Recently I had a conversation with a prospective client about the user experience of internal applications.  The question was about the ROI of having a good user experience of an internal application.  While I may write another article on the math side of the ROI question, the conversation revolved around how the ‘internal’ application and experience isn’t always internal. 

In my last blog post, I wrote about the need for your software / personnel / any customer experience to provide a consistent user experience. I wrote about an airline attendant who was less than helpful to me.  That said, this rep was saddled by a computer system that clearly made it difficult for her to do her job.

David Armano wrote a short piece about Randy Pausch’s $100,000 salt and pepper shakers, and quoted Randy:

"If I sent a child into one of your stores with a broken salt and pepper shaker today, would your policies allow your workers to be kind enough to replace it?"

To paraphrase that, "if a customer called your call center with a problem today, would your software allow your workers to take care of the problem." This is my single biggest reason why I believe the user experience of internal applications are so critical.  Very few applications today, whether ERP systems, time sheets, or CRM systems, are so silo’d that they only impact the users themselves.  A bad user experience, e.g. rigid rules, antiquated systems, disconnected systems, bad data, etc., for a user of the system, rarely impacts that user only.  If that user has to interact with the customer, make decisions on behalf of the customer, or provide customer data to a manager, then a bad user experience will have downstream impacts on your customers. 

The next time you are thinking about whether to improve your internal systems, ask yourself how internal those systems truly are.

So… these guys hook treadmills to World of Warcraft and then race to Darnassus: http://www.manapotions.com/raceazeroth.html

WOW, thats sweet.

As with all good web sites, Social Media activities should start with an objective for your business. You should not just pick a technology because it seems like the next big thing. Choose one objective and stick to it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps5_Y5RZeg4

Bex Huff says that work-life balance is nearly impossible for good computer geeks. I couldn’t disagree more.

There’s a distinction between creative work that people do for “work” and what they do outside of work. Work/life balance for computer geeks, knowledge workers, or artists has nothing to do with not being creative or solving problems. It’s about giving your brain a break from the same, constant grind and giving yourself time to think and be refreshed.

Like Bex, as a programmer and computer geek, when I go home, I still talk about and think about technology. But that doesn’t mean that I’m still “working.” I may be solving similar types of problems, but I get a lot of relaxation and enjoyment from not working on the same exact problems. Outside of work, I do iPhone development, personal Grails and Groovy projects, AppleScript, play with bayesian algorithms in perl, tinker with embedded linux, spend time with my family, and more. Those are all geeky technology things. But that’s my point - that’s still work/life balance because it gives me a break.

Finally, Bex quotes Isaac Schlueter as saying “An artist doesn’t stop being an artist when he goes home.” It’s true, but that artist doesn’t always work on the same projects when he gets there.

I had already posted about Cassini’s August 11th very close flyby of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, and some of the amazing images it captured, but this mosaic warrants posting as well. It is a composite of eight images from Cassini that have been stitched together. The image above is shown in enhanced color and Enceladus would not actually look like this to the human eye. Enhanced color, in this case achieved using a combination of five different lenses, is used to bring out more feature differentiation and detail for analysis, things like the four south polar sulci (which are surface depressions or fissures, and often referred to as Enceladus’ “tiger stripes”) visible in this mosaic. To the human eye Enceladus would look more like below, the starkly stunning image that led my previous post on Enceladus:

More on these images at The Planetary Society

Came across an incredible series of images at The Big Picture of volcanic eruptions, many of which were captured by astronauts on the International Space Station or from an orbiting Space Shuttle. The picture above is of Sicily’s Mt. Etna erupting back in 2002 and shot by astronauts on the ISS. Below, the 1994 eruption of the Kliuchevskoi Volcano in Russia as captured by astronauts onboard the orbitting Space Shuttle Endeavor:

