Explore Nottingham through the Sillitoe Mobile Trail iPhone 5 App
"The Alan Sillitoe Memorial Committee are launching a Mobile Trail App and Handbook – (a book with a digital heart) at Nottingham Contemporary on Saturday 27th October [2012]. ...
The mobile trail features the work of leading contemporary writers revisiting the themes and spaces of Sillitoe’s Nottingham and is the culmination of our work with The Space - the experimental digital arts platform commissioned by Arts Council England in association with the BBC."
(2012 Sillitoe Trail)
Fig.1 "Sillitoe Trail Nottingham: Al Needham - Life through 21 Pubs", Published on 13 Jul 2012 by thinkamigo.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Adrift in a shopping maze: it's a successful no-exit strategy
"Alan Penn, director of the Virtual Reality Centre for the Built Environment at University College London, has come to a conclusion that Ikea stores are 'designed just like a maze'. In doing so he's given scholarly validation to a feeling that will have occurred to many shoppers as they blunder around the blue and yellow hangar looking for a new TV unit only to emerge with two candles, a wok and a bottle of lingonberry cordial.
Penn went on to suggest that it was Ikea's strategy to keep customers inside the store for the maximum time possible. They achieve this by setting a route round the store from which it's difficult to deviate. Taking the shortcuts (which are only there to conform with fire regulations) often leaves you adrift in a sea of lampshades.
The effect is to boost impulse purchases. See a coathanger, and you might buy 'because the layout is so confusing you know you won't be able to go back and get it later'."
(Ian Tucker, 30 January 2011, The Observer, Guardian News and Media Limited)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Making New Maps: Explorations in Interactive Space
The Making New Maps project (2010) has been created by 1st year NTU Multimedia students. Each student created individual interactive spaces through arranging and interlinking sets of images. In doing so they have endeavoured to create coherent interactive narrative experiences which are both pleasurable to navigate and intuitive to use.
This project has been run in conjunction with students from the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art in the Peoples Republic of China.
CONTRIBUTOR
MultimediaSHARE
Wayfinding: the organization and communication of our dynamic relationship to space and the environment
"Wayfinding is the organization and communication of our dynamic relationship to space and the environment. Successful design to promote wayfinding allows people to: (1) determine their location within a setting, (2) determine their destination, and (3) develop a plan that will take them from their location to their destination. The design of wayfinding systems should include: (1) identifying and marking spaces, (2) grouping spaces, and (3) linking and organizing spaces through both architectural and graphic means."
(Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access, School of Architecture and Planning, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
An introduction to information design
"Information design, also known as communication design, is a rapidly growing discipline that draws on typography, graphic design, applied linguistics, applied psychology, applied ergonomics, computing, and other fields. It emerged as a response to people's need to understand and use such things as forms, legal documents, signs, computer interfaces, technical information and operating/assembly instructions. Information designers responding to these needs have achieved major economic and social improvements in information use.
Today information design is engaged in most complex projects which involve communication with customers, suppliers, partners and citizens - particularly where the costs of misunderstanding are large. Some examples of bad information design might include: forms that are incorrectly completed and costly to process; instructions that cause frustration and even danger and that may damage the reputation of the provider; education materials that fail to promote learning; scientific and technical data that is easily to misinterpret; command and control displays that fail to alert operators to potentially dangerous situations; and websites that are difficult to navigate and unpleasant to look at.
Information design is user-centred. Usually, it is iterative - design solutions are tested and modified repeatedly. Sometimes the testing is local and informal; sometimes a project justifies formal and extensive usability testing and evaluation.
Information designers serve the needs of both information providers and information users. They consider the selection, structuring and presentation of the information provider's message in relation to the purposes, skills, experience, preferences and circumstances of the intended users. To do this they draw on specialist knowledge and skills in a number of fundamental areas."
(Sue Walker and Mark Barratt)
CONTRIBUTOR
Tom EdsonSHARE
