Author: Victor

A fair article about bikeshop.com, a site I helped design.

A new addition to the Common Ground patterns could be Filter, in which some function is applied to content and results in a new set of content. An example would be filtering search results using a date range.

I was citing lists of heuristics yesterday, and another good one is The Human Interface Design Principles of MacOS 8.

On Saturday I was outside in a t-shirt and hot in the sun. On Sunday I woke up and saw a few inches of snow on the ground. Today is still cold, but there’s no trace of yeterday’s snow. All those poor, fragile buds that excitedly came out early were frosted.

Being away at a computer conference for a week, around so many different people doing research in such diverse areas, helped my realize how I should look more at the long term of my career. This also affects the short term: I must stop getting so worried and caught up with work matters. I think this can be done without sacrificing my dedication to doing a great job, I just need to remember there’s a big world of opportunities beyond my job, office, and company.

My notes on the aforementioned The Origins of Pattern Theory: The Future of the Theory, and the Generation of a Living World:

• Coplien says in the intro, “Focusing on objects had caused us to lose the
  system perspective. Preoccupation with design
  method had caused us to lose the human perspective.”
  
• Alexander wrote the introduction to Richard
  Gabriel’s book “Patterns of Software.”
  
• Alexander on the philosophy behind his work: “All of my life I’ve spent trying to learn how to
  produce living structure in the world. That means
  towns, streets, buildings, rooms, gardens, places
  which are themselves living or alive…This
  living structure which is needed to sustain us and
  nurture us and which did exist to some degree in
  the traditional societies and in rural communities
  and in early urban settlements has disappeared…We don’t know how to create it
  or generate it any more.”
  
  
  
  • Interesting to think about the application of this idea to HCI design.
    
  
  
• His intention with A Pattern Language was “first of all, of course, intended just to get
  a handle on some of the physical structures that make
  the environment nurturing for human beings. And,
  secondly, it was done in a way that would allow this to
  happen on a really large scale. And, what I mean by that
  is that we wanted to generate the environment indirectly,
  just as biological organisms are generated, indirectly,
  by a genetic code.”
  
  
  
  • Which makes me wonder if my top-down approach contradicts his approach. It it just the creation of the language that is genetically generated or also the use of the language?
    
  
  
• He points out the success of communities that were designed by the inhabitants, citing their familiarity with the environment and their use to be vital design input. This has significant implications for participatory HCI design.
  
• He cites three goals of pattern languages: “First, it has a moral component. Second, it has the aim of creating coherence, morphological coherence
  in the things which are made with it. And
  third, it is generative: it allows people to create coherence,
  morally sound objects, and encourages
  and enables this process because of its emphasis on
  the coherence of the created whole.”
  
  
  
  • I think the moral aspect is implicit in HCI design – that we’re trying to design artifacts that improve how we interact with computers. But perhaps it’s not implicit for other designers, just as it’s not implicit with all architects. This aspect should be stated in the design pattern.
    
  • My use, more than anything, lacks the ability to create coherence. Once HCI design patterns are selected for a task/project, how can they be used together to create a coherent whole? Can the pattern language itself accomplish this, or the process of using it, or is this reliant upon a skilled designer’s intuition? Perhaps this is what the Nature of Order addresses. Perhaps the 15 properties of the Nature of Order should be used to judge the design, much like Nielson’s Heuristics or Razorfish’s Heuristics.
    
  
  
• Alexander says, “By the late ’70s, I
  had begun to see many buildings that were being
  made in the world when the patterns were applied.
  I was not happy with what I saw. It seemed to me
  that we had fallen far short of the mark that I had
  intended. But, I also realized that whatever was
  going wrong wasn’t going to be corrected by writing
  a few more patterns or making the patterns a little
  bit better.”

• This leads to a need for a more rigorous approach to judging whether a structure has life or not, hence the 15 properties. The properties are an attempt at objective measures of a structure’s living qualities, or wholeness. (He rebutes those who say this is too subjective by saying the effects of a design on the people who use it can be measured, so we can’t hide behind artistic impression when it comes to design.)
  
  
  
  • This makes me more confident of the applicability of the heuristics mentioned above.
    
  
  
• He says you can compare designs by asking people, “Do you feel more
  whole? Do you feel more alive in the presence of this
  thing? Do you feel that this one is more of a picture
  of your own true self than this thing you know whatever?”
  
• More lamenting, worth noting: “whatever feeling
  there is in here is obviously not a profound positive
  feeling. And this is what we have come to expect
  in our modern world. The failure of that
  profound feeling to exist in the world around us at
  small scales, large scales, middle scales, here, there, and everywhere, is tragic. It’s the thing that we miss.”
  
