MEX note: MEX alumnus Andrew Muir Wood shared this article from James Darling at BERG, explaining how he prototyped a simple application to show the status of London buses. Transport for London tracks 8500 buses around the city using GPS and, with a bit of tinkering, Darling found a way to tap into the data. He deliberately kept the interface as simple and unobtrusive as possible, using quiet design techniques to create a simple web page which could be refreshed every 15 minutes on the e-ink display of a Kindle (or any other device with a browser).

Darling then taped the Kindle to inside of BERG's office door, providing the team with an at-a-glance display of the buses expected at their local stop. The primary objective of the design was to harness the power of the network without taxing the users' attention: information on demand, rather than demanding information.

Read the original article for some interesting photos of the application being used in situ.