The Honda C-3R is a revolutionary three wheeled battery electric vehicle concept designed to show what a future minimal urban transport vehicle for one person might look like.
The vehicle has a clear canopy that covers the driver’s seat while it is parked and not in use. When in motion, the canopy becomes an enveloping wind-shield that provides the pilot, who sits low in the vehicle, with significant protection from the bodywork and doors.
Berlin designers El Ultimo Grito will exhibit a collection of blown-glass installation pieces called Imaginary Architectures at the Aram Gallery in London later this month.
The glass objects feature tubes, funnels and steps to each represent a different building typology.
Shown here is ‘Apartments’ (top) and ‘Hotel’.
Via Dezeen.
Started the day at Colston Hall (which has to be the best Bristol City Council meeting venue) for a gathering of 30-40 Bristol digital companies and organisations, kindly convened by Mike Bennet of Bristol Media, on behalf of Bristol City Council’s IT and Communications Teams.
The aim was to start a conversation about the Council’s plans for a new website – and in particular, how it can be used to best effect once it arrives.
Unfortunately, I had to leave early…. to be at Filwood Community Centre to help with the Council Leader’s input into the media coverage of the Bristol Digital TV Switchover – but from what I saw and have subsequently heard, things went pretty well.
I thought the presentations from Paul Arrigoni (IT Director) and Peter Holt (Comms Director) were refreshingly honest, open and engaging. I keft with a real sense that Bristol CC wants to engage with people who have an interest in what “the Web” can do to help transform the Council and the city. And in the world of Connecting Bristol, that is really quite a breakthrough.
There is some Twitter/Blog coverage of the event here.
Curated by Dan Zambonini
For most of our recent history, technology has been focused on the mechanics: does something solve the problem or not? Over the last few decades we have gradually become aware of the importance of design to technology solutions, whether it is ergonomics dictating the comfort of a stapler, the whitespace of a magazine improving readability, or the psychological choice of wording in an online checkout process.
Most recently, we have seen a reversal of roles; design is now the foremost factor, and technology is forced to adapt to fit the design. Apple re-thought hardware components to achieve the sub-millimetre precision needed for the iPod shuffle construction, some video game developers spend more money than Hollywood movies on animation, and even lower-end automobile companies like Nissan are now focusing new marketing campaigns on their design-led strategy.
At BathCamp #10 we’ll take a look at a wide variety of design, and how it’s influencing and improving every-day technology.
If you’d like to talk about design of any type – whether it’s web, print, hardware, video game, industrial, or anything else – let us know. We’re looking for talks of any duration, whether you want to talk for 3 minutes or 20 minutes.
Time: March 10, 2010 from 8pm to 10pm
Location: The Innovation Centre
Street: Carpenter House, Broad Quay
City/Town: Bath
Website or Map: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=BA1%201UD
See http://bathcamp.ning.com/events/bathcamp-evening-meetup-10 for further details (requires Ning sign-in)
As Tim Berners Lee calls for Governments, Scientists and Institutions to make their data openly available on the Web and Government launches its Open Data Portal this afternoon we held the first meeting of our Innovative Data Projects group – this is just one of the new “20-20” projects that the the recent Council Budget meeting agreed £1million funding for.
Barbara Janke the Council Leader came up with the name (so best not change it) but the working title is “Opening-up our Data”, which nicely sums up what the group is all about…or not?
Because, as with any innovation-type project in Local Government, there are justifiable worries about staff capacity (“what if we are over whelmed by the demand”), timescale (“we have so many priorities”), legality, procurement and public reputation. The last is always a particular concern…
“What if we free up our data and people use it against us?” and “What if people use data in ways that we did not think of and cannot control?”
I find this type of reasoning quite interesting. Some council colleagues perhaps do not recognise that Public Sector employees are generally held in about as much public esteem as… er, bankers? In my mind, being open and honest with data can only help us to build trust and confidence.
Anyway, by the end of the meeting all anxieties had been voiced and enthusiasm had triumphed – everyone was pretty much in agreement that opening-up Council data is a good thing to aspire to.
Thanks to Peter Holt, Paul Arrigoni, Clare Reddington, Rob Scott, Alex Minshul, Sarah McMahon and Carolyn Hassan for attending and contributing so eloquently.
Peter Holt, who is Bristol City Council’s Director of Communications suggested that I blog the whole thing. So I feel duly empowered to report back on our progress. Keep an eye out here.
Enterprise Europe Network South West is holding an event for organisations looking to get an understanding of the future opportunities for European R&D funding for ICT projects.
Attendees will learn what European funding is available for ICT projects and will get advance notification of the likely call contents. The event will also give attendees the chance to meet with regional and national support teams and network with potential partners and experienced FP7 participants.
The event will be of interest to businesses, academics and other interested parties working in the areas of:
For more information on this event contact GWE Business West Events on 01275 370849 or email events@gwebusinesswest.co.uk.
A further full day event outlining how to form a consortium and write a proposal will be held on the 25th May at Bristol Marriot City Centre. Information and online booking for this proposal development event is available here.
Paul Graham published this article about maker and manager timescales which defined the main differences in perception and schedule between those that make and those that manage and the problems that can cause.
At about the same time that article was published I started a transition from a maker to a manager that is still ongoing and surprisingly hard to navigate. The usual expected problems of being promoted from within a team were minimized by virtue of the fact I was primarily the designer and front end guy working with a team of pure developers and so was always slightly apart from the crowd anyway. That and the startup I work for is small and has a pretty flat hierarchy.
