FEATURE
How to Embrace Doing Nothing
Absolute idleness is both harder and more rewarding than it seems. It will also help you reflect and with imagination in daily life as the article in last issue explained.
In a 2014 study, researchers left people in a room alone for six to 15 minutes with nothing to do and found that the participants turned to almost any available activity, including administering painful electric shocks to themselves. Even pain—even, gasp, Twitter—is better than being alone with your thoughts.
Sound familiar? The author offers three steps you can take to improve your slothful skills.
theatlantic.com
CURIOSITY
Researchers Have Taught Machines How to Follow Lego Instruction Manuals
No, you won't be able to drop a pile of plastic bricks and a manual in front of a robot arm and expect to come back to a completed model in a few hours (not that any self-respecting LEGO fan would ever consider that)
The goal of this research was to simply translate the 2D images of a LEGO manual into assembly steps a machine can functionally understand. Teaching a robot to manipulate and assemble LEGO bricks is a whole other challenge.
While I wouldn't want to had off building LEGO builds to a machine, if they can do this with IKEA instructions, that would be more useful!
gizmodo.com.au
How Mark Rober became the Willy Wonka of engineering
Thing 2 got hooked onto his new video drops since elementary school, and even signed up for his engineering course. Rober has more than 22 million YouTube followers, new headquarters, and an endless stream of ideas to get kids psyched about science. Even the squirrels are getting into it.
fastcompany.com
VISUAL
Mapped: The Salary You Need to Buy a Home in 50 U.S. Cities
This visual, using data from Home Sweet Home, maps out the annual salary you’d need for home ownership in 50 different U.S. cities. I like how the visualization shows both the median home price and salary needed over a map.
Depending on where you live, owning a home may seem like a far off dream or it could be fairly realistic. In New York City, for example, a person needs to be making at least six figures to buy a home, but in Cleveland you could do it with just over $45,000 a year.
visualcapitalist.com
UX
Don't call it UX design!
Google's Abigail Posner tells us how she prefers to refer to user experience design.
She takes an anthropological, human-centered approach that reminds us that we need to think about who we're designing for. Her big tip for successful user experience design? Stop using the word 'user' for a start! Despite working in user experience, Posner doesn't like that term. Instead of the word 'user'. The director of Creative Works at Google prefers to say 'human', which is, after all, what the user is, unless you're really designing a product to be used by bots.
creativebloq.com
AI applied to Usability Testing
I co-authored this article while at Capgemini, focusing on how AI is currently being used in usability testing, and behind the scenes in tools that we use.
sogeti.com
AI will be a thing in Design and Research, but there are some issues to resolve first
To what extent do digital designers and user researchers in industry make use of AI-powered systems to support their work? The answer seems to be “not much,” as the authors found in a survey with 34 practitioners. In general, there seems to be little awareness of the specific advantages AI can bring to a design process and which tools are already out there, despite significant issues with existing processes that could be well mitigated with the help of AI. However, designers and researchers are very open to the topic and would appreciate AI-powered systems to support them in both ideation and evaluation. Providing practitioners with such systems that are easily accessible and demonstrate added value holds great opportunities.
uxdesign.cc
INCLUSIVE
Inclusive Design 24 - 22 September 2022
Inclusive Design 24 (#id24) is a free 24-hour online event for the global community. It celebrates inclusive design and shares knowledge and ideas from analogue to digital, from design to development, from planners to practitioners, and everything and everyone in between. There's no sign-up or registration, but sessions will be streamed live on their YouTube channel, so set a reminder now...
inclusivedesign24.org
BlenderBot 3 | A Conversational AI Prototype
Bored? Curious? Give BlenderBot a try - it's a conversational AI prototype from Meta. They admit it is an early stage prototype and need help to improve. It does need help! It sang Zuck's praises, abruptly brought Trump into the conversation, and then switched topics!
blenderbot.ai