MakeDo is a deceptively simple system for quickly and easily assembling pieces of cardboard, paper, fabric or plastic into … anything! The system includes basic connectors, as well as two different types of hinges. Also included is a special tool for cutting and poking the necessary holes in your materials. With only the tools and parts you find in the box, you can assemble structures, creatures, costumes or anything else you can dream up.

MakeDo is clearly marketed toward children, but having spent my share of time in both product design and exhibit design firms building mockups and prototypes, I can say these little snaps and hinges would be a welcome addition to the gaffers tape, hot glue, foamcore and exacto-knives of a professional model or prototype shop. Check out this quick video for a sense of what’s possible.

TouchOSC also includes a companion layout editor. This free desktop application allows you to define custom screen layouts of UI elements and then upload them to your iPhone. Unfortunately there are only a limited number of UI widgets, and because the software was designed to control realtime sound apps, they naturally tend toward realtime control- knobs, faders and toggles as opposed to forms, dropdowns and checkboxes of more rich interfaces. Still, if all you need is a few buttons and a slider to control an interactive system and you aren’t able to develop a native iPhone app, TouchOSC offers some enticing potential. See below the jump for some examples of unexpected uses.

This guy uses TouchOSC to control a robot!

You can even access the iPhone’s accelerometer and send that data over OSC (warning:video has loud sound).

osc, processing and an iphone accelerometer from codingnature on Vimeo.

If you’re using Flash, I recommend flosc for parsing and sending/receiving messages. There are many resources out the for using OSC with Python, Processing and a variety of software packages. So build you UI, teach your software prototype to speak OSC and you’re set!

TouchOSC homepage
TouchOSC @ iTunes Store

First, the fact that the complete interaction can be described so clearly in 40 seconds shows how novel and intuitive this little thing is. I don’t even need to describe what it does. It clearly combines form, interaction and customizability in one elegant package. It is in short – a great idea. However, while I won’t be surprised when I see something like this on a store shelf sometime soon, what struck me was the use of physical and digital prototyping tools to so completely and effectively express the idea.

The body is built with a 3D printer and the electronics are all off-the-shelf development tools such as Arduino and XBee, with the addition of an FM radio, accelerometer and speaker. None of these tools are custom and none of the technologies are opaque. In fact, all of the schematics, models and code are available on the Radioball Blog Entry. This entire project was realized by two people in a “short time” in order to serve as a “starting point for conversation about the need for richer, more spatial interactions.”

What I tend to write about are essentially tools to aid in, facilitate or speed up a traditional design process. What I find so exciting about Radioball is that an entire functional prototype was developed to describe the idea. I can write about tools that make 3D modeling easier, software to help you build walk-throughs, or electronics that you can use to aid in detailed user studies, but those are still essentially tools that aid an old-fashioned process. This thing is completely new, both in concept and execution. I can’t wait to see more projects like this and won’t hesitate to share what I find.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to start building my parts list for building (and maybe improving upon) my own Radioball.

(video, links and observations after the jump.)

Research that aims to explore methods of facilitating group collaborative processes form an entire subset of HCI research, but after watching Pictionaire’s project video, a few features jumped out at me right away. The basic image capture is much like an electronic whiteboard, where users can save and retrieve the contents of a reading surface. However, it’s interesting to see what opportunities open up when the collaboration surface is laid flat and is able to be combined with scanned images or objects.

In my experience in brainstorming or design sessions, oftentimes there is a tactile disconnect between work posted on a wall or corkboard, work on a table and notes or writing on a whiteboard. Pictionaire addresses this disconnect in an interesting way and I would be curious to learn about more specific feedback that the design professionals who were involved in user testing had to say about using the system.

Collaborating on a projected surface and presumably in a darkened environment might pose interesting challenges, I was inspired by the ’spotlight’ feature shown in the video, and thought it would be interesting to have the capability to create, move around, pinch-zoom and rotate generic white rectangles. These could be used to provide light on printed media or an object, and could also facilitate highlighting specific objects or materials during a session.

The Pictionarie Project Site
has some interesting videos exploring some of formal HCI issues such as the use of contextual interactions.

See Also : BumpTop, Reactable, Microsoft Surface

Scribbles is an ideal addition to any visual designer’s toolkit – it is simple without being simplistic, has features designed to enable creative flow and speed, and generally does a good job at what it claims to do. While I found its control over color a bit frustrating, the layer control and ‘trace’ tool were both features that I can actually see myself using. For a small piece of software like this that relies on demo versions to spur purchases, a handful of features that stick in a user’s mind can mean the difference between an application that is used once out of curiosity and one that is purchased and becomes a valued tool.

With that said, after using Scribbles for an hour or so, the biggest insight I came away with was that it really is designed to be used on a tablet computer, or at least with a tablet input device. First, Scribbles’ tools respond to pressure, which obviously makes use of a tablet ideal. Second and more importantly, without the array of mechanical tools like bezier curves, lassos, masks and all of the other little robot helpers designers use, Scribbles relies on the fine motor abilities of the user’s hand. In fact I feel that the design is revolutionary precisely because it it designed from the ground up with the hand in mind.

MacLife had this to say:

Its bare-bones aesthetic doesn’t come from dumbing down the program’s capabilities, but rather from cleverly removing unnecessary complexity.

