This green home will heat itself

For all the complex solutions proposed to lower building energy use, Simon Hare has a project to demonstrate the power of simplicity in green buildings.

A Well Designed Wedding March

Just watch and enjoy!

GE's Net Zero Home Project Aims For Energy Neutral Living By 2015

Using smart grid tech, solar panels and energy-efficient appliances to create homes that produce as much energy as they us.

Using Deceptive Design Elements to Emphasize Product Features

Apple’s product designs have taken a direction towards deception — a gentle sort of deception that doesn’t trick you into thinking the product has something it doesn’t, but a deception that promotes and extends the appearance of certain features so that they appear better.

SiFi Ryder for easy surveillance in hostile terrain

Spying or surveillance is a demanding as well as dangerous job, just meant for experts, which requires refined tools to make an operation successful.

The end of driving

Either the Thunderbird or the Beetle had to go.

Tools of Engagement

This is a time to ask questions. Not small questions but big, fundamental questions. What role did Design play in contributing to our current global crisis? And what role should/will Designers play in leading us out of this mess?

What's Next For Green Building?

How will the recession affect the green-building market? Peter Morris, principal of the construction consultancy Davis Langdon, tackles the question.

What is design strategy?

In this short film, Continuum strategists demonstrate and discuss the methods they use to guide the development of experiences and products that matter to people and keep them coming back for more.

Microsoft Office Labs - Future Vision

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&showPlaylist=true&from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

Here’s an interesting Future Vision Montage by Microsoft Office Labs. In an effort to understand certain questions such as “How will emerging technology improve our productivity in the years ahead?” or “What opportunities will arise from evolving trends and global change?”, Microsoft has collaborated with customers, partners, and thought leaders across multiple disciplines to develop scenarios that explore how long-term trends, customer challenges, and emerging technologies might converge to improve our lives, both at work and home.

VC blog Magazines: Form + Creativity

Form Magazine (Germany) and Creativity Magazine (US) have recently published two interesting pieces, respectively “InfoGraphics” and “Information Beautification”, on the recent outburst of interest for Information Visualization.

Science and design

Several groups, ranging from economists and bioengineers to Christian creationists, have claimed the word “design” as their own.

Service Design Tools

Communication methods supporting design processes.

Who says technical presentations can't be engaging?

People often ask if technical or science-related presentations can be as compelling as presentations covering other less technical topics.

Click: A Visual Tour of Camera Interfaces

Here's a sampling of user interfaces across compact cameras from every major digital camera maker: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Panasonic, Casio, Olympus and Fujifilm.

12 Essential Rules to Follow When Designing a Logo

The logo is the face of any brand — the very first impression — so its design is extremely important.

Audi Toots Its Own Horn, Through Design

To celebrate its centenary, Audi has released a slew of designs, including a piano, a yacht, and a 108-foot tall sculpture.

Design Is a Point of View: Seven Truths in Designing

Designers at all levels of experience could probably list hundreds of opinions about what makes design successful.

Solar Powered Sunflower Jaguar

Welcome to the future - where plants take us by surprise and seal our fates as the dear or dying species on this planet!

Why designers need to focus on focus groups

Designers are keen observers, just like researchers. But designers are very different animals who process information in a unique way. They seem to pick up signals from consumers that differ from the ones researchers observe.

Open-Source Innovation: IDEO's Human-Centered Design Toolkit

As designers working to improve the quality of life in other countries, the firm IDEO has spent more than 10 years creating a methodology focused on designing for the user. And now, IDEO wants to give all of that methodology away...free.

Hartmut Esslinger - The book

A Fine Line offers a step-by-step overview of the innovation process — from targeting goals to shepherding new products and services to the marketplace — in order to reveal how to arrive at an authentic human design that connects strongly with consumers.

Jacek Utko designs to save newspapers

How to Stay Ahead of the Curve as a Designer

With the lows of financial times, and bleak economic outlook lately it can be a bit unnerving for us as creatives. Will our jobs be in danger if there are budget cuts? Will our client/freelance work slow down as a result of small business having to cut expenses? Is there enough work out there for all of us?

About Challenges and Authentic Experiences: An Interview with Bill DeRouchey

An interview with Bill DeRouchey about his view on the field of interaction design, and the challenges designers face and about authentic experiences.

Data vs Insight for UX Design

Andrew Hinton talks about how user experience design is not data-driven, it’s insight-driven. Data is just raw material for insight.

10 UI Design Patterns You Should Be Paying Attention To

Design patterns are solutions to recurring problems. By extension, UI design patterns are solutions to common user interface problems.

20 Visualizations to Understand Crime

While a lot of this crime data is kept confidential to respect people's privacy, there's still plenty of publicly available records. Here we take a look at twenty visualization examples that explore this data.

Zugara: Webcam Social Shopper

This app, currently in alpha, uses augmented reality and motion capture control so users can try on clothes virtually, using their webcams and a print-out marker.

Google Reader Multipurpose Drop-down

They’ve successfully offered a power user feature in a delightful and surprising way.

Design in the Wild: Verizon FIOS ad – it’s all about the experience

For a service who’s value might not be immediately clear to many, this particular FIOS commercial goes beyond the usual monetary value + HD channels-focused differentiation and highlights the user experience.

It does an excellent job of showing people what about the FIOS interface (and service) is interesting by showing you (the ad viewer) exactly what future you (the user) would see on their TV if you had FIOS. The ad also made me (yet again) go check to see if FIOS is available in Park Slope yet (it isn’t).

Meet Whitney Hess

Whitney is a user experience designer. She make websites, software, mobile applications, and gadgets easier to use by figuring out what people really need and how they really think.

Daniel Libeskind's 17 words of architectural inspiration

No Tangible Screen For this Mobile Phone

Are you over the iPhone 3G S and Palm Pre? Good, coz get you prepared for the future.

Super Green, Super Dangerous, Super Bike

So you’d like to have a tiny motorcycle.

Jabra Bluetooth Headset With Touchscreen: Design Overkill?

Jabra's latest Bluetooth headsets come with a bizarre extra--a charger base-station equipped with a color touchscreen.

Social Design Gets Its Own Curator

With the Cooper-Hewitt appointment, a design movement claims a more prominent place on the agenda.