We decided to have a company outing to Decode @ V&A last Friday and trotted off to West London (yes, we do venture out of East London) to see what we could see.

The blurb states:

“Decode: Digital Design Sensations showcases the latest developments in digital and interactive design, from small, screen-based, graphics to large-scale interactive installations.”

And

“Decode is a collaboration between the V&A and onedotzero, a contemporary arts organisation operating internationally with a remit to promote innovation across all forms of moving image and interactive arts.”

From a visitors’ perspective the exhibition was interesting enough; quite a lot of interactive art installations which capture, record and insert the audiences contribution (for example a video ‘wall’). And others works which use interesting data sources (such as stock market data) to as the source of algorithmic animations. In some ways though there was nothing we hadn’t seen before in terms of technology and this is where we became a little critical of the exhibition: for all the slickness of the works, it felt to a few of us that something was missing – what was the meaning of things? For instance, a lot of the work in the exhibition played on the fact that people seemingly love to have their 5 minutes of fame and hence fall over themselves to be filmed, pictured, captured in some way and displayed for others to look at. But what is the intended meaning of the art? Is there any actual cultural or personal message hidden in them? It didn’t look to me like there was and as such the exhibition fell short of what art can offer people (excite by all means but also get the audience thinking). I didn’t see any obvious cultural references, or personal messages existential or otherwise. As an example, there was an algorithmic animation which was generated from ‘stock market data’ according to the blurb. All well and good but no further explanation was given, it looked nice but think of the possibilities involved in this subject of telling a story, making a comment about capitalism / money and the state of the economy and what effect this has on society (obviously poignant now). It’s a shame it didn’t explore these meaningful avenues or if it did that the blurb about the work didn’t even mention it (they often sided on a practical explanation of how it was achieved / built).

As such, some of the exhibition felt a little more like the interactive section within the science museum as opposed to any great art exhibition – great fun and visually stimulating but lacking an underlying meaning (of course the science museum obviously has an educational remit it fulfils). I wonder what people in 100 years will think when they look back at this period of digital art? I suppose they may come to the conclusion that the early 21st century signified the beginning of a new art movement but at the same time, as art goes, was a little naïve; getting carried away with new technology at the expense of what art is actually all about.

I might be looking at this too critically and I guess there is nothing wrong with showing off techniques and new found skills, after all the great artists of the renaissance and beyond have often done just that but I would like to see an industry I am involved in attempting to merge the technology with the fundamental reasons why art is so important to everyone – to get us thinking about things (anything!).

For those of you who are un-aware ARIA (or ‘Accessible Rich Internet Applications’) is a way further conveying a specific elements role within a webpage or application through the use of enhanced semantics. This allows for screen readers and assistive technologies to more accurately define to the user how to interact with a websites controls, in turn creating a richer user experience. It is especially useful to define the use of more advanced user interface controls (that are becoming increasingly more popular ) made using javascript and ajax, that have states that constantly change.

For the more interested developers out there, ARIA is applied to your applications by placing extra attributes within your elements tags, most commonly using the role=”” attribute.  One of the most important aspects of ARIA is the ability to apply multiple attributes to an element (as you would do with ID’s ort Classes). This is because each element can have multiple properties:

• It’s Role: role=”menu”
• It’s State: aria-disabled=”true”
• It’s Properties: aria-haspopup=”true”

A simpler way of describing this may be to show you an example of the markup one would use of a simple two panel tabbed interface.

<ul role="tablist">
       <li role="presentation"><a href="" role="tab">Tab 1</a></li>
       <li role="presentation"><a href="" role="tab">Tab 2</a></li>
<ul>

<div role="tabpanel">
       <p>Content</p>
</div>

<div role="tabpanel">
       <p>Content</p>
</div>

Although this is clear when visually displayed like that, the only true way of showing ARIA in use is to see (and more importantly hear) it working within a supported browser or screen reader. Though, as with all new or unfinished W3C specs, browser support and implementation varies across all vendors, with JAWS and Window-Eyes supporting the most amount of roles and states attributes. This leads us to the question of ‘is it worth all the hassle’, my own personal answer: YES, being a big support of progressive enhancement, as long as it is aiding in a better user experience for your some of your users then it is worth the small amount of extra time to implement it.

Overall, Todd’s talk was very insightful and good to see how Yahoo! are going about creating much richer user experiences for people with specific needs, and even more so educating others about the best practices which can hopefully lead to a more accessible web!

