Life & Research Notes

http://www.detanicolain.com/ another nice hollenbach find. nice to have these design students acting as my agents in the field. she's right that the "world justified" is very good. visual web design maps typography

Pattern Foundry lovely set of patterns for licensing. simple exploratory ui. via kjhollen design web stock pattern illustration drawing

Alterlab Burak Arikan's new company. burak arikan burakarikan design art web network medialab mit

Search less, understand more – Evri wow, this looks promising. clearly this is some semblance of the semantic web vision, just developed in a more straightforward way without ridiculous committees or overwraught standards. i wonder what technology they're using to crawl and create connections. semantic web semanticweb search amazon

Streetline Sensors for gathering real-time city data, including parking spots! Apparently some MIT connection as well. From the site: "Streetline builds solutions to longstanding problems in city management and operations, through the customized design and application of new sensing technologies. Our parking management system offers cities the first real control and oversight of their complex inventory of on- and off-street spaces, and forms the backbone for other innovative sensing solutions that lower city costs and improve public services." urban city design sensors electronics future data visualization

FairSoftware: Start Your Virtual Online Business the future of distributed work? this reminds me a little of promiserver, but maybe actually practical. :p via oreilly radar's coverage of techcrunch50. web web2.0 business future startup

World Bank – Welcome to the World Bank Developer Network! via joe/swivel. "The World Bank's first API offers 114 indicators from key data sources and 12,000 development photos (see all sources). We are releasing this API because we believe this information can be mapped, visualized and mashed up in an unlimited number of ways that will help develop a better understanding of trends and patterns around key development issues." api developer data world economics mashup statistics

thematicmapping.org Nice resource of country borders map data. Handy for the current travel project… map data visualizastion gis

:*:OnionMap:*: i love this simcity style map. content is pretty sparse though. map visualization travel

Is it Sarah Palin? Vote Yes, No, or Maybe. Upload your own pics. Created by Jeevan over the weekend. :) humor funny tacolab politics appengine participation

From now on, all projects must have a gorgeous outer space scenery backdrop (Bar of Soap pictured above).

I felt a lot of PLW and MIT Media Lab pride reading John’s RISD inauguration speech, Start Here. I particularly enjoyed the last bit:

The creative mind is not limited to black and white. It is comfortable with ambiguity, and “doing both,” as I like to say. You can be both a designer and an artist, a humanist and a technologist, a student and a teacher, a hand craftsman and a Photoshop guru, a global and local thinker, a leader and a servant, a president and a citizen. And we can start as many times as we like when we are open to the spirit and rigor of the creative way of being.

It’s a wonderful start to just the sort of boundary-bridging creative imperative kick in the ass I’d hoped he’d bring to his new role. Read the whole speech…

Last week we quietly deployed the new Taco Lab website, and we posted a revision today. If you remember anything about the old old placeholder page (think giant Helvetica text and a horrible hand drawn taco guy), you’ll agree this new version is overall an improvement.

Our key design imperative with the new site is to balance clarity of vision, sincerity of our business (we’ve been working together for almost a year now!), and a sense of play and humor that we feel fundamentally distinguishes Taco Lab from other design and technology firms. We are also seeking to show the wide variety of mediums and technologies we work in, and to provide some sense for the types of services we offer.

So please check out the site. We already have a laundry list of improvements we’d like to make over the next few weeks, and any additional ideas or feedback would be greatly appreciated. Also, as we’re just ramping up full time now, we have some spare cycles to throw at cool projects, so any hookups or suggestions would be most welcome.

Pretty incredible video and images of the latest project – “La Princess” – from the La Machine group who put together Sultan’s Elephant two years ago. See also Laughing Squid’s post.

From O’Reilly Radar, this new game’s satellite-style imagery is wonderful in its Google-like familiarity:

If only I still played video games, I would be all over this. And their website’s promo game is pretty great too…

(Created by Jeevan over the weekend)