While researching my previous post about véjà du and Abraham Wald I came across "The Back of the Napkin Blog" (a.k.a. Digital Roam). This blog is devoted to visual thinking and representation. Very cool and very interesting... well worth a visit. Turns out that there...
Font Face Off
Mike DeSchryver sent me this video... very funny particularly if you are a typophile like me...
Only one recipe…
I have been catching up on my reading of Slate and came across this gem of an article by Judith Shulevitz titled, The care and feeding of fiction. Shulevitz has written a quasi-review of James Wood's new book How fiction works and makes we want to read the book...
Virtual speed bump
Optical illusions are usually seen as being cool visual tricks, an intriguing way of peeking into how our brain works. They have rarely been considered to be functionally useful. Here is an exception: an optical illusion seen as a virtual speed bump! Check it out...
Design related videos
Just a link to online videos related to design. Check it out by clicking here Relevant to CEP817 and CEP917 (and maybe even CEP818)
The political psychology of images
Browsing through Nikita Prokhorov's website (see this posting about Nikita's new blog about the process of creating ambigrams) led me to a fascinating article about how symbols and the historical weight they can carry. I think a similar issue comes up regarding the...
Ambigrams and the creative process
I received an email out of the blue from Nikita Prokhorov, a freelance graphic designer and assistant professor of graphic design from Connecticut. Nikita runs a blog devoted ambigrams, but in a different kind of way. As the email said, the blog is "devoted to the art...
It’s a wonderful world
My 12 year old son, Soham, has never been into music. An MP3 player I bought for him languishes somewhere in his room. So you can imagine my surprise when, a few months ago, he indicated an interest in a song, Louis Armstrong's What a wonderful world. So this posting...
Distributed creativity
Re-Public: re•imagining democracy, an online journal focusing on innovative developments in contemporary political theory and practice, has a special issue devoted to Distributed Creativity and Design. This may be a useful resource for my Learning technology by design...
Improv here, there, everywhere…
A few months ago I wrote about Professor R. K. Joshi (here and here). He was, as I said in the piece, maybe the single greatest influence on my role as a teacher. I had mentioned that R.K. loved absurdity and play. I was reminded of this when I read about this group...
Digital convergence…
A few years ago Sachin Kalbag, then at Digit, contacted me to write an article for a special for the magazine's fourth anniversary issue. The topic at hand was Digital Convergence, what it is, and what does it mean for our future? Other authors who would be writing in...
Chinese-English Ambigrams
During my travel through Taiwan and Hong Kong, I usually opened my presentations with some bilingual ambigrams - words that can be read in Chinese AND English. These ambigrams were created by David Moser, someone I got to know, virtually, through Doug Hofstadter's...
Summer travel 2008 photographs
I have been taking photographs as I travel around Asia (what I have previously described as my multi-national TPACK tour) and uploading them onto Flickr as and when I can. Go to the photographs
Buttoning on to a trend
There is an barely interesting article on today's NYTimes.com site by Steven Heller on campaign souvenirs being sold by the three presidential candidates through their websites (read: From Mousepads to Piggy Banks). I thought his earlier columns on the graphic design...
France Sings for USA
In a previous post I talked about Pangea Day and the Imagine anthem series, where people from one country sing the national anthem of another. Here's another one, France sings for the USA. Enjoy. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3T60NaNPiMg[/youtube]
Kenya sings India for Pangea Day
NYTimes technology columnist, David Pogue, has a recent blog entry about Pangea Day, a global film festival coming up in a few days. As he says in his note: Pangea Day endeavors to bring the world together and promote understanding and tolerance through film. Over...
Mishra & Hershey, 2004
A few years ago I was invited to be a part of a symposium on etiquette and the design of interactive media (organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence). I hosted all the papers and presentations from the symposium (links to which I...
Mishra, Nicholson & Wojcikiewicz (2001/2003)
Mishra, P., Nicholson, M., & Wojcikiewicz, S. (2001/2003). Does my wordprocessor have a personality? Topffer’s Law and Educational Technology. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. 44 (7), 634-641. Reprinted in B. C. Bruce (Ed.). Literacy in the information...
How to author 85,000 (or is it 200,000) books…
Andrea Francis just emailed me a note about Professor Phillip Parker who is the world's fastest book author. He has over the past five years over 85,000 books to his name. He is also the most eclectic. As the article says, "He has authored some 188 books related to...
More sketches
A few weeks ago I had blogged about my experiments with sketching on a Wacom graphics tablet. Here are more sketches I have created in the meanwhile. You can see them here as a webpage or view it as a slide show.
The brilliantly twisted mind of PES
I discovered PES a couple of years ago when searching for examples of stop motion animation on the web. One glimpse of his work and I was smitten. Combine a prefect sense of timing and shot composition with a whimsical and surrealistic point of view and you get some...
The degradation of Matt
A rumination on goofy sketches, the perils of reproduction as it plays out in a children's game, a B-list Hollywood movie, and botany textbooks I read when in high school, all leading up to some thoughts on the history of scientific illustration. If this sounds even...