Shenzhen has got one of the most audacious looking city halls I’ve ever seen with the sweeping roof supposedly resembling traditional Chinese architecture and a bird in flight, as a symbol of the city’s upward growth. It even dwarfs some fairly large skyscrapers beside it giving you some idea of the scale - click the photo for a much larger panorama.
The roof is quite beautiful and elegant but the square red and circular yellow supporting columns are ugly and the lack of symmetricity upsets the balance between both sides. I can’t quite work out if I love or hate it.
Nearby is the main library, another building with an interesting roof, but for some reason they didn’t appreciate me taking photos inside even though it appeared to be fine to use your phone! It was nice to see some civic architecture that for once wasn’t laden in oppressively heavy grey fake marble or covered in musty red & gold drapes as is so often the case in China. By contrast the library is light & airy and propounds to contain over four million books covering six floors with 2000 seats.
For library buffs it’s also the worlds second largest RFID enabled library which provides full automation to the high volume of users through the new electronic tags.
It’s no secret that I love system map design. There’s something intrinsically beautiful in being able to represent a complex network of lines, interchanges and stops in a simple map which just about anyone can easily follow. As I found out last weekend Hong Kong doesn’t have a huge metro system but it does have a very nice map which concisely represents both the lines and the land masses which it spans (encompassing two islands and soon to be connected to mainland China) as well as providing duel language labels (Cantonese and English).
It appears to be based on the same design principles as employed to create the original London Underground map but has so far avoided the pitfalls which have ruined its older counterpart. They seem to have found the perfect balance between providing not enough information and just enough.
If you like this sort of thing you may be interested to see that the 2002 classic “Atlas of Cyberspace” book which chronicled the history of visualisualisation and the design of maps which explored the digital landscape has now be released under a Creative Commons licence as a free PDF download. I remember first reading this book when I was at school and being fascinated by the amazing new world it depicted. Although some of the content is now a little dated it’s well worth a read, if only for the amazing pictures! [via]
While the digitally-empowered of today may find the concept of searching for information in a library full of dead trees rather quaint how will future generations see the way in we navigate the sea of hypertextually linked information today and what will they be doing differently?
Envisioning or conceptualising the future has always fascinated me. Some lucky people get to do this as a job and futurologists at Adaptive Path have recently produced some interesting videos (as part of the Mozilla Labs concept browser series) showcasing a possible future user experience on the web -
There are some extremely cool ideas going on here with four major themes; contextual awareness (understanding and finding patterns in data), natural interaction (bringing the digital experience closer to a real one), continuity (a single interaction model between multiple devices and input methods) and multi-user applications (enabling collaboration).
Mashing-up and sharing data using an innovative interface lies at the heart of the demo and I liked the way that it allows you to organise people, things and places in 3D space. Whist it clearly needs further research and refinement I could see being extremely useful considering the mountains of information most of us sit on and produce daily.
The problem with concepts is that they rarely become reality. Steve Jobs hit the nail on the head when he talked about the development of concept cars -
“You know how you see a show car, and it’s really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory! What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, ‘Nah, we can’t do that. That’s impossible.’ And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, ‘We can’t build that!’ And it gets a lot worse.”
Simply put, turning concepts into reality without loosing the integrity of the original vision is very hard. This applies across many areas in life but there’s nothing more exciting than when it actually works out.
One concept slowly being turned into a reality is that of the semantic web (which I’ve written about before here and here). The video below is not a concept; it’s an evolving reality and, dare I say it, rather an amazing one! -
Although it might not be ready for the prime time yet I can see huge potential in projects like Freebase Parallax for a radical shift in the way in which people navigate information way beyond the traditional boundaries of static pages hard-linked together. This is the first step towards the future of unlocking information in data and knowledge in information.
If you know of any other interesting projects I’d love to hear from you!
Whilst being more of a toy than having any tangible application Wordle is a cool way of generating “word clouds”. Words are given more prominance depending on how many times they occur in the source text. I generated the cloud above using tags from my blog - simple but effective.
What do you notice about the design of these web pages (aside from the fact that they’re not English)?
Cyworld
Daum
Naver
163
Sina
Sohu
The top 3 are Korean and the bottom 3 Chinese - all are popular portals. Naver is Korea’s premier search engine (with 77% of the market there) and Cyworld could be compared to Facebook (with over 20 million users).
If your first reaction is that all these sites are very crowded and densely packed with content then you’re not alone. Your second reaction might be to ask why would they design something so cluttered, and from a western perspective lacking in the clarity and simplicity that we’ve come to expect from “good design”. It’s certainly not very “Web 2.0″, as we know it anyway.
It turns out a lot of other people are thinking the same thing. Different theories for why there is this marked difference are abundant, ranging from the influence of Buddhist principles whereby “strong and rich colour, density, and opulent presentation symbolize happiness and wealth”, otherwise termed the ‘aesthetics of abundance’, to different advertising models and the way in which people read/scan different languages. It seems no one has a definitive answer which means there’s definitely room for research here.
What I find fascinating is that two almost entirely different ways of looking a web design have emerged from a common set of technologies used by different cultures. It’s even more applicable when you consider western firms doing business in East Asia where a simple re-branding exercise is clearly going to be insufficient.
Another interesting point in fact is that whereas in the west we are used to accessing and advertising websites by their URL (e.g. www.randomwire.com), in East Asia the search box is king and URL’s are virtually redundant. These so called “navigational searches” may have something to do with the complexities of typing roman characters on input devices especially designed for Japanese/Korean/Chinese but still seems a pretty good idea to me and one which I expect will slowly make its way westwards in time, especially with the rise of the mobile internet where typing is even more cumbersome.
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