I will certainly be trying to force and implement the use of ARIA in future projects here at UVd, so keep your eye out for more info and posts around the subject in the near future. Though in the mean time I have included some further reading to feed your ARIA thirst, and start trying out ARIA yourself. But as Todd said himself:

Reading the documentation only gets you so far.

So try actually testing your new aria goodness with a screen reader, two of the links below are to help your setup a screen reader testing environment on your machine.

Enjoy!

Further reading:
WAI-ARIA Best Practices

YUI Configuring screen readers

How to use NVDA and Firefox to test your web pages for accessibility

Halloween special – Mooncake! And what a cake; brought back as a present from Hong Kong this cake holds a dirty little secret. Inside, AKA Scotch egg style is a duck egg yolk. You might think this is normal, ‘cakes are made with egg’ I hear you say. But this one actually has a solid egg in the middle and so deserves another picture (below). Suffice to say that it didn’t go down particularly well in the office. In fact, I was the only one who tried a second bite and certainly the only person to partake in the egg. According to Wikipedia Mooncakes are “rich, heavy, and dense compared with most Western cakes and pastries.” You can say that again.

Still, in the spirit of Halloween, these cakes are for the Zhongqiu Festival for lunar worship and moon watching. So fill your boots!

GOOD produces a website, videos, live events, and a print magazine. They seem to successfully mix an ethical ethos with good design throughout their projects.

I came across the results of a competition they have recently finished for the best infographic which would “highlight executive compensation (as in, how much CEOs etc. are paid) in an interesting way.”

It’s nice to see creative visualizations of mass data and these are very good examples of this.

One of the first blog posts on the UV^d blog was about Java application called Wordle which created pretty looking tag clouds based on word occurrences in blog RSS feeds, del.icio.us accounts or any block of supplied text.

It is quite interesting to see a peripheral snapshot of how a blogs content changes over time. Saves the trouble of reading it all as well.

Whilst Gareth was attending the1^st linked data meetup I was on the other side of the country in lovely Bristol attending the FOWD Bristol Tour.  The day long conference was designed to let people get a chance to experience what the normal FOWD conferences are like in a place nearer to them without having to go to London or New York (And for a fraction of the price!).

Though, as I already live in work in London, the main attraction for me to travel all the way to Bristol was down to the fine line-up of speakers for the day. With the likes of Elliot Jay Stocks and Bruce Lawson I had no valid reason not to attend, and the small factor of being able to catch up with some old friends.

Elliot kicked the day of with ‘A Perfect Portfolio’. A talk aimed at highlighting the key strengths and weaknesses in portfolio designs, and some very valid points that you should take into consideration when designing your own. A subject that is very topical here at UV^d at the moment due to us being in full swing of our own re-branding. It was very interesting to see the amount of points that came up that we have spent hours (coming up to years) discussing and deliberating over, such as the importance of showing your featured work on your homepage, to how you go about showing the process of your work: Elliot summed up the presentation succinctly:

“It’s not about the finished project, it’s ‘How you get there!’”

The next discussion of the day was from Paul Boag of Headscape titled “The Battlefield of Design – Designers vs Clients “. The first interesting thing to note was that Paul had decided not to use any slides at all and to rely purely on his memory (and cue cards) to educate us. Although, even with his new controversial style of presenting, it turned out to be a very insightful look into the process that Headscape use from brief to sign off. With the main aim of including the client throughout the design process rather than “designing behind doors”. I picked up some good tips from this, which we will be hopefully be putting into practice here in the future.

The HTML5 working spec is something that I have been following throughout the year and starting to become very passionate about. Therefore there was no doubt that in my opinion the best was saved until last, with Bruce Lawson’s talk on the Future of HTML5.  He covered a wide range of basic HTML5 knowledge, from the introduction of new basic tags such as <header>, <article>, <section>, <aside>, and <footer> to some of the more advanced such as <video>, <audio> and my personal favourite <canvas>  which enables the dynamic rendering of graphics on the page through javascript, a good example of this can be seen here.

The most important thing to take from Bruce’s talk though, is the fact that you don’t have to wait for the HTML5 spec to be complete to start using it. That could be years and even more so for the browsers to fully implement it, the pages with the new doctype<!DOCTYPE html> will still render in the browsers we know today, and most will accept the new tags. So why not start experimenting and playing! We certainly have, as you’ll see if you take a look at the source of this very blog.

Overall FOWD was a very enjoyable day, yet there is no way I could have covered everything in one small blog post. So for more info Bruce and Elliots slides from the day can can be viewed here:

• The Future of HTML5
• Stop worrying and get on with it

We’re so close; I can smell it! Our new site is careering dangerously towards completion. One element of the homepage is a frivolous physics environment which I was kindly allowed the time to make in Flash using the Box2DFlash physics engine.