Really, it’s an interesting way to layer relevant information in a printed piece, but how could this possibly be a more useful alternative to any number of map/GPS/city guide applications accessible via mobile phones, most of which are free and pervasive online applications? That, and Urban Mapping has already failed once trying to introduce this approach to city maps. Maybe we’re just not ready for paper maps.

via techcrunch

Miranda, EatonGolden Intern February 08-August 08

I first met Miranda when she was interviewing with us to become an intern at EatonGolden. She had seen Mahtab and John speaking in one of her MCAD classes and was intrigued by how EatonGolden works. I think this is a great example of why it it really important to stay involved with students in the community. Without our team going out to speak, we might not have connected with Miranda. When she joined us, we needed to find out what she wanted to work on, what skills she could apply to work and how she would fit into our team. She started part time and then joined us 40 hours a week when summer began. As she worked with us she told me that her comfort level fluctuated and she became more confident. There was definitely an adjustment from how things worked at school than from how they worked in the real world.

Some of the favorite activities she participated in while working at EatonGolden:

• User Analysis
• Research
• IA
• Usability Testing

I asked her what thoughts she had as she heads into her senior year at MCAD. She told me she really likes that she has an understanding of different companies and the difference between a more traditional advertising agency vs. a more specialized agency around usability and the web like EatonGolden.

She is still looking for what she ultimately wants to do after school. She knows it will be something that involves a user-centric approach. She is really interested in continuing to understand the emotional connection a human might have with a product or service.

She’s got an exciting list of classes coming up in the fall including:

• Futures
• Aesthetics of Sustainability
• Project Tracking
• Visual Thinking

I asked her what she thought about the value of an Intership/Externship. She wisely stated that, “I’ve always believed in the value of learning by doing.” She said she’d love to do as many Internships as possible because being thrown into the real work gives you the pressure you need to figure out how to get it done.

She shared that she like the experience of being in an office and just random office things that you discover which are different from school. She felt her skills exapanded in many areas including sharper project management skills, design and information architecture.

Overall it was a great experience. She talked about being “excited to see how my style of working in teams changes.” She is curious to see “what will i do differently” in her school work based on the fact that she learned by doing in the real world.

We really enjoyed working with Miranda. We’ll miss her and we wish her good luck!

There is plenty to be said for (and against) the new iPhone and all the new apps flooding to our screens but aside from the sluggish response times and occasional crashes, the biggest problem I have is keeping track of and organizing all these apps.

Applications of all types are now spread across multiple screens as I try, mostly in vain, to come up with a strategy that doesn’t leave me needlessly flipping through 3 to 5 pages just to find the thing I want. I have tried to organize them by grouping like apps together on screen but I don’t really want a whole screen for music-related apps or games. Then I tried by frequency of use with the most frequently used apps on the first couple screens and then those I rarely use on the last few. This too was less than ideal as it isn’t readily apparent when I am search for something how many times I really use it. I guess I could try alphabetical.

How about adding folders?

The folder is a simple organizational mechanism that could help keep my applications in order: Creating and naming folders and then dragging apps into them could work nicely. (like shown above)

Double tapping the folders brings up a radial menu of its contents - app icons - that can be clicked. I have mocked up how that may look (see below). A simple, dark overlay similar to a lightbox effect to represent the mode change would work well.

This example only shows a folder with six applications in it and I am uncertain how to deal with folders containing more than eight. Perhaps there would be a number on the the folder and then single tapping would tab through them.

Until I get something like this the number off application I will be downloading will be significantly restrained.

Bonus gripes to Apple:

1. Please let us delete (or at least hide) those app you included on the phone that we do not use. I don’t need stock quotes and notes.

2. When updating an app, don’t move its position. This is very annoying.

3. Get the stability and fluidity of the interface back to the point where it was when the phone first launched. I don’t think you can totally blame the apps being installed, but if you can, then be more stringent on the apps you let in the store.

