Monday, May 19, 2014

Bangkok’s skyride and skypark | World Infrastructure News

Bangkok’s skyride and skypark | World Infrastructure News

I do find the notion of cantilevering out from the existing elevated train track to be incredibly interesting. I don't know much about the weather in Bangkok, but I would imagine that it gets pretty hot. If it is anything like the weather in Atlanta you could find that people can cycle quite comfortably in the morning and evening which is the normal commute point.

Otherwise, I would have expected such a line to have some shade from the sun and protection from the rain. Not for enclosure perhaps just some sheltering like a bus stop.



Generally this is quite an interesting proposal.

Display versus utility

My wife came across the interface for this coffee machine."The instructions display is the small rectangular screen to the top right, which begs the question, why the large screen to the left?"


Clearly the larger screen is meant as an advertising facility. This separation of interaction area and shall we say advertising area strikes me as particularly strange. 
I was struck by the similarity to this and a number area namely  union station in Toronto. One revision the group I worked with had was that the signage timetable and advertising will become all merged. 

My primary reason for this was that at retirement times of peak usage the display would become all utilitarian. Advertising would dynamically give way when navigation and wayfinding became the primary goals of the station. This would have the added advantage for the advertisers of eliminating the so called banner blindness problem. 

Banner blindness is when people know that advertising sits in some portion of the environment and deliberately avoid looking at it. Think of it as cognitive information optimisation. 

so the idea of dynamically mixing information and advertising makes a huge sense from the advertiser.

So in the case of the coffee machine people will quite quickly learn to avoid looking at the adverts. Even today LCD panels don't come cheap so you are effectively adding cost without benefit. 

By combining both displays. Giving you the larger interactive space you improve things like the honeypot effect. Clearly the small black and white display is also touch sensitive. Provision of something as simple as a proximity sensor could easily switch between display as advertising and display as interaction surface.

A really smart coffee machine manufacturer. Would have a number of different adverts which could be dynamically displayed on the screen and then have each coffee machine making its own A/ B testing to see what information it could give to attract people to it.
this would allow the coffee machine to optimise itself for its own local environment. 

So yes a big improvement in usability and a big improvement in sales who could object to that? 


Friday, May 16, 2014

Talk at museum of London

My talk last night at the Museum of London seemed to go really well.
The opening was a sell-out (600 tickets gone). And lecturing in the Victorian gallery works really well. I was really too nervous to take any pictures during my talk, this photo is one I talk at a very excellent talk by Joe Wood. 

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Late events at the Museum of London

Late events at the Museum of London:



I’m giving a talk in London on digital London on the 15th as part of an event in the Museum of London


http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/london-wall/whats-on/adult-events/late-events/


Should be good.