
Scott Snibbe, founder at Eyegroove
I think a key for designers today is to think of two 'invisible' aspects of design that are more important than visual design. The first is interaction design. Imagine how an experience feels to a user: what the core user experience and moment-to-moment flow is like without considering any colors, shapes, or forms. If you don't get that right then, nothing you add to it will matter. You can "design" at this stage via user stories, wireframes, and prototypes. And the key mental abilities are empathy, psychology, social psychology—understanding how people think and experience your product. The second "invisible" technique is data-driven design: coming up with hypotheses for A/B tests and measurable data that comes back from your prototype or product. That helps you know whether your design is working in the first place, and it helps you decide how and what to change upon revisions. Think of it like the DNA of your product. If the DNA is good, then the specific ways you later instantiate the design materially (as an app, a physical product, etc.) will have a far better chance of success.
On May 29, the One World Trade Center Observatory in New York will open up to the public. To get passengers to the 94th floor as quickly as possible, 71 elevators designed by the German conglomerate ThyssenKrup will ascend 1 WTC at a rate of 2,000 feet per minute, or more than three floors per second. That will make 1 WTC's elevators the fastest in the Western hemisphere.
If you think that's impressive, you ain't seen nothing yet. We spoke to Patrick Bass, CEO of ThyssenKrup North America, about the elevators of the near future. Although today's elevators are really fast, tomorrow's lifts will blow your mind. Here's what he told us.
Right now, the fastest elevator in the world is located in the Shanghai World Financial Center. It travels at 3,600 feet per minute, which is about as fast as you can go without making people uncomfortable due to rapid depressurization. Future elevators, though, will have pressurized cabins, like an airplane. This will allow elevators to shoot up as fast as anyone could want. Going down, though, is another story: even with pressurized cabins, Bass says, elevators can't descend faster than around 2,000 feet per minute without people's ears starting to hurt.
Currently, elevators require giant steel ropes to move up and down. Those ropes are incredibly heavy: in 1 WTC, each one weighs 20 metric tons—about as much as two and a half elephants—and you need a lot of bulky equipment and energy to jerk them into motion. Future elevators will be able to do without. ThyssenKrup's upcoming MULTI elevator system will use magnetic levitation to move elevators without ropes. Maglev is a popular technology in trains—magnets suspend a train above the rails, so it can move quickly and without friction. For elevators, getting rid of the ropes will free up valuable real estate, too: Bass tells me that MULTI elevators have shafts that are 25% smaller in area than regular systems.
ThyssenKrup has another trick up its sleeve. Right now, only one elevator can move up or down an elevator shaft at a time. Magnetic levitation and conjoined elevator shafts can change all that, though. MULTI elevators have cars that can move sideways, and even diagonally. This allows elevators to work more like cars on a highway, switching lanes to pass an elevator above or below it that has stopped. The result? Even if elevator cars don't go up and down any faster, you'll still get where you're going quicker most of the time.
In a traditional elevator, if the elevator you're in breaks, you end up trapped until a technician comes to either fix it or rescue you through the roof panel. But Thyssen envisions a system where elevators can actually dock with each other, almost like space shuttles. If you get stuck in a malfunctioning elevator, another elevator can drive up to you, dock, and offload stranded passengers, Bass says. Hopefully, that means something like this never happens again.
Thyssen Krup
In short? The elevators of the future will be like something straight of Star Trek or Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, traveling up or down, sideways, or diagonally without ropes. And this isn't just some futuristic fantasy: the technology's proven, and ThyssenKrup will finish building the first fully functioning MULTI elevator system in Rottweil, Germany, by the end of 2016.
Which U.S. states are most active has a lot more to do with access to trails and state parks than anything else. So suggest the results of data gathered from 22 million users of the MapMyFitness suite of apps (MapMyWalk, MapMyRun, MapMyHike, and MapMyRide), which finds that easy access to nature is probably the most important motivator in getting Americans off their butts.
You can probably guess the most active states in the country. In Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, and Colorado, MapMyFitness users log, on average, anywhere from 80 to 90 minutes a week of fitness activity. It's not surprising: these states generally have pleasant weather, and lots of beautiful vistas on hiking trails and in state parks. In all of these states, save Arizona, running is the most popular fitness activity, and hovers around 40% of what all users are doing for physical fitness, followed by walking and cycling. In Arizona, though, walking is the most popular activity, because hey, it's hard to motivate yourself for a jog through the desert.
And what are the least active areas in the country? Washington, D.C. (43.2 minutes per week), North Dakota (46.3 minutes), Delaware (48.5), and, bizarrely, Hawaii (49.4 minutes per week). Hawaii's low overall fitness may be due to the fact that the MapMyFitness family of apps doesn't accurately track swimming-based activities.
Explore the interactive graphic hereThe Wall Street Journal
Overall, Americans exercise, on average, 73.2 minutes of exercise per week. And that's bad news: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity a week. Even California, which averages 89.3 minutes per week in fitness, is a state of slovenly, stay-at-home fat-asses compared to what Americans should be averaging. Maybe we should all just stop reading (or, in my case, writing) and go for a run?
