Author Archives: Michel
Rapid Prototyping Physical Environments
Physical environments play an increasingly important role in designing digital products and services. In a world of mobile devices and connected things, how they all fit together in physical space becomes just as important as the design of the individual … Continue reading
Design and the Developing World
A few days ago, a tweet by Amy Quispe appeared in my feed: Saw someone on fb say a comment re:smartphone battery life is a "first world problem" but it's actually *such* a third world problem. — Amy Quispe (@amyquispe) … Continue reading
A Simple Mac Web Server App
I like little single-purpose utilities that do one thing and do it well. I regularly make little web apps and prototypes and have come to rely on using the python built-in web server that comes with Mac OS X, for … Continue reading
An expensive line of code: scaling Node.JS on Heroku
One of the perks of working in multidisciplinary teams for the past few years has been that there I have continuously been surrounded with people with more tech chops than me who would tackle the really hard problems™. While working … Continue reading
Mining the long tail: extracting insights from search data
The first step in improving the user experience of a product, service or website is understanding its users. The best way to understand what users want and what keeps them busy is still to seek them out and listen to … Continue reading
Super Game Boy: Creativity in Constraints
In 1994, Nintendo released the Super Game Boy. Being lucky enough to own both an original black and white Game Boy and a SNES at the time, I remember not being particularly excited by the idea of playing my handheld … Continue reading
Lessons from dConstruct 2012
This week was the eight edition of the dConstruct conference in Brighton. It was a day of information overload and inspiration, and offered plenty of food for thought. From my notes, I have tried to distill the most important messages … Continue reading
A Mac OS X Vector Arrow Cursor
Many times when making mockups or design illustrations, I have found myself wanting to include a cursor in the image to show what the user would click on. I have scoured Google Image search too many times, looking for a … Continue reading
Misunderstanding Minimalism
Microsoft has historically not been known for their strong design and taste, but in the age of Metro it’s too easy to say they fundamentally don’t care about design. In fact, the Metro Design Language, with its focus on content … Continue reading