Dan Roam

To see what will be beautiful in the future, look to the past.

That’s the advice some design experts shared recently when we asked them about the future of design, usability and visual experiences. Many everyday devices we’ve used for generations are beautiful, they say, because of their adherence to age-old simplicity and solid strategy, which is why they’ll remain useful for years.

Dan Roam, a design consultant who dubs himself a “visual thinker for business,” says the most beautifully designed thing in his life has existed for decades: a Sharpie.

“It’s future-proof,” Roam says. “That’s not true about a lot of technologically enabled pens out there. What would happen if we added digital bells and whistles to the pen to make it smarter?”

Sketches courtesy of Dan Roam

Not much so far, he argues.

A few companies that have fused the indispensable pen with gee-whiz tech have not improved upon the simplicity of putting pen to paper and communicating ideas through sketches.

“Just bolting technology onto an existing, effective tool doesn’t mean you’re going to get anything great,” says Roam, who wrote the bestseller “The Back of the Napkin” and has helped clients like Google, Boeing, Wells Fargo and the U.S. Navy solve complex visual problems.

But, Roam cautions, that doesn’t mean designers shouldn’t be thinking about the future, what’s next in user experience, why design translates to revenue and how designers can improve our lives.

“The big challenge for designers and UX professionals today is to find the simplicity that lives on the other side of complexity,” he says. Focusing on simplicity will be integral because “everything is complex, and everyone is overwhelmed with information and data today.”

And it’s only getting worse. The hurdles for designers will be parsing the data, unraveling the complexity and presenting customers and companies with simple and elegant solutions.

‘You cannot not communicate’

Hans von Sichart

Designers must stop copycatting and understand what users need, Hans von Sichart says.

Von Sichart, a design expert at GE who has also worked as a UX designer at Apple and Cisco, says he’s hopeful the industry’s future is truly based on improving usability. It sounds simple, but he fears too much design today is a “re-dressing” of others’ work and a regurgitation of trends.

It’ll also be vital to keep understanding that designing means communicating, von Sichart says. He’s reminded of a useful aphorism: “You cannot not communicate.”

In other words: Everything we do every day is presenting information, whether we realize it or not.

“You’re always communicating, even if you’re doing it badly,” von Sichart says. “Even if you build a house without an architect, you still make architectural decisions. And if you build interactive products without designers, you still make design decisions. You just make them subconsciously or you make bad decisions, or you make random decisions.”

He believes the design community must become increasingly collaborative to create the wonderful user experience solitary artists are incapable of designing.

“I don’t like competitive sports,” he says. “I think the binary result of how people score in soccer, for example, is completely ridiculous because you miss all the elegance. It’s just not about scoring goals. But a friendly competition that is inspiring and where somebody tries to top the latest idea, I think that is very helpful.”

‘Design needs to have strategy behind it’

Jen Byyny

Jen Byyny wonders when we’ll experience a world akin to “Minority Report.”

“It seems like it’s coming. But is it 10 years away? Is it 20 years away?” Byyny, a senior UX designer at Yahoo, asks in reference to the 2002 sci-fi film that was flush with futuristic interfaces and tools.

In the meantime, the expectations for design standards will continue to rise — even from the most general consumer.

“It’s interesting to think about 10 years from now if you think about 10 years ago. 2014 sounded so far away in 2004,” Byyny says. “There’s this vision of design being seamless but the standards being very high. I think they’ve gotten higher in these 10 years. More of our lives are more designed than they were 10 years ago. That trajectory will continue.”

And vanished are the days when the design of a device or browsing experience needed to be merely utilitarian or pragmatic. It now must be beautiful, too. For some consumers, for instance, the iPhone is less about call quality or processor speed than it is about its looks and gestures.

The key is a well-engineered project strategy. That process — designers working closely with product directors, account managers and backend developers — will push the industry toward a brighter future. But Byyny says there’s still too much disorganization and a lack of standardization, even at large companies.

“Projecting forward, design needs to have strategy behind it. It needs to think through the whole experience and not just the task at hand. It goes beyond a module on a page, it goes beyond a page on a website and it goes beyond a website,” Byyny says. Good design needs to integrate the consumer’s experience with the experience of the brand.

“We’ve come so far in 10 years,” she says, “but there’s still so much more that can be done.”

What’s beautiful in your life?

