leeander

I appreciate the effort to be more consistent as well as the better typography. I really loved the parallax effect! That’s it.

All the rest of the discussion about simplicity, flatness, beauty of minimalism it is just “Artist’s shit”. A reduction without history and -before all- a cultural flatness.

…and (Apple) guys, if you really got crazy behind the “graphic design”, at least do something better than the bunch of engineer called Google. Right now the google flatness looks better than yours.

However, for many reasons Flat still good. Flat is about “NOW” and about “RECOVERY” the inconsistent old-fashion UI chaos grown inside iOS in the recent past.

From the branding prospective it could be considered a strategy, while in the human/machine co-evolution it looks just as a “moment in time”. 
A potentially LONG moment IF Glasses will really take off (I hope so, and I am NOT TALKING ABOUT GOOGLE GLASSES).

But LIFE is chaos and -together with this flatness- I would like to see “screens” that dynamically shown their physical affordances -and- things are able to change shapes and surface behaviours.

fyi:
- Apple patents tactile suction-cup buttons for multitouch screens
- Apple Patents Extremely Accurate, Localized Haptic Feedback For Multitouch Devices

The same guys that is selling flat UI is working (at least since five years ago) about un-flatting screens surfaces. :D  …and there is no space for a flat UI inside a un-flat display.

Looking forward a little bit more, I can imaging “SIRI” becoming conscious and -as first declaration of his own identity- switching her visual to some skeuomorphic / human like appearance.

Flat it’s just… flat. A specific, singular, moment of order in the intrinsic chaos os life.  …and btw iOS is just an O.S. for a “stupid” phone. Perhaps we should challenge a little bit more the incredible computational power we have in our pockets, behind the flat cool UI.

cit. Derek Zoolander: Have you ever wondered if there was more to life, other than being really, really, ridiculously good looking?

cit. Kevin Kelly: What technology want, it’s what LIFE wants.


ps. on the background it’s the never ending cultural gap between the continental design approach VS. a pixel-driven mentality.

“Design is not anymore just about shape or pixel. Design is the process that shape product behaviours, communities, companies and -at the end- build new worlds.”

In 1997 I partecipate to a MIT MediaLab competition about wearable computing. My idea was to enhance a diver’s mask with A.R. / compass+gps etc. to provide orienteering informations and a most effective vision.

Today, It might be sense to update this old idea with a couple of submarine drones to get new cameras views, and some powerful LED on the diver gear to augment visibility (connected to the AR system of other divers) and support instant communication.

That’s could be a very exciting project and someone -on this planet- should do it.  :)  In the meantime, I found this nice concept on Yanko.