• He talks about a process involving “unfolding wholeness.” You begin with a structure in a certain state and perform “structure-preserving transformations, maintaining the whole
  at each step, but gradually introducing differentiations one after the other.” This mirrors what happens in nature.
  
  
  
  • This seems to support my top-down approach, expecially as I determine the overall posture of the interface first. I should check (and test) my order to see if it supports this sort of unfolding wholeness.
    
  
  
• Why this is needed in HCI design: “The process of design
  that we currently recognize as normal is one where
  the architect or somebody else is sort of moving stuff
  around, trying to get into some kind of good configuration.
  Effectively this means searching in an almost
  random way in configuration space, and never
  homing in on the good structure.”
  
• He addresses the practical difficulty of all this: “The social and technical shifts involved are
  large. The shifts in thought, in practice, in administration
  of money, in contracts, all sorts of real nitty-gritty
  things that one would much rather not mess
  with because they are so hard, you must mess with
  because it is those processes which are undermining
  the ability for our whole contemporary social
  process to be structure-preserving unfolding. If life
  is to be created, these processes must change.”
  
• There is an enormous amount of livable space in the world, and most of it is filled with lifeless design. A genetic approach, like the way human genetic code generates a body, could help spread these ideas and processes over this space. But spreading via culture influence, i.e. Alexander’s books, isn’t happening nearly fast enough. Instead, transferring these ideas to the realm of software could have greater influence. So much is coming under the influence or control of software, using software to further these concepts can go much further much faster. Architects and others in the building profession should control their future, but they’re not taking responsibility for it. So instead the torch could be passed to the software professionals.
  
• The pattern language books said the design patterns were meant to be used sequentially, but this didn’t happen in use. His new pattern languages are generative, offering sequences of instructions that let people build entire buildings. These new patterns are dynamic, and interact with context.
  
  
  
  • Wow! Can’t wait to see what those look like.
    
  
  

Great find – Christopher Alexander’s The Origins of Pattern Theory: The Future of the Theory, and the Generation of a Living World. IEEE charges $10, which is a reasonable price for this speech for anyone interested in the application of pattern languages. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:

The timing and audience of the venue
afforded Alexander the chance to reflect on his own
work and on how the object-oriented programming
community had both hit and missed the mark in
adopting and adapting his ideas to software. As
such, the speech was a landmark event that raised
the bar for patterns advocates, for object-oriented
programmers, and for software practitioners everywhere.
Beyond that, this speech has timeless relevance
to any engineering, scientific, or professional
endeavor.

A new Susana Baca album – very exciting.

I heard a speech this morning about the humanitarian effects of the embargo on Iraq. While I agree the Iraqi citizens are suffering and the embargo has largely failed, I don’t think the embargo is the cause. Regardless of the amount of resources Iraq has, the government will always syphon off what it needs to further it’s militaristic aims. The embargo just has the effect of amplifying the humanitarian shortcomings and ironically gives Saddam something to complain about.

Ultimately, the syphoning process must be changed to achieve both goals of humanitarian rights and arms control.

Of the folks I met at the HCI Pattern Languages workshop, I was most interested in the work of Austin Henderson, Tom Erickson, Lyn Pemberton and Richard Griffiths, Adam Stork, and Jan Borchers. Also, John Thomas had a way of always coming up with the insightful question, regardless of the topic.

James Landay is working on a book about applying design patterns to web site design. Nothing there yet, but must revisit in the future.

Super-cool insight from Microsoft regarding web browser UI design. Last year I corresponded a bit with the head of Apple’s Quicktime UI design and discovered they’re not allowed to talk about their work in these sort of forums for legal reasons.

Doors of Perception PLAY demo. It can be “playfully navigated.” I know I sound like a party pooper, but I wonder if people (meaning real people, not other designers) like playing with media like this (for more than a few seconds)? They strike me as rarely-visited museums, or toys initially enjoyed and now abondoned. Essentially, this is not design, it’s art.

Just downloaded Netscape 6 PR 1 and there’s about a 6:1 annoyance to possibly interesting feature ratio. It’s small in size, but takes longer than Photoshop to install. It’s too slow on my humble PowerMac 8500, the initial registration procedure is lifted verbatum from the frustrating procedure on NetCenter, and they changed the command key shortcuts like F for Find (at least they didn’t change command-q for quit).

I wonder how, with the open source, distributed development method, they developed the user interface? Did they do user testing (or is that what the preview release is all about?)? I’m suspicious that the process of making a great user interface can be done in a distributed, free way.

back from The Netherlands, and my head is a blurry, hurtin’ jumble. Got a cold following crazy Scandanavians through a freezing wind on the boardwork at Schevining (I know that spelling’s wrong). Much to write about in the next few days…