Take all of this with a grain of salt, of course. Although 22 million users is a strong sample size, all of these results could be skewed toward which states are the most tech savvy. Californians might not be the most physically active at the end of the day, nor North Dakotans the most sedentary: they might just be more or less likely to pull out their phones during a jog.
To help make us more alert, our bodies produce cortisol (also known as the stress hormone) according to our natural circadian rhythms. Cortisol production is at its peak roughly four times during the day: for the hour after you wake up, between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., between noon and 1 p.m., and between 5:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. If you drink coffee during any of these periods, your cup of joe isn't as effective at actually waking you up. That's bad, because it actually increases the amount of caffeine you need to wake up when cortisol levels aren't peaking. The result? A caffeine addiction that does nothing to make you feel more rested.
So when should you drink your coffee? Pretty much any other time. Remember that next time you blindly grope for the handle of your coffee pot minutes at 6:30 am, you little cortisol zombie, you.
Amazon's Kindle e-reader is a lovely single-purpose gadget, with an industrial design ethos that, in its singular focus on the purity of e-reading, even Dieter Rams could love. The iOS and Android apps are even great. But no matter what gadget you read on, the Kindle's typography and typesetting has always been a bit of a disaster, with six different typefaces, that are barely suitable for reading an actual book. (Who reads books in Futura, anyways?) As for the typesetting, "hideous" is the word many type lovers would use to describe it.
But today, Amazon is making a big step towards better typography on the Kindle. Not only are they unveiling Bookerly, the first typeface designed for the Kindle for scratch, but they're finally solving the Kindle's typesetting problems with an all-new layout engine that introduces better text justification, kerning, drop caps, image positioning, and more.
Replacing Caecilia as the new default font for Kindle, Bookerly is a serif that has been custom-made by Amazon to be as readable across as many different types of screens as possible. Like Google's Literata, Bookerly is meant to address many of the aesthetic issues surrounding e-book fonts.
In appearance, it looks something like if Baskerville, a 225-year-old typeface that has been shown to shape our perception of truth, and Caecilia made a baby. Both of these parent fonts were previously available on the Kindle, but they had issues. On low-res devices, Baskerville's thin, elegant lines looked crude, where as Caecilia, a slab serif, was just a bizarre choice for Amazon's previous default font: although it's highly readable, it's a type of font best used for headlines, not body text, because slab serifs often look and feel bolded, even when they're not.
Bookerly addresses both of these issues. No matter what screen you're on, Bookerly was designed from the ground-up to be even more readable that Caecilia. According to Amazon's internal tests, that means it's about 2% easier on the eye. That may seem like a small improvement, but spread that 2% across millions of Kindle users and billions of pages of e-reading, and it all starts to add up.
Read Bookerly at much larger font sizes, and some of the fonts delicate touches are allowed to shine: for example, the delicate way the upper arm almost licks the stem of the lower case 'k'. Bookerly even includes some lovely ligatures that makes reading on the Kindle feel more like printed typography, like the way the terminal on a lower case 'f' will replace the tittle on the lower case 'i', if they are right next to each other.
While Bookerly's not an entirely new typeface—Amazon silently soft-launched it on the Kindle Fire earlier this year, a development only a few people noticed—it's a lovely font. And in my testing, I thought it was even more pleasant than Palatino, the typeface I previously used on my Kindle.
But to be honest, Bookerly's not really what has me excited. The Kindle's new layout engine? That's another story. After almost eight years, Amazon's finally starting to get e-book typesetting bloody right.
Previous to today's update, when you read an e-book on the Kindle, sentences were fully justified. In other words, no matter how big your font size, Kindle's invisible software always laid-out the page so that the left and right margins were completely straight. And it was ugly. Words were never split across lines, so there could be as many as half-a-dozen spaces between words.
Printed books just don't handle typesetting in this way: they fit as many words into a line as possible while maintaining the spacing between them, and they aren't afraid to either break a word in half to hyphenate it or to leave a gap at the end of a line.
Before (left) and after (right).
But the new app finally gives the boot to the hideous absolute justification of text that the Kindle's been rocking since 2007. The new layout engine justifies text more like print typesetting. Even if you max out the font size on the new Kindle app, it will keep the spacing between words even, intelligently hyphenating words and spreading them between lines as need may be.
The layout engine also contains some beautiful new kerning options. They're subtle, but once you see them, you can't unsee them: for example, the way that the top and bottom of a drop cap on the Kindle now perfectly lines up with the tops and bottoms of its neighboring lines. Like I said, it's a small detail, but one that even Apple's iBooks and Google Play Books doesn't manage to quite get right.
Just a quick note if you don't see the improved layout engine when you update the app. Amazon needs to reprocess each book in their Kindle catalog to support the feature. They're currently working through an extensive backlog, so if you don't see any improvement, re-download your book, or try again later. Some of the books updated so far can be found here.
