Very Cool Post!: Design Firm Precious on Patterns for Multiscreen Strategies | MobileBehavior

Patterns for Multiscreen Strategies

Original Post May 26, 2011

"Precious is a German design consultancy for strategic design and visual languages. In their early years, they were involved in website and desktop software design. Today, they specialize in smartphone apps, prototypes for TV interfaces, and applications for tablet devices. Here, we've invited them to share what they've learned about interactivity within this emerging ecosystem of screens.

precious: Working with all of those devices was interesting and challenging, not just because of the diverse number of screen sizes and input methods, but because, through user research, we learned about how different the contexts are in which these gadgets are used.
Even more interesting, however, is how those devices relate to each other. What does it mean for the digital products and services we are designing when laptops, smartphones, TVs and other electronic devices are connected? What are the implications for interfaces if people are interacting within an "ecosystem of screens"?..."

Comic-Con: Robert Rodriguez & friends bring "Heavy Metal" to the social media masses - What's Trending - CBS News

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by Jeff Gomez

(CBS/What's Trending) - "It's day three at San Diego Comic-Con, and the floor is buzzing with one of the most unique and unlikely announcements yet -- one that leverages the Internet and social media in ways that anticipate a new phase in the entertainment industry. During his panel to trumpet the formation of his new studio Quick Draw Productions, director Robert Rodriguez ("El Mariachi," "Dusk 'Til Dawn," "Grindhouse") told a rapt audience that he had acquired the rights to "Heavy Metal."
Some of us remember the wildly overblown 1981 R-rated cartoon anthology based on the hide-it-under-the-mattress glossy magazine that featured vicious monsters, flaring ray guns and scantily clad babes. Rodriguez says he's already lined up James Cameron, Zack Snyder, possibly Guillermo del Toro and Gore Verbinski to direct what are sure to be gorgeously animated segments of the new film.
But, what's really trippy is that Rodriguez has invited fans to contribute "characters, worlds, and/or story ideas" to Quick Draw via a dedicated web site, with the chosen concept being added to the film as a final segment! This is no ordinary trip to the set contest, but an embracing of the power of fandom that makes Comic-Con relevant today...."

Very Moving Piece: Russell Brand on Amy Winehouse: 'We have lost a beautiful, talented woman' | guardian.co.uk

Russell Brand on Amy Winehouse: 'We have lost a beautiful, talented woman'

We need to review the way society treats addicts – not as criminals but as sick people in need of care

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  • Russell Brand and Amy Winehouse
    Russell Brand: 'Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions or death.' Photograph: Dave Hogan/Getty Images

    Excerpt from a very moving article:

    "...I was myself at that time barely out of rehab and was thirstily seeking less complicated women so I barely reflected on the now glaringly obvious fact that Winehouse and I shared an affliction, the disease of addiction. All addicts, regardless of the substance or their social status share a consistent and obvious symptom; they're not quite present when you talk to them. They communicate to you through a barely discernible but unignorable veil. Whether a homeless smack head troubling you for 50p for a cup of tea or a coked-up, pinstriped exec foaming off about his speedboat, there is a toxic aura that prevents connection. They have about them the air of elsewhere, that they're looking through you to somewhere else they'd rather be. And of course they are. The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of the day with some purchased relief..."

    Amazing: A 3-D Printer Which Uses The Saharan Sun Instead Of A Laser | Co. Design

    When you were a kid, maybe you built a parabolic solar cooker as a science project and thought you were pretty hot stuff. (Zing!) Markus Kayser, who is not a kid but clearly has the lateral-thinking skills of one, did something much more impressive: he built a working 3-D printer that uses the sun's rays to sinter solid objects of out desert sand.

    His demo video is about as pulse-poundingly paced as an Antonioni film, but that's appropriate given how slowly Kayser's "Solar Sinter" device works in real life. "In this experiment, sunlight and sand are used as raw energy and material to produce glass objects using a 3-D printing process that combines natural energy and material with high-tech production technology," he writes. Sintering is a technical term for "melting powder into solid objects," and selective laser sintering is a common 3-D printing technique. Kayser realized that the world's most powerful laser is right above our heads, and to conduct his experiment at maximum sintering strength (and also afford himself with abundant, free printing material), he dragged his rig out into the Sahara Desert near Siwa, Egypt, and got to work.

    Good Read! Yay PopSandbox! Digital lit: How new ways to read mean new ways to write - The Globe and Mail

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    By Kate Taylor, Saturday July 9 2011

    "The Next Day is a graphic novel about people who have attempted suicide. Once it is posted online in September, you’ll be able to click your way through it according to your own preferences about how it should unfold. CityFish is a Web-based short story, about a Nova Scotia girl visiting relatives in New York. Unfurling horizontally, like a scroll, it looks like a scrapbook, full of photographs and short videos of the places it describes. Inanimate Alice is an episodic, interactive, multimedia novel for children that offers text, videos and puzzles as it recounts the adventures of a heroine who becomes a video-game designer....

