This blog has been powered by Wordpress since we setup way back in 2006 but since then Wordpress has become much more powerful and is a real CMS in its own right. We’ve built fully featured Wordpress sites for clients and it has worked out extremely well:

• www.projectblogger.ie
• www.ul.ie/envirocom
• www.3bv.org to name a few.

Clients have always been delighted at how easy it is to add/edit/remove content from the site. This is really important when your working for a client who isn’t at all tech savvy and would probably end up with a dormant, dead site if implemented in static HTML or even a CMS which was too complicated for them to use.

Our current site www.tricycle.ie is pretty much static with a few different php scripts to display dynamic content but by and large it is static. This means going into dreamweaver or whatever to edit the html and upload. This shouldn’t be a huge barrier for a web development company but it is! Inevitable, we concentrate on our clients and neglect our own site. Our staff has also grown since those early days and alot of them are eager to contribute. Sooooooooo… we’ve decided to take our customers advice and move to Wordpress.

At the moment the site is 50% redesigned and we are exploring options of having this design converted to a highly functional wordpress theme. We’re busy with client work until late 2010 so we are considering using a markup company for the conversion. In the past we’ve used www.psd2html.com and have had varying success with them. Sometimes the markup is excellent, but sometimes not! You get assigned a random project manager but you never learn their name and its just not a personal service.

So for this job we’re looking for a new Marker upper solution. Wordpress themes should be a specialty of the chosen company not just an additional service. I did alot of googling and there’s a tonne of choices in this area. I cut it down to two though:  ShopHTML  and ConvertPSDtoWordpress. I chose these two for very different reasons…

ShopHTML has a terrific live chat feature and I talked to a very friendly REAL person. We went through the rough requirements and I was sure they could deliver, as they really seemed interested in the job.

On the otherhand ConvertPSDtoWordpress are making this specific type of markup job their speciality. They provide a number of additional features over any other provider I found. For example a custom admin panel for controlling certain theme specific settings. Also integrating certain functions into the theme rather than installing lots of plugins. They are also running a competition at the moment to win a free markup so hopefully I might win that and cover some of the psd to wordpress costs!

If anyone has anything to add or could suggest a really good alternative I am all ears but until then it is between these two.

We will be launching our new site mid-March 2010… so I’m gonna be busy!

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Minority Report was a breakthrough in fictional design of interactive technology back in 2002. The vision for Human Computer Interaction in the film has since guided the tech community’s attempts to match the capabilities shown by Tom Cruise’s magic gloves.

Oblong.com is making headway in achieving the level of interaction and pure “wow” that could easily pass for magic in many parts of the world.

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

The only drawback with the obvious brilliance of this interface is that the complexity of the tasks being demonstrated is specific to the gesture/interaction performed. The skills and knowledge to acquire a productive level of use would probably take years to learn. The guys in Oblong and hopefully here in Tricycle too will do a lot of the “hard yards” now to design the “conventions” and “protocols” that will guide the universal language of Gesture Driven Input.

Keep up the good work guys, its going to take a while though!

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Cushy CMS 

Cushy CMS is a lovely simple web app created by Australian company Stateless Systems. Tricycle are using it now to help their clients make basic changes to text content and images.

Apture

This web app is a powerful system for adding media to your site. Quickly  insert video clips, photos and wikipedia links on your web page and see instant results.

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Sorry for the erratic postings but I was away for a bit. Spent part of the my time in the Saharawi refugee camps near Tindouf in Algeria. This blog is primarily a design blog so I won’t get all political and ranty but if anyone is interested to know why there is a wall, longer than the Great Wall of China, in the middle of the Sahara Desert than I have uploaded a pdf entitled Western Sahara - the cost of the conflict for you to have a read of. It was issued by the International Crisis Group - recently voted one of the top ten think tanks in the world by Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Anyway, back to the magic of technology. Let me present Johnny Lee and his head tracking for desktop V displays.

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Well lads, they are slick, that’s for sure. NONOBJECT are an American company that pride themselves on creating profound new design experiences which are emotionally compelling and meaningful. NONOBJECT, with its beautiful brand aesthetic and admirable ideals was founded in 2006 by the award-winning teamsters Suncica Lukic, Branko Lukic and Steve Takayama - all impossibly talented in their fields. They have defined NONOBJECT as ‘the space between you and the object’. They are releasing the NONOBJECT book sometime soon. In their own words, ‘It is the first of it’s kind - the first of a new genre of design fiction… By deliberately creating objects that cannot exist - because the material is not yet available, or the business plan, or the manufacturing process, or the infra-structure to support it, or even the human sensibility - it becomes possible to explore the meaning of design at a more profound level and to think more richly about what is and what might be’.

