Open Government, Open Data, Moods, and Pixels

09.Jan.15
by Emily Twaddell

You already know that it’s Friday, right?

So why waste valuable character space and SEO just to state the obvious? Starting now, we’ll still give you a quick run-down of the week’s articles and share a few of our latest web finds. We just won't tell you that it’s Friday.

City of Cambridge Participatory Budgeting

cambridge_budget

Open government is on our minds often here at the studio, what with our work on Arlington Visual Budget (more). The City of Cambridge, MA is launching a new democratic initiative that gives Cambridge community members the power to decide how to spend $500,000 of the City’s FY 2016 Capital Budget.

Thync

thyncapp

We’re curious about apps that relate to emotional status. Enter Thync, a wearable device that uses neurosignaling to shift your mood.

Pixel Perfect Shapes in Photoshop

pixel-perfect-trialngle

Still in a bad mood? Is it the problem with pasting vector art into Photoshop, hmm? Now you have a neat solution.

The Week’s Highlights

Check out The Digital Life: Is Leisure Dead? Exploring Time Poverty in the Digital Age. Jon and Dirk discuss the design of time, and in particular, the rampant busyness of the digital age—what has been described as the time poverty of knowledge workers.

The fifth in our UX Maturity series, Best Practice, provides some concrete advice for positioning your organization for UX excellence by adopting a best-practice approach.

On Monday, Dirk Knemeyer shared his short list of books for enriching your knowledge, practice, and imaginative life with Of Zen, Big Data, and Infovis in our Around the Studio spot.

Topics: Design, Open Government, health, open data