The Faculty Blog @ IIT Institute of Design

Google celebrates Mies Van Der Rohe's 126th

Mies Van Der Rohe turns 126 years today Mar 27, 2012. So Google decided to celebrate his birthday with a Doodle of the iconic Crown Hall (home of the IIT School of Architecture, and the old home of IIT Institute of Design). Google Doodles are "the fun, surprising and sometimes spontaneous changes that are made to the Google logo to celebrate holidays, anniversaries and the lives of famous artists, pioneers and scientists". Doodles are important because of Google's reach. In the past, Doodles have helped bring media attention to sometimes forgotten but often important icons, events, and people. 

PSFK's Future of Mobile Tagging profiles IIT ID project

PSFK recently released a new report called the "Future of Mobile Tagging". Art Loop Open, an IIT ID designed project in the Chicago Loop is profiled as one of the projects in this report. An IIT ID team developed and implemented the experience design for Art Loop Open.

You can see the report here - (the project is profiled on page 76).

Google Doodle to celebrate Jules Verne

Today's amazing animated {CS3} Google Doodle celebrates Jules Verne's birthday. You have to check it out to see how imaginative and beautiful the Doodle is: http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en



Why games are essential ingredients for the future of design...

via shakeoutblog.com

One of my students, Raph forwarded this blog post to me and I procrastinated from reading it. Till now!

Click the link for TWO amazing videos - both of which show why Games and Game Theory will effect the way we design...

Good watch (especially the second one - Jesse Schell @ DICE, which is already quite viral).

{thanks Raph}

Microsoft continues to be information-centric with their new Socialphones - KIN

via www.wired.com

The new Microsoft offering is KIN - a set of two Socialphones - KIN1 and KIN2 + KIN Studio - an online portal where all your information is stored. The KIN is a feature phone that is entirely about your social network. Historically, KIN comes from Project Pink, which in turn started with MS's acquisition of Danger. What is most interesting for interaction design is that these phones follow a trend that MS has taken with regard to phones recently - keep it "information" centric instead of "app" centric.

The approach is both unique and commendable - the question is will Socialphones matter in a world of extremely agile Smartphones?

Cloud Computing and me...

             
 

        

So how do I use cloud computing? Perhaps the biggest hurdle with the cloud is that it is difficult for most of us to move directly from hard resources to soft resources and now to the online resources. Eventually, like a Gibsonian dream, all my instances will be on the cloud. But till then, the primary reason I use the cloud apps is to sync information stored locally on my hard drives with information on the cloud. 

Here are some of the cloud apps running in the background of my machines (a Tablet and Netbook running Windows 7 and an iPhone running MacOS):

Like everyone, I have much of my information stored on Google. Through a suite of cloud applications like GoogleDocs, Picasa and GMail {for contacts and calendar}, I am able to store a lot of information and share this information with anyone I choose. I dont think I need to explain Google Docs and the amazing ability to now construct information in real time with multiple collaborators. You have no idea (or maybe you do) how useful a tool Google Docs can be when you are trying to co-ordinate information across multiple parties that are not co-located! In addition Google also has Google Sync which syncs the calendar and contacts on my iPhone with GMail - all over the air, while Google Calendar Sync allows me to keep the calendar on my desktop Outlook and GMail sync'ed.

I update files all the time, and not always on the same machine. How do I make sure all of this information is properly synced across different machines? Surprisingly the answer comes from a company you probably weren't expecting - Microsoft! 

Microsoft has made a host of new acquisitions to move their operations to the cloud. One such interesting acquisition is FolderShare (bought from ByteTaxi in 2005 and now called Windows Live Sync). This is a free service that allows you to sync the files in 2 or more computers. Live Sync allows upto 20 folders (or "libraries") and each library can contain a maximum of 20,000 files and each file cannot exceed 4GB. You will not believe how useful Live Sync is - I can now make a change on one machine and expect to see the same file when I open up the other one. All over the air! Microsoft also offers a second service that is extremely useful - Skydrive. Skydrive is part of the Live suite and offers you 25 GB of access-anywhere-as-long-as-you-have-internet space (for free)! Of course to compete with Google, Microsoft has now taken their Office suite of products to the cloud - called Office Live, it offers pretty much the same as Google Docs - except that if you have Windows and Office 2007 or later you can save directly from your desktop to your Live folder.

Dropbox is another app I use frequently. The great thing about Dropbox is that it sets up a folder on your desktop and has an app for the iPhone. What this means is that I can drag upto 2 GB {for free, more if you pay} worth of files and documents into the Dropbox folder - and it will be sync'ed across all Dropbox instances (including my iPhone).

After a recent upgrade cleared out all my contacts on the iPhone - I decided that my contact list was too valuable to lose. So I decided to do another search for a cloud app to store my contacts - and surprise, surprise, I found one. Soocial is a cloud app that allows you to store your contacts and sync it across multiple connections. So Outlook on my Tablet and Netbook as well as my GMail contacts are all connected to Soocial - such that if I make a change in any one of these, that change is {nearly immediately} reflected across all the others.

So far my schizophrenic lifestyle has been great - thanks to these and other purely-on-the-cloud apps that make my digital life so much easier. What cloud apps run in the background of your machines?

Cloud Computing

In this month's WIRED magazine, there is an article about cloud computing - like all good ideas it starts with one man who is just simply so pissed off with another, that he wants to beat him up with a club (or hard drive, you pick)! In this case, the angry man is Larry Ellison {the man behind Oracle} and the person he is angry at is Bill Gates {the man behind Windows 95, the reason Ellison is angry!}. Out of this rage, came a "vision for Oracle that would neutralize Microsoft’s main advantage: the dominance of its operating system. They imagined a simple machine that would eschew software installed on a hard drive in favor of accessing applications online. Data — videos, documents, pictures — would be stored in Oracle databases instead of on the computer itself."

What a brilliant idea! Except it wasn't Oracle that finally did it - it was Google! Merely 2 years after Ellison and his brilliant vision, two young Stanford graduates set up a company that would redefine computing forever! 

But cloud computing is older than Google or Oracle. John McCarthy as early as 1960 suggested that "computation may someday be organized as a public utility". In 1999, Loudcloud, founded by Marc Andreessen, was one of the first to attempt to commercialize cloud computing. {see the Wikipedia entry on cloud computing}. Amazon and IBM's work on significant technologies for data services led to many of the revolutions in cloud computing. Macromedia (before they moved to Adobe), AutoDesk, and Dassault Systems have all tried out various trials to move thinner versions of their software to the cloud. But in the end, it was Google with their Docs, infinite storage, and near free digital connection tools that made cloud computing truly accessible to everyone. 

This year, with their announcement of the Chrome OS, Google is redefining the way we access and store our information forever. Cloud computing is here to stay - now if only everyone could just catch up!