Instapaper founder Marco Arment once lamented that the Kindle's typography and layout engine was so bad, it felt like it only had a staff of one person "who's only allowed to work on it for a few weeks each year." That's apparently not true: Amazon tells me that the Kindle team is significantly larger than just one dude, although they refuse to give exact numbers. But they are aware of the criticisms from long-time Kindle users, and hope this new update will address some of their pet peeves.
"In e-books, you have this tension, between the purity of a book's layout as it was envisioned in print, and the flexibility that e-reading brings to a customer, by allowing you to increase font size, read books across multiple devices, and so on," says Dave Limp, senior vice president of Amazon Devices. "It's a tension between the beautiful but static nature of print, and the dynamism of digital. We're trying to strike a balance between those two things."
It has proven a tricky task, drawing criticism from the likes of Daring Fireball's Jon Gruber, who once noted: "Amazon's goal should be for Kindle typography to equal print typography. They're not even close."
Limp's comments, however, suggest that Amazon had criticisms like this in mind. "We do care. Our goal at Amazon is to eventually make digital typography as rich as it is in print. I'm not sure exactly when that day will come, but I'm optimistic we can get there."
Amazon updated the Kindle app for iOS with Bookerly and a new layout engine today this morning. Another update rolling out the new font and typesetting technology to users of Amazon's line of e-ink readers, Android, and other devices will be available later this summer.
The currency of branding is one of optimism. Logos and slogans are designed to be relentlessly cheery, and the intended effect of viewing them is that of Ren and Stimpy'sHappy Helmet. Be happy! No! Happier!
Graphic designer and illustrator Adam J. Kurtz wondered what advertising would be like if it weren't quite so chipper. So he took the logos of Nike, Penguin, Chipotle, Ikea, and more, then redesigned them as if a manic-depressive nihilist designed them on an overcast day after his dead mother's coffin accidentally crushed his baby corgi to death.
It's sadvertising taken to absurd ends. Adweek interviewed Kurtz, who says he got the idea after leaving a more traditional advertising gig, albeit one he loved:
I worked at Barton F. Graf until just a few months ago, and I think there are awesome and hilarious things that advertising can do for people. It's incredible when you can take a brand's money and reach and turn it into an overwhelmingly positive experience while still accomplishing marketing goals. Really innovative brand activations and clever social interaction is my favorite. Keep things honest and remind people that behind even the largest brands are some genuine, human people. Again, some self-aware sadness is part of that humanity.
The mining of the world's most beautiful marble is a majestic affair, but it's also a wasteful one: because of minor discolorations, damage, and prominent veins, only 30% of marble quarried ends up in finished products.
That's just insane, considering how beautiful the objects you can make from it can be. Inspired by the wastefulness of marble quarrying, Italian designers Paolo Ulian and Moreno Ratti decided to launch a new line of vases showing that even the dregs of the marble trade can be used to make some exquisite objects. They have released the Little Gerla collection, a group of four vases made from discarded Marmette marble slabs—in other words, pre-cut marble originally meant for use as wall and floor tiles.
Each vase is made of a stack of concentric rings, which are sliced using a Waterjet from a single Marmette tile. The rings are then stacked, rotated, and glued together to create an unusual, yet still organic shape. They're almost like a piece of paper that, through a series of spiral cuts, has been expanded into a three-dimensional funnel.
The finished designs are stunning. Far from looking like designs crafted from the rejects of the marble trade, they look as contemporary and sophisticated as any other housewares out there. You can find more information about the Little Gerla collection here.
Just outside of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, there is a small island township called Spijkenisse that's criss-crossed with imaginary bridges. But how can bridges be imaginary when they physically exist? You steal their designs from the Euro.
In the latest episode of his ongoing series, Things You Might Not Know, YouTube personality Tom Scott explains the curious history of Spijkenisse bridges:
When the European Central Bank was first designing the Euro back in 2002, it decided to put bridges on bank notes as a symbol of the link between all E.U. countries. The only problem was that there were 12 E.U. member nations at the time, but only seven bank notes. So they hired Austrian designer Robert Kalina to come up with seven fictional bridges to put on every European note. Now no one could be offended by exclusion.
Kalina did a good job. He designed each bridge's style to reflect a different period in architecture, from the Classical and Romanesque architecture of the 5- and 10-Euro notes, to the Art Nouveau and Modern styles of the 200- and 500-Euro bills, respectively. These bridges were sort of abstract, designed with weird lines and vibrant colors that played well on print, but that's okay: it's not like these bridges were ever going to be built. Except Spijkenisse did! The town hired artist Robin Stam to bring the bridges to life in 2011, single-handedly claiming all of the Euro's imaginary bridges for the Dutch.
I'm inspired. Anyone else want Washington, D.C., to take a page out of Spijkenisse's book and build a real-life version of the dollar bill's cyclops-capped Freemason pyramid?
Everyone loves a good optical illusion. Here are three good ones, based on shadows, motion, and perception, which Japanese design firm YOY has turned into a trio of fun, cool home furniture objects.