Read what Roam, von Sichart and Byyny say are the essential and beautiful designs in their lives:

Dan Roam:

It’s a big, fat Sharpie. To me, a Sharpie — not the little skinny one, not the tiny ones, but any one of the round, warhead-looking Sharpies — they’re the perfect tool. They write upside-down, they write on anything and they write instantly. I’m the back-of-a-napkin guy — pull out a pen and starting drawing as you talk to help clarify what you’re thinking. The Sharpie is the absolute perfect tool for that. It doesn’t matter what you have to write on, your Sharpie has got you.

One that I love is called the Super Sharpie. If you want the killer app, the killer tool, the thing of beauty — the Super Sharpie. It looks exactly like the original, but it’s twice as big.

Hans von Sichart:

I have a Mercedes Benz built before 1988 — before the [Berlin] Wall came down. I have three. I bought them all here. My wife drives a wagon from ‘88. I have a diesel from ‘79 and an eight-cylinder from 1977. They are very ergonomic. They are easy to use. They have a different feel on the road. The suspension and everything is thought through by people who knew how to engineer cars. It’s just a completely different experience to a new car. The way the interior is made is much better than newer cars. I could talk about this forever.

The interior of one of Hans von Sichart’s Mercedes Benz.

Jen Byyny:

Most of the things at the store Design Within Reach. We’ve made some purchases from there. When I’m in my backyard, I look at our patio furniture, which are Adirondack chairs. They’re plastic and they’re all from recycled materials. You can leave them outside when it’s zero degrees. You don’t have to shovel the snow off them. You say, “Gosh, these look nice. They feel good. They’re simple.” I don’t have to pack them away. Having them doesn’t complicate my life. It makes a part of my home more enjoyable.

The style of Jen Byyny’s patio furniture.

The post Why Good Design Matters — and Why Pens and Patio Furniture Are Gorgeous appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

Crafted with great attention to detail, today’s icon set is extremely easy to use and will most probably be the next ultimate resource for any of your design projects. This set of round icons was thoroughly designed by the creative team at Roundicons and has been released exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

This freebie contains 60 icons that have been designed in both round and flat styles, and can be used for free without any restrictions and serve various design purposes. Feel free to modify the size, color or shape of the icons, and use the icons in your commercial as well as your personal projects. No attribution is required, however, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms is not allowed.

The colors have been chosen with care to ensure maximum harmony when multiple icons are used on the same page, and can also be used in your mobile applications as well as in templates and themes. (Large preview)

The icons come in various file formats, which makes them very easy to use. Also, each icon is a flat illustration that can either be used in its circular container or as a standalone illustration. (Large preview)

A preview of each icon included in the icon set, with and without rounded containers. (Large preview)

Download The Icon Set For Free!

• Large preview
• Download the icon set for free (ZIP, 71.4 MB)

Insights From The Designers:

“Ever since the launch of our first 1000 flat icons, we received great feedback which encouraged us to further refine the icons, add more features, provide more formats and most importantly, produce many new icons. It is a true challenge attempting to cover all subjects and actions while trying to keep the illustrations simple enough to work as “icons” — a challenge we love!

We’ve received requests for over 800 different icons and have now successfully produced 500 of them for our first update. New ideas keep arising, so bear with us and stay tuned!”

Thank you, dear Roundicons team, for this fantastic icon set! We sincerely appreciate your time and efforts!

(il)

© The Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2014.

The Multimodal Interaction Working Group has published a Group Note of Vocabularies for EmotionML. This document provides a list of emotion vocabularies that can be used with EmotionML to represent emotions and related states. EmotionML provides mechanisms to represent emotions in terms of scientifically valid descriptors: categories, dimensions, appraisals, and action tendencies. Given the lack of agreement in the community, EmotionML does not provide a single vocabulary of emotion terms, but gives users a choice to select the most suitable emotion vocabulary in their annotations. In order to promote interoperability, publicly defined vocabularies should be used where possible and reasonable from the point of view of the target application. The present document provides a number of emotion vocabularies that can be used for this purpose. Learn more about the Multimodal Interaction Activity.

Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research
Distinguished Computational Science Lecture Series

Image Registration for Multisource Remote Sensing

Dr. Jacqueline Le Moigne
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Software Engineering Division – Code 580

3:00pm Thursday, 3 April 2014, ITE 456, UMBC

Satellite remote sensing systems provide large amounts of global coverage and repetitive measurements representing simultaneous or multi-temporal observations of the same features by different sensors; for example over the last 40 years, Landsat satellites have been acquiring more than three million images representing about one petabyte of data. Furthermore, most sensors are carried on separate platforms, resulting in a tremendous amount of data that must be combined. In meeting some of the Earth System Science objectives, the combination of all these data at various resolutions — spatial, radiometric and temporal — will facilitate a better understanding of Earth and space science phenomena, and image registration enables the first step towards this integration.

