.oO Tailwind

Morning folks,A quick heads up on some upcoming topics for .oO Tailwind. these topicshave been floating around in my head for months and being a victim of time, I’ve failed to get going, but with a .oO Tailwind behind me… The Bauhaus Effect - A breif article on how Bauhaus design philospohy still permeates my work.Innovation 101 - Our comapny is changing, and we have a great opportunity to engineer space for innovation and design ourselves so we keep the best people thinking the best things.7 Stages of Search User Experience - A set of pieces posing a framework for desiging ‘find and discover’ services. Based on 10 years experience with search related projects.Principles of Interaction Design - a design philosophy for creating digital services.Tough to be Inclusive - Challenges to fight the good fight, why inclusive design is struggling to make a foothold in the world of digital

Originally uploaded by Snow_badger.

This is a photo I took in Paris whilst away with work. It’s one of the images I’ve Geotagged using GMiF and FlickrFly (see previous post). If you follow the link, underneath the image you’ll see some text saying ‘Fly to this location (Requires Google Earth)’.

Give it a go.

There is no doubt that this sort of technology is changing the face of the photo ablum as we know it.

Poor photo albums.

At the moment I’m involved in redesigning a well know online mapping service. I’m a bit of a photo sharing Flickr nut anyhow, but digging into the map/geospatial blogosphere I started finding more and more articles and posts on people who were Geotagging their pictures. Infact, I’d known that this has been going for a while but hadn’t yet stuck my head under the bonnet (or hood if you’re reading this Stateside).

‘Geotagging’ basically means one of two things, a) you can add longtitude and latitude information to your associated tags, or b)that the ‘long’ and ‘lat’ info is embedded into the images’ EXIF data. But seeing as I don’t have a GPS enabled camera (that automatically does b) for you) I have been using some Flickr / Google mashups to hand crank the geo data.

First up is GMIF which is a Flickr mashup that places a GMAP button on your toolbar on the Flickr website. Clicking it allows you to use a Google map to locate the place where you took the picture and then ‘Tag it!’. As you tag it the long and lat coordintaes are added. Nice and simple.

So what’s the point of tagging it if all you see are some 15 digit numbers in the images tag set?

Well, second up is FlickrFly from Flickr user RobRoyAus. This is a cool little tool that enables the geotagged image to be located and ‘flown’ to using Google Earth.

Proper geeky, but really cool if you ask me. It’s certainly been good for showing family where my daughter first made a sandcastle.

I shall be painstakingly geotagging my worthy pictures over the next few weeks because I’m not buying a GPS camera soon with a second baby due to arrive and week now.

Welcome to Tailwind.Working in an agency, you are often required to rapidly assimilate information of new industries, trends and technology. I work mostly with Technology, Media and Telco clients, so the subject matter can be hugely varied.In my time so far I’ve worked on Maps, Search, Medicine, Law, Mobile Gaming & Content, News, Citizen Journalism and many more. Surely many more to come. The constant change is what makes it interesting.Tailwind is a blog about that journey as I have to ramp-up and ramp-down within particular areas of expertise. Tailwind represents the information behind us, that pushes us through and out the other side.It’s also a place for me to keep abreast of the wider design industry, goings on and a smattering of articles on classic design and iconic designers. A bit of design history if you will as its something I’ve always wished to write more about.