Dwell magazine visits the design firm Smart Design and talks to Dan Formosa, and Richard Whitehall about the ‘intersection of Universal Design principals and the limitations of public bathrooms.’ The video presents an insightful yet humorous look into the use of public restrooms. Well worth a watch and if anything will provide a great topic for discussion amongst friends.

Gabriel Biller and Kristy Scovel from the IIT Institute of Design have created an excellent primer for those getting into the field of Ethnography. Their primer provides an overview of the practice, interview tips, as well as anecdotal stories from the field. While it is a little slow at the start, once it gets going, it is both educational and interesting. Definitely a must watch for those getting into the filed of Human Computer Interaction.

Alex Roman has created this beautiful piece that tries to “illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view”. The entire piece is computer generated and demonstrates a tremendous amount of skill. Alex used 3D Studio Max, Vray, AfterEffects, and Adobe Premiere in its creation. Alex also created the music which was done in Sonar & EWQLSO Gold Pro XP. Simply amazing!

Juhan Sonin gives a brief talk at O’Reilly Ignite about creating a practitioner’s guide to UI Design. The fast-paced talk speeds through many great tenets such as “Let Data Scream”, “Repeat Users Rock”, “Bitch Loud and Often”, and many more. For a more detailed look, check out his longer talk given at O’Reilly OScon, and also be sure to check out his ever-expanding website of publicly contributed design tenets.

Luke Wroblewski speaks at Mix ‘09 about the best practices of web form design. Covering everything from flow, layout, error handling, help, buttons, and more… Luke covers everything you need to know to design great web forms. And of course at the end he encourages people to not use forms at all. Overall, Luke presents a great practical guide backed up with lots of research and maintains the audience’s attention with the use of lots of great visual examples of both good and bad form design. Check out his book Web Form Design at Amazon.com.

Doubling up on its bet on tablet PCs, Microsoft is working on the dual-screen Courier booklet. Using both pen and gesture based interaction methods, the technology incorporates many of the interaction models we’ve seen developed over the past 10 years. Most interestingly is the fact that it is the first piece of technology to emphasize the light-weight notebook form factor while utilizing two displays. The potential is imaginative as usual and it will be fun to see where this leads.

Scott Dadich, Creative Director at Wired magazine, talks about the design processes behind Wired at the IDEO Know How Talks. The in-depth descriptions of the cover creation process, font designs, infographics, etc… are fantastic and wonderfully juicy. “Details matter. Evolution, not revolution. Constraint is freedom.”

Aaron Forth, VP of Product at Mint.com, speaks at UX Week 2009 about the importance of user experience as it applies to managing personal finances with Mint.com. Aaron talks about tying the user experience to business objectives and how it influences everything from the people they hire hiring, creating their business model, and all aspects of Mint.com. Through several anecdotes Aaron talks about building the brand, building trust, and how the emotion of personal finances has a large impact on how Mint approaches design. A few of the most important factors have included the name, the light color tones, and framing the topic of finance in the light of ‘hope’. One of the most interesting insights was hearing how Mint.com chose to no longer support Internet Explorer 6.0 after discovering they were spending nearly 20% of their time working specifically to support it.

10/GUI, a project by R. Clayton Miller, demonstrates a proposed means of interacting with a desktop computer via a touch interface. Stepping out of the box of traditional approaches to designing peripheral devices, Clayton takes a leap forward in not only designing the hardware aspects but also rethinking the software aspects of the computer for use with the device. Overall the idea is intriguing and inspires further thought on touch interfaces for the desktop.

Adrian van Hooydonk, head of design at BMW, sits down an in an excellent interview with Tyler Brûlé of car magazine Monocle. The conversation leads down many threads including how BMW’s design thinking has changed recently, how they are always working to meet customer’s changing expectations, and the relationship between the drawing board and the driver. Big pushes for the company are happening in the way of being more environmentally friendly, meeting more of their owner’s needs and their lifestyle, and creating story narratives around vehicles as part of the design process.