Sharon’s Blog

Whilst this blog generally focusses on all things accessible, this design challenge from Mozilla Labs caught my eye. Sometimes ensuring an application is accessible can be considered as a hindrance rather than an opportunity to show off design skills and develop new ways of working. However, good design can provide benefits to many users, not just those with disabilities.

One of the aims of the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge is to inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole. New ideas and mockups for the future of the Web are invited from designers, students and design-focused people. The focus is on finding creative solutions to the question: “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser - How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?”

The Challenge website states: “Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive. However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless. And tabs don’t work well if you use them with heterogeneous information. They’re a good solution to keep the screen tidy for the moment. And that’s just what they should continue doing”.

All you need to is create a mockup of your proposed solution in any format - from a napkin drawing, to a wireframe, to a polished graphic - and create a short video presenting the mockup, explaining your idea and how it works. The submission deadline is 21st June 2009.

Good luck!

“Chapter Two: Framing Conversations about Technology” of “Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart” by Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O’Day looks at the differing views of technology from the dystopic to the utopic.  The authors make some interesting comparisons between the technology we have now with the technology of the recent past, as well as some very interesting comments.

Nardi and O’Day have noticed that although the advance of technology is seen as inevitable, people do not critically evaluate the technologies they use, even though they have been designed and chosen by people.  In other words, we accept the technology that is placed before us but we forget that we have a choice as to the type of technology we actually use and the way in which we use it.

The authors compare the differing views of Nicholas Negroponte (technophile and director of the MIT Media Lab) and Clifford Stoll, author of “Silicon’s Snake Oil”, programmer and astronomer.  Interestingly, although their views are remarkably different (one utopic, the other dystopic), they both agree that “the way technology is designed and used is beyond the control of the people who are not technology experts” (Nardi & O’Day).

Nevertheless, people often use technology in ways that are completely different from the way in which the designer intended. For example, Johnny Chung Lee has developed some interesting and unusual uses for the Nintendo Wii controller.  Thinking out of the box can bring control back to the user and it’s probably fair to say that we all (from expert users to newbies) use the technology we have in ways which weren’t even considered by designers, even if it’s just using a CD as a coaster for a coffee mug.

So although technology (hardware and software) designers may only have a limited perspective on the way in which they expect their technology to be used, once it is out in the public domain, alternative uses or ways of working will often be developed and exploited.