‘Of course — If I’m going to have a watch, I’m going to have a watch that can make graphs. Yes I realize this is funny. ‘
And via James: ‘the fly affords being peed on.‘
Author: Victor
Information Evolution
A nice simple model of how knowledge can move through formats (from bottom up, visually and figuratively).
books
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articles and papers
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summarization in IAwiki & blog postings
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mailing list discussion & blog postings
Measuring Delight
Not content with measuring the ‘satisfaction‘ or ‘initial quality‘ of automobiles, Strategic Vision seeks to measure ‘Total Quality‘ including the customer’s perception of delight.
Dr. Edwards developed a consumer-friendly scale that allowed them to register their response to the vehicle in highly discriminating ways. Called the Strategic Vision Delight Scale™, it allows a series of judgments to be made. Any aspect of the vehicle can be "A failure," "Unsatisfactory," "Satisfactory," "Excellent" or "Delightful." Owners have been able to discriminate easily between the levels on the scale. "Delightful" is clearly more positive a response than "Excellent."
nswered is this: how does the system affect the entire experience for the driver?
Hopefully the emergence of product research firms focused on measuring user experience will nudge corporations to think more about the customer and not just the product.
Lanier Interview
Coding from Scratch: A Conversation with Virtual Reality Pioneer Jaron Lanier
…if you make a small change to a program, it can result in an enormous change in what the program does. If nature worked that way, the universe would crash all the time. Certainly there wouldn’t be any evolution or life. There’s something about the way complexity builds up in nature so that if you have a small change, it results in sufficiently small results; it’s possible to have incremental evolution…But in software, there’s a chaotic relationship between the source code…and the observed effects of programs…
What advice do you have for developers just starting out?
There’s a lot I would say. If you’re interested in user interfaces, there’s a wonderful opportunity these days to push what a user interface can be. If a user interface gives a user some degree of power, try to figure out if you can give the user more power, while still keeping it inspiring and easy to use. Can you do it? For instance, could you design a search engine that would encourage people to do more complex searches than they can do on a service like Google today, but still do them easily? I haven’t seen a really good visual interface, for instance, for setting up searches on Google. Could you do that? Could you suddenly make masses of people do much more specific and effective searches than they currently are doing just by making a better user interface?
The Fred Astaire of Cartooning
Al Hirschfeld died yesterday.
Lay and Lie
The IA Hammer…
…seems to be text organization, and so every problem looks like a challenge to get the right text in front of people. It may ultimately limit us if we don’t also consider the impact of social interaction, communication, etc.
IA Goings On, Jan 2003
Here’s a heaping tablespoon of IA links for you and Google:
The IA Summit website is up. Come to Portland, OR and hear the honorable Stewart Brand March 21-23. A few of us from AIfIA will be teaching an Information Architecture Leadership Seminar featuring Morville on strategy, me on CMS, Sinha on research, and McGrane and Rosenfeld on selling IA.
Rusty Foster talks to journalists about IA and AIfIA in the Online Journalism Review.
Peter Morville gathered opinions on the Big Questions facing information architecture today.
an infinite number of small reversible steps
Stefano Mazzocchi’s email overfloweth with quotable wisdom:
‘It’s exactly like thermodynamics, where a infinite number of small reversible steps is more efficient than a small number of big but not-reversible steps.‘
‘…good ideas and bad code build communities, the other three combinations do not. This is extremely hard to understand, it’s probably the most counter-intuitive thing about open source dynamics.‘
The Unböring Manifesto
Form, function, and affordability. This is the key to IKEA’s philosophy. The egalitarian mindset seduces me. ‘For us, price is the magic ingredient. It divides the indispensable from the unattainable. And so we embrace a third dimension of furniture design – an affordable price.‘
Of course price point is always part of a proper business plan, but the philosophy here is not what will the market bear but what will fill the market with lust. Overall the manifesto manages to inspire, educate, and explain (and advertise) all at the same time.
Though a friend recently commented that modern furniture now looks cheap because it all looks like IKEA.
And I must ask, is it too cheap, environmentally speaking? Furniture can be the sort of thing that lasts generations and yet the Billy might only last a few moves.
