Cars with a water theme

My friend keeps telling me stories about their first car, which happens to be one with a water theme. When I spotted this, I was sure their theme couldn't top this version.
This is a YTV bus with a leakage in the window gasket, which causes the water to gather between the glasses. Every now and then you can see this happening, but this time I was able to make a video. Too bad that my tiny battery ran out of power before we arrived to the streets with a cobble paving - that was a blast to watch.. XD



At the time we were coming with a bus 24 from Meilahti art museum. There's an exhibition of HC Berg. Really worth visiting!

Design journalism

Last autumn I participated for a design seminar in Oulu. One of the speakers was design journalist Anna-Kaari Hakkarainen who talked about absence of real design journalism.
Design articles are still pretty much heroic stories about designers and not so much about design nor products. Though design has transformed to more close to earth topic, writing around hasn't.
Especially Hakkarainen was missing writing designers. After all, there's wast amount of ideas and thinking behind a single piece of design.
Her word's have been bugging me since. After all, I'm a designer, I think, I write, and still seldomly write anythink meaningfull about design. -Could general reasons for designers to stay quiet be such that it seems useless to write about things that already have been spoken. Maybe not for the public, but inside the profession. And the other reason might be the change of design to be more scientific. Research on the area is getting deeper and deeper, and to provide something interesting for peers, one should be in the frontline of change.
This brings up the guestion, do designers define themselfs through other designers or through the users and the customers?
One good try to analyze design is the blog of Ville Ylläsjärvi, http://villedesign.blogspot.com .

Sunrise at Helsinki city centre

Posted from a mobile, through Flickr.
-If using a reader, check links from the original post.

They probably put me into wrong floor, because the view was like this and all the other doors had Financial Times waiting to be read XD

4 hours later trying to rip my SAS mile card in two pieces

Luckily flying is still usually the faster mean of transport, but now 4 hours after leaving home I'm about to arrive to Helsinki. And I'm really considering to increase my train usage.

Although new work is a great thing it has some negative side effects on blogging. I'm sorry folks, I try to cure my habits ;)

Amazing picture collections from Crooked Brains

Today added one post from Crooked Brains to my Just read about-list.
Then I added second one.. ..and I knew I was in trouble. For so long I have fight against this urge!

-The problem is that the picture collections are absolutely Great and not only they fill my Reader, but a single post would fill entire page of my Just read about..
So please do check it. So far I haven't figured out any use for these, but surely they open eyes for all kind of abnormalities ;D Here's some sample pics.










Meat art collection: Simone Racheli


Star wars origami collection: Phillip West

Animal love collection: Animateca

And finally a pair of advertisement collections:

Read and create mobilecodes

Increasing amount of mobile codes -matrix shaped barcodes- can be found around the cities. If you have a camera phone you can upload a code reader and even create your own barcode, like I did for this blog. Now after loading the application I think I'll go to window of Kiinteistömaailma to test it for different apartments ;) -Not that I have anything to complain. I just rented an apartment without seeing that first. -It really paid of. Perfect apartment in the heart of Oulu with a slice of (almost own) green grass =)

How to make a 3D paper snowflake

As mentioned, I'm not the most presents buying type of person. -But making those can be fun. And this really made my fingers itch..
How to make a 3D paper snowflake via Core77 and WikiHow.

"There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other"

I was buying some christmas presents which is quite unusual for me. I usually buy such only if I clearly see something is for somebody or then I just see something really nice. I bought two books and for a reason not totally clear to me the other book was "There is an special place in hell for women who don't help each other" by Liza Marklund and Lotta Snickare (Helvetissä on erityinen paikka naisille jotka eivät auta toisiaan). Today I had to open the package and I read it.. The reasons for this were probably the same as already in the store: My dear friend used the frase and I got interested how deep feministic values it posessed. And I also seem to end up in different kind of equality conversations, and I was a bit curious what kind of book this was.

I have never understood why men and women wouldn't have more or less equal possibilities in study and working life. After reading this book I understand that there's more connected than just a persons own survival strategy. It might not be enought if a person decides to claim one's place and space and be a Person instead of a stereotypic representative of one's sex. There's certain sosiomechanic structures in working environments too. Raising them to the open certainly helps to start understanding these issues. For that reason I would have wanted to see more issues from the book on the posters that Mahdollista menestys -organisation is publishing 1) 2). Posters sadly include more orders than explanations.

Reading this book also reminded of the bubbles that we create around us. For me I have found myself already in engineering bubble, academic bubble and arts bubble. Bubbles are comfortable but also make us forget what is happening in other bubbles or on the ground. I didn't remember how stubborn ideologies people still can have in some bubbles.

Most of the bubbles leave out rural areas and suburbs, where new kind of equality thinking would help a lot according to Marklund and Snickare. Unfortunately writers don't go too deeply in that what kind of changes could be made, but at least schools have major impact on the development and misery of both, boys and girls.

One thing was nice to understand. I have been on the right track when I have expected equal results from both sexes. But it is not always simple. Even now I feel that I have started to be carefull in some situations, so I wouldn't break anything. Too much political correctness is not a good thing. If we try to guess other peoples opinions, we end up rating them.

Flock - a test drive

Earlier I made a brief mention about Flock - a social web browser. This weekend I have been forced to be still due a hard flu, so I was able to test this new browser. -It really feels that this could be my default browser!

For you who are regular visitors might be aware that I'm a user for several social web services like, Flickr, Facebook, Blogger, Google reader, Del.icio.us and Dopplr. Using many different services can be challenging and that's why services tend to collect themselves as clusters (money plays also a major role in this). But like me I have to use several clusters, like Google and Yahoo. And balancing on these services is sometimes quite awkward. Feeling of control is lost on these several services.

The thing about Flock is that now I have all my accounts open on the sidebar of my browser and I constantly receive RSS feed from those all. This means that I skipp the whole mess of opening pages to see my accounts. And for example uploading my photos, I just press the upload button, and after that I can choose to which service I want to upload. Or for this blog entrty I needed a single button. -Me likes..

Blogged with Flock

Usability orientation - the cause or the symptom

I have been wondering the mindscape of an usability person. Does usability point of view on everyday issues turn us cranky, demanding and short tempered or was it already there before we started to form theories about that to justify our own anxiety and to make a living out of that.

Another great generalization could be that people with usability expertese have all experienced something which has formed them to be more emphatic than the average Joe.

A usability oriented person senses the problems more easier, but like the rest of us, cannot escape those. This is a reason why usability persons themselves are an interesting group to monitor and see what kind of protective tactics they use against the stress the world has to offer.

Time management for creative people

Time management is something what you can always do better. Especially in case of creative people.
So in this case I'll proritize and only leave you the link -that is said to be a really good one- and just wait for you to comment was it any good..:
Time Management #1: Why You Need to be Organised to be Creative
You can also download it, thanks BODO.

IT security

Opening our University webmail I popped into this nice contradiction in the picture. There's been a campaign for the IT security and password policy. This picture astually shows what is the difference between talking and doing.
People are willing to adopt protective means, if they can do it conveniently. -The meaning on convenient for starters is Not:
1) You just Have to uninstall your firewall not knowing where to get a new one. (picture)
2) Every year you have to go to helpdesk to loan a CD to get your virus scanner running.
3) An old post about passwords