First, there's the Float. The lamp mounts to your wall along with a rigid length of cord. When it's turned on, two irregular motors gently sway the lamp back and forth. Because the cord stays straight, the Float makes your entire room look like it's rocking back and forth, like on a boat.
Next, the Shadow, a vase-shaped lamp. Placed up against the wall, it casts a sort of reverse shadow in the dark, illuminating its silhouette courtesy of some in-baked LEDs.
Finally, there's the Lens. It's a standard wall mirror with a section that looks as if a magnifying glass was placed over the top-right corner. But while the bezel in that spot has been made physically bigger, the glass doesn't actually cast your reflection any bigger. Which seems like sort of a missed opportunity: you could have a good time with some fun house style glass in there.
A couple weeks ago, Yahoo unveiled a new update to Flickr that made Flickr worth taking seriously again. But, as often happens in the world of tech, it only took two weeks for someone to release a photo service that makes Flickr's update look old hat. That was Google, which at yesterday's I/O 2015 conference unveiled Google Photos, a slick new service that is basically the Gmail for Photos we've wanted for years.
Do you remember webmail before Gmail? It's really awful to think about. Super crunched storage space meant that you might only have room for 2 megabytes of email before you had to start deleting stuff — that's not a typo, that's what Hotmail actually offered before Gmail rolled out in 2006. And email search was totally broken, requiring anyone who got more than a few emails a day to spend most of his time organizing his mail, instead of replying to it. Gmail changed all that: it gave you enough storage so that most people never had to worry about running out, and sophisticated enough search that you never had to manually sort anything.
Now that all of us have at least a few digital cameras in our lives between smartphones, tablets, and point-and-shoots, photo management is the new email. We take thousands of pictures, with no good way to keep these massive photo libraries organized. And searching for photos is even more nightmarish than searching for email: unless you keep everything tagged (and no one does), you've got to murkily hunt through your library based solely on memory every time you want to find a specific image.
At I/O 2015, Bradley Horowitz, boss of Streams, Photos, and Sharing at Google, said it best: "Devices can now record every single moment of your life. The problem is, you don't get a second life to review the first one." Which is where Google Photos comes in, leveraging Google-scale technology, Material Design, and sophisticated computer vision algorithms to make sure you don't need a second life to find and relive the most beautiful moments of your past.
A little secret: Google has always had pretty magical photo technology that could do an amazing job automatically sorting and surfacing your best photos for you. The problem, as Fast Company's senior tech reporter Harry McCracken noted in our Google I/O 2015 live blog, is that this magic photo tech always had the albatross of Google's failed social network, Google+, hanging around its neck. Google Photos finally cuts off this albatross, and makes it accessible to everyone.
In a lot of ways, the new Google Photos has a lot in common with the latest Flickr update, except it's more powerful. Both services automatically scour your smartphone or computer for images and videos, and invisibly beam them to the cloud. But while Flickr "only" gives you 1TB of storage to play with, Google Photos will store everything you throw at it, including RAW images (unlike Flickr). Like Flickr, Google Photos is also capable of letting you search your images by content and location: for example, by finding all pictures of dogs, or all photos taken in Egypt. But Google Photos allows this content search to be more granular: you can literally type in a search for a photo of the "Golden Retriever near pyramids" and Google Photos will dig it up for you, figuring out the correct Egyptian golden retriever based upon its knowledge of over 250,000 landmarks around the world, which is also how it can add geolocation data to photos taken before GPS's and navigation satellites even existed.
It's also fast. Even over a crappy hotel Wi-Fi connection, we watched a Google Photos developer just hold down the arrow key on his keyboard, flashing through photos at a rate of a few a second, with no visible slowdown. Google swears none of these images were pre-cached: that's just how fast Google Photos and its WebP photo compression technology are. It's as fast as a native app, even in the cloud.
Google Photo's slick new Material design on Android, iOS, and the web makes the app a fluid, frictionless joy to use.
On smartphones and tablets, the Google Photos app has four panes. First, there's the floating action button, which triggers search. On this screen, you can, say, search for pictures of beers you drank in Amsterdam in 2008, but it also automatically populates your Search screen with the people, places, things, and types of photos you take most. So if you take a lot of pictures of your kid, it'll automatically become a favorite; just by tapping your child's face, you'll be able to see all the photos you ever took of him or her. And here's where Google's impress facial recognition technology really gets to shine, because in the demo, Google showed Photos grouping all the pictures of one child together, regardless of age: just by swiping through them, you could see a newborn age into a 10-year-old in just a few seconds, no human intervention required. Even seasoned journalists gasped when they saw this: facial recognition has never been this sophisticated. We'll see if this actually works in the real world, but if it does, that's about as magical as technology gets.
The other three panes can be swiped through using left and right gestures. The center pane is for your photos library. It's presented in a fast, scrubbable timeline view that, like Apple's Photos app, can be zoomed in and out of with a pinch. Swipe right, and you get the Collections pane, where you can select multiple images and have Google automatically turn them into folders, albums, animations, movies, collages, and more. Selecting multiple images is incredibly slick on mobile: once you've selected your first image, you can select more just by sliding your finger through them. It's probably the first implementation of multiple image selection that is actually easier to do on mobile.