Update: they post quite a bit of info about them and the environment on their site.
The Quietest Place in Central Park
I’ve tried to determine the quietest place in Central Park, which I think is in the northwest corner, about a block east of 103rd St and Central Park West in a hilly, wooded section. I hadn’t thought of this question in terms of time, but on Christmas night almost the entire park was silent, with a heavy snowfall continuing late into the night. The Pinetum was magical, which I just discovered is by design…Evergreens played an important role in the original design of the Park. Olmsted and Vaux created a “Winter Drive” along the western carriage road from 102nd to 72nd Streets. Groupings of pines, spruces, and firs added color to the winter landscape and provided a backdrop for deciduous shrubs and oak, ash, and maple trees.
Articles on Indexing Software, December 2002
An introduction for the knowledge management crowd.
Data By Design in eWeek.
Metadata Helper Applications: Tagging and Entity Extraction from Search Tools.com
Automatic Indexing: A Matter of Degree from Marjorie M. Hlava in the ASIST Bulletin is still the most sober introduction to the topic.
Thanks to Demetri and Ed for links.
Later…
From eContent, Auto-Categorization: Coming to a Library or Intranet Near You!
Indexing Software
Business, Design, and Time
Revisiting one of Jesse’s elements diagrams I’m thinking about how the addition of a ‘length’ column (how long the layer requires) would generate some interesting outcomes. For example, significant business decisions can be made and ripple through an organization faster than upper layers, particularly Scope (Requirements, Specs) and Structure (IA, ID). A problem arises where a product can take longer to design and create than the span of the business environment the product was meant to serve. When business moves this fast, design must as well, limiting what can be built, or at least how.
Incidentally, I disagree a bit with that use of the term ‘strategy,’ preferring Michael Porter’s clarification of strategy and business effectiveness.
More incidentally, the summary on MSN Search for PeterMe.com says, ‘Web designer Peter Merholz offers some brain droppings for hungry designing surfers.’ Droppings? Hungry? Talk about your mixed metaphors. And what is a ‘designing surfer’ anyway?
SBI Buys Razorfish
Press release. For me it means new service offerings (process design, supply chain management, integrated marketing) and a return to having a presence in Europe. As opposed to the July 2002 acquisition of Scient‘s ‘certain assets and operations,’ SBI acquired all of Razorfish.
Of SBI, Gartner says
- Verticals: Energy, Finance, Consumer Packaged Goods, Retail, Transportation, Hospitality, Health Care, Telecommunications
- Practice areas: Enterprise management, customer collaboration, integrated marketing, supplier collaboration
- Investors: GE Capital and Cerberus Partners
- Calls them ‘Business Process Architects’ (services providers that are consulting-intensive and retain in-depth business process knowledge for specific vertical markets).
Of the media reports in general, I was surprised at how often the press release was simply regurgitated or the writers took the opportunity to dig up titilating-yet-ancient corporate history. Forrester – whose business, ironically, is not breaking news, – gets credit for original thought (‘SBI has only acquired five of the dozens of firms up for sale. After hundreds of conversations with different potential targets, it believes it has picked up the best assets available.‘) as does Inside Consulting (‘So while the IBMs, Accentures and EDSs battle for big-buck contracts near the surface, SBI and its counterparts will pick at the pieces that drift downward.‘)
Anyway, it seems Andrew Ross, an American Studies professor at New York University, has excellent timing in the release of his book No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs. I read an except a while ago and was surprised to find it accurate and insightful. One description of the book says,
Though urban knowledge workers enjoyed unprecedented autonomy and bargaining power, and their bohemian artisan style evoked a pre-industrial craft ethos, the volatile economy exposed even the rank-and-file to 24/7 schedules, emotional churning, and the kinds of pressure typically borne only by senior managers. With his characteristic mix of laser-sharp analysis and deft storytelling, Ross asks: How humane can, or should, a workplace be? In documenting the quixotic life of these neo-bohemian workplaces, No-Collar records a unique moment in American history and reveals what the landscape of work will look like for decades to come.