I spent a weekend with family in Neot Semadar (Shizafon), a Kibbutz in the Negev desert in the south of Israel. And I mean desert: he place is searing hot in the day, cold at night, and all around is sand, rock and the majestic desolation typical of deserts anywhere. In Israel we’re used to … Read more
There is no place quite like Israel, and this is reflected in many design decisions made in this country. For instance, consider the Arrivals Hall at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport, which is designed around our family-centric cultural attitude. While in many airports arriving passengers just go out into the street to pick a … Read more
I’ve mentioned the headup publisher widget before. This nifty add-in identifies entities (places, people, companies, books, etc) mentioned in a site it’s installed on, marks them up with a dotted underline, and when you mouse over them a small pop-up comes up with information, news, photos and videos about that place/person/whatever. That was then. Now … Read more
More from Amir’s visit to Japan: This staircase gives access to the trains at a Tokyo underground station. Given rush hour crowd density, its designers did well to split it in two, to separate the up and down streams of commuters. But note how the two sides are of different width. Someone characterized the traffic … Read more
Amir is back from Japan, and sent in some interesting photos attesting to that country’s outstanding and different ways of solving life’s daily problems. For starters, here is yellow path marked out on a Tokyo sidewalk, whose surface is textured with the little rubber bumps that are so annoying at some airport terminals. Turns out … Read more
A piece of thoughtful design on the Renault Clio: When you activate the windshield washer, the fluid is squirted onto the glass and the wipers are activated for four consecutive cycles. This is pretty much standard these days. But in the Clio, they then rest for three seconds, and give the windshield another single wipe. … Read more
Our supermarket provides a large billboard for public use, where people post the usual mix of personal ads of all kinds. So many of them, in fact, that any one ad is likely to get drowned or covered by other ads before the day is out. So here’s one person that solved this problem in … Read more
As someone who spent a large chunk of lifetime working on improving knowledge worker effectiveness, especially around computer mediated communication and collaboration, I can barely contain my excitement. I’ve just sat through the lengthy video of yesterday’s unveiling of Google Wave in the I/O developer conference. Not only have the good folks at Google integrated … Read more
I was waiting for a Cappuccino at a coffee shop and asked the girl making it to also give me a glass of water. An incongruous conversation ensued: Girl: To drink or to smoke? Me: Huh? Girl: To drink or to smoke? Me (the sensible part of my brain trying to stop the engineer’s part … Read more
The progress of engineering over the years has brought us many triumphs of human ingenuity, but it has left quite a bit of roadkill behind. One species driven to the brink of extinction is the Tinkerer. The attitude to Tinkering has always been ambivalent. Look at the dictionary definitions: tinkerer [noun] 1. a traveling mender … Read more
