Author: Victor

This ok/cancel had me in stiches. We need some more East Coast power. Maybe like in Lord of the Rings we can light fires along the Appalachians and summon Krug, Druin, & Quesenbery?

I’m desperately searching for “A Short, Grandiose Theory of Design”, by Jay Doblin from a 1987 issue of the STA Design Journal on Analysis and Intuition. If you have a copy to share you can email me from my bio page.

Come visit, I never see you anymore!

Now Preening on the Coffee Table is a story in the NY Times (free registration required). ‘Central to the process, Mr. Newby said, was producing prototypes “early, ugly and often.” Ugly? “There tends to be this conservatism in the design process,” he said. “I encourage young designers to go off and scare me.”

Someone is selling old Razorfish paraphernalia on Craigslist. I actually owned much of this stuff at some point, still have a couple of the shirts. The sleave of my MOM3000 (the name of the intranet) shirt says, ‘never in beta‘ which pretty much sums up the exuberance of the time.

Michael describes his work tracking where on the screen users click on navigation.

I was in the paper store with James the other day and as I started picking out neutral shades he joked, ‘What, are you afraid of color?‘ Well, yes, a little. I have a hard time picking palettes from scratch, I just have no training there. The blue he picked out made me happy.

When I read about the discussion of emotions in the design community, I wonder how far that will go. Is raising the awareness of emotions & design enough to get the people in charge of products to work differently? Is enlightening them on how to design for emotion all that’s needed?

In many of the companies I’ve worked with people are comfortable with style, but scared of emotions. Especially in politically-correct, lawsuit-prone America, it’s often safer to wring out the emotions and play it safe. And it’s rather difficult to encourage a creative process that embeds emotions in a product when only a small subset of emotions are allowed in the workplace. I suspect we’ll need to do more than just raise awareness, though it’s a great start.

The woman who sits next to me at work does a lot of shopping online, and is constantly having customer service problems that she tries – often in vain – to resolve over the phone. We imagine a consulting service dedicating to improving fucked up customer service, or F.U.C.S. It would include sophisticated methods like angry voice detection. We would have titles like Lead Unfucker and Prophylactic Application Specialist.

From today’s MUG:

The Justice Department is demanding patient records from, among other hospitals, Columbia-Presbyterian, Cornell, and St. Luke’s-Roosevelt, for hundreds of women who have had abortions in those hospitals since last November. Since the passage of the so-called Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, the Justice Department wants to know more about what abortions are being performed and why.

But your medical records are confidential, right?

According to yesterday’s front-page story in the Times, Justice Department attorney Sheila M. Gowan argued before Judge Richard Conway Casey (U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York) that “Individuals no longer possess a reasonable expectation that their histories will remain completely confidential.”

What the fuck? Were we out of the country the day that happened? We’re not going to make even a stab at privacy any more? Called it off one day, did we? Game over?

Ben’s got a new website with portfolio. We were both early IAs at Razorfish, moving in and out of projects, him continuing my work on bikeshop.com and me taking over on Avaya. He’s finishing up his masters in interaction design at Carnegie Mellon; whoever ends up hiring him will have one great designer.

Period.‘ Jeff Dachis – in the March Fast Company – comes to terms with what went wrong at Razorfish. His passion was inspiring, he had amazing optimism and drive, but it wasn’t enough. ‘It’s hard to describe loving 2,100 employees so much you’ll do anything. You’ll buy $1 million of stock on the open market, like I did, to show you believe in them. That was a dumb move, straight up.‘

George Packer’s excellent A Democratic World in the New Yorker reveals why the American Democratic party hasn’t yet had a coherent point of view on foreign affairs and what they must do to get there. Juicy excerpts:

• the Afghan girl was telling [Senator Joseph Biden], “Don¹t fuck with me, Jack. You got me in here. You said you were going to help me. You better not leave me now.” Biden described the encounter as “a catalytic event for me.”
• At conferences and in journal articles, the singular idea of these conservatives was that, with no Soviet threat, the United States was uniquely positioned to exert power all over the world… the conservatives were organized; they had ideas, and they were poised to put them into action.
• Certain mental traits that have spread among Democrats since the Vietnam War get in the way‹not just the tendency toward isolationism and pacifism but a cultural relativism (going by the name of ³multiculturalism²) that makes it difficult for them to mount a wholehearted defense of one political system against another, especially when the other has taken root among poorer and darker-skinned peoples.
• Senator John Kerry, of Massachusetts, said, ³Most importantly, the war on terror is also an engagement in the Middle East economically, socially, culturally, in a way that we haven¹t embraced, because otherwise we¹re inviting a clash of civilizations.²

There are surprisingly few user-centered design presentations out there, so Matt’s Alien Cowboy is a welcome addition, nicely customizing the big ideas for a techie audience. Thanks Matt!