The engine has been ported from Eric Catto’s powerful C++ physics engine (Box2D). It took a little time to adjust to some of the coding conventions that have also found their way from the C++ version but after that initial steep learning curve the engine is fantastic to work with.

I’ve released this today before the site launch so that people can play with it and inevitably find the bugs which I’ve lovingly engineered into it. Feel free to put it through its paces!

http://demos.ultravioletdesign.co.uk/physics/

One of the most beneficial and exciting parts of being a web developer in London is the welcoming and engaging community which exists here. There are continuous events and workshops being held (usually for free) on various technologies and topics relating to our industry. My expectations of these usually small scale and low key events were massively surpassed by the 1st Linked Data Meetup I attended last Wednesday. A large portion of the Linked Data community were present and some of the leading developers and thinkers in this field were there to showcase applications of Linked Data.

For those not acquainted with the phrase and its meaning it would be beneficial to watch Tim Berners-Lee’s introduction to Linked Data at the TED conference. But in brief it is one of the many possible methods of incorporating meaning (semantics) into the abundance of information that is available on the World Wide Web. Essentially Linked Data could bring us closer to a Semantic Web or as Tim Berners-Lee calls it the ’next Web’. His image is of a web where explicit URIs are used to represent things in the real world (people, places, events, objects, etc). Once this URI exists, as a representation of a concept or object, it can then be used as a reference point to be talked about or linked to by other sources of data; hence creating linked data.

I cannot begin to cover all of the information relayed during the half day event particularly that relating to the formal specifications of linked data. However one of the messages of the day was the importance of exemplifying the incredible potential of Linked Data by either blogging about it (tada!!!!) or by creating compelling applications which utilize it.

Firstly we will be endeavouring to use RDFa in our future web projects to embed rich metadata into our web documents and I strongly recommend that other agencies and developers do the same. Secondly I would like to draw attention to a couple of the projects which were illustrated at the event which exemplify the possibilities of Linked Data.

MusicBore
A project completed during the Music Hack Day in London which uses Linked Data to essentially remove the need for radio DJ’s. \o/

Data Incubator
Data Incubator is a project which is focussed around taking mass datasets from willing participants (NASA, Discogs, OpenLibrary) and opening them up for wider reuse. They do this by converting the data into accessible linked data and through a community of developers maintain the dataset with the intention of eventually giving it back to the original owners. As stated on their site; “the goal is not to steal, but to show that there is a better way.”

Sig.ma
An RDF search engine. If for example you typed your name into sig.ma, you will receive results from various different online sources which already embed RDF, RDFa or microformats into their sites. An impressive array of information will be returned which is eerily specific to you rather than any of your namesakes which you tend to find on Google.

On a personal note I am very proud of myself (and Marc who I attended with) for not screaming like girls and demanding the autograph of Tim Berners-Lee when he arrived at the conference and sat at the table with us! I wish I was wearing my I LOVE THE INTERNET tshirt!

I’d like to draw attention to some impressive new interfaces which seem to be bringing a Philip K Dick reality ever closer. Using various open source technologies it is possible for artists and programmers alike to experiment and innovate with things such as computer vision, augmented reality and tangible holographs.

Computer vision enables face detecting and motion tracking of live video footage meaning that a user can interact with software using gestures or that the software can autonomously react to user’s movement. The video below does not illustrate the practical potentials for openCV but is too pretty to not include here.

Gold dust from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

Amongst other things computer vision enables the process of Augmented Reality (AR); the fusion of computer graphics/text and live video imagery to ‘enhance’ the experience. This has become more popular on mobile devices of late and there are many AR applications for the iPhone on the horizon. Here is an illustration of mobile based AR:

Touch screen interfaces such as that of the iPhone have almost been absorbed into common use and understanding in their short existence. Despite this, one of the difficulties of using this type of interface is the lack of tangible feedback from the smooth screen apposed to pushing buttons on a phone or keyboard. This problem also applies when flailing around your arms whilst interactive with a gesture based computer vision interface. This almost seems like an impossible problem to overcome. Of course this is not the case as illustrated by this Tangible Hologram which responds to user interaction using small blasts of air or “Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display” (via). Amazing if not a little scary – love it!

After 8 years hunkered down in the Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, in what can only be described as ‘cosy’ surroundings we have moved to a bigger, brighter, fresher and more creative space! We haven’t moved far (physically) but things are far from the same in our nice new airy, windowed office. We even have a sofa. It’s been a long time coming but it was worth the wait…patience as they say is a virtue.