— Jeff Bezos (via WSJ).

I’m calling ebooks for Amazon. The biggest selection, a client for every screen that matters, and now its purpose-built axe has been sharpened to kill. The new $139 Kindle can last an entire month on a battery. That’s not electronic, that’s supermechanical.

E-Ink is beating the middling expectations it first set and getting better at what it does well, rather than trying to be an LCD. This model is more readable, faster, smaller and lighter. Its browser now uses WebKit. And controls have been refined.

This is all in the service of reading, whenever, wherever. Amazon is honing its tool — the third-generation Kindle adds no new features, only improved existing ones. How many new gadgets do you see doing that?

One important advantage of [tangible user interface] is that users receive passive haptic feedback from the physical objects as they grasp and manipulate them. Without waiting for the digital feedback (mainly visual), users can complete their input actions (e.g. moving a building model to see the interrelation of shadows).

— Hiroshi Ishii, Tangible Bits: Beyond Pixels

In The burden of pushing, pixels I discussed the frustrating step backwards we’ve taken with computers. The lack of a native physical interface causes more friction than we care to admit. But how do we realistically make physical computers?

My answer is to make the objects in our everyday lives super-mechanical. ¹ Through their form and interface, they strive to shed the negative connotations that electronics now carry. While computer companies are trying to shoehorn the complexity they know into new forms, this approach starts with familiar objects and maps digital functions to their physical affordances. Computer interfaces today require translation between hand and eye and button and screen. These provide a tighter feedback loop through passive physicality. Embedding computing into the objects already in our environment can be invisible computing as Weiser saw it: “…playful, a building of foundations, constant learning, a bit mysterious and quickly forgotten by adults.”

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Remember when we made a connection by handing someone a photo? Now we fiddle with too many cables, menus, and communication channels, and the person on the other end fades away. Can we return to sharing experiences intimately while retaining the power of digital communication?

Tableau is an Internet-connected nightstand that stores and retrieves memories using a Twitter account. It quietly drops photos into its drawer for the owner to discover. Images of things placed in the drawer are posted online as well. This is a humane alternative to the consumer electronics experience.

The inspiration for this is my great aunt Olga, who loves writing letters and shuffling through photos. I, on the other hand, write emails and share photos on Flickr, and as a result, we don’t communicate nearly as much as we’d like. Tableau acts as a bridge between users of physical and digital media, taking the best parts of both.

The Scoop was designed to immediately convey it’s function while being inviting and alluring to the user…. I wanted to created an object that reflects the energy of our modern era, and be classic in form to last into generations to come.

This is everything I hate about product design.

(via Design Milk)

Mobile hapticons from Hunter Sebresos’s thesis on touch-based communication. An excellent exploration of the kind of qualitative information that tactile feedback is good for, that we miss in standard channels. (via monotask)

This phrase comes up a lot in a strategy deck I’ve seen by a certain consumer electronics company you’ve heard of, one that is not Apple but wants to be. One slide says “Mobile Phone Business is disrupted so that it is getting more like desktop PC business.”

True. The no-muss no-fuss app model is getting chipped away by bloatware you can’t remove from some of the newer Android phones. (Oh, “open”? That means the source code is available for the carriers to lock you down.) The equivalent of “Punch the Monkey” ads are cluttering up the App Store. Even adding folders and a task manager in iOS 4 seem like a step backward.

If Apple’s swinging back to more complexity, I don’t hold out much hope for the other consumer electronics companies. As Gizmodo might as well have said about any of them: “Sony is rife with good ideas. Too afraid to commit to each one fully, Sony instead releases a ridiculous number of products in an attempt to see which might take hold, making many that seem like one-off oddities that even Sony doesn’t believe in.”

We can no longer live without these devices. We love them for their potential, we hate them for their complexity. Manufacturers don’t understand what we need. They all just throw shit on a wall and hope it sticks. If it does, it’s still… shit. They sell to the techies, and everyone else wanders into a store and gets the one that looks the most like an iPhone. These companies need to be confident of what is valuable to people and hone that. It doesn’t even have to be the thing that people don’t know they need yet. They’re engineering companies — let them optimize an experience. Technically, that’s what Apple’s done with a bunch of things. FaceTime, iPod, freaking UNIX.

Where Apple’s weak, is playing well with others: social networking, cloud blah blah, third-party interoperability. (I’m shocked Apple hasn’t created a self-congratulatory social networking site yet. It’d be like going to church.) That last one, no one’s good at; interoperability is the bane of consumer electronics. Everyone knows that you use open source and standards as a lever where you need to overcome a stronger opponent. Go open, there, and simply — you’re playing with our lives here.

Fraser Speirs reviews a backpack and concludes, “It turns out that the ideal computer bag is not a computer bag at all, but making the computer so that it doesn’t need special love and care.”

This is the route I’ve taken with the iPad. Pristine so far, but when the first scratch comes, hopefully it looks good. I’m tired of serving my devices. It’s a weakness with electronics, that they are powerful in a way that mechanical engines can only dream of, but still physically fragile. Does this reflect the fragility of software not written by NASA?

Maybe my computer is durable, but we like cases because we’re not used to the idea of an expensive precision machine being tough. If so, this is a design opportunity to disabuse users of that idea, to make a computer look best when taking a beating. Make it say “I’m loved” in the wear on its skin.

Computing will never be invisible as long as we coddle it. Name your laptop Sue and make it tough.

30 pencil icosahedron lampshade, by Michiel Cornelissen. Not as photogenic as his pencil bowl, but the connectors are a better object-to-repurpose-objects. At least in a designer/artist household, you probably have a lot of building blocks for this in a coffee can somewhere. With some different angles or bendier connectors, you could use all your stubs and create a bigger variety of objects.

(via Design Milk)

Baton 8-bit gestural sampler for interaction designers. In doing research on interaction designers, I found that hands played a critical part in communicating the character of an interaction. Drawings and gestures might convey to a programmer the pattern of an LED or the snap of a transition. The translation from hand movement to code, though, is frustrating. I think this is why so many electronic objects feel digital instead of analog — it’s just easier to program a light to blink on or off than to get it to pulse like a heartbeat.

Baton lets you use your hands to create expressive output — instead of coding it, tap on the keyboard or use the mouse to generate samples. The program will export an array of values along with sample code to playback on an Arduino board. You can play back input as a waveform, sound or directly through your serial-attached Arduino device. I used it to quickly prototype the motion for my dashboard hula girl project. Of course, it could be handy for games or any software that you want to give character.

Download the Mac app. The source code is included so you can compile it for Windows or Linux yourself using Processing. A Wii controller would be the ultimate baton, obviously, so either wait until I have the time or contribute the code yourself.