Google's real money shot is the Assistant, which lives in Google Photos' leftmost pane. If Google Photos is Gmail for photos, the Assistant is Google Now. Assistant periodically alerts you that it's been looking at your photos and decided to work a little magic on them. For example, it took several pictures I took of my wife dancing in the snow in 2013, and turned them into an animated GIF for me. Assistant does more than that, though: it'll stylize a photo for you so it's even more beautiful, creating a video montage of a great day, put together a collage for you, or create an animated GIF out of a series of successive shots. Google+ users might already know some of these tricks but again, they've been freed of the albatross: you don't have to deal with the rotting, fish-stenched corpse of Google+ dangling under your nose anymore.
One last killer feature: If you upload all your images to Google Photos, and you start running out of space on your smartphone or tablet? Assistant will let you know, and just by tapping a button, delete all the images archived from your device. I wish this trick would come to desktop.
Everything Yahoo's latest Flickr update does, Google Photos does better. There's one caveat: if you opt to use free, unlimited Google Photos storage, you're limited to 16MP photos and 1080p videos. Otherwise, you're working off your Google Drive, so if you're a serious photographer, you're going to want to buy more storage to store your photos at native resolution.
Google Photos is just so, so, so good. There's really only one thing it can't do, and that's tell you which photos you took are actually worth keeping or not. But give it time. If Google can crack the problem of tracking a person's face right back to birth, it'll eventually crack the curation problem.
A year ago, Android lead designer Matias Duarte announced Material Design. A system for designing apps graphically beautiful apps across all platforms and screen sizes which used motion and animations as a core design principle, not an afterthought, Material Design was a bold and breathtaking attempt by the search giant to deliver a unified digital design language that was applicable wherever Google's apps and services were.
On Material Design's first birthday, Duarte once again took the stage at Google I/O 2015 to announce the biggest update to Material Design yet. Here are some of the more important updates:
• FAB Expansion — One of the core elements of Material Design is the Floating Action Button (FAB), a universal button viewable on every screen of a Material app. The FAB is not just there as an easy way to access the single most important function in any app, but can morph, slide, and spin along the way as it calls up those actions. Think of it as Google's version of the bouncing ball from an old sing-along cartoon. Material Design's latest update gives the FAB a number of new animations and transitions developers can choose from to make their Material apps seem even more like the quantum paper Google wants Material Design to be: for example, floating action buttons that morph into cards.
• Television, Auto, and VR Support — Material Design was written with the web, smartphones, tablets, and wearables in mind, but Google's ambitions for Android go further than that. The Material Design specs has now been updated to elaborate on how its principles can be applied to new platforms like television, automobile dashboards, and even Google Cardboard. In the new Material Design guidelines, for example, there's sections on how designers can design Material VR apps that avoid making users experience motion sickness, or disorient them in the virtual landscape (PROTIP: render graphics in 3-D space, don't place actions on an automatic timer). The support for such new platforms is rudimentary, but it's Material Designs first big toe-dipping into the UI/UX space of the future, not the past.
• Icons — The Material Design spec has recently expanded to include an icon library, a collection of 750 icons that developers can use in their projects. Here's where things get cool, though. The Material Icon library functions as an embeddable web font, so it can be used on any web page as easily as Futura or Helvetica. Better yet, this web font uses ligatures to automatically convert the typed-out name of an icon into its iconographic form. It's like if you typed in the word "smiley" and a smiley icon automatically popped up instead. "If you're a type geek, you'll think this is the coolest thing," Duarte notes. I'm a type geek, and I do.
• Backwards Compatibility—Android is a super fragmented operating system, with only 10% of all devices running the latest release, Android Lollipop. In theory, Material Design was always backwards compatible, but in practice, it took a lot of work to custom code different Material implementations for various devices. A new library, called the Android Design Library, automatically makes Material Design elements backwards compatible all the way back to Android 2.1, which was released all the way back in January of 2010. No additional coding required.
• A big refresh to Google's official Design site, offering more tutorials, explainer videos, FAQS, behind-the-scenes videos, and more. "We wanted to make a resource that helped you be comfortable designing Material everywhere," explained Duarte.
The new Material Design guidelines also offers a host of less-glamorous-but-still-meaningful changes, like updated sections on how Material apps should use motion in meaningful ways, a resource for Material designers to more easily design apps for more exotic screens and devices, and Duarte says that developers can expect it to continue to be updated from here.
To put things in perspective, last year, Google announced a new universal design language, an overhaul of Android built on that language, an array of wearables jumping Apple to market, and even a way to turn any Android smartphone into a virtual reality headset with just a cheap cardboard rig. This year? Google announced slight incremental improvements to Material Design, Android, Android Wear, and Google Cardboard.
