What are we designing? A call to action

It was just last week,I was attending a demonstration of Blackboard Mobile.

Blackboard..the interface that we love to hate. In classes, over informal conversations, on trains, I have had roughly the same sort of conversation.

Me: Isn't this Blackboard program horrible? I mean, the interface is just..
Other person: Wretched?
Me: Yes, I mean who can navigate this thing?

...

So, sitting in a presentation of Blackboard Mobile, my heart sinks, just a little, as it is revealed that students from Stanford, working as a team, designed a new Blackboard experience. Blackboard hired a set of the students, who formed their own company.

Blackboard was just out there, waiting to be redesigned...waiting for some new experience to be set forth. Everyone knew it; it was glaringly obvious.

There are many other interactive spaces, used daily, that are glaringly obvious in their need for redesign, or for new platforms to be created.

The course description for this course, the official one, has something about collaborating in teams to create a product. How exciting!

What it is, instead, is something more wrote.

Why not the wrote within the framework of collaborative environment? Why not take on real-world problems?

Are we robots, churning out the next thing ("responsive design"), or are we doing more than that? Are we identifying problems to solve, thinking critically about products in our social world?

Where is that component in the course? Can we have it? Can we make it? Let's figure out, together, how to make the world a more friendly, usable, beautiful place, together...

Passion Code

Rob,
Here's a link to my "Passion" code.
Just right-click "View Source"
http://adamholstendesign.com/passion_small/

Gap Minder... Visualize data

Hey Guys!

Thought you all might like this. Especially Luis

http://www.gapminder.org/

Inspiration 005: FONT-BOT

Battling for the Future of type supremacy.

Bootstrap

"Bootstrap is a simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and Javascript for popular user interface components and interactions." This CSS framework is loaded with components, modules, scripts, its responsive, etc, etc. Project was built in Twitter and is open source. Code available on github. http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/index.html

3D CSS

This is a real interesting 3d css website. It only works in Chrome however.

"Sometimes you need to see what technology can do before you can fully appreciate it." This offers a 3D website, just more things to think of for the future. I'm sure it was be cross browser in the eventually.
http://acko.net/blog/making-love-to-webkit/

More information
http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2012/01/pushing-the-3d-boundaries-in-w.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

978 grid?

Hi,
I read this article a while ago on Web designer wall:

http://webdesignerwall.com/trends/960-grid-system-is-getting-old


I started thinking in terms of a 978 grid after reading this. It gives you an increased content area...

I started to read the responsive web book, and it seems that advocating a 960 grid.

Thoughts?

Michael