Tsé & Tsé, and the NY Times article. French design that is just what I would think it would be. I want to play with this site while eating a croissant and drinking a bowl of latte.
Category: Unfiled
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Miracle in a Bottle
I live not far from the intersection of 23rd St and 8th Ave, a fairly busy intersection in New York. When a long-neglected Hagen Daas store on the corner was closed down and a giant, wrap-around store was implied by the construction I was curious what would replace it. On the other corners are a Gap, a new bakery, and a large, popular BBQ restaurant. It turns out the new corner will hold a vitamin shop. Is that all? Just another vitamin shop? ‘I hope that fail within months to be replaced by something better‘ was the thought I had.
Are supplements really so popular? Looking around I realized they were sold in a lot of places. Then I read Miracle in a Bottle in the new New Yorker, and the whole, giant world of nutraceuticals was exposed to me. It turns out this stuff is incredibly popular and highly unregulated, our laws not being what they once were: ‘One recent Harris poll found that most people believe that if a supplement is on the market it must have been approved by some government agency (not true); that manufacturers are prohibited from making claims for their products unless they have provided data to back those claims up (no such laws exist); and that companies are required to include warnings about potential risks and side effects (they aren¹t).‘
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Reinventing the Business Analyst
The Role of Business Analyst – a Need but no Room for HCI? is a great look at a HCI-trained person taking a position as a BA and reporting from the inside. This illustrates one big reason HCI-related roles, like information architecture, have a hard time penetrating business: business thinks they already have a customer-centric process when they have BAs, and BAs aren’t trained in user research. It might continue to be true until the Tom Peters of the world say otherwise. Personally, I’m working with some BAs who are open-minded and like to hear what I have to say, but changing a culture takes a while.
Link courtesy PJB.
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‘my film for the day’
Looking for something else, I came across my blog entry for Wednesday, November 24, 1999 pointing to this interview with Spalding Gray…
One of the things that I do every day when I finish working here or writing or reading, is go out and walk around Washington Square fountain. I’m the only one to do this. I go around and around and around. I don’t count the times that I go around but I walk until I feel I’ve had a good walk, rather than going in a straight line which is what I used to do. I’d beeline up for Barnes and Noble on 5th Avenue and 18th Street because it would be a point of reference to go to and thumb through the books, because I like to be going somewhere. But I started to like the circle, because my eye, and I really have only one good eye now, my right eye, becomes like a camera, panning — and every time around, you have the same configuration of people doing a little something different and so on around, so it becomes like my film for the day. My take on the day, Washington Square Park.
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Job market temperature
I went to a meeting for an hour, came back, refreshed my email, and saw:
- Hotwire – Visual UI Designer Opening
- Customer Experience Project Associate
- Sr. User Interaction Designer position at Adobe Systems
- Experience Planners at Semaphore Partners
- Staples Job Opening: Usability Research Analyst
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Tog on Mac OS X, again
Tog is back in the critic’s chair, this time with genuine praise for Mac OS X. OS X is up to speed at last. It appears as crisp, with a few exceptions, as OS 9.2.2. That from the man who helped invent the check box, not too shabby. Which is good as I wasn’t looking forward to learning yet another way to use the desktop (i.e. Exposé). Link courtesy PJB.
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Management/Geek Support
Whether a technology comes in to a company via management or geeks was recently mentioned by Tim Bray, and reminded me of how my last project changed from iPlanet (hateful thing, that) to the IBM HTTP Server – in mid-project! I think the sudden switch was a coup by the techies, made acceptable by it being labeled I-B-M, despite the fact that it’s powered by Apache.
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Mike goes over the deep end
‘It’s during those times of waiting her out that I’ve recently taken to metering the sound level of her cries with a Radio Shack Sound Level Meter (part no. 33-2055). Now that I have metrics on our baby’s cry, I can benchmark her to other babies.‘
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Career Change Justified
I went and spent all that money on a masters degree in music technology, and realized it wouldn’t be long before everyone would have the same skills as soon as the ease of use improved and PC processor speeds made dedicated hardware obsolete. Witness Apple’s GarageBand. Glad I’m a designer.
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Books of 2003
Jess has a nice roundup of IA Books from 2003. I’m personally considering Brenda Laurel’s Design Research.
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Norman on Powerpoint
Don Norman says, PowerPoint is NOT the problem…. Any dense, detailed information that requires study to understand can NOT be presented in a talk it can be summarized and described, but the study and concentration required for understanding should be done elsewhere. Talks are for summaries. Amen. Link courtesy PJB. Also see the Laurence Lessig slides for a bit o’ contrast to Tufte-ism.
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Software Project Management Resources
Wow, the page for the Columbia University software projectment management course is a great list.
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Security update
We just noticed a fighter jet flying low over the Hudson River along Manhattan. Spooky.