4. For next iPhone INCREASE THE RAM!

Beautiful photographs of the Olympic flame burning atop the Beijing National Stadium, the “Bird’s Nest,” with the moon appearing to be singed as it passes through the flames. The image above was taken by toomanytribbles, and is one from a series of photos of this nicely timed opportunity. Click to check them out as her photography is excellent. Most of the images I have used here to feature the new architecture of Beijing have been snapped by toomanytribbles, and I have especially enjoyed her periodic pictures of the CCTV Tower during construction.

Saturn’s moon Enceladus, pictured above in a full color image from a flyby in 2005 and written about on schneiderism before, received a close visit from the Cassini robotic explorer on August 11th. This flyby allowed Cassini to snap incredible surface detail images. The following are some of the more compelling pictures to come out of this flyby.

Below is an image of “The Mound,” which is the object in the center right of the image which is casting a long shadow to the right. The incredible detail of this photo shows us the complexity of ridges, fissures, and cracks that makes up the surface of Enceladus, looking almost like a close-up image of elephant skin.

One thing that Cassini potentially revealed is evidence of the active venting occurring on Enceladus, venting observed by Cassini on previous missions. The image below appears to show this venting in progress, and in detail. Looking at the center of the image, note the blurred whisps over the whitish fissure feature. Serious speculation suggests that we’re seeing active venting right there:

Cassini was able to get very close to Enceladus, much closer than previous visits, and the images below show the high detail that this made possible. The first was taken by Cassini at a distance of about 1600 miles, the second even closer taken from about 975 miles. Both are incredible.

From 1600 miles:

From 975 miles:

I do not think that we can overstate how incredible it is to be seeing the surface of Enceladus in such rich detail, truly an important and amazing accomplishment. These images are a treasure trove of information for researchers and scientists seeking to learn more about our solar system.

More on Cassini’s August 11th flyby of Enceladus at wanderingspace, and a very informative article on Enceladus can be found at The Planetary Society.

Cut Chemist - 1st Big Break from eyestorm on Vimeo.

I came across this video at Coudal earlier this week and loved it. I dig this song, and expected a video like this from Cut Chemist. This is the first music video to be shot with a 360 degree panoramic lens. You’ve got to admit that it’s pretty amazing. To really experience this I suggest clicking through to Vimeo and watching the video in HD.

The above image is the Vela concept that came out of a partnership between BMW and the Transportation Design School IED in Turin, a city that continues to embody its position as a design epicenter. BMW asked students there to design what BMW’s might be like in 2015 consistent with BMW’s “language evolution and trademark essence.” This simple brief resulted in a very interesting and creative response by the students, like the Vela pictured above and the ZX-6 concept pictured here:

Pretty wild. 2015 is only seven short years away and while these concepts may be unrealistically radical BMW is smart to take advantage of the way the students at IED are thinking to look for innovative design opportunities. It’s hard to say what cars may look like in seven years. If you think back to seven years ago today cars are not really that different at all. Still, much can happen to change our expectations of what an automobile is in this short time.

More at car body design.

Over the last 50 years nothing has driven technology innovation like the military industrial complex. Sure, academic institutions, independent researchers, and private industry have achieved many things, but for sheer volume nothing can touch what the United States military technology research behemoth has accomplished. For researchers, this is where the big money lies and we’re talking about projects in areas beyond armaments and weapons like networking science, trauma medicine, communications, materials sciences, robotics, and transportation. Behind this is DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is the central force behind the Department of Defense research initiatives that we usually hear about after they are no longer relevant. Their motto is “Bridging The Gap,” which may be a stretch. Regardless, DARPA is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and along with that celebrating 50 years of technology innovation… some of which is not actually used to kill people.

