As constructed by Marc Rettig, beautiful and ghostly. ‘…On the wall, the Marina Towers. Upside down, of course, because we’re inside a camera…‘
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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.
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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.
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Doblin’s Short, Grandiose Theory
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
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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.”‘
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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.
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IA/ bigger, better, faster
IA/ moves to a faster server, upgrades Drupal, and sports a fresh new look.
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Worth while
Desperately seeking interesting business blogs to read, I came across Worthwhile, a group blog including authors David Weinberger and Tom Peters that strives to ‘put purpose and passion on the same plane as profit.‘ Amen. Also found An Entrepreneur’s Life with a sizable blogroll, and I’m off…
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eWeb Edit Pro, now with XHTML, Styles
Ahhhh, content management applications, those wonderful places where “business users” author text and where content smacks right into presentation, with the results falling short of peanut butter and chocolate. Inserting a WYSIWYG tool into the CMA – like eWeb Edit Pro was often the way to make editing easier but at the expense of clean, consistent, standards-based HTML. Now it not only supports XHTML, it supports styles too (admins can remove unwanted buttons like bold). Nice.
A similar product is editlet.
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IA Library Launches
The Asilomar Institute of Information Architecture today launched the IA Library. It’s a collection of faceted, searchable, juicy resources for your learning pleasure, 173 items strong and growing.
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Search Engine Edge Case
I want to find occurances of Hi! on the Internet, but the search engines’ syntax apparently don’t do that (they ignore the exclamation point, and you can’t force it like you can with plus signs on stop words). I’ll paypal you $1 if you can tell me within a day how to do this on Google or Yahoo!
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My Architect
Wow, a wonderful film. I had trouble imagining how a film from the point of view of the architect’s son would be interesting, but he intertwines the personal life and work of Louis Kahn remarkably well. If you go, bring tissues.
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Reid on Neruda
Saw Alastair Reid last night at 192 Books (a wonderful bookstore in my neighborhood that feels like a friend’s apartment with an amazing bookshelf). He spoke about his friendship with Pablo Neruda and read from the Chilean poet’s works. One story:
Neruda: When I married Matilda I promised I would write her 100 love sonnets. I’m still working on them.
Reid: Couldn’t you have said “50”?
Neruda: I wish I had!
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Jakob Appleseed
Sippey pokes fun at Jakob for stating the obvious (mobile phones are annoying), with findings Peterme revealed a while ago.
Just as the popular rags are now popularizing ideas that bloggers covered months and years ago, it seems like a person with Jakob’s noteriety could do the same just by mining the blogosphere.
