This week Mark was in South Korea, where he made two presentations at the International Design Congress organised by the Busan Design Center and also met a lot of designers, which led him to a series of reflections on Korean design.

Meanwhile Bo Begole from PARC’s (formerly Xerox PARC) Ubiquitous Computing Area, has been developing an app that brings the concept of ‘ubicomp’ to a commercial reality, while James Glasnapp of PARC provided a helpful overview of data collection methods (and methodologies) that ethnographers use to understand a particular population or situation of interest.

Data use and smart human-centric data visualisations are becoming the “next big thing” in UX design. A number of posts this week delve into the matter.

The latest issue of Interactions Magazine is the last issue of editors Jon Kolko and Richard Anderson. Many articles reflect on the results achieved and the changes  that occurred over the last three years.

Finally, Matt Richtel reflects in the New York Times on the impact of growing up digital. The constant stream of stimuli offered by new technology, he says, poses a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.

It always frustrates me when I find out that a USB stick is full after I’ve tried to put new data on it? Does data have to be so invisible? This frustration was the starting point of a new product, one that visualizes the digital information on a USB stick.

Below you see my ideal USB memory stick, even though I am pretty sure it will be too expensive to develop. Let’s dream:

The light inside the glass represents the data saved, so no light means no data and full of light is no more space. Each type of data is represented by different colors. For example pink is for images, blue is for documents and green for movies, etc.

It syncs with the icon on your desktop.