Foggy cloud

> Customer: "I want to have problem x to be solved by a new cloud product y, can you make this?"
> Engineer: "Yes, of course, I'm an engineer. I can make anything, just pay me and give me sufficient amount of time."
> C: "Sorry, time & money are finite…"
> E: "Ok, so I guess with cloud you mean your data should always accessible, right?"
> C: "Yeah"
> E: "Like a website?"

When talking about The Cloud we're talking about making things invisible. Yet the implications of the actual technology chosen, hidden by that same cloud, matters a lot to most customers: should the application be up and running all the time? Does it matter whether where the servers are physically located (because of data security & privacy concerns)? Don't make it too foggy with labelling stuff cloud-computing.

Image is my own, so the terms at the bottom apply to this pic as well

Invisible design

Wired explaining that the movement towards invisible design1 should be nothing new to desingers:

> In the early 1980s, Dieter Rams laid out his now canonical 10 Principles of Good Design. Rams taught us that great design is as little design as possible. It doesn’t draw attention to itself; it merely allows users to accomplish their tasks with the maximal amount of efficiency and pleasure. At its best, it is invisible.

btw: the link to a less secondary article was added by me, it is Ram's 10th principle

Wired is stretching Dieter Rams famous “less is more” design attitude to the logical max: nothing left (the extreme of less) is invisible. Hence follows: good design = invisible design.

Rams is popular among designers in de digital sphere. [Oliver Reichenstein, famous for his design agency iA and …

ContextSonification

ContectSonification is another way of looking to adding sound to your computer environmen. This was my graduation Thesis for the European Media Master of Arts (EMMA) programme PrefaceThe first version of ContextSonifier was created in 2004 by Maarten Brouwers. It was the result of his Master-thesis: 'Context Sonification'. You can download his thesis here or just continue reading it in HTML format.The whole process has been supervised by:: Martin Lacet (thesis), Janine (project), Tom (project) and David Garcia (project) and was first published in Hilversum, August, 2004.When communicating from one human to another, visual, auditory and/or haptic cues are being used for communication. When communicating to another person directly a person communicates more than a plain message. It communicates also a state of being, a soul. Somehow also mechanical devices and environments are able to communicate this 'state of being'. Communicating not only in true/false messages. To…