The most revolutionary thing Google announced in a 2.5-hour keynote was Google Photos, an app that largely repackages the photo technology Google+ has quietly been offering users for years. Heck, even the swag is boring: spoiled last year with two top-of-the-line smartwatches, this year's I/O 2015 attendees will receive the 6-month-old Nexus 9 tablet, which received middling reviews, and a slightly improved version of the cardboard box they gave attendees last year.
So yes, it's boring here.
But you know what?
That's okay.
It just means Google's finally doing things right.
Whether you're a journalist or you're just someone reading the news, you're always looking for the next revolution. Revolutions are exciting; they upheave everything. If you're a journalist, like me, tech revolutions can give you a year's worth of stories: look how much mileage we've gotten out of Material Design.
But revolutions are also an indication that things are broken. That a drastic fix is needed. And they're bad for business, because disruption is bad for business…unless you're the disruptor. And when you're Google, which has an ecosystem of hundreds of thousands of app developers who depend on stability and predictability, you don't want to be the disruptor. You've become the status quo.
Photo: Flickr usergilipollastv
The thing is, Google's not broken anymore. Not the way it once was. Android's not just a viable iOS alternative, it's arguably better designed, and starting to pull ahead in important metrics like revenue. Material Design, meanwhile, has given Google and developers a consistent, universal language to design beautiful, modern apps on any platform. Google's collection of apps and services no longer look like they were designed by color-blind mutants with varying degrees of macular degeneration. These days, you can make a case that the worst of them is better designed than the most beautiful Apple app.
Google I/O is boring this year because Google's platforms have become more mature, more self-assured. No wonder I/0 2015's coolest developments are either moonshots like Project Jacquard, weirdo accessibility projects like the Exii prosthetic limb, or apps like Google Photos that better expose Google's existinct capabilities. Sure, there's a few areas where Google is still catching up — for example, Android Pay, Google's alternative to Apple Pay. But for the most part, the problems have all been solved.
Google's largely solved the web. It's largely solved mobile. It's largely solved app design. And it's getting there on wearables. Now it gets to reap the rewards.
Here's the truth about the human experience. Things that aren't broken are boring. It's why all our heroes have demons, all the lovers we lust for are damaged, and why the systems that work remain 99% invisible to us.
For the first time since the conference started in 2008, Google I/O was boring.
And that's okay, because it means it's not broken.
We don't want big screens on our wrist, but small screens are tough to interact with unless we use a precision tool like a stylus. If smartwatches are going to be a thing, they'll need to offer users something other than a touchscreen.
At Google's Advanced Technology and Projects group, or ATAP, Project Soli is the first of two projects led by legendary interaction designer Ivan Poupyrev that is trying to decouple the way we interact with our devices from touchscreens. It's a tiny radar, small enough to fit into a 1.5-inch smartwatch, that can understand the gestures your fingers make even though they never touch a screen.
Google isn't the first company to attempt to tackle this problem. Apple released its watch with the "digital crown," a dial that's comparable to the iPod wheel. Spin it to zoom in and out of content or to work your way through various buttons on menus. But even Apple's digital crown only understands one of the many complicated finger movements that we make every single day. We don't just use our fingers to turn a dial. We rub them together, we snap them, we point, and so on.
That's what makes the radar even more fluid, functional, and hands-off than Apple's digital crown could ever hope to be be.
"Our hand is an amazing instruments," Poupyrev says. "They are very fast and precise, especially when using tools, but we're still not able to capture that in our user interfaces." ATAP's goal was to create a way to capture the "broad vocabulary of gestures" that we all make with our hands every day, and transmit them to a smartwatch or wearables—no touch required.
When we think of radar, we usually think of echolocation: getting a picture of an object by bouncing a sound wave off of it, waiting for it to come back, then extrapolating that into a 3-D model. But when you're tracking something that moves as fast as a human hand, with so many possible points of articulation, that approach can be expensive, Google found; it just soaks up processing power, and therefore, battery life. So to make Project Soli more efficient, Google doesn't even try to track your fingers as a 3-D model: instead, it just tries to compare the combined radar waveform of your whole hand against a library of possible radar-read handmotions. Google watches the ripples and extrapolates the gestures that's way.
It's surprisingly precise. On stage at Google I/O 2015, Poupyrev held his hand a foot away from an Android Wear smartwatch and showed how he could quickly scroll through lists by just rubbing his fingers together, change the time by turning an imaginary dial in mid-air, impatiently swipe away a Google Now card with a hand wave, and even play a game of Pong on his watch face by just flicking his fingers. "We don't need to be able to detect everything you can do with your hands," Poupyrev tells me. "It's enough to detect just three or four really accurately, at least at start."
Project Soli has only been in production for 11 months. Even so, Poupyrev says Google will try to get it out to dev kits later this year.
And don't think Soli is only for smartwatches: Poupyrev says this technology can be applied to pretty much everything. Put a Soli sensor under a table, and now the table surface can tell what you're doing above it. Put it on a light switch and you can now adjust the lights just by waving at it. Soli predicts a day when controlling your devices by touch will look practically quaint.