Surprisingly my main problem has been the redefinition what I expect of myself. My expectation used to be that at the end of the day there would be a small pile of code or images that are production ready and in the git repo. And suddenly my output is my thoughts, opinion or influence sometimes in wireframe form and sometimes verbal so how can I as an employee measure my own performance when I have nothing to show for it? We are a tiny company so of course I still cut code and I still photoshop production images from time to time but that only appears to confuse my poor addled maker brain and skew the teams agile velocity.
Part of navigating this transition will affect this journal as well. Not sure how as yet, it may increase the frequency of code and imagery as I’m no longer getting my ‘maker’ fix at work but the more text based output may well increase as I practice the art of expressing an opinion with words rather than through a medium such as music or design.
It's always nice when some work you've done gets appreciated. For most of the tail end of last year I was working with moneysupermarket.com to redevelop and redesign their credit card channel.
It’s always nice when some work you’ve done gets appreciated. For most of the tail end of last year I was working with moneysupermarket.com to redevelop and redesign their credit card channel.
The project followed a classic UCD approach, test then design, test then design. One of the key challenges was to reduce ping-pong beahviour – that is the user clicking on a more info link for each product to get more details. But for us to add more details to each card listing how do you limit information overload? At the same time we wanted to move away from the standard, slightly dull, table listing.
We tested a number of alternative approaches and the eventual design direction was for mini tabs on each listing.
User testing showed we needed to make the tabs more tactile, more attractive to click. The purple hover was introduced. User testing results were really positive. Users liked the interaction and playfulness.
Post launch we got some great feedback from the design community:
Go see the results for yourself, moneysupermarket.com’s new credit card site. Let me know your thoughts.
Reference:
Ever wanted to be able to collapse all items within Visual Studio's solution window? This is a nifty little Visual Studio macro that I came across a few years ago and have been using successfully in Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008 and now in the Visual Studio 2010 RC.
I'll overview how to install it below in case you're unsure how to do it but I have this bound to the key combination Ctrl+Shift+` as ReSharper now uses my previous key combination of Ctrl+` for it's new bookmark explorer.
Anyway, here's the Visual Studio Solution Explorer item Collapse All macro:
Imports System
Imports EnvDTE
Imports EnvDTE80
Imports EnvDTE90
Imports System.Diagnostics
'-----------------------------------------------------------
' CollapseAll Module
'-----------------------------------------------------------
' Simple macro that fully collapses all items in the
' Solution Explorer rather than just the top level node
'
' To make live easier, bind it to a keyboard setting such
' as Ctrl+Shift+` which by default has no bindings (Ctrl+` is
' now used by Resharper
'
' Tested and works with:
' Visual Studio 2005
' Visual Studio 2008
' Visual Studio 2010
'
' Originally from: http://bit.ly/bmRu3W
'-----------------------------------------------------------
Public Module CollapseAll
Sub CollapseTree()
' Get the the Solution Explorer tree
Dim solutionExplorer As UIHierarchy
solutionExplorer = DTE.Windows.Item(Constants.vsext_wk_SProjectWindow).Object()
' Check if there is any open solution
If (solutionExplorer.UIHierarchyItems.Count = 0) Then
Return
End If
' Get the top node (the name of the solution)
Dim rootNode As UIHierarchyItem = solutionExplorer.UIHierarchyItems.Item(1)
rootNode.DTE.SuppressUI = True
' Collapse each project node
Collapse(rootNode, solutionExplorer)
' Select the solution node, or else when you click
' on the solution window
' scrollbar, it will synchronize the open document
' with the tree and pop
' out the corresponding node which is probably not what you want.
rootNode.Select(vsUISelectionType.vsUISelectionTypeSelect)
rootNode.DTE.SuppressUI = False
End Sub
Private Sub Collapse(ByVal item As UIHierarchyItem, ByRef solutionExplorer As UIHierarchy)
For Each innerItem As UIHierarchyItem In item.UIHierarchyItems
If innerItem.UIHierarchyItems.Count > 0 Then
' Re-cursive call
Collapse(innerItem, solutionExplorer)
' Collapse
If innerItem.UIHierarchyItems.Expanded Then
innerItem.UIHierarchyItems.Expanded = False
If innerItem.UIHierarchyItems.Expanded = True Then
' Bug in VS 2005
innerItem.Select(vsUISelectionType.vsUISelectionTypeSelect)
solutionExplorer.DoDefaultAction()
End If
End If
End If
Next
End Sub
End Module
In case you've never installed a Visual Studio macro before, here's a couple of instructions:
You're done :)
Dha ti dha ge na dha ti dha ge na
ga dha ti dha ge na ga dha ti dha ge na
na ke na
Our friends at Connecting Bristol have asked for our assistance in publicising their Green, Open and Social event being held at 6 pm on Monday, 22nd March 2010.
Connecting Bristol’s Kevin O’Malley writes:
Connecting Bristol are hosting a free event on 22nd March exploring the way that the principles of Green, Open and Social Computing can help to shape the way that Bristol develops its digital future.
As well as inspirational presentations there will be live theatre and video case studies, and plenty of opportunities to interact through twitter or live blogging.
Although the event is free (as in beer? Ed.), places are limited and if you’re coming, you’ll need to register via Eventbrite.
There’s also an event flyer available (PDF).