Apple is planning to launch a software update for iPad in the fall of 2010, which will enable a valuable feature: multitasking. With this update, it is likely that the new iPad would be more appealing to the younger generations as well as Boomers. Considering the simplicity and intuitive nature of this technology piece, seniors are more attracted to what iPad offers for them. However, when it comes to more advanced users such as Boomers or younger population, iPad still needs more time to replace their netbooks. Cathy Ginther from the AARP Bulletin visited the Greenspring retirement community in Springfield, VA., to see what residents there think of the iPad. According to her observations, the current iPad seems to be getting a lot of interest from the seniors.
Read Cathy Ginther’s article in its entirety at the AARP
Via NYTimes. The city of New York has begun a massive undertaking, turning it’s youthful, energetic metropolis, into a more senior-friendly city. The city has begun making several changes to its city life which include giving citizens more time to cross the street at busy intersections, busing elderly citizens to grocery stores, and allowing artists to use space in senior centers in exchange for conducting art lessons.
With the coming shift in age demographics heavily favoring the +65 citizen, these moves by the city are based on simple economics, as Linda I. Gibbs, New York’s deputy mayor for health and human services points out, “They come not only with their minds and their bodies; they come with their pocketbooks.” With the aging citizen commanding a substantial amount of spending power it is no surprise that other major cities have begun to undergo similar programs as they look to capture more of the aging population and with it their pocketbooks.
Check out the video to see highlights from our presence at the Northside 4th of July parade. The event was our first chance to get out into the public and get the word out about our upcoming website Cincinnati TransForum.
As our Summer Quarter transportation studio progresses, we at LWC took the time to look into some fonts commonly used in transportation signage and general wayfinding. Many of these fonts are commercial fonts, but we’ve included a few free ones as well. Before you fall back on the old standbys of Helvetica and Myriad Pro, here are a few fonts favored by wayfinding designers and the histories behind them.
Commercial Fonts
DIN
DIN, an acronym for the German Deutsches Institut für Normung (German Institute for Standardization), and the name of an increasingly large realist sans-serif typeface family. In 1936 the German Standard Committee selected DIN 1451 as the standard typeface for use in the areas of engineering, technology, traffic, administration and business. Among the other recommendations adopted by this committee was an early precursor to the typographic grid.The earliest version of a DIN typeface was released by the D Stempel AG foundry in 1923. Stempel’s design was applied mostly to schematics and blueprints. In 1929, the Berthold foundry released a version, and it, too, was used mostly for technical drawings. It remained in use for German number plates until 2000.Linotype markets a digital version of the original font while Albert-Jan Pool created a very versatile family of DIN typefaces (FF DIN) for Fontshop. FF DIN is more geared towards commercial applications.
In a world of increasing technology dependence, and increasing consumer choice; companies are fighting, now more than ever, to differentiate their products and capture a larger market share. While the tech world once embraced technical complexity, the trend now seems to be moving increasingly towards simplicity. Consumers want technologically complex machines, but they want their interactions with those machines to remain simple. It is this simplicity of use that can encourage first-time technology users to take the dive; and often those first time users are older consumers; a group once disregarded by youth-leaning tech companies. With older consumers commanding vast spending power, the new trend in simplicity has been beneficial for both consumers and tech companies that have adopted the mantra of simplicity. Two products banking in on this trend are Apple’s iPad, and Amazon’s Kindle.
Apple is planning to launch a software update for iPad in the fall of 2010, which will enable a valuable feature: multitasking. With this update, it is likely that the new iPad would be more appealing to the younger generations as well as Boomers. Considering the simplicity and intuitive nature of this technology piece, seniors are more attracted to what iPad offers for them. However, when it comes to more advanced users such as Boomers or younger population, iPad still needs more time to replace their netbooks. Cathy Ginther from the AARP Bulletin visited the Greenspring retirement community in Springfield, VA., to see what residents there think of the iPad. According to her observations, the current iPad seems to be getting a lot of interest from the seniors.
