Design vs Art would like to invite you all to join the next IxDA Munich social meeting.

Thursday March 25
Café Mozart
Pettenkoferstr. 2
U-bahn: Sendlinger Tor
(089) 59 41 90

http://www.cafe-mozart.info

We have the front/modern room (holds 20-25) booked from 7:00pm on. There will be no presentations this evening, just a chilled evening with a couple of drinks.

We hope to see you there!

At Design vs Art we want to wish you a merry [and nerdy] Christmas. This time we created a quick Processing greetings card that you could easily modified to fit your town.

Processing is an open source programming language to program images, animations and interactions. It is used by designers to create prototypes and to create interactive interfaces. One of the best characteristics about this language is its community, which is encouraged to share what it creates.

Click once on the image and move your mouse to change the wind direction.

More about the Processing project here

Download the Design vs Art Christmas Card code to modify

Design vs Art, together with Curt Collinsworth (Frog Design), is organizing the first meeting of the Munich chapter of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA).

Logo of the Interaction Design Association

This meeting should be a first get-together for the local community, and of course for visitors from other places too. Interaction designers, industrial designers, usability experts, web designers; all are invited to join and collaborate.

For more information, please visit: http://www.ixdamunich.de/

In the last years there have been a lot of buzz around the electronic paper technology (or epaper, for short), specially after the introduction of the Amazon Kindle. At Design vs Art our motivation for our last project was the fact that, aside from ebook readers, not many devices have been presented using the epaper technology.

In order to discover opportunities we went through a whole design process: defining the problem to solve or motivation, looking for a strategy, ideation, prototyping and explaining the idea.

For us one of the most important features about the epaper technology is the possibility of creating a whole system around the device. Data on the display could come from different sources and the epaper device could communicate to a variety of other devices and to gather information from its environment creating a whole information ecosystem.

Once we decided to develop an advertising system, it was clear for us that we would need more than a device if we wanted a good user experience; so we designed epaper billboards and a whole information system including the necessary interfaces to manage it.

We also imagined the way the user would intereact with the billboard and how the service could add value to customers.

Of course traditional paper billboards already work in a system; but the digital nature of the electronic paper could revolutionize the business.

At Design vs Art we do product ideation and concept design, starting with a motivation and following a whole creative and design process.

If you are thinking of a new product or service focused on users or if you are interested in any of our concepts you might want to contact us. Here is our contact information.

At Design vs Art we have been thinking for some time about how it would be to give users of public transportation the possibility of knowing in a fast way how to get from A to B in an extremly fast way. In this article I would like to give you some insights about the design of the fromhere application.

The Problem to Solve

Our agency is based in Munich, a city with a huge public transport network that takes people everywhere. The problem is that as the travelers get more options the network becomes more complex. Then, is very difficult for people to plan a journey without a computer with access to the online route planning system.

There are several services to check this information through a mobile phone but none takes advantage of the latest technology, like GPS.

The Solution

In the following video you can see a fast introduction to our design.

We have been asking users of public transportation about the places they usually go. The answer was that most of them are regularly going to the same places, like work, gym and favorite cafeterias or bars.

So we decided to design an interface as simple as possible that makes the journey planning really fast, wherever the user is but going to those "standard" places. We decided to design our first solution for the iPhone as we realized that tapping on the destination would be the fastest way to do it. 

The Interface

The fromhere interface is clean, it loads fast and eliminates any distraction other applications could have. For us, designing an interface that is fast and easy to use was our main goal. 

The Technology

Thanks to GPS the telephone knows where the user is located. The application then connects to the server to translate coordinates to a real address, such as "Duesseldorfer Strasse 11, Munich".

In the next step the application requests the journey plan between departure and destination to the servers.

Contact Us

Please contact us if you need farther details about the application.

The official fromhere product information website is here: http://www.designvsart.com/fromhere 

Creative Commons

You can use the contents of this article and video under Creative Commons Attributions License 3.0. Just link to http://www.designvsart.com/fromhere

An article written by me, Alexis Brion, recommending the best usability and interface design books was published on the Smashing Magazine. This is exclusive content, read the Usability and Interface Design Books article on the Smashing Magazine.

I hope you enjoy it! 

This is the first post for the new Design Vs Art digital design agency site. What do we want with this site? Well, to let you know what are we doing, to show you our projects. These are Tourname.com and Mapoot.com, both to be launch very soon.

In the Services section you could have a look at what we can offer you, more information in About Us and feel free to get all our contact information at Contact Us (obvious?).

The blog? (bl?g) An online diary; a personal chronological log of thoughts published on a Web page (Dictionary.com) Kind of… well, we will try to do that.

See you soon here.