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
- ‘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).
- ‘Cameron’s Lament’, musical interpretations of David Cameron’s parting ditty after resigning as Prime Minister, published by Classic FM.
- 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
- 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.
- Dutch designer Iris Van Herpen’s collection, shown in Paris, was inspired by ‘cymatics’ – the study of sound waves.
- 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
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