In this talk, we will describe the image registration challenge in the context of Earth and space remote sensing. Then, we will review a subset of the methods that are being utilized to tackle this challenge, and finally we will describe some of our work that utilizes multiscale representations, in particular wavelets and over-complete representations, as well as more recent work dealing with the registration of Martian data based on crater extraction and matching.

Dr. Le Moigne is the Assistant Chief for Technology in the Software Engineering Division at NASA Goddard, and was Goddard Center Associate for ESTO/Advanced Information Systems Technology Program, from 2009 to 2012. Dr. Le Moigne received a B.S. and a M.S. in Mathematics, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University Pierre and Marie Curie, France. While her Ph.D. thesis dealt with biomedical imagery, her post-doctoral work at the UMD Computer Vision Lab focused on the development of a visual navigation system for the first DARPA Autonomous Land Vehicle project. At NASA Goddard since 1990, Dr. Le Moigne has performed extensive work in the processing and the analysis of remote sensing data. Her work particularly focuses on image registration, utilizing multiscale representations as well as high-performance and on-board processing. More recent work dealt with creating web-based access to benchmark data for Image Processing education and research (imageseer.nasa.gov). Currently, Dr. Le Moigne is the PI of a Goddard Internal project focused on Distributed Spacecraft Missions. She has published over 120 publications, including 23 journal papers, holds one patent, and has co-edited a book on “Image Registration for Remote Sensing” published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. She is a NASA Goddard Senior Fellow, an IEEE Senior Member and an ABET Program Evaluator. She was a NATO Science for Peace and Security Committee Panel Member from 2008 to 2011. In 2012, she received the NASA Exceptional Service Medal and the Goddard Information Science and Technology Award.

Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research
Distinguished Computational Science Lecture Series

Image Registration for Multisource Remote Sensing

Dr. Jacqueline Le Moigne
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Software Engineering Division – Code 580

3:00pm Thursday, 3 April 2014, ITE 456, UMBC

Satellite remote sensing systems provide large amounts of global coverage and repetitive measurements representing simultaneous or multi-temporal observations of the same features by different sensors; for example over the last 40 years, Landsat satellites have been acquiring more than three million images representing about one petabyte of data. Furthermore, most sensors are carried on separate platforms, resulting in a tremendous amount of data that must be combined. In meeting some of the Earth System Science objectives, the combination of all these data at various resolutions — spatial, radiometric and temporal — will facilitate a better understanding of Earth and space science phenomena, and image registration enables the first step towards this integration.

In this talk, we will describe the image registration challenge in the context of Earth and space remote sensing. Then, we will review a subset of the methods that are being utilized to tackle this challenge, and finally we will describe some of our work that utilizes multiscale representations, in particular wavelets and over-complete representations, as well as more recent work dealing with the registration of Martian data based on crater extraction and matching.

Dr. Le Moigne is the Assistant Chief for Technology in the Software Engineering Division at NASA Goddard, and was Goddard Center Associate for ESTO/Advanced Information Systems Technology Program, from 2009 to 2012. Dr. Le Moigne received a B.S. and a M.S. in Mathematics, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University Pierre and Marie Curie, France. While her Ph.D. thesis dealt with biomedical imagery, her post-doctoral work at the UMD Computer Vision Lab focused on the development of a visual navigation system for the first DARPA Autonomous Land Vehicle project. At NASA Goddard since 1990, Dr. Le Moigne has performed extensive work in the processing and the analysis of remote sensing data. Her work particularly focuses on image registration, utilizing multiscale representations as well as high-performance and on-board processing. More recent work dealt with creating web-based access to benchmark data for Image Processing education and research (imageseer.nasa.gov). Currently, Dr. Le Moigne is the PI of a Goddard Internal project focused on Distributed Spacecraft Missions. She has published over 120 publications, including 23 journal papers, holds one patent, and has co-edited a book on “Image Registration for Remote Sensing” published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. She is a NASA Goddard Senior Fellow, an IEEE Senior Member and an ABET Program Evaluator. She was a NATO Science for Peace and Security Committee Panel Member from 2008 to 2011. In 2012, she received the NASA Exceptional Service Medal and the Goddard Information Science and Technology Award.

