For a new business pitch in 2007, I was asked to predict some future wayfinding trends for the year 2015 and I just rediscovered the presentation in my archives. So, how'd I do? Unfortunately, the visual and cognitive clutter of physical signs has not subsided, but their dominant posture has diminished to a secondary role,... Continue Reading →

Congratulations to Chris Calori and David Vanden-Eynden on the publication of the new edition of Signage and Wayfinding Design, their comprehensive guide to environmental graphics. I was very happy to contribute a section on digital trends. Plus check out their beautiful work at C&VE Design.

before the chaos began... From Curious Bridges: How Designers Grow the Future Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, The Museum of Modern Art "I love the contamination of disciplines, like performance architecture or bio-art" "The QR tag is so obsolete it's not funny" From Mark Duplass Keynote Mark Duplass, Producer, Duplass Brothers Productions (watch keynote video) "Minor... Continue Reading →

"Are better signs the secret to a successful city?" That's the question Steven Poole poses in The Guardian's Resilient Cities series. As he ambles toward an answer, Poole explores Legible Cities, the physical and digital wayfinding system first built for the city of Bristol and then expanded and refined for Brighton and London over the... Continue Reading →

In 2011, I had the honor of touring the nearly-finished NJ 9/11 memorial with its designer, Fred Schwartz. He died of prostate cancer on April 28th. On a crisp September day, my husband and I met Fred and his wife Tracey at the World Financial Center terminal to take the ferry to the memorial. By... Continue Reading →

Samsung's Galaxy S5 launches next week, but some sly engineers at Chipworx have already dissected one to find the first dedicated heart monitor to be embedded in a handset. (Apple patented a sophisticated heart rate sensor late last year, but Samsung beat them to market.) A number of apps use the phone's camera to take... Continue Reading →

As part of SXSW Interactive's Future 15 sessions, I presented a challenge to my colleagues: Reinvent the Art Museum: a playful and captivating experience for all. Here's a annotated version of my slides and some press from the event: How Technology Can Help Reshape The Museum by ArtandSee Tech and Art Collide as the Museum... Continue Reading →

More than 30,000 people attended SXSW Interactive this year, so I'm sure it was one of the most documented human experiences to date. All of the themes have been codified by the digerati: "the year of hardware," "democratization of outerspace," "the next industrial revolution," so I won't add to the litany. Instead, here are some... Continue Reading →

Declarations made at SXSWi, to be recited with aplomb in relevant conversations... 1. "Oil paints were the retinal displays of the Renaissance." Jeff Wilson, artist and frog. 2. "The internet has propagated an endless array of obligations and cellphones are the new cigarettes, addictive and often antisocial." Amber Case, cyborg anthropologist. 3. "You've got to... Continue Reading →

We moved to Austin in March 1994, right after SXSW. That was the first year that the festival expanded beyond music with the "SXSW Film and Multimedia Conference." Starting in 1995, my husband and I participated in "multimedia," (aka interactive) and film for about 10 straight years, watching the festival grow beyond anyone's expectations. I... Continue Reading →

Colleague Tom Mulally of Numagic Consulting endured the leviathan of technology trade shows and gives us the highlights on mobile OS, the latest touchscreens, and tablet installations.

Wrote a short blurb for the TwoTwelve blog on our experience designing and building an app for the segd xlab conference which took place in November, 2011. Thanks to Two Twelve and Rubenstein Tech for donating their resources for this first conference app for an segd event. I learned a great deal from the project... Continue Reading →

One of the most popular topics at last year's xlab: the Design of Location was what I like to call "the final frontier" of digital navigation: indoors. Google Maps has invested millions in capturing and digitizing our world and Google's virtual globe has given us confidence to self-navigate unknown lands with our personal wayfinding devices:... Continue Reading →

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the NY Tech Meetup and saw some very cool new web and mobile services that you might want to check out. (NY Tech Meetup meets every month and helped launch successful apps like Foursquare and Tumblr...) If you'd like to attend, the events sell out quickly --... Continue Reading →

Nice mention about Shakespear's forthcoming book on Icograda today.

A couple of busy weeks ago, I participated in O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference in Santa Clara. In 2009, I attended the same conference and wrote about it here and there. I highly recommend this event for anyone interested in "the business of location," as the tag line goes. And thanks to O'Reilly for posting all... Continue Reading →

Great artists are blind to the traditional borders of creative endeavor. They don't yield to the exclusive canon built up over generations by a craft's practitioners. Instead, they follow their muse, often tripping from one medium to the next to discover and declare their vision across a mutable palette of artistic tools. When an artist... Continue Reading →

At the SEGD workshop a few weeks ago, I was asked how one should determine whether to build a downloadable app for smartphones and tablets or a mobile-optimized website that visitors could access from embedded browsers on those devices. The choice is not a simple one — it is the product of user experience expectations,... Continue Reading →

Last Friday, I had the pleasure of participating in the SEGD's Identity, Brand, and Experience Design Workshop in Chicago. I gave a short talk on "Technology in the Wild" -- a survey of technology in the environment (such as digital signage, touchscreen kiosks and smartphone apps) and my thoughts on what it takes to create... Continue Reading →

Perhaps it is because the first website I ever visited (June, 1994) was The Louvre. Or maybe it is because I wrote my undergraduate thesis on "Contemporary Additions to Beaux Arts Museums." Or it might be because I spend my time exploring how digital technologies can help people navigate the world. Whatever the reason, I... Continue Reading →

  Outside the construction trailers in Masdar, April 2009 and today, from the New York Times slideshow In April of 2009, fd2s was shortlisted to provide wayfinding strategy and design for Masdar, the visionary sustainable city taking shape outside Abu Dhabi, UAE. Herman Dyal and I accepted the invitation and flew 8,000 miles for a... Continue Reading →