r+d

Posts on innovation, user experience, research and design
 

Monster.com: "Your Calling is Calling" Ad

Lots of ads are creative. Some are really creative. This one from Monster is rare, because it's not only extremely original and creative but also thought-provoking and inspiring. In some ways it reminds me of that old Think Different ad from Apple because it uses aspiration to forge such a powerful emotional response in such a short time. 


via

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Filed under  //   advertising   aspiration   calling   career   motivation  
Posted September 1, 2010
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Asteroids!

Beautiful visualization of asteroid discoveries in the past 30 years. Watch the video and be amazed that we haven't had to send Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck into space yet. 

via FlowingData

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Filed under  //   info-viz   science   space   tech  
Posted August 27, 2010
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Visualizing the $12 trillion U.S. deficit

The BBC has launched an interactive visualization site called BBC Dimensions. It provides overlays of historical and scientific information onto a postal code.Careful with that link as it'll cost you at least 10 minutes of your life.

Anyway, the BBC Dimension site got me thinking about another large number we hear a lot about these days: the U.S. budget deficit. Right now, it's hovering around $12 trillion dollars. When we hear that figure we typically hear things like,"If that were a stack of $1 bills it would stretch all the way to Alpha Centauri" or whatever. But that's still abstract because I can't picture how far Alpha Centauri is.

So I thought, I wish someone would put that into perspective with small units, something I can relate to. Then I figured I'd just try. 

 So here goes:

Ants
Ants are about 1/10th of an inch long and about 1/20th of an inch wide. Converted to cm^2, that's about .25cm by .125cm or .03125cm^2. Multiply that by 12,000,000,000,000 and convert to km^2 and you have an area 37.5 square kilometers or 14.5 square miles of ants stacked leg to leg. Here's what a sea of 12 trillion ants would look like in Washington, DC:
Mice
So ants aren't super impressive although that would be a mighty ant mound. Let's go with the common field mouse (10cm long x 4cm wide ~ 40cm^2). Times 12 trillion. That's about 48,000 square kilometers or about 18,500 square miles. Basically that's mice carpeting the entire, sprawling Atlanta metro area:
House cats
Since I don't have a neat API to help me with these overlays (hint hint), let's finish with cats. (40cm long not counting tails x 15cm wide ~600cm^2). Times 12 trillion = 720,000km^2 or about 275,000 square miles. Now this is pretty impressive. Parked over the East coast, this looks like:
Centered over Kentucky, you see it stretches from Atlanta to Chicago and well out over the Midwest:
Finally, for the West Coast. Yes, that is an entire state of Nevada full of cats, plus a healthy chunk of California.

That's a lot of debt.

 

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Filed under  //   BBC Dimensions   debt   info-viz   U.S. deficit   visualization  
Posted August 20, 2010
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Facebook Places logo is a four in a square

Kudos to Tim Shey/TechCrunch for finding this. Even more kudos to the graphic designer at Facebook (or whichever design shop they're using) who came up with it. If Facebook Places succeeds in crushing Foursquare (or even just marginalizing it), this could go down as one of the better, more vindictive logo designs. Not only is it clean, but it carries this really aggressive message. Notice how the placemarker also conveniently doubles as a spade, effectively stabbing the "four in the square". Evil genius.

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Filed under  //   design   Facebook Places   Foursquare   location   strategy  
Posted August 19, 2010
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Global population by latitude and longitude

Via radical cartography (and kottke) comes this view of the world's population by latitude and longitude. Nothing surprising here, but this is another good use of overlays to clarify data.

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Filed under  //   infoviz  
Posted August 17, 2010
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Twitter's recruiting video

Nothing too fancy here. Just a creative and interesting recruitment video that seems to be channeling Wes Anderson. All they needed was a slow-motion running scene to cap it off. Young companies are fun. 

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Filed under  //   HR   PR   recruiting   Rushmore   Twitter   Wes Anderson  
Posted August 9, 2010
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Lost in Val Sinestra

There are no two ways about it, being able to choose a cast of your friends and then seeing your real friends' pictures and names embedded into a created-on-the-fly movie trailer is pretty catchy. It makes you want to watch every scene of the trailer, studying the minutiae of the action. 

How long will it be before we'll have a more integrated experience. Imagine technology like that used by Microsoft Photosynth, which could process hundreds of tagged Facebook pictures of you and complile a more or less 3-d version of your face. This "skin" could be digitally stitched around a real actor's face, on the fly. Imagine Xtranormal with a dash of Roger Ebert's new voice synthesizer . . . only with pictures. Voila - custom movies made with a cast of you and your friends. It's not that far off.

In the meantime, check out Lost in Val Sinestra here:

http://www2.lost-in-val-sinestra.com

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Filed under  //   entertainment   Facebook   media   social network  
Posted July 29, 2010
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Visualizing cognitive surplus

Via Information is Beautiful.

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Filed under  //   cognitive surplus   creativity   infoviz   television   wikipedia  
Posted July 20, 2010
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Tinkerbell and bird-like UCVs

 

Fascinating article on some work being done at MIT to create an automated algorithm that would allow an airplane to land like a bird on a wire. MIT Associate Professor Russ Tedrake, a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Rick Cory, a PhD student in Tedrake's lab are pioneering the work.

While it's still very early in the development process, I really enjoyed the quote from Mr. Cory at the end of the article because it sums up the power of the creative/innovative mind:

Cory will be moving to California to take a job researching advanced robotics techniques for Disney, [but] he hopes to continue collaborating with Tedrake. "I visited the air force, and I visited Disney, and they actually have a lot in common," Cory says. "The air force wants an airplane that can land on a power line, and Disney wants a flying Tinker Bell that can land on a lantern."

And this is exactly right.

More interestingly, this also makes a strong statement about the innovativeness of Disney, which is looking at the same technology the Air Force is, only they just want to entertain people with it.

Video
Image via Jason Dorfman (MIT/CSAIL)

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Filed under  //   Air Force   airplane   aviation   biomimicry   Disney   innovation   MIT   technology   UCV   unmanned combat vehicle  
Posted July 20, 2010
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