Ricardo Sato

We’ve all seen arguments in the design community that dismiss the role of beauty in visual interfaces, insisting that good designers base their choices strictly on matters of branding or basic design principles. Lost in these discussions is an understanding of the powerful role aesthetics play in shaping how we come to know, feel, and respond.

Consider how designers “skin” an information architect’s wireframes. Or how the term “eye candy” suggests that visual design is inessential. Our language constrains visual design to mere styling and separates aesthetics and usability, as if they are distinct considerations. Yet, if we shift the conversation away from graphical elements and instead focus on aesthetics, or “the science of how things are known via the senses,” we learn that this distinction between how something looks and how it works is somewhat artificial.

After introducing a couple of smart objects and noticing that the audience is uncool as nobody has a Poken, Dominique asks how we are going to deal with the 1000+ smart objects each person is going to have within the next 5 to 10 years. Communicating with these objects could be made easier with Mash-ups.

The agenda will consist of a discussion of the Web of Things, the introduction of a Web-oriented architecture of the real world, the demonstration of two prototypes one of which is going to crash, and finally real-world Mash-ups.

Inspired by Yahoo's Pipes, DERI Pipes is an engine and graphical environment for general Web Data transformations and Mashup.
* Supports RDF, XML, Microformats, JSON and binary streams.
* Use it as a "Web Pipe" or embedded in your applications
* Works as a mashup command Line tool
* Supports SPARQL, XQUERY, Several scripting languages.
* Extend it as needed

We’ve talked in the past about the idea of user interfaces and visual output merging. Instead of a UI on one screen and visuals on another, the idea is that the interface itself melds into the output. I can think of few better examples of how this begins to evolve than a video recently posted on Vimeo by user nucode. Working with a projected, camera-tracked multi-touch interface and audiovisual loops in custom Flash-based software, nucode manipulates samples as though on an alien, futuristic interface.

Steffen Haak is providing us with some blueprints for RESTful apps. He starts with a number of principles:
1) Resource oriented architectures -> services should expose data instead of functionality
2) Lightweight composition and flexible binding -> services should be re-composables
3) Mass collaboration, customization and perpetual beta -> ability to share the compositions.

Mobile widgets are very lightweight applications similar to mashups. They offer to use content on the web, just like mashups, but also content from your mobile phone such as data coming from on-board sensors, address books, messages, etc. Unfortunately mobile widgets platforms are rather proprietary and incompatible amongst the vendors. Efforts at the W3C are going towards a standard for mobile widgets which could really help towards more homogeneity.

There is no clear definition of what a mashup is. It’s about data processing, reuse, Web 2.0 (especially the do-it-yourself part). Victoria
provides an essay of definition: “Web-based applications that is created by combining and processing on-line third party resources, resources that contribute with data, presentation and functionality”.