    ...“E-books as we know them are electronic replicas of books, it’s paper under glass,” says Kate Pullinger, author of the children’s novel Inanimate Alice – which can be viewed free online. (She also won the 2009 Governor-General’s Award for her conventional novel The Mistress of Nothing.) “If you are going to put a work of fiction on a computer, why would you not use the multimedia components a computer has to offer you – image and sound and interactive games?”

    Montreal electronic writer J.R. Carpenter, creator of CityFish, agrees: “I have been using the Internet as a medium since 1993. …There is fantastic multimedia, non-linear storytelling that has been going on since the beginning of the Web, and e-book publishers are not interested in that.” She says that a work such as CityFish, which explores odd corners of New York through the eyes of a displaced teen, is another way of reflecting the imagination, adding the visual images and sounds that are associated with places in the author’s mind.

    These multimedia experiments often use short texts because readers seem unlikely to tolerate long passages of type in a video or interactive environment. “Maybe the chunk is not the chapter; maybe the chunk is the paragraph, and one paragraph can lead to more, different paragraphs,” says Caitlin Fisher, Canada Research Chair in digital culture at York University, who used that approach in her 2001 multimedia novella These Waves of Girls. “People have been figuring out how to get their message onto a single screen. It makes some writing better and some writing worse.”...

    Public finds less value in entertainment industry, unhappy about paying: survey - Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal

    "...In addition, the survey showed that the spread of consumers' time across multiple devices has increased. Fifty-nine percent of people in the U.K. and 53 percent in the U.S. spent more time on their laptops in the last year, and 49 percent of people in the U.K. and 52 percent in the U.S. spent more time on their mobile phones.

    More than half, or 52 percent, of all respondents would like to use a computer to access further entertainment content, and 30 percent would like to be able to access that content on their mobile phones. Among age categories, 43 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds in the U.S. would want access on a mobile phone, compared with 30 percent of 30- to 44-year-olds and 20 percent of 45- to 54-year-olds. Overall, the youth market, above all other age groups, wants more access to content across multiple platforms.

    "This may be due in part to the increased partnership between high quality entertainment output from other channels moving into the online space, but it may also reflect that users are now watching television while also surfing the web and using social networks on their smartphones," said Jon Hargreaves, managing director of Technology for Edelman Europe. "For the entertainment industry, if the Internet can add real value to offline content, we believe consumers would be willing to pay for it."

    However, most consumers are unhappy with the industry’s move from free to paid entertainment services, with 84 percent of U.K. and 88 percent of U.S. consumers saying they feel negative about the development.

    Payment required for previously free services are being met with feelings of frustration and distrust by users, the survey found. Some cite the lack of improvement in quality of service, while others state they suspect a profit motive driven by greed. Trust in the entertainment industry has fallen by 9 percent in the U.K. and 11 percent in the U.S...."

    Which medium is right for the message? #Transmedia Teasing for Comic-Con

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    By Alan Sepinwall WEDNESDAY, JUL 20, 2011 1:05 PM

    "Comic-Con starts tomorrow, and before I head out to San Diego, I had a few idle (and unsurprisingly nerdy) thoughts on a subject that feels particularly germane, given the blending of comics, movies, TV, etc. at what was once primarily a convention about comic books:

    What happens when characters from one medium cross over into another?

    One of my favorite comic book series of the last decade is Greg Rucka's espionage series "Queen & Country," centered on the life of Tara Chace, a tall, cool blond "minder" for the British government, who's one of the best killers in the world.(*) Each arc is drawn by a different artist, automatically giving it a different one even as characters like Tara, boss Paul Crocker and others continue to appear and, in some cases, evolve. It works wonderfully as a thriller, as a character piece and also as a bit of geo-political commentary. Rucka's so plugged into this world that he had a Taliban story in the works months before 9/11 (it had the eerie timing to come out right after), and a later story opened with a terror attack on the London Underground that was eerily similar to the actual attack that happened nearly a year later in the real world.

    (*) And to pre-empt the two inevitable questions: Yes, I am aware that Rucka based the series in part on the '70s British TV series "The Sandbaggers," and no, I have never actually seen an episode of "The Sandbaggers."

    I bring this up because it's a great series that more people should be reading, but also because in addition to the "Queen & Country" comic book, Rucka has also written three different prose novels in the series: "A Gentlemen's Game" (that's the one with the London terror attack), "Private Wars" and "The Last Run." Rucka got his start as a crime novelist (his Atticus Kodiak series is still ongoing, though it's evolved pretty dramatically over the years) and so he's an old hand at the format. And the "Queen & Country" novels are interesting for two reasons:

    1)To see how differently the same writer, working with the same characters and universe, can tell a story so differently depending on the medium;

    and

    2)Because Rucka didn't treat the books as inessential, or non-canon, or however the various "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" tie-in books are usually treated. These books are not only part of the ongoing story of Tara Chace, but major events in her life and the ongoing life of the series take place within those pages...."