Anyone who follows my Flickr stream has lately probably wondered WTF is going on. All of a sudden, instead of cute pictures of my daughter, there’s all these seemingly-random shots of stuff. Well, they aren’t random, they are for my new side project No Ideas But in Things.
I was inspired first by Bill DeRouchey’s History of the Button talk at Web Visions, then by Andy Clarke’s Creating Inspired Design talk at Web Directions South a few weeks ago. In Andy’s talk, he urged designers to look to the outside world for inspiration instead of just looking at other digital things. This seemed reasonable and fruitful, so that’s what NIBIT is: a collection of physical things for my inspiration. And, if you are an interaction or product designer, hopefully yours as well. I’m compiling a (hopefully large) set of different physical objects and parts of objects, from handles to dials to control panels to different animations.
One reason I’m doing this is that, after Andy’s talk, I realized that although I use my creativity almost every day, I don’t do very much to nurture, nourish or expand it, to deliberately broaden my palette. I hope NIBIT (along with my blog education experiment) does this for me.
Coolio – kind of like Widgetopia for real life, eh?
Great idea, great inspiration (that poem’s stellar) and great shortform – a ‘NIBIT’ (niblet?) sounds like a good name to describe the little affordances in our interfaces that work (or don’t work). I’ve been doing the same thing with one of my Flickr sets – it would be lovely to have it be a communal blog where people submit ideas, or a companion Flickr group where people annotate the pics of these nibits showing what it is they like about them…
As much as I like ‘nibit’, I’m still partial to niblet, like a corn ‘niblet’ – a small, sweet little package of goodness. Then again, I’m strange, right?
Hey Dan, you thinking of opening this up for submissions from the public? Here’s my contribution:
http://www.purecaffeine.com/2006/10/no-ideas-but-in-things/
Cheers! 🙂
Hey Dan – hope these projects turn out to be fruitful for you. The blog one reminds me of a chapter in Schwartz’s The Art of the Long View, which looks at “information-hunting and -gathering”, but in the context of scenario planning. And NIBIT makes me think of Suri’s Thoughtless Acts?, though I think it’s more focused on the interactions (or the evidence of them) than the interfaces themselves.