mauro pinheiro

Left or right?

I’ve already written about how bad is the signage system in Rio’s subway, the Metro. Not only it’s cluttered with advertising – seems like they want to place an advertising in each sign, no matter if it will make the sign less clear – but also it’s a mixture of many different previous signage systems, each one of them using different typographic concepts and solutions. Obviously, this mixture make the whole system even more confusing, like many different voices were trying to talk to us at the same time, with different accents and voice tones.

I don’t take the subway very often, but every time I do it, I find something that gives me chills on the spine. One of these days I saw a map that was placed above the stairs, in such a way that it was impossible to read anything. The map was in the wrong scale, making it hard to read anything from a certain distance, and placed in the worst location one could imagine. The only way you could read something was being in the middle of the staircase, looking up, like if you were asking heaven for some guidance. I should take a picture of that sometime…

The last time I took to the Metro I saw this sign (see photo bellow), pointing to the exits.

Rio’s Metro sign system, at Carioca station. The sign at the left points to the right, and the sign on the right points to the left. And, believe it or not, the upper text in the right corner of each sign is “Exit”. Can you read anything at this scale?

The “beauty” of this is that the sign on the left side is pointing to the exits that are on the right, and the sign on the right side is pointing to the exits that are on the left. I was totally confused when I was leaving the Metro. My natural reaction to any sign like this is to think that the information displayed on the left would be related the exits and pathways on the same direction. I was expecting to read the information about “Av. Chile” exit on the right side, and was almost leaving when noticed that the sign on right side was pointing to the exits that I knew were on the other way. That made me completely confused, so I had to stop and read everything carefully. I barely noticed that the arrow was pointing to the other direction. I finally realized that the exits hadn’t changed places, and that the signage was crazy, not me.

I’m not even complaining about the bad typographic solution (wrong scale, bad use of the space, advertising spots side by side with the signage). This is already as bad as it can be…I have to come close to the signs to read them, what is a bad thing for a signage system that should help you make decisions quickly, considering that you may be in a hurry and don’t want to waste your time.

Am I too picky, or this signage is as bad as I think it is? Drives me crazy to know that the Metro has many (so called) designers working on its signage system.

Feliz 2010 / Happy 2010

New article + presentation online

I’ve just finished the online version of the paper I’ve presented at the 4th Information Design International Conference.

The article is about Ambient Information Systems, a specific type of information systems. It is part of the research I’ve been doing during my PhD. You can read and/or download it here.

I also uploaded the presentation to my Slideshare account. Take a look:

See other presentations of mine at Slideshare.

4th Information Design International Conference

This week I went to the 4th Information Design International Conference, here in Rio de Janeiro. It was much better than I expected, and I have to say that I was very excited with the presentations I saw, and very pleased to meet many interesting people.

The conference really made me think about our professional field, about how it’s evolving, how we’re growing and improving our view of what is Design, what are the chalenges of designing in such a rich information-driven society. And I mean not only design practice, but also design thinking, design research and teaching design. Although the conference was about Information Design, many of the presentations dealt with broad aspects of Design. It’s really hard to define boudaries for some design activities. When it comes to designing information systems, what are the limits to say where information design ends, and where HCI begins, or ergonomics, or communication, or graphic design, or typography? After all, aren’t they just different approaches, different steps, different elements of the same communication problem? Aren’t we all trying to improve communication with our skills?

I was glad to see the broad scope of issues that designers (and non-designers) are dealing with to improve communication. From poetry, typography, to graphic language, pictograms, to sound and other medium, many colleagues are really opening different fields for research, and building a more complex language that we could use as tools for helping people to communicate.

I saw great presentations, had inspiring moments, and I’m a little bit excited and willing to go back to my teaching activities, to try some different approaches, to start new researches with my students. There is much to do, but right now I have to stay focused on my thesis.

And I finally met Omar Tzec (Tzek), my mexican friend. After so many online exchanges, it was really a pleasure to meet him and have a chance to talk about so many things, including the silly ones. As I suspected, he is a great guy, and presented a very interesting project he made during his Masters. I really have to read his article more carefully, specially considering that he also dealt with Calm Technology, a topic that is central in my thesis.

I also had the fortune to meet Isabel Meirelles again, someone I met at the Information Design Conference in 2005, in São Paulo, and whose presentation at that time really made me think and inspired some of the work I’ve done afterwards as a teacher. And this year, again, she made a very inspiring presentation, but this time we had a chance to get to know each other, to talk about our work, and I realized what a nice person she is, and that we have many common interests – which made me really happy. I hope we’ll manage to keep in touch and to exchange some ideas.

These conferences reminds me of my undergraduate time, when I usually went to student’s gatherings, in many different places in our country. Some of the friends I’ve made at that time are still great friends, although it’s hard to keep in touch. But I still have great care for many of them, and it’s always a great joy to meet them. In the same way, I hope to see some of the friends and colleagues I met during this conference, in the years to come.

Augmented Reality for shopping

An interesting application for augmented reality. This is not exactly my research field, but is interesting to see that is becoming more popular. But somehow it seems to me that is one of those cases of “a solution looking for a problem”.

Anyway, it is a fine example of an application for this technology, although I think this could never be compared to the experience of putting the clothes on, specially for women, who usually are more “picky” with this stuff. When it comes to trying an outfit, there is much more information than the visual experience simulated here.

But, again, this is an interesting example of what can be done using augmented reality.

Interview: Diseño de interacción desde Brasil

I recently was interviewed by Omar Sosa Tzec (Tzek). He is an interaction/information designer in Mexico, and we met some time ago over the Internet.

He published the interview on his website, translated to Spanish. It’s been a while since I answered his questions, and I totally forgot about it. I really liked the interview, as I saw it again now. Tzek is a very interesting designer/professor, and I think we have much in common, being in similar positions in Brasil and Mexico.

So there it is: Mauro Pinheiro: diseño de interacción desde Brasil.

¡Gracias Tzek! :-)

Mobility and pervasive computing – second round

Here is my second class about pervasive computing, for the course on Interaction Design of Instituto Faber-Ludens.

You can see more presentations of mine at Slideshare.