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Fat Thumb: A One-Handed Alternative To Pinch-To-Zoom
An experimental smartphone interaction lets users pan and zoom without using two hands. Apple may be fighting tooth and nail to patent “pinch-to-zoom,” but sometimes I wonder if I’d even miss it if it...
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The Inside Story Of Ubuntu’s Gesture-Centric Smartphone
No home button. No lock screen. The open-source smartphone is all about gestural interfaces—but does it go too far? Ubuntu’s designers don’t think so. Earlier this month, Canonical, the co-creators of...
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The Strange Allure Of Visual Loops, From Zoetropes To GIFs And Vine
Why we can’t stop watching things that never stop playing. The emergence of the animated GIF over the last few years has made short visual loops a regular part of our media diet, but the phenomenon is...
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Conquering The Curse Of Being An Expert
When you know more than anyone else in your field, how do you keep learning? History explains. Here’s a great story from a thread on Quora about intellectual honesty, excerpted from Secrets, the memoir...
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iPhone Maps For The Blind, Using Haptic Tech
Moving pins on a perforated screen gives the visually impaired a constantly updated way to navigate the urban environment. Imagine an urban route you know well—extremely well. It’s the kind of...
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What 15 Years Of Computer Screen Evolution Looks Like
The standard desktop monitor today has a resolution of 2560×1600. This artwork shows two dozen or so of its most recent ancestors. As the resolutions on our computer screens have grown larger, the...
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You’re Never More Than 19 Clicks From The Other End Of The Web*
According to a Hungarian physicist, no matter how big the Internet may seem, you can almost always traverse it in under 20 clicks. Some people look at the Grand Canyon and feel a sense of awe or...
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The UX Thinking Behind Mailbox’s 800,000-Person Waiting List
For many users, Mailbox’s iPhone app doesn’t do anything except tell them it’ll take an eternity until they can use it. Why? I’m waiting in line behind 40,000 people to read my own email. I got in this...
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The 12 Trends That Will Rule Products In 2013
Think 2013 will spell the end of good old analog and human interaction? Eh, not so fast. Near the end of 2012, a group of us at Ziba got together to review what we’d learned over the course of the...
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Why Are Old Technologies So Hard To Kill? Nassim Taleb Has A Theory
The author of The Black Swan is back with a sweeping new theory: The longer a certain idea or technology has been around, the longer we can expect it to survive. In the physical world, lifespans are...
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Fresh From TED: A Mind-Blowing App That Could Remake Mobile Retail
Jinha Lee, an MIT Media Lab alum, gives Co.Design a first look at an invention that allows you to try on clothes virtually. To be perfectly honest, Jinha Lee—the MIT Media Lab alumnus and TED Fellow...
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Watch: Delicate Art Made With A Massive Robotic Arm
A stunning glimpse of where robotics, art, and architecture will intersect in years to come. We’ve already started to see how useful robots can truly be. They assemble products and take surveillance...
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It’s Science! Novels Will Make You A Better, More Empathetic Designer
Empathy is a hallmark of good design. New research finds that reading fiction can increase your empathy within a week…but reading the wrong story can have the opposite effect. Empathy is the act of...
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The 3 Rules Of Innovation: Location, Location, Location
Does manufacturing have a future in the U.S.? A two-year-long study suggests it does—especially if companies work together. It’s been two years since a group of 21 scientists from MIT announced the...
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Should Designers Fear Design-Thinking MBAs?
What every designer and every design-thinker should know about their limits, according to Continuum’s Brian Gillespie. The tangible success of design has propelled business schools around the world to...
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Cloud Shield, Twine’s Gateway To The Full-Blown Internet Of Things
Co.Design gets an exclusive first look at Cloud Shield, which makes Twine a full-blown internet device. Welcome to the Internet of Things. If you’re not afraid of hacking together a bit of code and...
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A Projector And A Fog Machine Create Startling Virtual Spaces
Anthony McCall uses two off-the-shelf projection screens and a fog machine to create a “solid light” installation in New York this month. British artist Anthony McCall’s “solid light” sculptures have...
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Nicholas Felton Unveils His Latest Annual Report
An exclusive first look at the latest from Nicholas Felton, life quantification guru and Facebook Timeline designer. Today, you probably know Nicholas Felton best for his most widely seen work,...
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Stamen’s New Map Tool Looks Like SimCity On Acid
Nokia’s HERE maps go from 3-D virtual realities to new aesthetic wonderlands in just a click. We used to have cartographers. Before satellites took over, these scientist-artists painted our view of the...
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4 Surprising App-Design Principles, From The Instagram Of Quick Quizzes
Designer Luke Wroblewski describes the sometimes counterintuitive tactics he used to make Polar stand out from the crowd. When we first wrote about Polar, an addictive app that invites you to make and...
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Can A Shapeshifting UI Make You Hug Your Toaster?
An MIT Media Lab project adds a new dimension to touch-screen interfaces, with hopes of making our experience with gadgets even more tactile. The ubiquitous glass touch screen sure seems like it has...
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Jan Chipchase On Mapping The Lives Of Your Users
Following users throughout their day and identifying touchpoints can unearth unmet needs or new ways to tailor products. The following is an excerpt from Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Create...
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Self-Assembling Furniture That Could Make Ikea Obsolete
Developed from space antenna technology, this amazing pop-up foam furniture could make the Ikea Allen wrench a thing of the distant past. Good riddance. I want you to imagine a scene. You come home...
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Frog Predicts: Flexible Displays Will Soon Change The World
The influential design studio’s chief creative officer talks to Co.Design about the greatest, nearest innovation that most of us don’t even see coming. I’m talking to Frog’s Chief Creative Officer,...
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Brilliant Words Of Advice From 14 Great Graphic Designers
A new book anthologizes the wisdom of the most influential designers in the world. It’s late in the day, you’ve been working on a project for weeks, and you’re stumped. The client meeting is in hours,...
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The Evolution Of The Disco Ball Is Now Complete
Dynamic sculpture? Projection mapping? Interactive light art? Fluidic is all of the above. You walk into a dim room. You become aware of a mass hovering in the distance. As you draw near, you see that...
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Infographic: Visualizing All 168 Cover Versions Of “Love Will Tear Us Apart”
Peter Crnokrak listened to lots of Joy Division wannabes to put this together. “I first heard ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ in a basement nightclub in Detroit in 1985,” Peter Crnokrak tells Co.Design. “I...
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Watch: A Clever Stop-Motion Video Tells The History Of Typography
Graphic design student Ben Barrett-Forrest couldn’t find any educational type videos he liked, so he took the matter into his own hands (very literally). The history of typography began with a German...
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Infographic: Compare Today With Every Day That Came Before
Day not going well? Don’t worry. Because in the grand scheme, today is woefully insignificant. Here is today. And it’s only today because there was a yesterday—a whole lot of yesterdays, in fact—the...
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A Rare Peek At The Guidelines That Dictate Google’s Graphic Design
A pair of “Visual Assets Guidelines,” posted by one of the company’s senior graphic designers, outline precisely how Google designers are supposed to sweat the small stuff. In April 2011, Larry Page...
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