“For the conference this year, the TED curators approached me about staging something unexpected to surprise their audience. We had previously staged a musical prank at a conference, but I wanted to do something new and different for TED. I came up with the idea to have a fake speaker give a talk and make it seem like his big moment in the spotlight had been ruined by a computer crash. Apple users love to hate the notorious Spinning Beach Ball of Death. I started with that image and set out to heighten it to absurdity.”

I would like if this were to happen the next time a presentation crashes.

Last week I was responsible for the design specialization at Hyper Island. The 4-day course’s aim was to give all of the students at Digital Media 13 a basic understanding of what design is and how we can work with it.

We started the course with a very basic introduction to design and how to go about when solving problems. The introduction focused on the most important part of the design process: identifying the problem that we are trying to solve.

The students were then given an assignment to redesign something related to Apple, but were free to choose wether it be iTunes, iOS, the dock in OSX, physical products or even the visual identity.One of the most common questions I received afterwards was why we had chosen Apple as a brand. Our idea behind this was:

1. - as we had very limited of time we needed to choose a brand that the students already had some sort of relationship with. Regardless if they are Android or iOS users, PC or Mac, it’s safe to say that all of them have a relationship to Apple in one way or another.

• - Apple is somewhat considered as a brand that’s, by many, seen as “perfect”. However, when you do a good research and analysis, you’ll find that there are many small parts in the big machine that could be improved (through design, usability, etc).

The fantastic thing with the presentations was that although there was nearly 50 students, there was at least 40 different design suggestions for improvements. I saw a great redesign of Game Center, an amazing Notes/Reminders app, a great iTunes, a motion sensitive remote as well as a great improvement to AutoCorrect.

I’m really looking forward to coming back to Hyper Island in December to continue working with their great students!

It’s only been a month since we got our iPad and we’re still browsing, analyzing, testing, playing with all the the different applications available. Many predict that the iPad will be the newspaper’s proceeder. So far – it seems there is no given format for what a magazine on the iPad is – or should be. Which in a way is nice and challenging but also leave room for a lot of “interactive” magazines, that basically just a fancy PDF.

So far our favorites include:

Esquire

Times Eureka

And although I think the pricing models seem a bit off, I’m looking forward to trying out News+

Swedish agency Daytona have released a very research about how Swedes use their iPads and what we are expecting from it.

Unfortunately for some of you, it’s only in Swedish. Men ni andra kan läsa vidare här.