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Saturday, September 29, 2001
David Talbot's essay about Democracy is excellent, probably the best thing I've read so far during the last two weeks. It's frightening to feel one's sense of "unity" or "patriotism" taken hostage by pro-war, witch-hunting, reactionaries so thoroughly and successfully. Everyone should read what Susan Sontag wrote that got her severely critisized (scroll down to her short essay on this page).
Friday, September 28, 2001
The current issue of Loop and the current Digital Web cover user-experience and user-centered design. I've enjoyed articles out of Loop in the past, but this issue was a bit academic and tedious. Digital Web beats it hands down for actual useful information (also for readability and usability, btw). I hadn't heard of the web community Ozone Asylum before but it seems incredibly useful.
Tuesday, September 25, 2001
I've been reading through the AIGA Experience Design 2001 proceedings, which are extensive and mostly give good insight into various companies' methodologies. Interesting is the amount of work that's been done in promoting UCD processes and roles internally at places like Rare Medium. Erin Malone has written a good summary of the three day event which makes a good place to dive in to the various powerpoints and pdfs.
Monday, September 17, 2001
I hadn't been planning on posting more about political stuff here, but what the fuck is this.
Friday, September 14, 2001
Phil Agre's post on imagining the next war is gripping and quite frightening. His essay suggest that "war" as it's being defined, both technologically and politically, requires the most repressive conservative values cranked up to eleven.
Tuesday, September 11, 2001
No time to read it yet, but Loop issue 3 is out, all about user-centered design. The articles are often long and a little too academic at times, but Loop is always worth a read.
Sunday, September 09, 2001
Well, the AMD.com site has finally launched, almost a full year after we began work on it at Cyberplex. I see something of our work in there, and the honor has to go to Gina for keeping it on track. Overall, it's a quite difficult to navigate site, though, and it's a damn shame that the search functionality is so utterly crap (it's better to use Google to subsearch the site). It does look a bit nicer, though not consistently. Working on it made me really question the possibility of doing truly user-centered design for a huge international company with a deeply entrenched corporate structure and practices. It is almost unreasonable from a business perspective to expect them to really present themselves and their information from a purely customer-focussed perspective; they just cannot think that way, it would be too much of an overhaul. I think one key that's missing in the new site is a way for a user to quickly map themselves and their needs to the correct facet of the corporate structure, since that's literally the only way AMD can deal with them, as abhorrent as that sounds. There are places where that's not quite the case, as in channel sales, where AMD really treats their customers (salespeople) well, and tries to consider their needs. If you're wondering whether the Athlon is right for you, though, you won't be convinced by the site, which is a shame.
I think the right euphemism is "I sure learned a lot on that project!"
Whew! We made it to Berlin, and are enjoying our lovely, though temporary (2 months) apartment. We made it out to the far eastern end of the U-bahn line yesterday to see some of the old East Berlin suburbs, which are really pleasant semi-rural places, centered on a big lake with the requisite stops for coffee and cake placed every so often in the woods.
Our net acess is quite limited for now, so the pictures in the new digital camera will have to wait a little while. I wonder about what the real possibilities for getting some kind of job are here. I've optomisticly emailed frog and Meta here, possibly they will have me on as an intern; I know that the dot com crash here is about five or six months behind where it is at home, although there's less chicken-with-head-cut-off attitide about it than there was in Austin.
As soon as we get some more reliable net acess, there will be a Berlin blog...