Oddly silly promotional video for DARPA’s 50th:

Found this video via Ares.

http://adage.com/smallagency/post?article_id=130304 http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/digital/e3i1e343e9ca0d6f68b176c54741d5c8437?pn=1 http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=130271 http://creativity-online.com/?action=news:article&newsId=130327 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121874914699942167-email.html

There’s milestones, and then there’s MILESTONES. The Hubble Space Telescope seems to have achieved quite a few while making it look somewhat easy, though lately it has again run into some technical difficulties. As Hubble rounds out its 18th year in Earth orbit, its orbital counter has passed the 100,000th mark (100,023 at this writing) which is itself an interesting accomplishment. This translates into 2.72 billion miles traveled, which is altogether impressive. All of this, of course, while it has remained just a few miles above the Earth’s surface, snapping pictures like this:

I’ve always found military disruption patterns and camouflage incredibly interesting, and sometimes beautiful. It was a big deal when the United States Army and Marine Corps began changing their decades old camouflage uniforms to a massively researched digital camouflage pattern, and one that was actually substantively tested for field effectiveness. Now, a similar approach to camouflage is being applied to military vehicles and aircraft. The plane above is a Slovakian Defense Forces MIG 29 that has had a digital camouflage technology from the Canadian company Hyperstealth Biotechnology Corp. applied to it. Frankly, I think it is gorgeous. Beyond that, though, it is also incredibly effective. This is much more than just a coat of paint. The finish that Hyperstealth employs is not only applied in a pattern that very effectively breaks up the shape and scale of vehicles and aircraft, it also has stealth properties by reducing radio wave reflection by as much as 45% on subsonic aircraft. I also found this image of the HCMS Calgary next to a U.S. aircraft carrier incredibly interesting, though it looks photoshopped:

David Fearnley, a recent honors graduate of the Transportation Design Course at Northumbria University, has been inside my head. The man has designed what I might have to proclaim as the PERFECT CAR. Let’s run down the criteria:

• Performance focused - check
• Innovative design - check
• Electricly powered - check
• Visually appealing - check
• Can seat three - check

The Eigne concept would currently be the only automobile that meets this criteria. I have usually driven two seat sports cars, but with the relatively recent arrival of my lovely daughter, this is no longer a practical option for our little family. A three seat sports car, though, totally works. One that is electrically powered, even more so. Rarely do I come across something that seems so perfectly tailored to my needs, my passions, and ultimately… my wants. This car must be made.

Fearnley’s design sports a coveted central position for the driver, with seats on the left and the right for passengers. The electric motors for the vehicle are conveniently located at the wheels, in each corner, freeing up valuable internal cabin space for the three seat position. This would be a phenomenal real-world vehicle.

Alas, though, it is but a concept for the moment. At least we are provided this video by Fearnley to appropriately whet our appetite:

I came across the Eigne concept at Car Body Design.

And begin in an incredibly memorable way. Holy crap. A couple breathtaking images of the fireworks display for the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in Beijing earlier today. Gorgeous. Below, Beijing National Stadium (The Bird’s Nest) explodes in a crown of thousands of fireworks.

This next image is the Beijing National Stadium again but with the National Aquatics Center in the foreground:

Definitely an impressive display, and all the more because of the dramatic architecture that is the backdrop for the spectacle. Nice work, everyone.

Images are from boston.com and I found them via Cork Leg Nelson.

I confess, it was my new IKEA catalog that put me behind schedule this morning.

You see, I rarely participate in any kind of mobile marketing. After the first time my cell phone woke me at 3 a.m. because of an unwanted offer for a low mortgage rate, I became very careful about what text message services I opt-in to.

But this morning, behind the cover of my new catalog, IKEA was inviting me to play - text in the magic code, answer the three questions and I could be an instant winner! (and really, who couldn’t find a way to use $10,000 of IKEA money???)

There is only one single reason I was willing to try this at the risk of un-knowingly opting in to a world of text spam - brand. I know and trust the big blue box. I feel confidant that they will not let me down. I am as excited about their business practices as I am about their design process. And yes, I am one of the many that took my kids on a “road trip” to Chicago so they too could have the experience long before we had our very own scandinavian outlet here in Minnesota.

