Gawking in Traffic - Interactions… designed or not 

I play guitar. I’ve played it for a good solid while. And when asked by a coworker the other day if I was good, I said, “Yes.” Not, “Yeah… I’m pretty good,” or “Sure… I’m alright.”

I didn’t always “admit” that off the bat - call me shy and modest.

And then I found this young feller on a friends blog and decided I need to get back to practicing. I have two reasons why you have to watch this video, the first of which being interaction related:

1) He uses his guitar in a fantastically innovative way in this song. I mean, I’ve seen people use the guitar body as a drum and the like, but I’ve never seen someone pull of “sound effects” quite like Sungha Jung. Seriously, I love it. He’s a one man band with one instrument.

2) I love guitar. I love this kid. And I want the world to know. Sungha, you are my hero. He’s 11 and has been playing for 2 years. Sheesh…

Plus, he’s got some rockin’ fingernails on that right hand. I’m sure the 11-year-old ladies love it.

Photography can be gorgeous. And photography of food - well, shoot… one of the greatest design opportunites ever. Enter… This Week For Dinner.

The site’s description reads: “This Week for Dinner(TM) is a place where we can share ideas for weekly menu planning. Every Sunday I post my weekly dinner plan. TWFD friends can then post their menus in the comments section, providing me (and everyone else) with fresh ideas every week! I also post other fun ‘foodstuffs’ throughout the week. ”

The blogger is Jane Maynard, who is, as it turns out, my sister. And let me tell you, she does a fabulous job of taking great ideas and using photography to illustrate them. The site itself is your general blog layout, with a white background and cleanly designed logo and banner. The rest of the visual character for the site comes from her photos.

The site itself was a great inspiration for a site concept I’ve been working on at work, but that’s a whole other story… meanwhile, she had a nice posting awhile back about cutting pancakes for toddlers with a pizza cutter.

Simple AND brilliant.

And what does she use to cut her pizza? I’m glad you asked… (click the picture to read more).

zak!

Who left the comment: “the sound of a metal slinky slinking is what does it for me. so cathartic.” You will get an email shortly and your Slinky soon!

Thanks for entering, everyone! There will be another giveaway soon, as well as a new post… before you can say the word ”cathartic.”

To celebrate the launch of Gawking in Traffic, you can win a classic example of fine interaction design - a SLINKY!!!

YEAH! I’m sure you’re excited about this.

All you have to do is leave a comment on this post to be entered.

There’s something fantastic in the simple enthrallment of a Slinky. And the whole “Slinky walking down stairs” trick is seriously one of the coolest interactions ever!

And as cool as the iPhone is, can it walk down stairs? It most certainly cannot. Trust me, it just bounces down erratically in a hopeless fall to the cement at the bottom…

So just leave a comment (scroll past the picture) before 11:59pm on Sunday, July 20th and you will be entered into the drawing. A winner will be randomly chosen Monday, July 21st, and will thereafter be able to kick it old school with a sleek new Slinky.

For those readers in the NY area, maybe we’ll have to have a huge Slinky race down the NY Public Library stairs one day. Maybe it could be one MASSIVE giveaway! We’ll have to see about that…

Packaging word usage is such a great opportunity to shine. And the folks at innocent - makers of “little tasty drinks” - done did it well.

Makes me laugh every time…

That’s the current “underside.” They ran a contest early this year where people submitted their own ideas for what to put on the bottom of innocent packages. They said they’d choose 3 winners, but in the end chose 7 (sounds like something I’d do). They were:

- suddenly everything is clear
- rub bottle to free genie
- if you listen real hard, you can hear the sea
- trapped in bottle factory - send help (my favorite)
- the end is nigh
- in case of emergency, breakdance
- all of the cool kids drink from this end

Get all the details here. And then if you find an easy way to get these drinks in the US, let me know.

When you discover this for the first time, it’s utterly mesmerizing. For me it was in 8th grade at the lunch table - Mark was nearing the end of his Pepsi and, in playing with the can, tipped it up on its side and realized that it was supporting itself.

He pulled his hands away with a look of pure joy on his face. “Dude!” he shouted (or something to that effect - just picture 8th-grade boys). And “dude,” let me tell you, it’s almost surreal. Mark was definitely the coolest person at the table.

Try it for yourself. As you are getting toward the end of your next can of Pepsi, tip it up on its edge. If you are at the right point, it will stay, and your friends will be awfully impressed.

Oh, and yes - Pepsi is my favorite soda. But Mark really did have a Pepsi that day. The image is burned into my mind - I even know where we were sitting.

Greatest. Idea. Ever.

You have to watch this video!

It is a short film from PangeaDay.org, a site with a ton of sweet films from around the world. This one epitomizes how people will use products (in this case, a wall between the US and Mexico) for unintended purposes, especially when they can stick it to the man at the same time.

I’m all for a full blown, dual-nationally organized Walleyball Championship between the US and Mexico. And the winner gets to throw a wet ball of sand at G-Dubya. Who’s with me?

For those who haven’t seen one, this is a DVD rental machine - known as “Redbox.” You go anytime of day and rent DVDs with a credit card for a dollar a day (or for FREE! see: insideredbox.com). They put them in places like grocery stores and McDonald’s. One of it’s HUGE advantages as a vending machine, especially for college towns, is that it’s available 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.

Well, unless of course it’s located in front of the Shop Rite in Millburn, NJ. That Shop Rite closes at 8:00pm (which is weird in and of itself). But it’s not that the Redbox machine is located inside the store or anything - it’s just that they padlock about a million shopping carts RIGHT IN FRONT of the machine!

Hilarious.

Granted, you can still get to the machine. But it’s hardly inviting. Seems Redbox didn’t really research this location out to intensely.

Note: they’re totally boxing out the Pepsi machine, too. That’s just wrong.

www.taggalaxy.de - You plug in a word, and it makes planets of pictures for you that you can peruse.

While creating a central planet of pictures tagged with your word, it also creates smaller planets all around it of related pictures.

It pulls them all from Flickr - there’s a lot of sites out there doing a similar thing. But this one is worth a look. And if you’re not really up for browsing pictures, just clicking and dragging to spin the planets around and around the screen is bound to keep you happily occupied for a least a solid five minutes.

I love signs. Good and bad ones.

But mostly bad ones.

I can just picture somebody saying, “Hey, we don’t need another sign! I’ve got a scrap of orange plastic and some electric tape right here.”

The best part about this sign is that it served its purpose splendidly! I drove past it twice, took a few pictures and just sat and admired… if there’s one thing I knew, it was that the left lane was closed, regardless of spelling.