Open Source Design in Action
It’s a challenge for designers to get our heads around the concept of open collaboration, though, and away from the ‘patent, patent, patent’ mentality that pervades design for consumption in the northern hemisphere.”
– Designer, Niki Dun
©2005 Niki Dun
The
Massive Change in Action site was launched this week, an education website based on the Massive Change project. One of the featured projects is by Niki Dun, a 2002 Industrial Design graduate of the
Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver.
The Bicyle Ambulance was Niki's ECIAD thesis project, which she later took to Malawi in East Africa to test and develop. The design is simply brilliant and brilliantly simple. It responds to a very real human need; it is human-centered design at its best. Congrats to Niki for being featured on the Massive Change site, but also for having the courage to take her design out of the classroom and in to the hands of the people she was designing for (a step that is unfortunately often left out of student projects like this). The development of the project is a great example of cross-disciplinary as well as cross-cultural participatory design. But my favorite part of the project is that Niki will be putting the schematic drawings for the design online, free to use and free to improve on. The Bicycle Utility Trailer is one of the first spin-offs, another design developed by Niki and her team in Malawi after completing the Bicycle Ambulance. Projects like this make me feel very self-conscious about the relative superficiality of my own work.
The entire
Massive Change in Action site is really worth taking a look at.
my continued fascination with Google Maps
A post ago I mentioned that the
Craigslist GoogleMaps mashup would be even better if it included the satellite view. This is more than a matter of the satellite view just being cool, it would be really quite useful in something like the Craigslist/GoogleMaps application. Well, I was just about put up an illustration of what I meant then went back to the Craigslist/GoogleMaps site and...hey! they added satellite view! Aww, come on! I spent a whole 5 minutes mocking that illustration up...
Anyway, this is great. The satellite view adds a lot more information about the surrounding neighborhood that just isn't communicated in an abstracted map. Ah, here's the illustration anyway:
Ok, so seriously, the only thing missing from the mashup now is the ability to directly link to a
portion of the map with a particular listing.
A couple other links of related interest,
GoogleMaps UK (which unfortunately doesnt include the satellite, yet) is now available, and
Google Sightseeing is very cool (
this shot is really impressive, I want to meet Luecke).
Postcardviewer
You need
Flash to view this post:
A couple weeks ago
Matt aka Blackbeltjones (with his site temporarily down, my life lacks meaning) pointed out the awesomely awesome
Flickr Tag Browser zooming UI on
Airtight. There are a couple
other nicely done
ZUI's on the site, including the
Postcardviewer, which can be very easily implemented onto your own site/blog with your own photos (as shown above, with these photos of some shoes that I had...). You can download the free version or buy the source code
here. The only downside is that the photos have to be manually chosen in this version. It would be nice to have
my latest Flickr photos pulled in automatically to make a more interactive version of the
Flickr Zeitgeist Photostream on my sidebar.
Many other nice Flash demo's on the site,
go check them out.
Google maps and Craigslist Mashup
This
hack of Google maps and the Craigslist apartment/housing listings is absolutely brilliant. Having spent many hours looking for apartments this past fall, I know this tool would have been very useful and would have saved a lot of time. Since I didn't know the area I was moving to very well, I would cross-check every potentially interesting listing on
Craiglist to Mapquest or
Google maps, then usually go visit the area to get a better idea of where the apartment was...a lengthy and inacurate process.
Like Google maps, it's really only useful if you live in the U.S. unfortunately (which I hope will soon change). I only wish that you could switch to satellite view like in the regular Google maps. I've always found the satellite view fascinating, even if
some find it not entirely useful. In this application however, the satellite view may provide one a better feeling of the community, topography and infrastructure of the area that an interesting apartment exists.
IDSA @ ECIAD
The
IDSA West conference is being held at my Alma Mater, the
Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver this weekend. There's great coverage of the event on the
Core 77 blog. Wish I could be there but i'm back off to Europe today...check
my Flickr pics to see where I'm at.