(Now if only they could give me back the 15 minutes I spent devouring all those things I don’t need and will never use!)

Many of EG’s clients and friends have been asking about Mahtab, so I though I’d let the world know that her baby was born this past Monday.

Omeed Andreas Rezai Church

Born at 2:00am on 8/4/08, 6 lbs - 15 oz, 20.5 in

Mother and baby are both doing great. Welcome, little one!

Even though blogging has been a form of communication for years, it hasn’t been a valid form of communication for some types of information.

Bureaucracies move a little slower than the Internet, but the SEC has finally approved blogs as a valid form of disseminating investor disclosure information. Blogs and RSS allow equal access to news by everyone, so it makes sense to use the Internet to share the information.

This has implications for change. Companies may start to move away from press releases to the social media news release. Now investors and intermediaries will have to monitor the blogs of public company officers, and it will allow company directors to disclose substantive information on their blogs. This will reduce governance issues of corporate blogging. This is a significant improvement to current channels.

Another interesting change this could bring on is how corporate websites are managed. If companies can release this type of information, the web sites become an even more vital and core communication channel for public companies than they already are today.

I first became aware of the need for this when Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, blogged about it. He talked about the benefit of ‘greater transparency and access to information for individual investors.’ This call to use the Internet for one thing it is perfect for, disseminating information quickly and broadly, has finally come to fruition.

If you want to keep up on the SEC, you can follow it on Twitter.

…and it IS collaborative: meet Aurora

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn died yesterday at the age of 89. A Nobel Prize winner, Solzhenitsyn was an accomplished novelist, historian, and dissident. Even in the face of threats and reprisals he wrote extensively of the abuses of Soviet state power, and the system of gulags employed by the Soviet regime, having spent eight years in a labor camp himself for “anti-Soviet propaganda.” After serving his term he was released but only to internal exile, eventually having his Soviet citizenship revoked and forced into foreign excile. He lived for a time in Germany before making his way to the United States, where he lived until 1994 when he returned home after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Among his most noted books are the novel Cancer Ward and The Gulag Archipelago, a history of the Soviet police state the manuscript for which was discovered by the KGB and caused his exile from the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn was tough, and never hesitated nor shrunk from his personally felt responsibility to shine light on the failings of the Soviet system, and its abuse of the people.

“Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.”

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn 1918-2008

Solzhenitsyn outlived the Soviet Union by 17 years.

Solzhenitsyn’s concise autobiography

I recently read an article by James Surowiecki about the “battle” between functionality and accessibility. Surowiecki implies that developers and designers fill their products with more and more functionality (which he calls feature creep) producing a product that, instead of making our lives easier, confuses consumers. He also states that users are willing to buy these products because they are attracted to these “overloaded gadgets.” Upon using the product users become frustrated with the amount of options and feature fatigue sets in. Surowiecki states that there is no easy solution and that there is a constant struggle to decide whether to add more functionality or make it easy to use. This is where I disagree.

Good UX means you don’t have to make this choice. Functionality and accessibility need not fight to the death. Good UX involves a full user analysis uncovering all pertinent pieces of functionality needed for a particular product/application/website. Then it determines which of these pieces are most important, and how the user will access each. Then it creates a system that is consistent and intuitive helping the user create the mental framework necessary to learn how to use and access all of the features. Good UX is doesn’t equate to a battle between functionality and accessibility - it understands and marries them.

Lot’s of excitement last week with Virgin Galactic’s unveiling of WhiteKnightTwo (WK2), the aircraft that will carry SpaceShipTwo aloft for mid-air launching into orbit, on July 28th. Developed by Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites, WK2 is an innovative and visually interesting aircraft distinct for its twin fuselage and kinked wing designed to hold SpaceShipTwo for the ride to 48,000 feet. I just came across this video from Virgin Galactic that shows us great detail of the aircraft’s exterior:

I especially like the end of the video which shows Burt Rutan and Richard Branson walking around the craft and smiling widely. This is a big deal, and these two gentlemen are far along in a pioneering effort to begin to make space accessible to a great many more than those that work for governement space agencies. WK2 is an exciting step in this effort, and flight trials of the aircraft are set to begin this fall. Note the functional benefits of WK2’s twin fuselage design. The aircraft can be flown from either side.

