Noise Between Stations

Chris Fahey’s notes on visualizing social groups is applied to high schools, but would work nicely on orkut etc.

My RSS file is almost three times more popular than my blog page, which gets about 4300 requests a day, mostly from myself. In third place is my undergrad thesis on music censorship written over 12 years ago and which I originally posted just to have some content on my website. It’s included as a [...]

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.

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 [...]

I saved my pennies while sitting in one of these* so I could give myself a gift of back relief, a Life Chair. It costs as much as the Aeron and is at least as comfortable, if not more so. Rather than mounting a dark, mechanistic rig, the Life is visually lighter and seems to [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Dieter Rams: ‘I have distilled the essentials of my design philosophy into ten points.‘ Good design is innovative. Good design makes a product useful. Good design is aesthetic. Good design makes a product understandable. Good design is honest. Good design is unobtrusive. Good design is long-lasting. Good design is thorough down to the last detail. [...]

I spotted this two page spread in Forbes magazine. It’s IBM using a persona (“Lois”) to get companies to think about ‘customer centricity.’ It’s text heavy and superficial, but if it increases customer centricity than I’m all for it. Similarly, Brett Lider points to Microsoft’s MSN personas. They’d be denounced by Cooperites based on the [...]

Lot’s of link goodness over at http://www.informationdesign.org/.

The Content Management for Information Architects seminar promises to be the best one day line up of CMS knowledge anywhere. Where else can you see Boiko, Rockley, Byrne, and Busch all on one stage, all laying it down with IA as their focus? CMS is the future, girls and boys, I really don’t believe we’ll [...]

Nathan Shedroff’s New Methods for Designing Effective Experiences looks relatively new (October 2003?) and is a current overview of methods that is strongly resonating with me. In particular, he nails some shortcomings of traditional personas. IAs take note, he’s using the term taxonomy in the widest sense, not only in the LIS sense.

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

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 [...]

Matthew Clapp started ProjectCMS, a blog.