One of Frog's big predictions was that 2015 would be the year that textiles got techy. Maybe it heard rumblings of Project Jacquard, Google's new venture to weave touch controls into textiles right on the loom.
Project Jacquard is the latest gambit from Ivan Poupyrev, the legendary interaction designer who Google, by way of Motorola, poached from Disney Research in 2013. Designed within Google's Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP, which Google described on stage at I/O last week as their "small, scrappy group of pirates working on wicked cool shit"), Project Jacquard gives textile manufacturers the ability to impregnate their cloth with a new kind of braided conductive thread. Unlike regular conductive thread, like the kind used in various touch-screen-enabled gloves, this thread comes in any color, and can be used in any existing industrial loom or machine. When coupled with a small Bluetooth controller running on a standard watch battery kept in a dedicated pocket, it will give any garment or piece of cloth the ability to pair with other gadgets and operate like a touch screen.
Striding on stage at Google I/O wearing a linen jacket threaded with touch-capacitive sensors, Poupyrev pointed out that while smart garments are nothing new, they're still fringe novelties. Why? Because they because they just aren't realistic to mass-produce at scale.
"The clothing industry makes 19 billion garments per year," observes Poupyrev. "Compare that to the 128 million smartphones made last year. So when we talk about interactive textiles, we need to think about it at the scale of clothes manufacturing, using existing supply chains and existing industrial weaving machines." And those supply chains and machines? They're torture on sensitive electronic components. Before a garment hits a clothes store near you, it will be stretched, washed, and even blasted with fire.
So imagine a pair of jeans where you can invisibly control media playback on your smartphone, silence an incoming call, adjust your home's smart lights, send simple messages to friends, and more. All without pulling out your phone, just by tapping and swiping on the fabric. Actually, no need to imagine such a pair of jeans: denim maker Levi's, expects to release a pair in early 2016.
I spoke to Levi's VP of Innovation, Paul Dillinger, who says that the reason Jacquard is so exciting is that it will allow Levi's customers to bridge their digital and physical lives in a really tactile, pleasing way. "At home, we're always burying our faces in screens; out in the wild, if you get a call while you're biking, you might risk your phone or your life to dig it out of your pocket," Dillinger notes. Why not turn your pair of jeans or your jacket into a more natural, ambient way to interact with your devices without actually having to give them your full attention?
Why start with jeans? According to Dillinger and Poupyrev, it's because almost nothing gets tortured during the production process like denim. If Project Jacquard can do jeans, it can do pretty much any other fabric, with the possible exception of Nike-style space age textiles that have seams joined together with a scary amount of heat. But Project Jacquard can deal with all of the exceptional rigors of the jeans-making process, except for ripping. About the fact that jeans rip, though Dillinger isn't concerned. "You know, we spend a lot of time designing the 'artful rips' in our jeans," he says. "So we can design around that." And Poupyrev notes that the idea behind Jacquard isn't necessarily to make your entire garment into a touch screen, just a patch of it. As long as that smaller patch doesn't rip, the tech will continue to work.
Project Jacquard is coming along at a good time. Recent projections from from Gartner predict that "smart garments" will become a regular part of our wardrobes. By 2016, smart garments are expected to make up 26 million of the 91 million units shipped for wearables, vs. 19 million for wristbands. And it's only going to get bigger from there.
And while Levi's is the first Project Jacquard partnership, jeans aren't the only possible applications. Throw out your remote: imagine a couch arm rest that can wirelessly control your TV. A pillow that controls the volume on your stereo. A set of curtains that you can use to adjust your smart lighting. A carpet that's also a DDR dance pad. Or a table cloth that can control all the appliances in your smart kitchen. Project Jacquard makes such innovations possible.
When they descend upon campus in September, the next wave of doe-eyed froshes will face, for the very first time, the blank slate of an empty dorm room. It is a blank slate usually filled by the cheapest objects of home decor a few hours at Ikea can afford. But even shitty Ikea furniture is expensive, it takes forever to set-up, it has no resale value, and let's face it, you're going to trash it anyway. So why bother?
Design firm Our Paper Life has an alternative. They call it Room in a Box, and it's exactly what it says on the tin: a wheeled cardboard box that is delivered right to your room. Inside, the box contains an entire suite of furnishings for your room made out of rugged cardboard: a folding desk, a chair, a wastebasket, and 12 cardboard cubes that you can use to make shelves, dressers, and even a platform for your mattress.
Supposedly, the Room in a Box is easy to set up: the company claims that, if you know what you're doing, the whole thing can be completed in 10 minutes, no glue, tape, or Torx wrenches required. The box itself comes on wheels, so it's easy to move, and while the furniture is made out of cardboard, it's at least pretty good cardboard: the Room in a Box is laminated for water-resistance, and it comes in a colorful palette of blue, green, red, and yellow.
