Algorithm will only become better and better at predicting people’s preference. But is it a benefit, or something gradually kills humanity? In Netflix’s documentary “The Social Dilemma”, it talks about how the tech industry is stealing our information and using the AI algorithm to completely take control over the content we are viewing to make…
Freddy Anzures – the person behind iPhone’s iconic “slide-to-unlock”
Freddy Allen Anzures is a Filipino American designer who worked on the original design team of the iPhone, the single most influential device of this century. Anzures graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Design, 1999. As one of the most prestigious design programs around the U.S., the environment at Carnegie…
The fantasy of Future IoT System
*This is a personal prediction of the future IoT system development. It may be biased or inaccurate because of my limited knowledge. IoT serves for human wellness. It aims to strengthen humanity in a way that elevates the living quality of minority groups that don’t enjoy the same amount of resources & rights. The IoT…
Music Player for the Blind
In my Creative Founder Project, our team is working on an online learning community for the blind. As we are conducting our MVP, I started to think, is the current design of the audio player friendly enough for the blind people to use? If you ask blind people this question, They won’t tell you “yes”….
Benjamin Evans – Designs for Everyone to Belong
Benjamin Earl Evans now works as an Inclusive Design Lead at Airbnb. Before that, he has a winding career path as a designer with a background in the performing arts. He pursued his career as an actor, not a designer, from the very beginning. In 2006, Evans graduated from the London Academy of Music &…
Sitemap and IA – How Interaction designers become good at IA
Information architects work with “the intention to inform“, trying to find a good balance among content, users, and context of use. Often times, information architects need to deal with a large amount of data. But just as R.S>. Wurman said: “I call things information only if they inform me, not if they are just collections…
Microsoft Minesweeper – A legend of generation
“Where there’s Windows, there is Minesweeper.” As it is one of the few pre-installed games that come along with the popularization of PC in early 2000, it may be the first game that the Y generation played during their childhood, including me. As one of the earliest games that Microsoft developed, Minesweeper witness the evolution…
Tasha Lutfi – Womxn in Design
Tasha Lutfi is an advocate for diversity in design, speaker, and designer with over 20 years of experience in the industry. She is also a 16-year tenure at Microsoft. Tasha Lutfi graduated from Indiana University Bloomington in 2000, double majoring in BFA Graphic design and BA Telecommunications. Tasha then joined Hubbard One working as a…
The Evolution of Online Community
“Information on the WELL was not merely an object of exchange, but a representation of its creator’s consciousness.” The early concept of an online community opens up a space for the internet not just as a tool, but also as an extension of people’s offline connection. Nowadays the social apps hold way more than as…
Make Game to Stick – the Oregon Trail
After successfully playing the Oregon Trail for one round (Yep, I died 1/3 of the way in the first run playing a poor villager), I started to extract elements that make this game so addicting. One thing about this earliest version of the RPG game is that it has alluring storytelling with an authentic setting….
What Interface was, is, and will be?
As we can see, the graphic metaphors being used in those systems are still being used today. These include icons of document, folder, disk, and drawer. However, as the video introduces, there is no real “hierarchy” in which all the documents get organized in those earlier versions. Everything lays out flat on the desktop. I…
Self Care for UX Researchers – Vivianne Castillo
Vivianne Castillo is a UX Researcher with more than 8 years of psychology and research experience spanning multiple contexts, cultures, and industries. She has experience working as a UX researcher at Weight Watchers, Google, and Salesforce with a background in counseling and human services. She is also an active writer on multiple platforms like Medium….
From Small Town Architecture to Web Apps – Design Patterns
The design patterns from the book A Pattern Language comes from Christopher Alexander’s observation of small towns that survived from the Medieval century. The way people construct the buildings falls naturally along with a certain set of rules, which sets the base of early architecture. In #41 Work Community, Alexander explores the physical and social…
Become a leader – Lola Oyelayo-Pearson
Lola Oyelayo-Pearson is a UK design & product strategist. Lola graduated from the University of Birmingham with a bachelor’s degree in engineering in 2003. During her college, she discovered her unique interests in interactive systems and learned the essential skills that helped her work with people to produce better solutions. She then pursued a master’s…
Keyboard and Mouse – don’t take them for granted
I’m now typing down this blog post in front of the screen. But imagine an alternative: Instead of using a keyboard, in front of me there is a large stack of paper cards and a hole puncher. I need to match every letter with an exact position on the card, then punch holes one by…
Empathy & Playfulness – keys to broad thinking
Focus or broaden up? This is a question that bothered me for a long time as a design student. When we look at the glory trail of the designers in the canon, the answer is clear: designers should never limit themselves to one discipline. Once one’s knowledge spans a significant number of subjects, one can…
Three Trailblazers to the Core of Interaction Design
“To look ahead one must learn to look back.” – Henry Dreyfuss Dreyfuss & Human-centered Design Henry Dreyfuss is known for improving the design of some of the most common objects in a daily scene. Dreyfuss and his teams spent time digging into the user needs & using scenarios in order to come up with…
Ellen Lupton – the True Influencer of Design Industry
Ellen Lupton‘s name might be a legend among all contemporary designers. She carries various titles & identities: writer, curator, educator, and designer. As the director of the Cooper-Hewitt Paul Warwick Thompson described as “a true polymath.” She has authored well-known books such as Thinking with Type, Graphic Design Thinking, Graphic Design: The New Basics, and Type on Screen….
Principles that sustained – From Bauhaus to Adobe XD
The teaching approaches of the Bauhaus is revolutionary. They let students thoroughly examine the basic elements of design in order to internalize them for later use. The idea is all designs should come from three elementary forms: square, triangle, and circle. To believe or not, we are still using that exact same principle to create…