Tonic

In these days of global economic melt-down, housing implosion, the failing pound, Iceland’s melting economy (the country went bankrupt for god’s sakes!), the painful leap in the cost of electricity and gas, the plunging stockpile of energy reserves - what says ‘T’is the season’ better than a never-ending fleet of giant 18-wheeler trucks?

I don’t have the time to calculate the gazillions of co2 emmisions that Santa and co. will generate this year as they truck along spreading Christmas cheer on behalf of Coca-Cola. (You can do it yourself here).

I suppose it’s one last hurrah for Christmas before Santa is stuck in the north-pole eating his elves while the rest of us burn our credit cards in order to boil water for a cup of tea.

I went to see the new Body Worlds exhibition at the weekend.

At first it’s slightly scary to think that once they were all living people and animals.

But it’s to fascinating not to want to look inside the human body. How everything connects and works so neatly compacted inside all of us.

It gives a really good insight in to the impacts that your body goes through during its lifetime.

Definitely check it out before it closes.

Body worlds website

The O2 bubble

Today is World Usability Day. This year’s theme is transportation. There are lots of events all over the world in honour of the day, so check out the official website for more details.

Also there is a Global Transport Challenge to help people measure and reduce their carbon emissions - not directly related to usability, per se, but increasing the usability of public transport and other alternatives to driving will encourage people to use them more, thereby helping save the planet.

What a week to remember. Amazing images of the next President of the U.S.A. can be found here 

Johnny Holland is a new online interaction design magazine. It covers all kinds of interactions in the digital world, with interesting articles on social interaction, touch-screen text, mobile usability testing and the psychology behind why some people develop their talents and some don’t. There’s a bit of a Dutch bias at the moment, which is actually a good thing, since many interaction design and user experience websites and resources have a US bias, so it’s good to see what people outside of the English-speaking world are exploring.