Archive for the 'Technology' Category

We’ve been so busy the past few months (and by busy, I mean working hard this spring and then enjoying a vacation in June), that we’ve neglected to mention CleanScores.com

In the fall of last year, we were approached about designing a website which helped people learn about how clean, or dirty, their favorite restaurants are. We literally started out with a one-page sketch from CleanScores’ founders, and a gigantic database from the San Francisco Health Department. A few months later, CleanScores.com, which allows you to see a restaurant’s health inspection scores, was bringing a new level of transparency to the typically murky subject of government reports (see San Francisco’s Health Department website)

Along the way, we were given a lot of freedom by the founders to determine the website’s look and feel. This led to some innovative uses like Sparklines in the search results and another layer of content for expert users (try hovering over a restaurant’s current violations to see more in-depth explanations).

Additionally, we spent several months debating how to display a graph of a restaurant’s inspection scores. One of more challenging aspects of the site was to have a restaurant’s page look simple and uncluttered, but allowed an expert visitor to quickly discover all the information they could need.

Link to CleanScores.com (only serving San Francisco for the moment)

Popularity: 8% [?]

For the next few weeks, as over half of Vestal’s employees roadtrip through the Andes, blog editor Jeffrey Goodman will be sharing some of his experiences in designing, constructing, and living in a sustainable house on the roof of Vestal’s Lima office. Look for updates in the coming days from the road.

Once in college, in some seminar I took, there was an angry discussion about what it means to have the title “architect” rather than “builder.” I remember claiming that anyone can do architecture, that the act of designing a building makes you an architect; maybe not a good architect, but an architect nevertheless. To claim a separate world known as Architecture, guarded by gatekeepers known as Architects, is pretentious and delusional; as if I need a trained chef to supervise all my dinners. What architects need to do (as my table of grad students grew increasingly restless) is give up on the economics of construction and focus on becoming artists, sculptors of the built environment.

The point is, you simply don’t need a MArch and years of experience to design a good, interesting, beautiful building. You only need those things in order to place yourself into a specific professional position to be taken seriously in the industry that is architecture, not in the artform. The grad students did not accept this idea one bit. I wouldn’t either if I had to pay the tuition they were paying.

I am, in no way, a professional architect, but I designed my home with architecture in mind. The beauty of a program like Google Sketchup is not in its sophistication – at times it resembles MS Paint – but that it even exists, for free, for all the world. As I tried to design my house, any idea could be almost instantaneously manifested in front of me – no blueprints, no $8000 software, just rendering pure and simple. It was beautiful, even if my ideas sometimes weren’t.

My final design, more or less, ended up as a multicolored futuristic tea house; a strange facade, made stranger by being completely removed from this (or really any) context. I had followed my own advice and “sculpted the urban realm” with a combination of free software, intense pretension, and a basic knowledge of aesthetics. I figured I could build this structure without major hiccups. It turns out, I grossly underestimated Peru disdain for multicolored futuristic tea houses.

Things went poorly.

Popularity: 14% [?]

For the next few weeks, as over half of Vestal’s employees roadtrip through the Andes, blog editor Jeffrey Goodman will be sharing some of his experiences in designing, constructing, and living in a sustainable house on the roof of Vestal’s Lima office. Look for updates in the coming days from the road.

Possible itinerary, depending if our car breaks down:

Lima – Arequipa – Tacna – Santiago – (Somewhere in Patagonia) – Southern Argentina – Buenos Aires – La Paz – Puno – Cusco – Lima.

What could go wrong?

Popularity: 11% [?]

We’ve been pretty busy around here lately, wrapping up a number of big projects, as well as preparing for a cross-continental roadtrip in South America. One of our favorite projects to launch recently is Campus Vortex, which we built for Portland-area entrepreneur Eli Alford-Jones. Based around select campuses, the website displays lists of restaurants by distance, cuisine type, price, and marks restaurants as “Open” or “Delivering”.

We had a lot of fun building the system and as we’ve just launched the 1.2 version, I think it’s polished enough to toot our horn over. A shout out to Christian Nuñez, one of our champion Cut&Paste Labs interns from the University of San Marcos, who built the first few versions – without his hard work and competence we might not have gotten this done.

Also see our portfolio entry for this project.

Popularity: 8% [?]

EA Sports, the massively profitable designer of dozens of sports-themed video games, has partnered with the Weather Channel to make real-time atmospherics available on their next generation of releases for the PS3 and X-Box 360. So if it suddenly starts to snow in Happy Valley, in your game Penn State’s team will have to slog through the slush or a cloudless Arizona sky will shoot glare into the various Wildcats and Sun Devils. All of this leads, I suppose, to a more realistic experience. Well, as realistic as sitting inside mashing buttons can seem.

