Google is making a Wave

Google Wave
Google is making a Wave by designing/developing a collborative environment inside the browser. I think it's more like iGoogle but less like it. Well it seems to be an attempt of Google to bring all its product under one hood and give user the power to create and share and recreate media/communications through inter usages of their already exisiting product.
So what's so big deal about it?
Well it's live and real time. So you can see what your friend is typing a message for you.
You may look at the different screenshots of Wave at its official website >>.

Big Data - visualizations

Stamen Design is one of the pioneers in conceptualizing and implementing data visualization projects.
Michael from Stamen Design, presents their projects on data visualizations.In the course explains key concepts of what goes behind making visuals of large amount of data so that it is not overwhelming to users.

Michal Migurski | UX Week 2008 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Smart and Clever

Dan Saffer is one of the respected names in the world of Interaction Design. He has authored books (Designing for Interaction and Designing Gestural Interactions) that are used as textbooks by design community. In his recent online presentation he presents the idea of smart and clever taken from dictionary and how we can use it in designing. They present guidelines for the process of design and work as a checklist at each and every stage.

Designing Smart and Clever Applications

View more presentations from Dan Saffer.

Agile Design

Lot of work load in last few months refrained me from blogging.
However the work I was doing was fascinating from learning point of view.
Design as such requires time to evolve. You need to go through iterations for the evolution of close to perfect design.
Agile is the a project management for Software development lifecycle wherein all the stakeholders of a project work hand in hand, updating each other everyday and hence leveraging the product development. This helps keep everybody involved and influenced on the same track.

So how does design get impacted by Agile methodology?

Well it doesn't get much impacted but influenced by engineering/developers who want to finish off their tasks as soon as possible. However this methodology does give designers a great opportunity to listen to what developers have to say about users and product usage scenarios and also listen to end customer goals. This allows designers to quickly make changes, rather than iterating on concepts in the cube without customers/users input. You might say that this takes away designers "big" time to bring innovation in the product. But then playing devils advocate I would say that it allows you to quickly test your concepts with the users rather than doing all at once then going to user just to find out that your design doesn't fit the context. This is especially true when you are designing for enterprise products and you have to cater to group of users of having similar professional persona.

So in nutshell Agile has its own advantages and disadvantages for a designer. But it closely gels with the Design process and hence fruitful for the team as a whole.