Jochen Winker and Stefan Kuzaj, students in Germany, allow users to “experience” water pollution statistics with objects on a digital table display…

I’ll be talkin’ Tue. March 16 at 5pm in Austin, TX with developer Daniel Williams about Beyond Scifi: Design For Surfaces and Big Screens. In true beyond sci-fi fashion, I’ll give you a space food stick if you show up early and ask.

Any discussion of NUI inevitably leads to controlling computers with your mind. A 60 Minutes segment from a little over a year ago shows the state of the technology via its most important users – those without any other alternative. It’s still slow and cumbersome (even with sensors surgically inserted into your head) so will likely remain a novelty to the average able-bodied user for some time to come. But perhaps growing interest will help those in need.

less intrusive headset from Emotiv for $300

Though I’d usually peg Apple for being a little more elegant, they’ve made the interesting decision in Quicktime Player 10 to put the controls over the video. I often use Quicktime at work for reviewing motion tests – short videos of UI that require detailed scrutiny, replays and scrubbing – so this feature has rendered the application virtually useless by constantly blocking the thing I’m looking at.

This may be a specific usage, but I doubt it’s rare and I’m not sure which user would *want* their video obscured when it clearly doesn’t have to be (c.f. Apple Quicktime 1-7). Maybe it seems more integrated or more like TV, though porting over the limitations of other platforms when not applicable is a strange kind of progress.

Also fascinating, and less frustrating, is their new 80s sci-fi icon (below left).

Luckily you can still get Quicktime 7 while anticipating the fate of this feature. However if you have Snow Leopard you have to install from the installer DVD.

I thought VLC media player would be better and has the added bonus of playing Windows Media files, but instead of controls it adds the file name on top of video. People just can’t leave video well enough alone.

It’s that time of year when Steve Jobs comes down from the mount and shares with us the latest impending Apple gadget. I followed this more closely than usual with an interest in multi-touch and was less surprised by the product and more intrigued by the lackluster response. Though apparently this is the drill with our volatile relationship with Apple products (noted by HuffPo and NYT amongst others).

However, thinking through a tablet and the best possible execution and positioning for the historically awkward platform, I’d be hard pressed to come up with something better. Lack of flash support isn’t great. Apple’s closed system has it’s downsides, but being an elitist control freak is what begets such holistic superior design. No multitasking has its advantages. They’re choices, trade-offs. If you’ve ever made anything you know you have to make hundreds to thousands of them, and few make them as well as Steve.

What’s notable in the iPad is less what’s emerging as what it’s ending – specifically, print and point & click. By introducing it as standing on the shoulders of Kindle, it’s clearly positioned to do what iPods did for music and CDs. The past few hundred years of books, magazines, and newspapers is over and a new, super easy digital ecosystem is being built to take their place. This is the last nail in the coffin for analogue media and something no general-use tablet has been positioned to do.

The other significant feature is that it is the first completely multi-touch computer designed as such, as opposed to a laptop with a keyboard and trackpad and a few awkward touch functions. This challenges the 25-year dominance of the mouse as primary computer input device. With the iPad being largely experiential and not in release, there’s much missing in live blogcasts of a product release keynote and even more lost on its most important potential audience – casual users. ‘Everyone’ is definitely a much larger and viable market than those sought by traditional tablets (realtors and doctors in TV shows?) or even of Apple computers (design/media professionals, rich hipsters?).

If the feel truly is as natural as early reports indicate, this awkward platform may emerge for the vast majority of people who just want computers for a few basic tasks and were never totally comfortable with the traditional computer platform. It’s like an anti-computer that is more out of the way than in your face. Given their prominence, hardware experience, and lowish price point, Apple may use portables success to sneak in the back door to personal computer dominance.

This is not to say there’s aren’t shortcomings, but dissecting its feature set may prove as irrelevant as doing one for mp3 players where “iPod” brand ubiquity borders on that of “Kleenex”. That’s why I think the reaction is interesting. The tech community’s judgment of tech and what comes to pass may or may not be related. Tech addicts can pull out potentially game changing features where others just don’t get the implications (Twitter always comes to mind), but there’s also ecosystem, integration, price point, and product narrative/positioning. When you read about tech all the time it’s easy to get very cerebral about it and forget about actual experiences – what made it to release, what works well, what users will or absolutely will not tolerate, what real-world relationships are involved in getting it right. But all of these things are crucial for market dominance and create the chasm referred to in diffusion theory.