I posted regarding NASA’s 50th anniversary a few days ago but just came across this somewhat goofy but very informative interactive tour through NASA’s 50 years of discovery and exploration. Read more about it here.

We’re talking about graphene, an incredibly strong nanomaterial made from graphite and comprised of a densely packed single layer of carbon atoms that are arranged in a hexagonal pattern like a honeycomb. This forms a two-dimensional sheet, as shown in the image above, with an incredibly simple atomic structure. All of this was entirely theoretical and not thought possible until it was actually made back in 2004. Graphene has been described as an unrolled carbon nanotube. Columbia University nanoscale science researcher and professor James Hone has been working with graphene and testing its strength. Hone likens his one molecule deep sheet to ultra-thin plastic wrap, and compares his test of the material’s strength to stretching that piece of plastic wrap over the top of a coffee cup, and measuring the force that it takes to puncture it with a pencil. Hone says that If he could create a large enough piece of graphene (it has so far been restricted to very small pieces more ideal for high-conductivity transistors) to lay over the top of the coffee cup it would be strong enough to support the weight of an automobile pushing down on the pencil.

While graphene does possess incredible strength, it’s most likely use in the near future is as a replacement for silicon in electonics and semi-conductors.

http://www.core77.com/blog/news/strongest_material_ever_10683.asp">Core77 just brought graphene to my attention, and I read this great article with more detail at Berkeley Lab.

I just finished up a solid month of travel, and my experiences during my travels led me to write this post. Whether a personal user experience or an online one, the consistency of what you present to the user is critical.

I had flight plans with my son set up in March. Two weeks before I was to leave, I had to reschedule the flights to a day earlier, and use some frequent flyer miles to offset the large increase in price. I called the reservation desk and spoke to a customer service representative. The call took a painful 45 minutes for her to accomplish the task of rearranging my flight and applying the frequent flyer miles, but here is what she did during the 45 minutes that made what could have been a painful experience a bearable, if not pleasing, experience:

* She was pleasant. It is amazing how far this can go to help.
* Several times she had to put me on hold, but I was never on hold for more than 5 minutes before she would "check-in" on me and let me know she was still there, and still working on my request. This is critical. Think about when you are stuck on a plane and the pilot says "it will be about 5 minutes" and 20 minutes later he has not come back on the PA to let you know what is going on. Users do not like losing complete control whether on your web site or in any interaction. Her simple act of checking in with me calmed me down because I knew she would be back on in another 5 minutes to give me an update.
* She sincerely apologized. Not every time, not for everything. But for the amount of time the process took and for having to place me on hold for so long.
* She didn’t blame her company, her manager, her software application to try and get me on her side. Because I am like most users, at the end of the day, I don’t care about who is to blame, I just want my request fulfilled.

So I began my trip feeling very positive towards my airline. Those good feelings would not last the trip. On my return flight there was bad weather. The flight was delayed and I had a connecting flight. The gate agent would not provide any updates at all and said we needed to go back out to the ticket counter to get updates and reschedule. I dutifully went to the counter, waited one hour in line, and waited another 30 minutes at the desk with the agent. She was rude, and acted as though I was the problem. In addition, while I gave her all my information she could not or would not provide me with any information whatsoever about my connecting flight.

Photo owned by specialkrb (cc)

I went back to the gate (having to go through security again) hoping that my connecting flight would be delayed as well. On a whim I called my wife and asked her to do some additional research for me. It runs out that my ‘connecting flight’ was the same plane that I was on, i.e. if my plane was late, it didn’t matter, because the same plane was taking me home!

