iancollingwood

Design is a tool, not just a deliverable

Great comment from Henning Fritzenwalder, a User Experience Architect based in Germany. He's talking about design and visualisation and the power of creating tangible, visual artefacts to help frame discussions about development and functional specification

"All development lifecycles based on the waterfall principle have a common shortcoming: The moment of truth, when all stakeholders can check the visual results with their expectations comes at the end / too late to change anything big.

There's a way to overcome this situation and improve the design results. First, you need to agree on this: Design is a service that transforms logic concepts, expressed in flows and ambiguous words into a clear, non-ambiguous, tangible visual vision.
Second: If design is a service that helps to turn something ambiguous into something clear and well-defined, it can help stakeholders to agree on a common vision and is no longer only the result of the process, but a part of it.

Third: If design can help stakeholders to agree on strategy and requirements, each step of the lifecycle needs to be accompagnied by a visual draft that visualizes the strategies and requirements. So that along with the final requirements you'll have a final design"

Beautifully put.


Here's Henning's Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=8565500&authToken=K0f3&authType=name

In praise of a real knob...

Check this... It's a fascinating integration of physical and digital interfaces.

Audio programs like Reason and Logic have long used the "knob" metaphor to control levels and manipulate sounds, and it's always been unsatisfactory; most producers worked this out a long time ago and map different knobs and dials to keyboards and other midi-control devices. But this new tool, called SenseSurface seems to sit somewhere in between - you basically attach a plate to the back of your laptop screen and a seriies of magnetic knobs to your screen and use them to control virtual knobs on the display.

God knows if it's any good, but I like the idea and technical execution.

 

This is what the manufacturer says:

SenseSurface can be used with most laptops with a USB input. The sensing knobs have a custom designed movement sensor to determine position within a range of 180 degrees with a 10 bit digital output, linearity typically 1%. The magnetic knobs can be removed and repositioned immediately by picking them up and moving to a different part of screen. A unique sensing x/y matrix is attached to the rear of the laptop screen to detect the control’s position. The distance of the sensor from the screen can also be detected. The rotary controls are low friction and there are no screen finger prints as with normal touch surfaces. Linear sliders and switches can also be used on the lcd surface. For audio use, a logarithmic response can be programmed. The system is multitouch and scaleable , the number of controls on the screen is limited by the size of the screen. The screen can be at any angle.

Thanks to Nicholas Nova at Pasta&Vinegar