How Can You Prevent Sexual Assault? Web Comic ‘Game’ Has Advice | CNET. With this choose-your-own-adventure online comic [interactive graphic novel], students discover how their decisions can ignite or diffuse uncomfortable sexual situations.
Can Wearable Tech Prevent Sexual Assault? | FastCompany Roar is a startup that’s building a wearable device designed to deter attackers and notify loved ones.
Web design is (finally!) dying of irrelevance. Web pages themselves are no longer the center of the Internet experience, which is why designers need to move on to the next challenges—products and ecosystems—if they want to stay relevant.
Web design has no future—a risky statement I know, but this article explains why it has no future and what we, as designers, can do about it. As a discipline, web design has already exhausted its possibilities, an emerging combination of tech and cultural trends highlight the need for a broader approach.
READ MORE: Why Web Design is Dead | UX Magazine
Launched on Kickstarter this morning, Holus is a tabletop device that converts digital content into a 3D hologram. Created by H+ Technologies out of Vancouver, the campaign has nearly doubled its goal of $40,000 in its first 2 hours.
Don’t expect to use this to summon Obiwan with a seven-inch image of Princess Leia. Objects aren’t 3D in any sense we’re used to. Instead, the device is a square tabletop platform which encases a glass pyramid upon which media is projected from below. The result is an ostensibly 3D image which can be viewed from 360 degrees around the machine.
READ MORE: Holus Is A Tabletop Device That Turns Digital Media Into A 3D Hologram | TechCrunch.
We got rid of lanthanides and noble gasses and replaced them with the 118 essential elements of enterprise wearable tech.
Our updated periodic table groups and defines the main capabilities that businesses are using today to build and harness a connected workforce. Individually they are powerful, but when you combine them together they create solutions that are impossible to deliver in any other way. Just about every large business will need all of these capabilities at some point.
The world is tough place to navigate in a wheelchair. But finding ramps and elevators can be easier thanks to this handy map app that anyone can edit.
It’s called Wheelmap, and it tells you the accessibility status of public places all over the world. It’s free and grades locations in a traffic light-style, red-yellow-green scale of wheelchair accessibility. Developed by German nonprofit SOZIALHELDEN e.V., it’s now celebrating five years since launch. Since 2010, users have added nearly half a million entries across the globe.
“Accessible” means you can enter the place without steps, and that all rooms inside a building can be entered without steps, as well. “Limited accessibility” refers to entrances with a max of one step no higher than seven centimeters, and that the “most important rooms” can be entered without steps.
Wheelmap launched back in 2010, and since then, has become available in 22 languages. It’s available for both iOS and Android users.
READ MORE: This Massive, Open Source Map Makes the World More Wheelchair Friendly | Gizmodo
Image Credit: The New York Public Library Digital Collections: Art and Picture Collection
In 1957, three New York designers Walter Teitelbaum, Leo Boren, and Howard Steel founded a company called Creators Studio that produced fashion design concepts. With the tagline “Not yesterday’s but tomorrow’s fashions today,” they’d draw up original garments based upon notable fashion trends, and design manufacturers would receive these sketches on a subscription basis.
Walter Teitelbaum gifted the New York Public Library with 1,067 of these drawings of women’s and children’s ready-to-wear fashions from 1957 to 1969, and the collection has been digitized for you to explore online.
READ MORE: Browse More Than 1,000 Original Sketches Of Mid-Century Fashion | Co.Design | business + design.
Instagram uses its official account to promote notable snapshots on the social network, and has been doing so for quite some time. But now, the filter-driven app will serve up a daily look at music “around the globe.” Through the @music stream, the folks behind the software will highlight music photographers, designers working on album art, instrument makers and fans in addition to current stars and emerging talent. It’ll even offer 15-second lessons from time to time. Musicians are a big part of Instagram’s user base, where artists can share updates and connect with fans, so it makes sense that the subject would get its own channel.
READ MORE: Instagram dives into curated content with a dedicated music account | Engadget
When Minecraft came out, I heard a lot of people describe as sort of like virtual Lego. Now, there’s a game for which that description is even more apt: Lego Worlds, an open world building game that lets users create using virtual Lego bricks, and interact with the world as a customizable minifigure avatar. READ MORE: Play Lego Worlds, A New Minecraft Competitor From Lego, Right Now | TechCrunch.
A robot is only as smart as its programming. Learning on the go has been the sole purview of living things.
That was, until a team of scientists at UC Berkeley programmed a robot to learn simple tasks through trial and error, just like humans do.
The robot itself, a Willow Garage PR-2, is not new. But researchers applied a relatively new form of artificial intelligence, known as Deep Learning, to give it a kind of primitive learning ability.
With it, the robot or BRETT, (Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks) can use visual and sensory information about itself, its environment and the objects before it. It uses them like LEGO, building little neural networks of information, basically figuring out how to do something (how to put two real-life blocks together, say, or put a ring on a peg).
READ MORE: This robot learns new skills just like a human | Mashable
As human beings, we get used to “the way things are” really fast. But for designers, the way things are is an opportunity … Could things be better? How? In this funny, breezy talk, the man behind the iPod and the Nest thermostat shares some of his tips for noticing — and driving — change.
via Tony Fadell: The first secret of design is … noticing | Talk Video | TED.com.
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