"Much of the fun in life is getting stuck in things -- parties, dating, working out, work itself, shopping, brunch, online research, social media... the list is endless. Sometimes these things are extremely useful, valuable and satisfying. Our spirit knows when this is the case, as we feel refreshed, content and rewarded. It makes us happy -- like the time we have coffee with the friend we have a soul connection with, the barre class we take where we love the music and really stretch ourselves, or the day we take a staycation somewhere new and find a fantastic book store or restaurant.

Then there's the rest of the crap we do. This "stuff" often isn't useful or valuable, and instead of feeling satisfied, we're left feeling neutral, indifferent, even hollow.

Picture an awesome day you had in your life. I bet it included people you love, an activity you love, or both. Sometimes, in the day-to-day of doing "stuff," we lose sight of the valuable and confuse it with the non-valuable. We say yes to things that don't necessarily serve us, connect with people who take our energy rather than energize us, and spend hours of our precious time doing things out of habit or to please others."

Read more...

At the end of last week ICANN, the body responsible for the allocation of domain names online, announced it will be adopting changes to domain name structure first proposed at the Paris conference in October. Those changes center around increased localization of existing domain names.

Localization of domains will involve cancelling all existing top level domains and reissuing a geographically local alternative. Whilst the changes won’t actually come into full effect until January 1st 2018, the first email notifications to pre-existing domain registrants will be sent out as early as the second quarter of 2016.

New suffix structure

The new suffix structure will apply to .com, .org and .net domains; decisions regarding other suffixes will not be made until the 2015 conference in Bern. The new domains, when they come into force, will consist of the existing top level domain, followed by a regional, national and continental suffix.

Existing .com domains will be reassigned based on the address of the registrant. So for example, WebdesignerDepot’s new domain name (indicating ‘British Columbia’, ‘Canada’, ‘North America’) will be:

webdesignerdepot.com.bc.ca.nam

There are two further suffixes which also included in ICANN’s specification, although they are likely to remain silent for now: .ear will be used to represent Earth, and .sol will be used to represent the Solar system—these suffixes are being added for future-proofing and aren’t expected to be in practical use for the foreseeable future. This means that our full domain will actually be:

webdesignerdepot.com.bc.ca.nam.ear.sol

ICANN’s strategy director Oscar Binnie believes that localising domains in this way will create the opportunity for small firms to grow and expand naturally on the Web:

What we see now, is a small firm in Tallahassee, registering a domain that blocks a similar business in Phuket from operating under the same identity…what will result [once these changes come into effect] is both firms effectively using the same domain name to reach their customers via localized suffixes.

Domain name owners will have first option on securing domains they already have registered, with a six month registration window to open in June 2017. Any domain options not taken up during this primary period will then be made available on a first-come first-serve basis.

Redundant shortcoding

ICANN have promised to introduce redundant shortcoding for domains. The system advocated by the Internet regulator, and reportedly favoured by several tech giants including Google, Microsoft and the W3C, is based on the shortcoding model used by the New York Stock Exchange’s redundancy system. It means that to remove one level of suffix, at least 51% of conflicting domains must resolve to the same IP address.

There are ten provinces in Canada, which means that our potential domains for Canada are:

• webdesignerdepot.com.on.ca.nam (Ontario)
• webdesignerdepot.com.qc.ca.nam (Quebec)
• webdesignerdepot.com.ns.ca.nam (Nova Scotia)
• webdesignerdepot.com.nb.ca.nam (New Brunswick)
• webdesignerdepot.com.mb.ca.nam (Manitoba)
• webdesignerdepot.com.bc.ca.nam (British Columbia)
• webdesignerdepot.com.pe.ca.nam (Prince Edward Island)
• webdesignerdepot.com.sk.ca.nam (Saskatchewan)
• webdesignerdepot.com.ab.ca.nam (Alberta)
• webdesignerdepot.com.nl.ca.nam (Newfoundland and Labrador)

If we register at least 51% of these domains our domain will be automatically shortcoded to:

webdesignerdepot.com.ca.nam

We also have the option to remove the national portion of the extension by registering 51% of provincial domains in 51% of North American countries. There are 22 countries that make up North America, meaning that we’d need to hold a 51% share of at least 12 countries.

The best value domains are: Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Grenada, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, each with 6 administrative regions. The worst value is the USA with 50 regions, followed by the Bahamas with 32 and the Dominican Republic with 31.

