Author: Victor

For the first time I recently sat at the bar at two different Japanese restaurants, and both times I was offered an extra little bowl of something: cubes of tuna in a mustard sauce, or small slices of squid with cucumber and herbs – wonderful stuff. Is this a custom reserved for people at the bar that I’m just discovering?

Received my sneakers today from customatix.com – shoes designed by you. Wow, it’s a great feeling – especially for someone like me who is not a professional designer – to have designed something, have it made to your specifications, and then feel great wearing it.

On a practical note, the shoes fit fine, have good support, are comfortable, and arrived two days early.

Information Architecture vs. Customer Experience, an interesting, passionate, and sometimes funny interview between Lou Rosenfeld and Mark Hurst.

I come down on the side of customer experience, but I don’t really see it as one or the other. IA is one of the disciplines you need to provide and evaluate a customer experience, just as ergonomics is one discipline needed to design a car, but far from the only one.

I have to wonder if Lou Rosenfeld stays awake at night wondering if Argus’s niche is too small.

A thesis from the Harvard Graduate School of Design on Information Architecture : The Representation of Virtual Environments. It’s interesting that the author is using the term in a sense that includes interface design, which makes perfect sense coming from, and when speaking to, traditional architecture.

A quote: “Architects are in a better position to design virtual environments than those who currently define the form
and structure of webspace, but not if we continue to apply the metaphors and constraints of shelter and
gravity. Software engineers produce objects of unparalleled efficiency and economy, but I believe that
information design also has a necessary purpose, the same as architecture, to move the heart (and the
mind), to inspire.”

First time I saw ArtandCulture I didn’t think it was all that. But the Interactive Design Annual award sounds convincing, I’ll have to get back there.

oh, and a well-derserved (IMHO) winner designed by Razorfish.

Last night I couldn’t sleep and woke to watch TV at 5:30 a.m. I saw a Jewish television evangelist speaking prophesies derived from the book of Daniel, a Catholic mass including shots of the churchgoers – a little girl singing Aleluia, I saw a man in a massive mobile vehicle who makes home improvement house calls all over America, I saw two Polar Bear cubs raised in a zoo in Denver. All without cableTV.

Logging into Blogger just now I thought about all the Blogs on their system and what mischief they could do if they decided to insert propoganda into all the Blogs. I imagined them holding a ceremony amongst themselves vowing never to abuse their power.

The Favorite Poem Project. A wonderful idea, to record Americans reading their favorite poems.

Lately I’ve been reading Pablo Neruda’s beautiful Memoirs and also thinking about how web sites might be different if we looked to writers, to poets, to provide the beauty instead of visual designers.

I’m grateful to my cable modem, flickering away, bringing me video tape of people expressing the stuff of their lives and the words that touch them.

Flag Education & Etiquette…an example of early branding guidelines?

The ultimate in exhibitionism? The Icepick House has cameras and sensors and stuff everywhere tied into the web site. The data is fascinating (though I don’t think I would make it all public).

I particularly like the Cattracker where you get to watch the cats eat. Interestingly enough the bar chart tracking eating events by hour parallels the toilet flushing chart. Coincidence?

World’s First Armed Roboguard:
“The robot is equipped with a camera and sensors that track movement and heat. It is armed with a pistol that can be programmed to shoot automatically or wait for a fire order delivered with a password from anywhere through the Internet”

Skeptics say, “The apparent goal here is to make remote firepower available on-the-spot from around the Internet, which means insecure clients everywhere. How long will it take for one of these passwords to be leaked via a keyboard capture, or a browser bug? Slowly, we’re bringing the risks of online banking to projectile weaponry.”

Somehow I’m not surprised this is coming out of Thailand.

Great mission, published papers, and work from SustainAbility, who strives to:

…help create a more sustainable world by encouraging the evolution and widespread adoption of thinking and practices which are socially responsible, environmentally sound, and economically viable – satisfying the ‘triple-bottom line of sustainable development’.

I love the triple-bottom line idea, and I’m working it into a business plan I’m preparing.

Just ordered a pair of custom made sneakers, designed by me, at Customatix. Maybe I’ll write an epinion once they arrive, but the process was pretty cool. As is the custom with hipster sites, the browser requirements are high and download time is just above acceptable over a cable modem. Pros:

I’m psyched that they have a proactive stance toward their Asian labor force

They donate some profits to charity

Money saved by cutting out retailers is said to be invested in better materials

There were about 16 different configurable options on the pair of sneakers I ordered, way more than I expected.

Interesting story on Intuition. Highlights:

“Experienced decision makers see a different world than novices do,” concludes Klein. “And what they see tells them what they should do. Ultimately, intuition is all about perception. The formal rules of decision making are almost incidental.”

“We used to think that experts carefully deliberate the merits of each course of action, whereas novices impulsively jump at the first option,” says Klein. But his team concluded that the reverse is true. “It’s the novices who must compare different approaches to solving a problem. Experts come up with a plan and then rapidly assess whether it will work. They move fast because they do less.”

The best decision makers that Klein has seen are wildland firefighters, who are force-fed a constant diet of forest fires…and rapidly build a base of experience. And they are relentless about learning from experience. After every major fire, the command team runs a feedback session, reviews its performance, and then seeks out new lessons.

“We sometimes think that experts are weighed down by information, by facts, by memories — that they make decisions slowly because they must search through so much data. But in fact, we’ve got it backward. The accumulation of experience does not weigh people down — it lightens them up. It makes them fast.”

Seems like one of the biggest invasions of privacy is the white pages in the phone book. Let me see if I get this straight: I buy a service from the phone company and this allows them to publish my address and phone number and distribute it to everyone in the county, and if I don’t want my name listed I have to pay an extra fee. Imagine if Internet service providers did this???