Noise Between Stations

Month: April 2004

  • Where are they now

    A former student wrote to say she’s working as a ‘web planner’ (‘IA is not a general term‘) in Korea, and helped design www.kbs.co.kr, the national broadcasting service of Korea. ‘Someday I hope to meet you as your student also as a IA.‘ How sweet is that?

  • Dreyfuss Mobile Phone

    You know what would be great? If someone created a mobile phone in the shape of Henry Dreyfuss’s classic 500 Series handset (not the whole phone, just the handset)…

    Yes, it’s rather large, but this could be used to our advantage. The space between the receiver and transmitter could hold a PDA…

    Riffing with Liz at work, we thought perhaps it’s part of a woman’s handbag. The phone clicks into the bag to become the handle. Click out to use the phone, and carry the bag with a shoulder strap. Might look great on a black Prada…

    I’m rather fond of this design, having had a 554 on the kitchen wall growing up.

    Postscript: Owen also cites the ability to hold this between ear and shoulder as well as not appearing crazy while walking down the street handsfree and in monolog. Even better, he points to a brilliant hack, simply wiring the handset to plug into the mobile’s headphone jack. That led me to more examples. And even if you think this is all rather silly, they offer a designer-friendly view of the future: ‘The phone accessory will very soon take over from the phone itself as the wearable part of the device. …people [will] leave their tiny phones out of sight whilst their low cost / highly expressive handsets will worn as any other fashion devices. It will also allow designers to produce handsets without the need for heavy technological insight or investment.‘

  • Review of Idea Apps

    Kiran Max Weber does a nice job overviewing some apps for recording ideas, many on Mac OS X.

  • Persuasion and the authority approach

    Scoble has a good post on persuading through authority and not through bias. ‘Then I got to the Ford dealer. First off, he admitted that Ford had had a quality problem in the past… If he had tried to play the “my stuff is the best and the rest is crap” line, he probably would have lost the sale. Instead, he played “I’m an authority and I’m looking out for your best interests” and that hooked me. He got the sale.‘ Basically it’s about being honest, offering overwhelmingly good service, and not bashing the competition.

    Some interesting comments there too, including a link to Stanford’s new Captology blog featuring BJ Fogg et al.

  • Brooklyn Design Expo

    Brooklyn Designs 2004 will feature designers and manufacturers of contemporary furnishings that include: furniture, lighting, linens, rugs, and decorative accessories for home, office and garden. In DUMBO from April 30 – May 2. $10

  • The Gherkin and the Shard of Glass

    Beautiful looking and oddly nicknamed buildings going up in London.

  • Recently: search method, mouse design, design theory, and web genres

    Seeds of a search method, marsupial mice named Joey, design theory from Doblin, and the golden genres of the web.

  • 23rd St. CSS

    If you’d like to see my background art without all this useless text obscuring it, use this blank HTML page and hit reload repeatedly.

  • Survey of Web Genres

    Peterme points to Kevin Crowston‘s Reproduced and emergent genres of communication on the World-Wide Web which is — and I’m not exaggerating here — design gold. It really is. It relates to work by researchers such as Dillon and Toms on information shape and genre that I summarized in my navigation research paper (.pdf). The argument, put simply, is that if we format information using familiar genres, the familiar information structure of those genres can become more intuitable navigation (intuitive, of course, equals familiar).

    What Crowston has done is survey and document all those genres. So the step I describe of “formatting information in familiar genres when possible” becomes easier when we have a list of common genres. Then you just need to figure out which genres your audience recognizes.

  • Hotel Room Camera Obscura

    As constructed by Marc Rettig, beautiful and ghostly. ‘…On the wall, the Marina Towers. Upside down, of course, because we’re inside a camera…‘

  • MBA POV on Design

    John Byrne points to University of Toronto’s School of Management’s alumni mag issue on design (.pdf), with a few insightful articles.

  • Google Gaga

    Sippey comments on the Google IPO hype, exactly what I was thinking about this morning. Yesterday I came across it in the New York Times, the Nightly Business Report, and NPR. This morning it was in the Wall St. Journal. I wonder if they all feel they got the story, or if they’ve been duped? ‘Deciding whether to IPO‘ my ass, if Google took money from Kleiner Perkins they will IPO, the hype is just spreading the word, building excitement, and raising the eventual price. Google is spinning the media like a top.

  • Doblin’s Short, Grandiose Theory

    Empire State lit up white, at night

    Thanks to Zap — who invited me to a panel on design methods (.ppt) at the IA Summit — I finally got my hands on a copy of Jay Doblin’s A Short, Grandiose Theory of Design, an article from the 1987 STA Design Journal. In its seven pages Doblin presents a straightforward and persuasive argument for design as a systematic process. Quick notes:

    • For large, complex projects, it ‘would be irresponsible to attempt them without analytical methods.‘ He cites the existence of a too-common ‘adolescent reliance on overly intuitive practices.‘
    • He contrasts direct design in which a craftsperson works on the artifact to indirect design in which a design first creates a representation of the artifact, separating design from production in more complex situations.
    • He outlines a generic process of design: STATE 1 -> ANALYSIS -> GENESIS -> SYNTHESIS -> STATE 2
    • Analysis is deciding what is relevant, then detailing and structuring it
    • Genesis is expressing the concept, what Terry Swack used to call expressing the intended user experience. In some ways it is model building.
    • He demonstrates using a 2×3 matrix of performance/appearance vs. products/unisystems/multisystems (increasingly complex artifacts or combinations of artifacts).
    • In the end, he brings it back to a focus on business, reminding us the core issue is to compete effectively

  • 10 Classics from Cognitive Science

    PeterV links to 10 Classics from Cognitive Science, several of which look applicable to digital design. And there’s this one that is just darn cool: ‘Do systems larger than single individuals qualify as “cognitive?” In this article, Hutchins argued that they do. He supported his claim by analyzing remembering by commercial airline cockpits, considered as cognitive systems. He proposed “that rather than trying to map the findings of cognitive psychological studies of individuals directly onto the individual pilots in the cockpit, we should map the conceptualization of the cognitive system onto a new unit of analysis: the cockpit as a whole.”‘

  • Photo rights

    The UK — including its infamous yellow press — is pissed about CBS showing pics of Princess Diana’s dead body, while the US is pissed about the release of images of war coffins. The irony is unbearable.