Month: September 2000

Scrum Meetings, a more strict version of the standup meeting.

How one company uses it.

My friend Sam and I cycled over 75 miles through New York City in the Transportation Alternatives Bike Tour yesterday. What was particularly amazing/surprising is that most of the route was through parks, along the shoreline, and beside preserved woodlands. I expected to see sights I haven’t seen before, but after having lived in Queens for two years I thought I would’ve known about miles of bike paths through the woods.

Nothing new, but the Extreme
Programming site has lots of good ideas. Makes me
wonder how many other disciplines could be improved using
this approach. What if we did user-interface design
the same way: extreme user-interface design
(“extreme design”)? Doesn’t look like anyone
has made this connection yet.

Incidentally, the site makes occasional references to the Portland Pattern Repository, drawing on the knowledge recorded by design pattern folks.

I was just walking down Broadway and discovered the office of govWorks.com. I’m trying to figure out the thought process that will generate return traffic on this site. Is it, “Oh I need to pay the water bill, I’ll go to govWorks” or is it “Hmmm, I need to pay the water bill, and that’s a transaction with the goverment, so I should go to govWorks.” In other words, by not focusing on a task like auctioning or paying bills they can offer a much broader array of services, but they run the risk of becoming a mushy entity that people won’t associate with their tasks. Or people might start using the site for one feature and gradually discover the other features(like Yahoo! with its email, briefcase, stock quotes, etc.). Or…

fusionOne looks like a cool service for syncing all of life’s various data.

Very weird coincidence…I just discovered the InfoDesign site the other day, and this morning I find out the author just started working here at Razorfish.

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.