Leave no rider behind

Two very different solutions to the user experience problem of vending a card for riding the subway, from New York's MTA and the Bay Area's BART. I love the hand-drawn flow charts by Aaron Reiss.

When Antenna Design came in, commuters were having a hard time adjusting to a pay-first interface, a system much like BART’s current ticket machines. “I saw immediately that wasn’t going to work,” said [Masamichi] Udagawa, “the interface was a big problem.”

New Yorkers simply didn’t trust the machines.

Big update

We launched a big tranche of updates to our podcast technology, on both the front and back ends. Mathilde Piard has the details on the user-facing side of the story.

On the server side, we re-integrated podcast channels and episodes into the overall data model. Now, podcasts are first-class objects in the CMS, peers of blog posts, news stories, topic landing pages, bios, and other kinds of content. Podcasts now can be associated with multimedia assets like video—oh, and audio—just like everything else in our digital universe.

Embrace change, and design for it

Laura Sydell profiles Barbara Beskind: retired Army occupational therapist, holder of six patents, 90-year-old designer for IDEO.

"Everybody who ages is going to be their own problem-solver," she says.

Pinning it down

A recent paper by Carman and Evans dates one of the dials of the Antikythera mechanism to the late 3rd century BCE.

ᔥ Nautilus

Breaking out of the black box

Sylvia Tippmann offers a brief introduction for scientists to the programming language R and its ecosystem.