Contextual Memory
There were just too many great projects at this year's
Umea Insitute of Design grad show to mention all of them, but one of my favorites was Paula Guntaur's E-MEM, a self-described "time and context based file management" system.
Paula's concept is a companion to the Smartphones, PDA's, or Notebooks of today (and tomorrow). It is a calendar with an integrated camera and projector that allows its user to locate files based on when and in which context the data was created. When flipping through the calendar, information such as file names, events, and email transactions from that day are all listed alongside the notes and appointments that the user has transcribed into the physical book. The device itself has a limited memory, as it is meant to reference data existing on other nearby devices, such as a Smartphone or Notebook.
Paula did some excellent ethnographic work during the research phase of her project, which really helps to support her final design. She has some very mature and well-considered thoughts and ideas surrounding context-based file management, and the execution is excellent. The industrial design isn't completely resolved (though that is understandable in a research and concept heavy project like this - there is only so much time), but the information design is very nice.
Paula designed the project in collaboration with
Microsoft. You can check out the description of
Paula's project on the Umea school site here, or
Paula's personal site here.
Crash and Burn
Wow, nearly two months past since my last post. Since then I've spent a couple weeks hopping around London and Copenhagen, then took a week off to go back to Sweden. While there I got to see this year's
Umea Insitute of Design graduation show. Check out the school site to see
this year's work, it gets better every year :)
When I got back to LA, I had the pleasure of having my computer crash. And it crashed hard. After running some diagnostics, turns out the hard drive failed. That's a first for me. Luckily I had nearly everything backed up, and I still had a couple months left on the warrantee. The nice people over at Dell set me up with a brand new hard disk and CPU fan, and now I'm back up and running. I have to admit, I was kind of hoping the death of my computer would be a good justification for buying a new Mac. I guess I'll have to wait a while yet before making
'The Switch'. A newly formatted computer is a nice opportunity customize my computer, and in the spirit of really wanting a Mac, I've managed to get XP working quite convincingly like OSX quite well using
WindowBlinds,
ObjectDock, and
Konfabulator. Now if I use my computer in the dark, I can pretend it's a Mac.
Unfortunately while I've been out of commission, visits to my site seemed to have increased fairly dramatically, all due to the
"XBOX Sucks (In)" post; a lot of people searching "XBOX Sucks" are finding my site. As a point of fact, I wasn't saying that the
new XBOX 360 sucked, it was in reference to the J.Hayes quote about the new XBOX design gesture. Sorry to dissapoint.
