Is your design resistant to failure? If a worst case occurs, can the user recover and regain trust in your solution? … »

Say your TV remote suddenly stops working and you are trying to change the batteries. Then you remember you changed one of the two batteries just a couple of days ago. Which is it? Exchange one of them with a new one. No, not this one… … »

The conclusion of the Nielsen Norman Group’s April 2010 study of iPad usability is that it has problems and more standards are the solution. Yes, the iPad is imperfect, but resorting to standards as the solution is an antiquated reaction that fails to consider how interactive systems have evolved. We’re not Usability Engineers anymore (not most of us, anyway); we’re User Experience Designers. Experience is more than just usability.

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Microsoft Surface is so 2008. That is what we are led to believe reading about the latest product from Future Labs, a interactive technology company that has developed Displax, a flexible and portable multitouch surface that can be integrated with any existing surface or screen.

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Portable computing, including tablet PCs,  has been the hot topic since Apple’s unveiling of the iPad in January. While the iPad has gained a lot of press and generated conversation about its intended audience and potential use, other tablet devices have been overlooked. Microsoft’s Courier is one such device. Courier—the soon-to-be production version of the Codex, a rumored tablet device widely discussed in 2009—provides a tablet platform for the student, techie, and slide-show-loving grandparent alike.

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How would you like to tap your wrist to engage the clock embedded in the OLED wall? Rub your fingers together to request a text message with your bank account’s balance? Or rub your ear to have the speaker phone in the center of the table adjust the volume?

The Hasso Plattner Institute out of Potsdam, Germany recently published a paper on Disappearing Mobile Devices. The paper does not attempt to act as a proof of concept but instead outlines the possibilities of interactions with mobile devices as technology becomes smaller and embedded into the very fabric of our lives, whether it be our buildings, our clothing, or ourselves. … »

Paola Antonelli is the design curator at the New York Museum of Modern Art and a leading voice in the power of design, shown most recently in her acclaimed 2008 exhibition Design for the Elastic Mind. Antonelli talked to us about how her process for creating an exhibition, the future of design, and how we make people and objects more elastic.
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How many times have you asked yourself why something was even designed in the first place? Or why some designs endure and others don’t? In this article the focus is one of the key dimensions of ‘sustainable design’: Durability. … »

I’m probably not the only one who likes the feedback from tangible shapes over digital ones, they give me a lot of valuable feedback. Today, I’d like to introduce two concepts that represent useful values with their own shapes.

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No single user is “special” – or maybe all users are? Either way you look at it, we as interaction designers will encounter contexts of use or knowledge domains out of the ordinary at some point or other during our career. In my experience, designers need not apply magic tools when designing for special situations. It is however beneficial to bear in mind some core differences between specialized use contexts and the mainstream use of a mass consumer product such as a social networking site or a mobile phone. And that’s what I want to focus on in this article. … »