Flux Capacitor

by CHRIS RIVARD :: MAY 31, 2007 :: COMMENTS (0)

I caught Marc Orchant's presentation at the nmitsa monthly meeting today. He and Oliver Starr gave a great presentation on blogging as a business tool for outbound communications.

They had some interesting metrics to show from their work at Foldera. I have to say, it was inspiring to hear how much mileage a company can get out of blogging. I've really had my head down cranking away most of the year - I'm sure no one wants to read about the business side of running a business. I think Peter Merholtz said it best in a past blog post about running a company, one becomes "intimately familiar with how the sausage is made". That said, I'm ready to get back on the wagon and broadcast from the rooftops (or from my computer as the case may be).

Onto the flux capacitor.

One working definition of interaction design is that IxD defines the behavior (the 'interaction') of an artifact or system in response to its users over time. So, user interacting, system responding. An observation that I have made lately that has me excited is this move away from a very linear way of interacting with the system. Not to prognosticate any kind of revolution - more of an evolution.

Take the following:

• Apple's upcoming Leopard feature - Time Machine (Time is on your side, with Leopard) - very catchy.
• Mobiface Timeline UI Concept
• Microsoft Surface - or the upcoming generation of multi-touch devices

What has me excited is this new visual manipulation of date on the Z-axis. We're no longer flipping through a book of data - page to page, screen to screen; we're going *into* the book.

I have always been a huge fan of Dynamic Diagrams and their beautiful information graphics. This concept has me looking at new ways of visualizing information and one tool that I have stumbled upon is Google Sketchup. This could be a great tool for creating information diagrams (sitmaps, wireframes, task flows). I have used color and diminishing levels of opacity to show paths through information - fading to 100% opacity when a user exits a specific flow. I have some more exploring to do, but I think there could be some interesting ways to design information using a tool like Sketchup.

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