The Best Thing I’ve Seen Today: Unicorn Institute Courses funded via Kickstarter

Design and technology generalists who can work in user experience (UX) design are so rare and highly prized that they are called unicorns in the web world.  “It’s hard to find these mythical magical creatures that have a holistic mix of design skills, research skills, content strategy, business savvy, leadership and software development, but these kinds of design generalists are really important within a company,” Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman says. “We are focused on creating industry-ready designers who can, on day one of getting a job in a professional setting, jump in and be an asset to the company without a whole bunch of onboarding.”

Jared Spool and Jensen-Inman teamed up to bring their vision of creating a holistic UX design program for adult learners—a program focused on both technical and interpersonal skills through project-based learning—to Center Centre school.

• Follow their research adventures at the Unicorn Institute.
• Find information about Center Centre on the school’s website.
• Keep in touch with @unicorninstitute, @jenseninman, and @jmspool.

The Best Thing I’ve Seen Today: SelfieCity

“If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many is a selfie worth? That’s what SelfieCity wants to find out. A new project by data visualizationwunderkind in collaboration with Lev Manovich, Jay Chow, and Nadav Hochman, SelfieCity is an attempt to analyze the data of more than 3,000 self-portraits and, in doing so, extrapolate what a selfie is even meant to say in the first place.” (via FastCoDesign article: Russians Are Miserable And Brazilians Love To Smile: What Selfies Reveal About Cultural Stereotypes).  

In order to visualize what a city’s super-selfie would look like, Stefaner and his team needed to quantify their data. The team collected 656,000 Instagram photos from New York, Bangkok, Moscow, Sao Paolo, and Berlin taken between December 4 and December 12, 2013. Feeding these photos to workers hired through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk marketplace, they then identified which of these photos were selfies, and made best guesses as to the age and gender of the person who took them. Here are a few of the highlights:

The Best Thing I’ve Seen Today: Organized Wonder

“Organized Wonder is a way to share and discover the best talks, documentaries, interviews, short films and various other videos scattered across the web. Follow people you admire and share your wonders with others.”  

From what I’ve seen of this site so far, it’s an incredibly well-curated selection of videos. May I recommend Ethan Marcotte’s “The Map is Not the Territory“.

 

The Best Thing I’ve Seen Today: Disarm: A Mechanized Orchestra of Instruments Built from Decommissioned Weapons

“As part of his ongoing effort to transform weapons into musical instruments, artist Pedro Reyes (previously) constructed a fully mechanized orchestra. Titled Disarm, the collection of eight new instruments were built through a collaboration with several musicians and Cocolab, a media studio in Mexico City.

The team acquired a variety of rifles, pistols, and shotguns seized from drug cartels by the Mexican army and used them to build the musical devices that are controlled by computers and can be pre-programmed to play music. In the video above the Creator’s Project recently sat down with Reyes to learn more about how he “transforms negative instincts into creative instincts.” It’s well worth a watch to see the instruments in use.” (via This is Colossal.)

The Best Thing I’ve Seen Today: Arcade Fire’s “Just a Reflektor”

“It’s been over three years since Arcade Fire released their critically acclaimed record The Suburbs. Recalling “The Wilderness Downtown,” the short film they had built for a “We Used to Wait” off The Suburbs, the Canadian indie-rock band have an exciting multimedia experience ready for “Just a Reflektor” from their forthcoming release.

Last Monday, the band released a video announcing the debut the title track off the forthcoming Reflektor. The video ends with an image with what is assumed to be Reflektor‘s album art along with text that reads “9/9 9 p.m. (9:30 Newfoundland)”.

What ensues is a tethered video experience that reacts based on the positioning of your smartphone (or mouse, if you’re without a compatible phone). In various scenes, you control beams of light, which seem to morph into a style of marionette strings on the video’s protagonist.” (via 89.3 The Current)

View: Just a Reflektor

The Best Thing I’ve Seen Today: Kit Kat’s Andriod-site

Ok, the day is still early, but I’m calling it. This site quickly follows the recent naming-news of Android 4.4…  clever, simple, and just plain fun (All the things a candy should be). A tip of the hat to you, Kit Kat. >> http://kitkat.com/#/home

The Best Thing I’ve Seen Today: Kelli Anderson’s Human Body App

Normally I try to at least attempt to briefly summarize the projects/bits of internet I feature here….  but really, this one is just too epic to not direct you straight to her process-filled blog post about it:  http://kellianderson.com/blog/2013/08/illustrating-tinybops-1st-app/

 

“Anderson worked with friends who own Tinybop, a com­pany that cre­ates systems-thinking apps for chil­dren, to pro­duce over 200 illus­tra­tions of parts of the human body — bones, nerves, teeth, guts, even chewed-up food — to show the diges­tion process.

In addi­tion to the required draw­ings, she also worked on an unso­licited, secret side project for Tinybop — an unglossy stop-motion app video she made out of paper, glue, and other arti­cles orig­i­nat­ing from her desk drawer. What she ended up pro­duc­ing is so inspir­ing and cre­ative that you need to watch the video to see for your­self. To read more about Kelli’s process and the Human Body app, visit her blog post where she describes her process.” (via DesignWorkLife)

The Best Thing I’ve Seen Today: Inequality.Is

A really great example of an interactive infographic. Beautifully illustrated. Great storytelling and UX. Political beliefs in agreement or not, it’s a really great tool. Check it Out

The Best Thing I’ve Seen Today: Michael Lanning’s Animation Experiments

A co-worker and I were talking earlier in the week and he showed me this site because it’s built on the Semantic gridsystem (reason #1 I like this site: responsive, semantic gridsystem, what?! love it.) After clicking around a little, it’s obvious that Michael Lanning is a really impressive designer/developer combo (reason #2: It’s rare to excel at both.) But really, I’m just straight-up amused and inspired by the animation experiments. (reason #3: Passion to the level where someone would experiment/learn/explore new techniques on their own time is such an invaluable thing, and I’m growing to appreciate it more and more as I seem to see it less and less frequently.) (via @pkander)

Carrot Chase (see the site):

Saurondipity (see the site):

The Best Thing I’ve Seen Today: Gmail’s New Tabbed Inbox

I love this post for two reasons… 1) OMG! tabbed inbox! Be still my organizationally-inclined-heart. and 2) Google just does such a good job with their communications (see video above)

Read more about the Gmail updates, here.