August 2004
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A coffee education
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0 min read
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The challenge of the 21st century
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1 min read
Forty-nine countries have agreed to participate in a 10-year project to collect and share thousands of measurements of the Earth, ranging from weather to streamflow to ground tremors to air pollution with anticipated benefits ranging from weather forecasts to energy consumption estimates to predictions of disease outbreaks. As usual, it’s not the design of the…
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How do we actually achieve great design?
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2 min read
Organizations that have hired talented designers don’t always produce good designs. For those of us who are designers, there are many, sometimes frustrating reasons. For organizations, there is a complex interworking of goals, communications, organizations, processes, tools, and relationships that may or may not positively influence the quality of design. In the past ten years…
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Applying for an IA job
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1 min read
Michael lays out the advice very nicely.
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Drive + Mouse
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2 min read
IOGEAR put 64MB of RAM into a mouse. Now that’s smart convergence: take two devices that already plug into the same port and that you have to carry around with your laptop, and combine them, taking advantage of all that hollow space inside the mouse. There’s still a challenge to help customers form a mental…
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That Swatch commercial
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1 min read
Does anyone know which musician created the music for the new Swatch commercial? It’s gets me all dancy and stuff. Found it: It’s Five for Fighting’s Something About You (.wav) (iTunes). Whew.
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The High Line Redesign
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2 min read
There’s a vestigal bit of elevated railray called the High Line that runs through about 20 blocks of the far west side of Manhattan. A contest to turn it into a park has resulted in the selection of Field Operations and Diller, Scofidio & Renfro who proposed a mixture of concrete paths and gardens. I’ve…
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Elevators demand poems
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1 min read
The The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators, and Waiting Rooms is a compilation from the journal that asserts “reading is the last refuge from the real-time epidemic. To that end, the selections gathered here are grouped by how long they offer escape from real time: waiting rooms need long stories, for example, while…
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Better invoices
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1 min read
Kevin Potts has a short and sweet article about Better Invoices in the new ALA. Highlights of the doc format: The word Invoice Tax ID # All names and addresses Date the invoice was sent List of services with dates Terms (he has a good example showing carrots and sticks for timing, to which I…
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Interactionary
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1 min read
Jess has a new blog to share his big thoughts, bless his heart.
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The School Bag
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1 min read
After reading about Cory’s Prague-style bag I started to drool with lust at a beautiful, earthy, practical bag at such prices. Alas, they were out of the one I wanted and weren’t sure when the Czechs would be sending more. By chance I was walking down Greenwich St. and passed Joseph Hanna’s store. It’s one…
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Exposing Company-Customer Tension
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2 min read
Not long ago I wrote about balanced design, design that benefits both the company and the customer. There’s an evident tension between company and customer: companies want to do less, make more money, gather more information, etc. Customers want better products and services, spend less money, retain more privacy, etc. The two parties meet somewhere…