April 2004

  • 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?

  • 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…

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

  • 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…

  • 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

  • Beautiful looking and oddly nicknamed buildings going up in London.

  • 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.

  • 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…

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

  • 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?…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.