The excess computing power in your average PS3 or X-Box lets the video game industry stuff as many bells and whistle as possible into their flagship titles. In game advertising (changeable through the Internet) is becoming a huge business, allowing a popular title to extend its money-making abilities beyond the initial purchase.

Nevertheless, the dedication of EA Sports designers to accuracy is impressive. In fact, when I play NCAA Football as Yale, each dropped pass, failed right sweep, or wayward throw looks exactly like how the real Yale team plays. It’s uncanny.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, when he isn’t rolling around on a giant pile of money, is out to make New York City a better place. His latest target: the dirty taxi fleet, and all its pollution. According to CNN, Bloomberg will instruct Matthew Daus – the head of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission – to begin replacing 20 percent of the city’s 13,000 cabs each year with eco-friendly hybrids. By 2012, everything yellow will be green.

Despite boasting the largest public transportation system in the nation, the Big Apple continues to push for a better way to get around town, and that’s commendable. The biggest loser in this shift may be Ford Motors: only one of the six approved hybrid models is made by Ford, the current supplier of the ubiquitous Crown Victoria taxis. Detroit better get some R&D guys on that fast.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Brought forth from the depths of the Earth by demonic instinct, swarming across the land in a great buzzing cloud, the cicada is nothing but pure evil. Sure it can’t bite, or sting, has trouble flying, and is easy prey for squirrels, foxes, and the occasional toddler; these are merely Big Cicada’s lies, told by so-called “professional entomologists.”

Why are we talking about these hellbeasts right now? Apparently Brood XIII (17 year cycle) is about to hatch, promising to overrun the Midwest with the bugs’ distinctive sound. Another swarm – this one of Internet fans – is organizing a massive investigation into Brood XIII using all the latest Internet tools: maps, forums, YouTube, and who-knows-what-else.com.

In many ways, the Internet allows people to immerse themselves so completely in a microscopically-scaled niche that they form mutually supportive groups around any variety of topics. These groups can be benign (like Wookieepedia’s minutiae about Star Wars) or despicable (as in any pro-pedophilia forums out there.) But some people would rather just spend their time on cicadamania.com, and – in the grand scheme of things – that’s not so bad.

Link to Cicadamania

Link on Brood XIII via CNN

Popularity: 9% [?]

Natalie Jeremijenko’s Feral Robot Dog project – which just about everyone at Vestal worked on except me – continues to be a popular item in the design world. Currently on display at New York’s Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, the dogs are hacked toy robots used to gather information on toxic substances in a media-friendly way. Also, they are really cute.

Look over our portfolio page, then go support the only Smithsonian museum focused on design! It’s the National Design Triennial – if you miss it now, you’ll have to wait until 2009.

Link to Vestal Portfolio

Link to Current Exhibitions at Cooper-Hewett.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Nothing is as important to democracy as the knowledge that your vote has been counted fairly, accurately, and without any sort of tampering. Though very futuristic, e-voting machines simply do not meet the strict and inviolable requirements of a proper ballot device; many come packaged with proprietary software, leave no record of individual votes, cannot be recounted, and tend to crash.

New Jersey Representative Rush Holt’s bill banning paperless voting machines moved out of committee last week, and with over 200 bi-partisan sponsors, stands a good chance to make it into law. H.R. 811 does a lot of things that just make good sense: banning voting machines from connecting to the Internet, for example. And, should H.R. 811 pass, the paper ballot – no matter what machines are available – will be the ballot of record in federal elections. The bill isn’t perfect, but it’s a step away from unreliable technology.

So good luck Rep. Rush Holt – your name alone is too cool to lose.

Link via Kansas City InfoZine

Popularity: 9% [?]

Somewhere between a happening and fan fiction, World Without Oil is an alternate reality ‘game’ where users simulate living online during a global petroleum price shock. ‘Players’ produce movies, blog posts, and other media about the (fictional) world they live in with the goal of producing some sort of “larger truth” about how individuals could adapt to a frightening new world.

It’s hard to say whether the ‘game’ contrivance makes World Without Oil more or less effective in planning for an oil-less society down the road. Do people really need such a heavy-handed framework to rally around environmental issues or is it just easier to understand? Does framing something as a game, as fictional, make the reality of the problem seem less important?

World Without Oil raises many questions, both about its form and its function. Give them credit for being bold and different; two qualities we will all need as the planet moves forward.

Link to World Without Oil

Popularity: 7% [?]