To shortcode our domain for the whole of North America, we’ll need to register at least: 4 domains from Antigua & Barbuda, Belize, Grenada, Saint Vincent & the Grenadines, and Costa Rica; 6 domains from Canada, Dominica, Haiti, Barbados, and Saint Lucia; and 8 from El Salvador, and Jamaica; a total of 66 domains, which would shortcode us to:

webdesignerdepot.com.nam

It’s worth noting that under this system, someone in Durango, Mexico would be able to register webdesignerdepot.com.du.mx.nam, and even be able to shortcode it down to webdesignerdepot.com.mx.nam, but they wouldn’t be able to shortcode it further if we have already registered for the whole of North America.

If we want to remove all of the new suffixes we need to shortcode down to a global domain. To do that we need to register 51% of regional domains in 51% of countries in 51% of continents.

The new continental domains—.afr (Africa), .asi (Asia), .eur (Europe), .nam (North America), .oce (Oceana), and .sam (South America)— are joined by .pol, the domain for the South Pole. Importantly, ICANN has determined that no political entities exist on the southern polar continent, meaning that .pol is a premium domain for anyone looking to secure global exclusivity of any domain name.

There are 14 countries in South America, 22 in North America, 31 in Oceana, 42 in Asia, 49 in Europe, 58 in Africa. The cheapest route to a global shortcoded domain would therefore be to take control of the .pol domain and 51% of countries in South America, North America, and Oceana. That would mean registering approximately 217 domains, leaving us with:

webdesignerdepot.com

The cost of registering a single .com for the maximum 10 year period will therefore rise to around $32,484.00

Managing the change

Over $32,000 for a single domain is excessive for the majority of small businesses, even if the anticipated subscription models allow staggered payment over the full duration of the registration. Freelance consultant Paul Dennehy suspects that’s exactly what ICANN is trying to achieve:

Over the last decade we’ve seen tens of thousands of businesses effectively domain squatting on a global domain presence, whilst only trading locally. ICANN’s move is intended to extend the number of domains available and prevent early Web adopters from trading off that initial investment.

It is unlikely that domain name registrars will be offering the full number of domains available to you. Instead, they’ll offer you the regional domain appropriate to your location, then offer you the option to upgrade to national, continental or global, depending on your budget and the current availability.

It’s unclear at this stage what actual costs will be imposed, it’s highly unlikely the market will bear such large costs, and domain name providers are likely to offer substantial discounts. But domain registrars will be taking on a lot of extra admin work, so they will naturally pass the additional cost on to their customers. Whilst $32,000 may be a worst-case scenario, it is unlikely to be too far from of the mark.

The implications

What is of significant concern is the lack of equality produced by the new system: someone in Canada will be able to claim the national domain subset by registering 6 regional domains; in the USA you’ll need to register 27 regional domains to be the owner of the national suffix; in the UK you’ll have to register 98 regions.

What is of greater concern is the opportunity for greater domain hijacking. On the 1st January 2018, all domains will automatically be converted to their regional equivalents based on registrant location, if the registrants fail to upgrade then anyone will be able to register the domains necessary to resolve the subset down to the global level; should, for example, Google fail to register enough regional domains, the global google.com domain name would be available to register; this means that companies have to pay up, or lose their most valuable marketing tool to a competitor.

This change is likely to infuriate domain owners who thought they’d staked a claim on their corner of the Web, only to find it being resold from under them. However, it will go someway to combatting the domain squatting that plagues new business owners.

One thing is for sure, if we don’t buy into this change, from 1st January 2018 our full domain name will be webdesignerdepot.com.bc.ca.nam.ear.sol

[ Update: thanks for all the great feedback, in case it wasn't clear, this article is an April Fools' Day prank. ]

Featured image/thumbnail, uses Earth image via DonkeyHotey.

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This coming weekend, the UMBC chess team will play for the President’s Cup in the Final Four of College Chess. UMBC will compete with chess teams from Webster University, the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and Texas Tech University.

The match has been held each year since 2001 between the top four US schools from the Pan American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship and the winner is considered the top chess team among U.S. colleges and universities.  UMBC has placed first at the Final Four a record six times.

CSEE Professor Alan Sherman, who is the director of the UMBC chess program, will accompany the team to the match, which will be held at the New York Athletic Club in New York City on Friday through Sunday, April 4-6, 2014. Games will be broadcast live on Monroi.

The UMBC team will consist of:

• Board 1: GM Niclas “The Dark Knight” Huschenbeth (USCF rating 2610)
• Board 2: GM Akshayraj “The Indian Knight” Kore (2519)
• Board 3: M Levan “The Georgian Gangster” Bregadze (2469)
• Board 4: IM and WGM Nazi “The Black Widow” Paikidze (2378)
• Alternate: WGM Sabina “Sunshine” Foisor (2315)