Whatever you make of the design fictions, however you assess their relevance, worth or credibility … they are beautifully rendered and in my opinion, worth a look. Saying that I am a sucker for anything presented using literate design-language, controlled typography, clean images and muted shades of grey …

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I love Canadian illustration and design. In fact, I quite like Canada in general. I like their national psyche as I understand it. As a quick aside … after all I am musing on the joys of the horizontal scroll today … I learnt an AWFUL lot about the Swiss national psyche this week as it is represented by the People’s Party, the largest political party in Switzerland. BBC world service did an excellent extended audio piece on what the Swiss people think constitutes the ideal Swiss citizen. Some pretty hairy quotes were thrown into the arena. Unfortunately I can’t find the original audio piece so I’ll link to a short video instead.

Anyway, back to some ’serious’ design issues. The purpose of this particular entry is to celebrate horizontal scrolling when viewing design portfolios. Two Canadian design companies that really pull it off in my book are Concrete and The Movement. For whatever reasons, and I am sure they have been well documented by interaction designers across the globe, I really enjoying viewing sequential images on a horizontal plane, especially when the movement is endowed with a smooth sense of flow. I find it a very rewarding interaction which affords me a real sense of progression through a body of work. Why don’t we scroll across more? Perhaps there are serious back end concerns that compromise SEO issues etc. Can anyone tell me? Sheena would have known.

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Watched an incredible show last night - Bruce Parry’s Tribe. He was living with the Penan tribe. The nomadic hunter-gatherer Penan are one of the last such groups in South East Asia. Out of the 10,000 Penan living in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, Borneo, only 200 nomadic people are left. In the programme, the Penan tribe bemaon the loss of their life-sustaining jungle to the onslaught of the logging industry. It is heartbreaking stuff.

Also couldn’t resist sticking this little film up - as the heading suggests it’s the tale of another bike modified to support a good cause. The video tells its own story so I don’t need to go on too much. Nice editing and music too.

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It arrived yesterday in the post. Tired, travelled but bursting to be read. Jon Kolko’s Thoughts on Interaction Design.

Jon is a Professor of Interaction and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design. I say Jon like I know the man. I don’t. But after reading a very small scintilla of his work, I wish I did. I like his take on Interaction Design. In fact, I like his take on Design (with a capital D). Fullstop.

As he says himself, the primary purpose of the book is to better define Interaction Design and in doing so assure ‘practicing Interaction Designers that they are not, in fact simply tools to be used in the cleanup phases of a technology-centreed project’ and offer practicioners ‘the vocabulary necessary to justify their existence to other team members’.

Jon asserts that Design is language and that Interaction Design is the creation of a dialogue between a human and a product, service or system. This dialogue is both physical and emotional. It manifests itself in form, function and technology. It unfolds over time and is usually located in the world of behaviour. Thus Interaction Designers can be perceived as shapers of behaviour. They speak both form and words at once. They construct a compelling argument and invite the user to share in their work - and hopefully in a dialogue that is ’subtle, lasting and intuitive’.

These are only some of the thoughts Jon elicits in the introduction of the book. There are many more and I’ll come back to you with the best of them once I have had time to digest them myself.

Also, the design of the book itself, is very attractive. And I’m a man that’s into my paper and fonts.

http://www.thoughtsoninteraction.com/

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I am quite excited about a paper I’ve just read. Unfortunately, I can’t just upload the thing because it is copyrighted. I can, however, take one or two vital points from it and spit them out with a strong recommendation to read the paper yourself. Cost me fifteen dollars I think. It’s called Sustainable Interaction Design: Invention & Disposal, Renewal & Reuse and it was written by a man called Eli Belvis. It’s loaded as academic papers go so I will try and give you a small tase of its contents.

Belvis mantains that sustainability should be a central focus of interaction design. His definition of sustainability includes social equality and justice, public health, environment as well as other conditions that effect humanity and and our fragile biosphere.

In the paper he presents two vital principles for SID as well as a rubric for understanding and assessing the material effects induced by particular interaction design cases. The two principles are

1.) linking invention & disposal, by which he means ‘the idea that any design of new objects or systems with embedded materials of information technologies is incomplete without a corresponding account of what will become of the objects or systems that are displaced or obsoleted by such inventions’.

2.) promoting renewal & reuse, by which he means ‘the idea that the design of objects or systems with embedded materials of information technologies implies the need to first and foremost consider the possibilities for renewal & reuse of existing objects or systems from the perspective of sustainability.’

These principles are best understood in context. He cites two products - the iPod and the Leica camera. The former, fails to link invention and disposal by promoting the idea that one must have the latest iPod to be in fashion thus irresponsibly encouraging wilful premature disposal and rampant consumerism. The latter, the Leica, is cited as an example where the manufacturer has continued to produce quality modern lenses that compliment an old Leica camera of heirloom quality. Belvin is quick to point out that this is generally a trait perferred by manufacturers of professional tools rather than by companies who produce deliberately consumer goods.

 That’s the gist of it. I think Belvin raises some quality points. Fair play, Eli, fair play.

Oh shit and another thing - he mentions a publication called the Design Philosophy Papers. Had a quick look in and she could definitely be worth a proper read.

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