Coding from Scratch: A Conversation with Virtual Reality Pioneer Jaron Lanier

…if you make a small change to a program, it can result in an enormous change in what the program does. If nature worked that way, the universe would crash all the time. Certainly there wouldn’t be any evolution or life. There’s something about the way complexity builds up in nature so that if you have a small change, it results in sufficiently small results; it’s possible to have incremental evolution…But in software, there’s a chaotic relationship between the source code…and the observed effects of programs…

What advice do you have for developers just starting out?

There’s a lot I would say. If you’re interested in user interfaces, there’s a wonderful opportunity these days to push what a user interface can be. If a user interface gives a user some degree of power, try to figure out if you can give the user more power, while still keeping it inspiring and easy to use. Can you do it? For instance, could you design a search engine that would encourage people to do more complex searches than they can do on a service like Google today, but still do them easily? I haven’t seen a really good visual interface, for instance, for setting up searches on Google. Could you do that? Could you suddenly make masses of people do much more specific and effective searches than they currently are doing just by making a better user interface?

Al Hirschfeld died yesterday.

Handy table.

…seems to be text organization, and so every problem looks like a challenge to get the right text in front of people. It may ultimately limit us if we don’t also consider the impact of social interaction, communication, etc.

Here’s a heaping tablespoon of IA links for you and Google:

The IA Summit website is up. Come to Portland, OR and hear the honorable Stewart Brand March 21-23. A few of us from AIfIA will be teaching an Information Architecture Leadership Seminar featuring Morville on strategy, me on CMS, Sinha on research, and McGrane and Rosenfeld on selling IA.

Rusty Foster talks to journalists about IA and AIfIA in the Online Journalism Review.

Peter Morville gathered opinions on the Big Questions facing information architecture today.

Stefano Mazzocchi’s email overfloweth with quotable wisdom:

‘It’s exactly like thermodynamics, where a infinite number of small reversible steps is more efficient than a small number of big but not-reversible steps.‘

‘…good ideas and bad code build communities, the other three combinations do not. This is extremely hard to understand, it’s probably the most counter-intuitive thing about open source dynamics.‘

http://www.unboring.com/

Form, function, and affordability. This is the key to IKEA’s philosophy. The egalitarian mindset seduces me. ‘For us, price is the magic ingredient. It divides the indispensable from the unattainable. And so we embrace a third dimension of furniture design – an affordable price.‘

Of course price point is always part of a proper business plan, but the philosophy here is not what will the market bear but what will fill the market with lust. Overall the manifesto manages to inspire, educate, and explain (and advertise) all at the same time.

Though a friend recently commented that modern furniture now looks cheap because it all looks like IKEA.

And I must ask, is it too cheap, environmentally speaking? Furniture can be the sort of thing that lasts generations and yet the Billy might only last a few moves.

Update: they post quite a bit of info about them and the environment on their site.