Do you remember the ‘New Economy‘? This wonderful time when we all thought that hierarchies are a thing of the past, working in established office structures is so 1995, productivity can only go up (as does the stock market), we all get rich through an IPO and the sheer whispering of “anything-dot-com” made you the coolest kid on the block?
Well, these wonderful times were back when we entered the age of Crowd Sourcing – more…
On May 14th we initiated our second Design Challenge – this time around the question “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?” (head over to the microsite to get the full scoop). IxDA and Johnny Holland as well as eight schools from three continents supported the challenge. more…
Amine Zafri from Morocco, with 16 years the youngest participant in our inaugural Design Challenge and honoree of the “Best in Class: Execution” category, summarizes his experience with the Design Challenge: more…
The submission deadline for the Design Challenge Summer 2009 is right around the corner! All ideas must be submitted to conceptseries@mozilla.com by Sunday, June 21st. Please note that your submission must consist of a mockup and a video explaining your concept and the thinking behind it.
Now is the time to help us answer the question: “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?”
All you need to get started is a mockup and short video!
A few days ago I had the great pleasure to talk to & discuss with a wonderful group of ‘Design Interactions‘ students from London’s Royal College of Art. The Department of Design Interactions at RCA is a truly unique place – their focus on the human being and her interactions with a complex world combined with an uncompromising position, yields enormously fresh perspectives and creative solutions. more…
Ecaterina, one of the participants of our Mozilla Labs Spring ‘09 Design Challenge and selected as “Best in Class” in the category “Innovation”, wrote up her experience with the Design Challenge in a wonderful blog post. more…
A little more than three months ago we launched our inaugural Mozilla Labs Design Challenge (Spring 09). We asked students from all around the world to develop solutions to the question “How would a windowless browser look like?”
More than 40 students participated, went through a rather intense three week-long tutoring phase (videos from all sessions are available online) and in the end submitted 18 prototypes. A panel, consisting of three Mozillians and two experts from Johnny Holland, bestowed “Best in Class” honors to four prototypes – in the categories innovation, execution, interaction and producible. more…
In my series of guest blog posts from our Design Challenge: Spring 09 participants, here’s Tyler Downer’s report on his experience with our inaugural Mozilla Labs Design Challenge.
Also make sure to check out Katie McCurdy’s wonderful posting about her experience, which she posted on her blog. The whole Design Challenge team is extremely proud of the fact that our little event could help her land an internship at VMware in California! Congratulations! 
But now for Tyler’s experiences: more…
It is my great pleasure to feature another guest post. This time it’s from Safwan Erooth, one of the Design Challenge: Spring 09 participants, about his experience with the event: more…
Mozilla Labs’ Concept Series provides a space for experimentation and discussion of ideas, mockups and prototypes – aka concepts – around the Open Web.
In a way this works alongside a workbench metaphor: From an idea one develops one or more mockups, distills these mockups into a prototype and eventually takes the learnings from the prototype (and often many rounds of iterations) and arrives at a product. more…
It is my great pleasure to feature a guest post (both in English and Spanish) from Eugenia Ortiz, one of the Design Challenge: Spring 09 participants, about her experience with the event: more…
Steve J. Bayer, a Mozilla Labs Design Challenge participant from India, wrote in a recent blog post about his experiences with the Design Challenge – you’ll find it here.
P.S.: We’ll have more feedback from the participants coming in the next few weeks…
Federico Viticci submitted a mockup to the Concept Series where he explores a sidebar based interface for Firefox.next which allows the user to create a library of his online activities. more…
This announcement is a bit late – but still… We finally moved the Mozilla Labs Concept Series discussions from the old forum (which had quite a few issues and warts) to a Google Group.
Join us here, upload your ideas, mockups and prototypes & discuss with the wider community. We’re looking forward seeing you there!
P.S.: For the time being you are still able to access (read only) the old forum to look up stuff – you’ll find it here.
We’re pondering about (online) rating mechanisms for quite a while now. One reason being, that we want to add the ability for users to rate concepts (an idea, mockup or prototype) in the Mozilla Labs Concept Series. The general thought behind this is, that a robust rating system allows good ideas to bubble up – and thus makes them easier to spot.
We looked at the most common rating systems currently being used on the web and found them all rather flawed. From the simple “I like this”-star to “1-n star”-ratings to the popular “+1/-1″-ratings from reddit — they all have distinct disadvantages in terms of robustness and accuracy. more…
