Mac’s Petit Inventions: Making it Human
Mac Funamizu
on
September 23rd, 2009 
When I design new gadgets I try to think of a human behavior that can be associated with it. Then I make up a personified character based on that movement. The character naturally decides what kind of gadget it will become, how it should be formed and what other functions it should have.
Page visitors
I want to know how many other people are browsing the website I’m watching. If there are a lot of people visiting the page, the article must be worth reading. But it is very boring checking out statistics or numbers of replies.
“Visit the page” sounds like a person physically comes to the website from somewhere else, so that’s what I wanted to visualize. If there are actual human figures we can see around the web browser (on the desktop), we can instantly see how popular the site is at least at that moment. When people walk away very fast it isn’t that interesting, if they stay for some time… it must be worth my time.
iPhone relaxation
I have an iPhone and always have it with me: at work and at home. When at work, I change the setting to the silent (vibration) mode in the office, but when it vibrates on my desk, it makes even louder noise than a beep. But it won’t rattle on something soft such as a sofa. An iPhone slacking off on a sofa? But (human) lazybones must love hammocks much better than sofas….
So I thought a hammock style would be more fun. I also added a parasol, which would be requested by such an idle guy, that works as a solar power battery charger. You open and flip the parasol in the sun to get electricity and close and fix it on the hammock to charge your iPhone.
September 23rd, 2009 at 7:06 pm
[...] Original post by CompTrac.com [...]
September 23rd, 2009 at 7:42 pm
Page visitors made me think to this really nice website, where you can see the mouse-icone of the ohter users : http://www.grapheine.com/
September 24th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
more info about multi-user navigation …
http://www.grapheine.com/blog/en/internet/le-premier-chat-de-souris/
September 26th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
“When I design new gadgets I try to think of a human behavior that can be associated with it. Then I make up a personified character based on that movement.”
This is analogous to a classic acting method: figure out the walk of the character you’ll be playing, and derive the rest of the character from there.