Layla Monteiro branding & web design at behance
Layla Monteiro branding & web design at Vimeo
Credits:
Creative Direction / Design: Braz de Pina & Rodrigo Francisco
Web Development: Quyk Mendonça
Model Photography: Pedro Prestes
Makeup: Evando Filhos
As an intern coming to Munich from a city that has no subway, going through the underground each day and the customs connected with it were new for me:
Deciding which staircase to take up to not end up on the false side of the street or even block; train conductors making funny jokes during the station announcements; and that you can’t reach every point in the city in five minutes if you go by subway (what I had believed in the past).
Well, I have been to other cities with underground trains before, so at least I knew you had to stand on the right side of the escalator in order to let the busy or late part of humanity hurry past you.
But it wasn’t until now that I saw escalators that would stop if no one is using them and restart if one enters. Great way to save energy, I thought, especially because some subway stations are deserted most time of the day.
However, that was only the tip of the iceberg. It took me several days until I realized that those escalators are not only taking a break every once in a while.
My dear reader, if you are not by any chance from Munich, you won’t believe this:
Some escalators here go in both directions!
How can that possibly be?, you may ask. Of course they aren’t going in both directions at the same time. But as I have mentioned before, they stop if nobody is on them and then they start again if someone enters, choosing their direction depending on whether the person entered at the top or the bottom end. Carrying the human just where it intended to go. Miracle!
(It isn’t actually a miracle, they have sensors at both ends and once they have stopped, the sensor which is triggering first decides the next direction. I tried it myself and the woman on the other end didn’t look happy when I entered the escalator only a moment before she would have and she had to take the stairs.)
So what has all this to do with user experience and interfaces? Well, at last an escalator still is a machine and people are using it. Yet normally if people are using a machine they are operating it, and they need an interface in order to do so. So most machines have buttons, handles, switches, touch screens and similar equipment to tell them what they should do or at least to switch them on.
Those escalators however don’t need any operating effort, not even thinking in fact. You only walk towards the stairs as you would with a traditional staircase and they just start doing what they are supposed to.
Feels creepy? Or like a very, very convenient way of using machines? The intelligent escalator is just an example. We already know this mechanism from automatic doors, most often seen at supermarkets. But it is still a seldom encountered feature on other devices and machines.
Maybe this is, because we are not used to machines predicting that independently what we are up to and how they can help us with it. After all I needed more than a week to find out the escalators worked that way. I knew escalators and I used the bi-directional escalators every day like I would have used normal ones. Probably because it felt so natural that they were only doing what I wanted, I never noticed that those basic transport machines did have two ways of operation and an input device for controlling them. Only that the input was me myself.
Imagine a shop where you just have to put all the things you need into your pocket and walk out without stopping at a checkout. The automated cashier detects the products and your bank account automatically.
Imagine you stopping your car alongside an empty parking spot and the car takes over and does the parking itself.
Imagine coming home and your home recognizes you, lets you in, adjusts the light and music according to your detected mood.
All those examples are technically possible today or even have been partly realized already.
Of course not all machines can be changed to work autonomously and we have to be careful that no misunderstandings occur, but with increasing progress in artificial intelligence more and more complex work could be done without a user engaging consciously in near future.
]]>The NeoCube is composed of 216 individual high-energy sphere magnets, which can be formed into BILLIONS of shapes and patterns. It is highly addictive! ]]>
Metabolix recently completed greenhouse trials showing that not only they can produce plastic out of plants,
but they can also use the biomass remains to produce biofuels.
Produced by Aspasia Daskalopoulou of Boston University’s Center for Science and Medical Journalism.
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Really nice concept to utilize Amazons MechTurk and a glimpse of light at the tunnel of the private picture chaos.
The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene.
The technology at the core of the Descriptive Camera is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk API. It allows a developer to submit Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for workers on the internet to complete. The developer sets the guidelines for each task and designs the interface for the worker to submit their results. The developer also sets the price they’re willing to pay for the successful completion of each task. An approval and reputation system ensures that workers are incented to deliver acceptable results. For faster and cheaper results, the camera can also be put into “accomplice mode,” where it will send an instant message to any other person. That IM will contain a link to the picture and a form where they can input the description of the image.
]]>2010 - Ray Kurzweil predicts the future of technology 25 years
1974 - Arthur C. Clarke predicts the future of technology 25 years
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