In this episode we share 6 digital design inspirations, from a sci-fi film script written by artificial intelligence to a fashion collection influenced by sound waves. Prompted by a move to Basecamp for MEX collaboration, podcast co-host Alex Guest introduced ‘Friday inspirations’, a recurring task for each member of the team to share a weekly ‘find’ with colleagues. Alex and co-host Marek Pawlowski take turns explaining why they picked each inspiration and how it relates to digital experience design. It leads to a discussion about how the project has influenced the work of the MEX team and how tangential inspirations inform the day-to-day of MEX research and conferences.

On this edition

• Marek Pawlowski, co-host & founder of MEX (@marekpawlowski)
• Alex Guest, co-host & CEO of Zingy.life (@alexguest)

Alex’s inspirations

1. ‘Sunspring’, an entry into the 2016 Sci-Fi London 48 Hour Film Challenge, the script for ‘Sunspring’ was written using AI (LSTM recurrent neural network).
2. ‘Cameron’s Lament’, musical interpretations of David Cameron’s parting ditty after resigning as Prime Minister, published by Classic FM.
3. Pzizz is an app which uses sound to improve sleep. Recently, the app released a 90-minute prototype track ‘to help you get in the zone and get stuff done’.

Marek’s inspirations

1. The Natural History Museum has a new exhibition looking at the evolutionary relationship between the development of the eye and the development of colour in nature.
2. Dutch designer Iris Van Herpen’s collection, shown in Paris, was inspired by ‘cymatics’ – the study of sound waves.
3. Deepart.io uses machine learning to apply the style of one image to the content of another.

Follow future Friday inspirations

Track #mexDTI on Twitter, or – better still – post your own Friday inspiration to the MEX team.

Bonus links

• MEX/16 conference
• Basecamp, the collaboration tool we’re using for the MEX team
• Design Talk 10. Artificial intelligence; Nathan Benaich, Partner, Playfair Capital
• Prisma, an image enhancing tool
• Very Deep Convolutional networks
• Long Short-Term Memory networks
• Kolly, Wattenhoffer, Welten, 2012, ‘A personal touch: recognizing users based on touch screen behavior’ (PDF)
• ‘How can UX improvements encourage users to pivot from consuming to creating?’, an essay by Alex Guest and Marek Pawlowski
• Smart Select GIF maker on the Samsung Galaxy Note 7
• FT Weekend article about the evolution of colour in nature
• Royal Academy’s summer exhibition
• ‘Where is the colour in the monochrome mobile industry?’, Marek Pawlowski’s 2007 article on product colours in the mobile phone business.
• ‘Touch me! An article on tactile experience’ published by Jessica Ching, Laura Henneberry and Shally Lee in 2009 on the MEX blog
• #mexsigns, an open project seeking digital inspiration in physical signage
• ‘Design principles for creating trust in digital UX’, summarising the results of the MEX/14 creative session led by Rich Clayton
• The Design of Everyday Things, a book by Don Norman
• Daniel Kahneman, Professor of Psychology
• A/B study of hamburger icon versus the word ‘Menu’ (via Luke Wroblewski)
• The Sync Project, music as precision medicine
• Experimenting with audio in digital experience design, the story of the MEX/9 original audio compositions and blindfolds
• Dutch designer Iris Van Herpen’s collection (from It’s Nice That, not Dezeen, as Marek mistakenly mentioned on the podcast)
• Design Talk 16. The value of nurturing tangential inspiration
• BERG’s ‘Touch’ project to visualise the NFC radio field

About MEX Design Talk & how to get in touch

The podcast for the MEX community, interviewing UX pioneers, exploring emerging technologies, user behaviour and how to design better digital experiences.

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Thanks

• Jukedeck, for the artificial intelligence engine which provided the music