Tracking Twitter posts.
Archive for the ‘Design’ Category
TwittEarth
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008Japanese Creative Barcodes
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008A fresh look at the design of barcodes by Japanese firm D-Barcode. Creating subtle branding opportunities and injecting fun into a practical device.
Ecover – extending the brand identity through the barcode
WhyBuy.It – easy as 1,2,3
Thursday, April 10th, 2008Designer Chris Adams is busy producing some great graphics for the WhyBuy.It consumer interface. Here’s how he explains the system to users:
WhyBuy.It?
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
Just what can you achieve with a weekend of Social Innovation? After 24 hours of simultaneous hacking, designing and user requirement gathering, our Barcode Wikipedia team came up with a basic prototype system: WIBI.it. This is a simple user interface to a wiki-like system that lets anyone look up a product by its barcode and add information. The system also grabs related tagged photos from Flickr and automatically links to Amazon, price comparison sites, and related blog and review articles.
Tom and Fred managed to integrate some open source code to recognise photos of barcodes taken using Nokia phone cameras, allowing users to look up information directly using their mobile. One of the killer apps we envisioned for this type of system would be in-store price comparisons. If you are looking around shops for say DVDs or a flat-screen TV, wouldn’t it be useful to see what online prices were available at the same time — and click to order? This has the potential to turn most of the world’s shops into exhibition spaces, with the real commerce happening on the Internet.
Thanks to David Wilcox you can watch our team’s presentation at the conclusion of the weekend:
Social Innovation camp
Saturday, April 5th, 2008
I’m spending this weekend with fellow enthusiasts at the Social Innovation camp in east London. This group of around 60 developers, designers and campaigners have met up to work on technologies that build social capital. One of the six ideas being developed is Barcode Wikipedia, described by the Guardian as follows:
The basic idea is to build a system that lets people quickly identify information about products they find in the shops; particularly things like ethical information, news items about it or reviews. Ideally this would work through a mobile phone – you could snap a photo of your product’s barcode or tap in the numbers and get back information that helps you decide whether it’s good to buy.
I’m trying to feed in everything we have learned so far on Fair Tracing, which focuses more on information from producers, distributors and retailers. Barcode Wikipedia should generate some extremely useful ideas on incorporating user-generated content from consumers into product information systems.
Try the QR Codes with your Mobile
Friday, September 7th, 2007You can download a free Java reader for the QR codes from http://reader.kaywa.com and try out some codes from the tryout zone. Here’s a nice graphic that explain how it works (from http://reader.kaywa.com).
The Fair Tracing Demo
Sunday, July 15th, 2007Over the summer, the Fair Tracing Project has two more members: Adel Haider and Vishal Shah, two students at UCL. They are working together on a Fair Tracing Demo. Please have a look at the current status of their work: here or here (find the links on the sidebar as well).
Please note that this is still an early prototype. However, you can help them by leaving feedback which would be very much appreciated.
What Fair Tracing might look like
Tuesday, June 5th, 2007These are some ideas what a Fair Tracing interface might look like. You can click on the pictures for a larger version. A very simple user interface enables the user to look-up a Fair Tracing code.
She can then follow the supply chain of the product, for example, using Google Maps. Additional product information like ‘who gets what’ or even third party information is available. She can then follow the supply chain of the product, for example, using Google Maps. Additional product information like or even third party information is available.
She can then follow the supply chain of the product, for example, using Google Maps. Additional product information like or even third party information is available. Moreover, multimedia like pictures or videos can be displayed together with information about the product journey from the producer…
… to the retailer or consumer.
Please let us now what you think about it by leaving a comment.
Reveal Labeling Initiative
Tuesday, April 17th, 2007
The Reveal Labeling Initiative is designing product labels to convey environmental impact, including information such as manufacturing energy and recyclable/reusable post-consumer content.
