Stuff that’s been floating around the office – September 2009

1. Service Design Tools: An open collection of communication tools for complex design processes.

2. Personas: A project from MIT, which mines data from around the interwebs to analyse what sort of personality you are. It decided that I like movies and music equally, which is actually true, if a very narrow description of my myriad interests. James was apparently arrested for felony in 1871, which seeing as how he didn’t exist then is rather amusing. Or he had an evil brother in the 1800’s. I like the way they explain the logic behind the project though: “It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world where digital histories are as important, if not more important, than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are largely opaque and socially ignorant.”

3. The news that Ralph Lauren launched its own Rugby iPhone app. According to the unofficial Apple blog, it may be of some use if you’re a budding designer, otherwise not so much.

4. The news that Moby Dick is going to be translated into Japanese using Emoji icons using crowdsourcing.

5. A talk by TED Fellow Evgeny Morozov that examines how the internet actually aids dictatorships:

6. Trendsmap: A real-time map of what the world is talking about.

7. Agile Experience Design: There’s a Ning community!

8. Google acquired ReCAPTCHA, and also a crowd computer in the process. Sounds scary, but is it really?

9. My Life Is Average: Along the lines of FML. From awful to average.

10. The Whuffie Bank: A new bank that calculates the good karma accumulated by people for doing positive things on the web.