Notes from Prof. Dipl.-Des. Oliver Wrede

  • re:publica 08

    Hobnox will be supporting re:publica 08 conference in Berlin. We will be recording some sessions. I have the honor to discuss »Because we can…« on Friday morning, April 4th, and we will also present Hobnox in a separate session in the afternoon.

  • New seminars – summer semester ’08

    The new seminars for summer term 2008 are fixed. It is always a very exciting moment to think about new topics for projects… or rather: to pick the best from the ideas floating around. And I always love to define topics with a leightweight appearance but at the same time much depth. Here are the…

  • iPhone SDK – a complete solution?

    Apple has released the iPhone SDK. The 2.1 gigabyte download is free after registration and includes the latest Developer Tools as well. I personally don’t use an iPhone. Being able to hack it (or get third party software for it) was a stopper for me. Another argument against the iPhone was the rather limited storage…

  • Director 11 – there’s life in the old dog yet

    This is a surprise: Adobe announced Director 11 – the follow-up release to Director MX 2004. After years of speculation Adobe seems to be committed to develop Director further. There is a rough comparison chart on the Adobe site which compares Director to Flash. I am not quite convinced the advantages of Director over Flash…

  • Hobnox Audiotool – Kewl! Totally!

    Next week Hobnox will launch the first Beta version of the community website. And we will integrate Flash-based tools to manipulate a content library. Here is an appetizer… Most areas of the site will start out as closed beta and/or demos, but we want to slowly ramp up the features and the design. We have…

  • Personas? Yes… influence group thinking!

    Jason Fried from 37signals argues against the use of Personas. Personas don’t talk back. Personas can’t answer questions. Personas don’t have opinions. Personas can’t tell you when something just doesn’t feel right. This is a pretty sketchy definition of what personas are supposed to do as a tool: The foremost reason for personas is to…

  • John Maeda the new president of RISD

    I just learned that John Maeda is now the next president of the Rhode Island School of Design.

  • Ron Paul – too intellectual and clear sighted?

    When TV news here in Germany talk about the republican candidates of this years US presidential election, they usually refer to Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney. And the only interesting “issue” with these two guys seems to be their religious background.

  • News from the evolution

    The Hobnox evolution contest is half way through and there are now 280 submissions in three categories: music (220), film (79), urban culture (30). There are regular “news” with portraits of some of the contestants on the Hobnox channels like this: For example »Twisted Reality« by Johannes Guerreiro and Krystian Majewski from the Koeln International…

  • Low-cost multipoint interface with a Wii Remote

    John Chung Lee made an interesting software that uses a Wii remote to allow interaction with multiple pens on any screen or projection. Very interesting!

  • The corrupt banking system: Money as dept

    Simple introduction monetarian theory. See Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

  • Hobnox Evolution launched

    Finally Hobnox has launched a »warm-up site«: The Hobnox Evolution. Creatives can suggest productions there and win several budgets totaling €75,000. I will return to regular non-Hobnox posts soon, promised!

  • Things move on…

    Things have been very busy for me lately. But instead of just apologizing I give you some links to see some stuff that is coming out of that: 99stories.com – sly-fi.com – str33t.org – mi145.com Most of that is “viewing only” at the moment. This will change radically… 😉

  • Design for discovery

    One of the most interesting topics for information architecture is search. There are ways to find, explore, browse and discover things in digital domains. The value of information increases with the possibility of being found. So design for findability becomes the most important strategy to increase the value of information. One of the distinct experts…

  • WMD remix

    Isn’t that amazing that this clip about the Bush administration lying about weapons of mass destruction needs to be compiled by someone and uploaded to YouTube instead of the professional journalists went for this one?

  • Naturalism vs. explicitness

    There constantly is a discussion about making the computer feel more “natural” to the user. I do think that this approach led to the graphical user interface we are all used to today and it is philosophically the right approach to deal with technology. But I also do believe technology is not yet ready to…

  • Tinderbox 3.6.3

    One of the tools I love to use is Tinderbox. The homepage says: “Tinderbox is a personal content assistant that helps you organize, analyze, and share your notes.” I just downloaded the latest beta version (3.6.3 b17) and found that it has a list of improvements that push it forward again. If you never heard…

  • Design podcasts

    As there are more and more programs offering podcasts I think there is more interesting content appearing in this subscription format that is interesting for design: DESIGNsuisseA german/swiss language series from swiss television mostly with portraits about designers and/or design agencies. These are spotlights about design processes and help to demystify design as a service…

  • 6 billion Others

    This is a very nice project by Yann-Arthus Bertrand that shows video portraits of 6000 randomly picked people in 65 countires that are talking about personal things.

  • Hobnox is hiring!

    Hobnox (the internet start-up I am CD for) is hiring: art director web/screen designer system administrator senior developers for C, Flash, PHP and Java junior developers for C, Flash, PHP and Java Work location is Cologne, Germany. More information here. The project is related to WebTV and the entertainment-/music business. It is an international company.…

Got any book recommendations?