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.
Mirren Fischer is someone who finds herself at the confluence of some really big challenges:…
Poetry and place...listening and lockdowns... Dan Phillips, who led the Royal College of Art's (RCA)…
Mark Baldino's path to co-founding a Chicago-based design agency wends its way from a degree…
Paul Campbell, a former chief designer at Ford, is now re-imagining the wheelchair at Centaur…
Opening the oven released a cloud of steam. I should have been expecting it. It's…
Jared Ficklin's approach of 'think by making' has led him to produce remarkable digital design…