Doctor's Note

A mix of essays and commentary about design, innovation, technology, society, coaching, personal and leadership development. Since 1996.

bruno taylor pixelsumo Play public

Play as you go - hijacking public spaces

A quick reblog of Pixelsumo’s post about Bruno Taylor’s work hijacking public places to make playful spaces, which explores the notion that play is …
Andy Polaine
Andy Polaine
Design interaction itunesU mfa new york sva

SVA to offer Interaction Design MFA

New York’s School of Visual Arts has just announced that they’re offering a Masters of Fine Arts in Interaction Design as of Fall (or Autumn as we …
Andy Polaine
Andy Polaine
atm Design interaction pentagram Struppek UI wells fargo

Design is Money - ATM Design

ATMs in Germany are lame, I have to say. They’re slow and clunky and appear to be designed by software engineers rather than UI designers. So I wish …
Andy Polaine
Andy Polaine
cultured code iphone prototyping things wireframing

Prototyping and Wireframing on paper

There are a couple of great shots of prototyping on paper over at at Cultured Code’s blog for Things, their task manager app that they’re bringing …
Andy Polaine
Andy Polaine
Design error interface microsoft UI

Why Good Looking Error Messages Matter

Almost anything involving computers falls over once in a while, but it’s how you handle it that makes all the difference. I spotted this in Newcastle …
Andy Polaine
Andy Polaine
apple elgato eyeTV imac pvr thelonius monk

Keep Thelonius Monk Off Your PowerBook

(C) Bibliothèque et Archives Canada Since we’ve got a couple of MacBooks now I noticed my old 2GHz iMac G5 gathering dust, which seemed to be a shame with …
Andy Polaine
Andy Polaine
apple hypercard multimedia tilestack

Hypercard lives again

Hot on the heels of my post about Director 11 there’s now a web-based version of Hypercard called TileStack. It’s still in beta (aren’t they …
Andy Polaine
Andy Polaine
advocacy backspace data Design ngo social design notes tufte visualisation visualization

Information Design for NGOs

The Tactical Technology Collective have released a great little PDF booklet online called Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An introduction to information …
Andy Polaine
Andy Polaine
3d adobe director flash macromedia

Director 11 Released - R.I.P. Director

ed. Director 11 was released a couple of months ago apparently, though I hadn’t seen the press release. If this was a new version of Flash, the web would …
Andy Polaine
Andy Polaine
Design desktop HUD interview iron man orphanage post-production rauch Writing

Iron Man's HUD and interaction design

The current issue of Desktop has a snippet from my interview with Dav Mrozek Rauch from The Orphanage talking about their work on the HUD for Iron Man. If you …
Andy Polaine
Andy Polaine