Given the frenzy of disruptive technologies of the last decade I think we’re in for ever higher expectations and diminishing returns. The ironic thing is that what makes a movie or future visions ‘futuristic’ is that it’s weird to us, but common to the subjects. People’s everyday is mundane, effortless and natural. It becomes invisible not because of failure but by surpassing all its clumsy predecessors. What’s big and new never stays that way and is sometimes opposite of what’s just right.

Though it has been over 10 years since its opening, Encounter restaurant at the LAX theme building remains a fascinating example of total experience design. It’s nice when an architectural landmark can be re-contextualized to fit it’s own crazy space age reality thanks to interior design, sound design (is that Lalo Schifrin in the elevator?), and sophisticated-ly kitsch identity design (by Adams-Morioka). Eddie Sotto talks about the project here as head of Walt Disney Imagineering team that worked on it.

Though the building is enduring some exterior work, the food is less inspiring and upkeep is not always keeping up, it is still an inspiring piece of LA. These kind of multi-sensory projects with such a strong look and feel are rare outside of family entertainment and make art of everyday life.

Cute conceptual dress called Skin for maternity, or not. I can’t find them anywhere for purchase, but you can try asking designer Marisol Rodriguez.

You could get to the 5 north from the far left lane of the 110 north in downtown LA, but this wasn’t reflected in signage so artist Richard Ankrom added it in 2001. CalTrans just made it official last month.

Oh, you distracting lower thirds!

Triple Self-Portrait (1959)

A recent Vanity fair article on Norman Rockwell suggests he might come to new relevance given our current economic and cultural hangover. Like many artists, he sought to materialize an idealized vision that didn’t quite exist. A recent book (Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, by Ron Schick) shows his photographic studies compared to his finished works to shed some light on what exactly he was adding. The fact that it’s optimistic and mundane seems to have put it at odds with our ‘traditional’ understanding of art and artists for the past 150 years, usually more driven towards the extreme, difficult, painful, stylized, elite, dramatic, and fantastical (or preferably all of the above).

However it’s hard to find what is so bad about a kid from NYC with an average-to-shitty upbringing longing for an ideal America. It is likely similar to what inspired many of us (and some of the most patriotic art in a long time) in the last presidential election. The ideals Rockwell depicted weren’t in a physical, materialist or even intellectual or creative sense – the usual realms worthy of celebration. His subjects were not so slick or conventionally beautiful and were often of average or modest means. He created scenes with ordinary and flawed humans longing to connect, stand up for what’s right, or simply get along. They do not appear particularly moralist, reactionary, or sanitized. There’s always the grit lurking in the background – not condemned or celebrated – simply existing, and perhaps also inspired by what’s in focus. Any moral or political content tended towards the liberal-universal side. Sure it was all tinged with fantasy and idealism, freely admitted by the artist himself. But it seems more plausible and more inspiring than, say, the equally fictional artworld-friendly concoction of J.T. Leroy.

It seems his past unacceptability in art culture is more about the preference for romanticizing neurosis than any inherent qualities of his work. For a culture long obsessed with the idea of authenticity, perhaps Norman can help turn creative discussion and responsibility back onto what an artist chooses to depict rather than their autobiography/persona. Maybe this will keep the latter from getting cannibalized by the former and require work to stand on it’s own.

Art can convey a range of emotions and visions. I recall being moved by his illustrations. This was before art school, when I was too young to know better. It’s strange if works have to be sufficiently obscured, complicated, intellectualized, and uncomfortable to be taken seriously. The aspects of society that have long been seen as subversive, hidden, and somehow more ‘real’ (sex, drugs, violence, drama, political dissent…) are actually quite ubiquitous in media and culture today and now seem more like escape than reality. In post-subculture America, it is unlikely that constant depictions of our vices, failings, and unsavory aspects will get us anywhere. Either we can feel superior to our flawed compatriots or we get even more comfortable with our already powerful addictions. In such a climate, optimistic moral idealism seems positively avant-garde!