Design, Science and Technology

The WestEdge Design Fair held its second annual design event over at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica.

Take a virtual tour of the showroom floor and a closer look at a few favorite exhibitors, from lighting design to art installations and custom furniture pieces...

Social-media platforms like FourSquare and Twitter have been a boon for sociologists and geographers who now have entirely new ways of tracking how we move through cities, where we go, who we are, and even what we think of the world around us. There is one set of social-media platforms, however, that has been tougher to crack for useful data than others: photo-sharing sites.

Their metadata can illustrate where people take photos, and how active they are. But on the whole, how do you aggregate useful data about entire cities and the differences between them from the content of millions of photos on a site like Instagram?

Researchers have been working on this for the past year, and they've just posted some of the initial results from their Phototrails project here.The project is less an exploration of a specific research question, and more a first foray into what we might learn by treating user-generated photography as another source of Big Data.

Night photography refers to photographs taken outdoors between dusk and dawn.

“Where people post geotagged photos to Flickr from and geotagged tweets to Twitter from.” via Eric Fischer

Red dots are locations of Flickr pictures. Blue dots are locations of Twitter tweets. White dots are locations that have been posted to both. 

Like all new technology, social media changes fast.

Just trying to keep your head around all of the different platforms, how to approach them and, of course, how to design for them can be a full time job.

Social media has proven itself as a crucial component of a brand’s marketing mix, but with the many different platforms, it can be very difficult to put forth a consistent brand image online.

The [Ridiculously Exhausitive] Social Media Design Blueprint features all of the major design dimensions for all of the major platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIN, YouTube, Pinterest and the most recent entry, Instagram.

A collection that looks at some of the stunning HDR photographs these talented artists manage to capture.