PingMag

Great findings on PingMag! I really like the ethnographic quality of the articles which balance well visuals and texts. The everyday as a source of inspiration…:

PingMag is an online design magazine based in Tokyo. Defining the term design as broadly as we can, PingMag writes about ideas and inspiration coming from both world class designers, and from the little store on the corner.

My favorites:

1. Top 10 ad-tricks in Tokyo’s train stations

Field work? Here is an interesting example: (screen shot from website)

2. Systemdesign: creating products, services and environments

In his interview, Stefan Rötzel elaborates on bridging physical and digital environments. He says:

But to point out a more simple example for a new problem in everyday life, let’s look at online shopping. For the global electronic commerce all goods require a digital representation. When people browse a web shop, they perceive this digital representation of an artefact, for example an image of a lamp. The new problem is now that the image does not communicate the true, real dimensions. (Would that lamp fit on my table? Is it too big or too small?) Online-shopping often ends with a surprise: the artefact is either better or worse than expected.

That is actually a similar problem designers and engineers face when working with CAD. CAD workers need a forced sense for spatial perception. They can scale and rotate the digital object, but often lose the feeling for the true measures of the object. There is a need for perceiving a CAD-object in relation to the real room.

I introduced a concept for displaying a digital object in the context of the real surrounding. It works by overlaying the digital representation in context to the real surrounding. This could be translucent display someday, or it could be a mobile phone with a photo-camera as well.

3. Accessibility for blind people

That is because of our culture, visual at the extreme… I had mentioned that conundrum when elaborating on 2D codes and tagging.