Personal Anecdote: A classmate of mine in design school hurt his right hand badly in an accident during the school year. A talented and experienced illustrator, he was distraught that the multiple surgeries and six months of physical therapy would derail his entire semester. One of his professors took it in stride and simply said to him – “well, just use your left hand.” He did, and being the talented individual he was, could soon draw and paint deftly with his left hand, with a looser, more expressive (and IMO more interesting) style.

I suppose this story goes to the heart of the point I am trying to make here, that sometimes removing ‘crutches’ that we use and starting from the ground up allows us to see things and communicate in ways we didn’t even know we could. I look forward to more software that challenges us in this way.

Much has been written about Sketchpad, Sutherland and all of the developments in HCI, computer science and engineering that continue to flow from his work. In the context of this site however, it’s important to note that Sutherland’s innovative engineering solutions were all driven by the desire provide people the ability to express themselves more intuitively with technology. The application precedes the solution.

“A display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarity with concepts not realizable in the physical world. It is a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland.” –Ivan Sutherland.

As an exhibit designer, I personally found Prezi’s strong emphasis on scaling inspiring. Since exhibition designers use scale as one of their primary mechanisms of information organization, I can even see Prezi as a potential tool for prototyping exhibit content, where the ratio in size between header graphics, sub-headers, body text and captions can be as high as 100:1.

Like most sketching tools written about on this site, Prezi’s success relies as much on its limitations as it does in its features. While the possibilities for creating zooming presentations seems endless, Prezi keeps its users on track by providing only a few design templates, not allowing users to edit transition times between ’slides’ and otherwise keeping the system as simple as possible. A professional motion graphics designer might find this constraining, but a casual user (like me) can create very professional looking results in less than a half hour. See below for an example I created (oh yeah, the final product is easy to share, download and embed in a website.)

Click Read More for more analysis.

The main editor menu in Prezi offers some innovative interactions. Organized in a visual hierarchy where the current tool selection is displayed as a top-level menu with available sub-commands below it, the process of building a Prezi slideshow relies heavily on mastering this unconventional interface. New users may be confused that the tools for creating and those for editing the size/placement of elements such as text exist on separate levels of the menu hierarchy, but with a variety of different media types to wrangle, and a variety of different parameters to edit within each slideshow, I found the separation of creation and layout interesting. Also, quickselect keyboard commands offer the potential of making the process of creation even faster.

The Prezi ‘dartboard’ (my name not theirs) is another innovative UI element that users will quickly become acquainted with (my labels added to the screenshot at left). When an element is selected for editing, the dartboard is overlaid on top of it. The various sections of this widget allow users to place, scale and rotate an element or group of elements. Again, the separation of creation and layout, while seemingly limiting, actually makes laying out presentations easier. It also must be noted that Prezi projects are created entirely within a browser and the Prezi team must be applauded for implementing such intuitive editing tools within the somewhat-limiting constraints of a web browser.

After wrestling a bit with OS- and browser incompatibilities and getting acquainted with the unconventional UI, I found Prezi extremely fun to use, and even after a half hour of noodling found myself wanting to play more.

As visual designers and not scientists, we won’t pretend we have any clue how EnzymeX works or how it is used, but given its glowing reviews from MacUpdate to the New York Times, and with features such as the ability to “Directly search and download sequences from the NCBI Entrez nucleotide database.” and “Simply and reliably determine which buffer is most suitable for a double digestion.”, we have no doubt that EnzymeX is allowing an enterprising scientist or two the ability to test theories, perform faster or at the very least settle a few barstool bets as to the effectiveness of various protein sequencing motifs.

So with a cure for the common hangover as yet unfound, I say young scientists of the world, sequence away!

Like any tool, a whiteboard is only as good as the person who uses it. On the other hand, easy access to space to let ideas fly can be valuable, and there is a lot to be said for ‘breaking the frame’.

IdeaPaint lets you paint a whiteboard anywhere you want it.

via FastCompany

Read More for excerpts

See Also :
Microsoft SketchFlow
Visio Sketchy Wireframe Tempates
Web-based iPhone collaborative mockup maker

(Via Boxes and Arrows)

Having used computer-based sketchy wireframes on a number of projects, I’ve found many ways that they can decrease confusion with teams and stakeholders:

* Clients and Executives – People in this group typically want to push projects forward as quickly as possible. Consequently, the more “finished” the wireframes look, the faster they will expect to see the finished product. You can do yourself a disservice by making your wireframes look more complete than they are. To quote Kathy Sierra, “How ‘done’ something looks should match how ‘done’ something is.”

* Programmers – Programmers who see traditional wireframes too early in the process may misinterpret their functionality as “signed-off.” Don’t be shocked if you hear frantic questions like “Did we agree to this?” Programming requires meticulous attention to detail, so programmers read wireframes with an eagle eye. Consequently, they may expect a level of specification from wireframes that isn’t appropriate in the early stages.

* Designers – Designers make their living with their visual creativity, and they resist anything that could constrain it. Consequently, in situations where designers must work with wireframes created by someone else, designers can perceive them as a creative straightjacket, or worse, as a threat. A sketchy representation can help reduce friction by removing unnecessary details and adding a certain amount of “fuzziness” to the wireframes, thereby giving designers more leeway in interpreting the look and feel of the interface.

* Users – In my research, I’ve found that users who are asked to comment on traditional wireframes can be intimidated by an overly finished look and feel. This is mirrored by a general consensus in the usability industry that the “less done” a demo looks, the more comfortable users feel with giving feedback. Where traditional wireframes can elicit comments like “I don’t like the font on those words,” sketchy wireframes are more likely to elicit comments like “I don’t know what those words mean.”