Is cardboard glamorous? No. Is it going to facilitate your amorous consequences? No. Will it hold up to spilled beer, Red Bull, puke, urine, bong water, or any of the other liquids that are regularly sprayed across college dorm rooms? Maybe, but I wouldn't press it. Then again, all the above is true of the bottom-of-the-barrel Ikea dorm room suite, which costs significantly more than the $149 pre-order price of a Room In The Box on Our Paper Life's Indiegogo page.
These are the unrecoverable moments of anticipation that are the cornerstones of our digital lives. But a new Chrome extension from MIT wants to change that. WaitChatter is an app that tries to teach you a foreign language while you wait for friends during the down-time between instant messages.
Created by a team led by a Carrie Cai, a PhD student at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), WaitChatter teaches you basic words in Spanish and French while you wait for your Google Chat contacts to finally cough it up. The app draws vocabulary words from a database, as well as those being used in you active conversations, and displays them unobtrusively beneath your chat field; to read the English translation, you just click "reveal." For example, if you and your partner are discussing your cat, WaitChatter might decide to let you know in-between messages that the French word for cat is chat, and yes, she is being une chienne méchante these days.
It won't exactly teach you to trade witticisms with Esther Duplo, but if you want to learn a smattering of European vocabulary, WaitChatter is effective: Cai says that in a pilot study, WaitChatter users learned an average of around four words a day over a period of two weeks.
"Given all the time that is wasted due to waiting, we wanted to explore how to use these moments as opportunities for learning," Cai told MIT News. "This integrated approach, which we call 'wait-learning,' is far less likely to be perceived as time-consuming or intrusive compared to using a separate learning app."
Right now, WaitChatter only works with Google Chat, but Cai says there's no reason the same software couldn't be applied to any other IM program: Snapchat, Facebook, Skype, and WhatsApp. Or how about Slack? That way, next time my editor walks off for lunch in the middle of typing something out to me, I can actually learn something during an hour I would otherwise spend in the paranoid terror that she might just be composing a several thousand-word dissection of my own garish ineptitude. Make it happen, MIT!
A common stereotype about writers is that they're always drunk. Let me tell you from a first-person position of authority that this isn't true: sometimes, we're merely hungover. Regardless, more than a few authors—Oscar Wilde, Kingsley Amis, Charles Bukowski, and Ernest Hemingway—have had alcohol-induced rosacea. So here's a weird thought: What if the color of a writer's nose could be used to discern more than just their alcoholism, but was color coded to their school of writing?
That's the idiosyncratic conceit of Literalogue, a new Kickstarter from U.K. designer John O'Sullivan that collates 100 literary greats into a series of postcards and prints. Sullivan calls it a "visual encyclopedia of literature, literary movements, and the greatest literary figures." Each card or print features writers, backed by a cheat sheet of their greatest works, where and when they lived, the period when they were writing, similar authors, and the movement to which they belonged.
That's where Literalogue's central gimmick comes in. On the front of each print, there is a flattened portrait of each author, whose nose has been colored to reflect the movement in which he worked. So William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac both have green noses, because they were Beat Generation writers; Oscar Wilde's nose is purple, marking him as an Aesthetic. It's an odd little contrivance, sure, but I sort of love it, and the colored noses run the gamut from the Augustans and the Metaphysical Poets to Oulipo and Imagism.
Now on Kickstarter, the London-based designers of Literalogue are selling their designs as either a set of 100 postcards for $40, or a postcard plus six posters (with whatever noses you like) for $60. You can pre-order them for July delivery here.
German typographer Erik Spiekermann is a legend in his field, and until recently, the closest his work would ever get to the fashion world was if someone licensed the fonts he'd designed for a baseball cap or sweatshirt. Now, though, Spiekermann is trying his hand at sartorial splendor, having designed a collection of scarves and pocket squares for the German concept label Unamono.
Called the Measure of Things, Spiekermann's designs are essentially colorful, wearable rulers. Each scarf or pocket square can be pulled out to actually measure things in centimeters. The designs are printed on a silk and cotton fabric blend, and come in various lengths and configurations: a 160-centimeter-by-40-centimeter scarf, a 190-centimeter-by-60-centimeter scarf, and a 30-centimeter-by-30-centimeter pocket square. It's like useful plaid, or graph paper that you wrap around you.
"I'd never designed a fabric before, which is the main reason I was so drawn to Unamono's request," said Spiekermann in a video announcing the Measure of Things. According to Spiekermann, the request had a huge draw for him because he loves being the anonymous architect behind things he sees in real life. Spiekermann says that he sometimes gets a wave of pleasure when he sees someone reading a newspaper set in one of his fonts on the train; why not expand that to seeing someone wear one of his designs? "With the scarf, it's the same thing: If I see someone on the street, I know that they're wearing one of my scarves. This makes me incredibly happy," he says.
The Measure of Things is available in a wide array of color configurations, including cyan, magenta, yellow, orange, green, blue, and gray. You can buy them from Unamono here.
Update: The original version of this story said Spiekermann designed Berliner Grotesk. In fact, he only helped digitize it. We apologize for the error.
