The mundane gets breathtakingly magnified

-

I came across this mesmerizing series of pics earlier this week in my Google Reader, via One Cool Thing a Day. I stared at all the pretty colours for a few minutes before I read the descriptions. Amazingly, these are pictures of mundane domestic items (or creatures) magnified 2 MILLION times. (Now say, "Meeellliiiooon" ala Dr. Evil, with your pinky up. You know you waaaaant to.)

These pics don't really speak for themselves. I actually found them amazingly compelling when I first came upon them, and even more so when I discovered what they actually were. Take a look for yourself!

And please share if you've seen any other science/geek related photo essays. I'd love to showcase more of them!

Head of a mosquito

A cigarette paper- the blue crystals are additives that keep the lit cigarette burning by producing oxygen

View all pics

(Source: One Cool Thing A Day)



[Technorati Tags: , , , ]

Popular posts from this blog

Designing the team experience: Building culture through onboarding (Slides from PPPConf, Chicago 2018)

-
Image
On Thursday, August 9, 2018, I delivered a presentation on team culture at the Prototypes, Process and Play conference in Chicago.

My presentation was a case study of an enterprise project where onboarding was not a priority and the project was a giant mess. Meanwhile, the little sub-team that I was on paid a lot of attention to designing the team member experience, including onboarding, and in turn ended up developing a reusable process for designing the team member experience.

My takeaways were:
Your team is an element of your project that needs to be designed. If you don’t build onboarding into your processes, people can get lost along the way.In UX, when you don't design the team member experience, you sacrifice the experience of your people for the experience of your users.Help new hires become part of the team and set them up to be productive contributors. Create a ramp-up process to show new hires how their work will make an impact.Establish and share your project folklore e…
Read more

UX Theatre: Are You Just Acting Like You're Doing User-Centered Design?

-
Image
Back in January, I wrote a Twitter thread about projects that pay lip service to user-centered design (UCD) and what we can do about it as designers. Here's an expanded write-up of the topic, for those of you who requested some additional context. (The original tweets are in italics.)

A few projects I've come across recently are doing UX theatre, not actual user-centered design. Sadly, it's becoming more prevalent as execs learn the term UX but their teams aren't empowered to do all the work that UX entails.
Organizations have latched on to "user-centered design" as a buzzword. In many cases, executives seem to misinterpret it as a euphemism for "thinking from a user's perspective." They don't fund user research or provide project owners the latitude to create teams that include UX and service designers. For all the talk about users, there is no consideration given to including them in the design and delivery process.

People pepper their pres…
Read more

The Unstuck Meeting: A safe failure space

-
GIF of a teammate turning the water bottle of another teammate so they can drink out of the right endvia GIPHY
I tweeted about my team's Unstuck Meetings earlier this year:
On my team, we have "unstuck" meetings. When anyone gets stuck on a task, rather than fester they book the rest of us for 30 minutes to talk through their problem. Using "unstuck" in the title immediately tells the rest of us that we have no prep to do and we're there to help. pic.twitter.com/VcI7LQBIfd — spydergrrl🕷️ (@spydergrrl) April 4, 2019
And I received a lot of great feedback, as well as questions about exactly how these meetings work. A friend asked me to document the process and its origins, so I decided to throw it up on my blog in case it could be of use to anyone. So here you go:
The Unstuck Meeting On my team, calling on teammates to help when you’re stuck is expected. Unstuck meetings are a quick, focused and fun opportunity for the rest of the team to support a colleague…
Read more