Noise Between Stations

May 2002

  • Companies

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  • Interaction Metaphor

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  • Research at IDEO

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    1 min read

    Alex Wright reviews The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO IDEO blurs disciplinary boundaries wherever possible. That’s especially true when it comes to research, a cornerstone of IDEO’s design process. Many design firms still treat research as a stand-alone discipline practiced by Researchers (with a capital R). At IDEO, research is everyone’s job.

  • Tools vs. Agents

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    New Architect’s By Design: Wisdom from the Industry gives off lots of sparks, especially this one from Henry Lieberman, Agents Research Lead at MIT Media Lab: Applications and menu operations are like hammers and screwdrivers. Each is specialized to do a particular task. There’s nothing wrong with tools, but having a different tool for each…

  • 9.11 Tribute

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    I’m off on vacation. I’ll leave you with this 9.11 Tribute site IA’d be a former co-worker of mine. I like that you don’t have to navigate upon arrival, you can simply sit back and absorb it. Sometimes the web can be like film.

  • Philosophy

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  • Complexity and Cars

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    Go read Haughey and come back. No really, go ‘head. It’ll just take a sec. Back? Interesting, right? That Niklaus Wirth quote is how I feel about ideas like emergence. It’s interesting, but trying to replicate them in a product isn’t necessarily desirable design practice. It’s just, interesting. Regarding the BMW, I used to drive…

  • Isn’t That Quaint?

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    Over beers with Meghan in marketing: Meghan: Wow, you’re still with the fish? What do you do?Me: I don’t know if you’re familiar with all our titles…I do information architecture…Meghan: Oh my god, I remember all those ridiculous titles. What the hell were we thinking?

  • Alex Wright

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    Just discovered Alex Wright’s site, agwright.com, I didn’t realize he kept a blog.

  • Business of Design

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  • Reaching Out

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    2 min read

    I recently worked with a Fortune 200 company spec’ing work on an application for an important group of internal users. Not too long ago they had converted some of their mainframe/green screen applications to browser-based apps, but not for the right reasons and without much success. No one inside the company has interface design expertise.…

  • Leslie’s Back

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    Harpold.com

  • Poynter.org

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    Poynter.org ‘exists to help journalists do their jobs better and to serve their communities’ – recommended. I’ve been trying to learn more about established design language rather than reinvent everything. This article discusses page elements like folio lines and bylines that we could seamlessly migrate to our online design dialog.

  • User Interfaces and Metadata Schemes

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    I’ve seen a few projects now, mostly big ones, where we’re trying to create generic metadata behind a website, the idea being you can then use that information for other applications (an example of an application being a portal that uses a person’s customized preferences to filter a set of documents using metadata associated with…

  • Visual and Speech Memory

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    From a report on Ben Shneiderman’s visual interface work: ‘when you tell your computer to “page down” or “italicize that word” by speaking aloud, you’re gobbling up precious chunks of memory — leaving you with little brainpower to focus on the task at hand. It’s easier to type or click a mouse while thinking about…