The frustration here is that either the gate agent or ticket agent could have spent one minute, looked at my information and told me that, and I would have had no anxiety because I would know I was getting home.

Now I’m not here to tell my airline horror story, everyone has them, and it’s a tough business. My point of this story is that it is not enough to have a good user experience here and there at your company, or on your site or your software application. The goodwill can be easily washed away if the consistency of the experience is dramatically inconsistent.

As of today, it is illegal to text message while driving in MN. This includes Twittering too. So, be careful out there and don’t tweet and drive.

Today, July 29, 2008, marks the 50th anniversary of the inception of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The year was 1958, the race for space was heating up fast with the Soviet’s successful launch of the first orbiting satellite, Sputnik, in October of 1957. NASA was, in many ways, a reaction to this event. That first team for NASA came out swinging, though, and they set about an intense range of projects motivated by the urgings of a passionate President. The first 25 years saw amazing accomplishments (Mercury, Apollo, putting astronauts on the moon, Viking, Voyager, Mariner, Skylab, the space-shuttle…) relatively swelled budgets, and endless manpower. The next 25 also saw great accomplishments (Hubble, ISS, Cassini, Mars exploration…), but mixed with the challenges of changed national priorities, increased international competition, the limitations of the space-shuttle, the slowed progress of the ISS, and budgetary constraints. Along the way there have been horrible tragedies and incredibly prolific failures, but when you push the technological envelope and seek to expand the boundaries of human experience there are inevitable risks involved. The astronauts that have died knew these risks well, and still came to work. I would like to believe that the tragedies have been more than balanced by the successes, by the amazing discoveries, and by the advancement of science. NASA has inspired generations, myself included, and provided the United States with a vital rallying point for an optimistic belief in the future of our nation, and for humanity. From those that have been inspired by NASA have sprung incredible private space ventures like that of Burt Rutan and Richard Branson, the Lunar X Prize, and the inevitable development of space tourism.

NASA is definitely not without its problems, but what large publicly funded organization isn’t? The fact is that NASA has been with us for 50 years, has achieved a great deal, and has a plan for the future of the United States in space.

Time to distract your attention from the deluge of architecture going down in Dubai and Beijing for a moment. I just watched this short animation of a building OMA is doing in Rotterdam, aptly named “The Rotterdam”, in conjunction with progressive development concern MAB. Note at the beginning of the animation the brief review of the program for the building, which takes a very literal and typically separated use division and mashes it up in an incredibly hyperrational manner. This approach to defining building program has been used with success by OMA and is essentially what Joshua Prince-Ramus presented at TED in 2006 with regards to OMA’s approach to the Seattle Public Library (a project that has met with some controversy before and after completion). This hyperrational approach is one that seems to tightly entwine form with function to the degree that function begins to bring definition to form. While this may be an accepted best practice in many design fields (UX rules!), it is still surprisingly novel in the world of architecture design.

Found video via architectural videos*

I subscribe to the NASA RSS feed for the Cassini-Huygens mission and just came upon this image taken back on June 10th of this year. This simple black and white image taken by Cassini conveys so much detail about the icy moon. There is the surface, riddled with impact craters and covered in ridges and striations. If you look at the upper right edge of the moon silhoetted against the blackness of space you get a sense of the dimensionality of the moon’s surface. Rhea is the second largest of Saturn’s moons at about 950 miles across, this image definitely gives it presence. Some more detail on Rhea:

• Rhea was discovered in 1642 by Giovanni Cassini, the namesake for the Cassini space probe and the astronomer who also discovered the Saturn moons Iapetus, Dione, and Tethys
• In direct sunlight the temp is as warm as -281°F, and in the shade -364°F
• Rhea has a rocky core that is about one-third of its mass, the rest is water-ice
• It is about 527,000 km from Saturn