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Tuesday, April 30, 2002
I'm back from giving two days of lectures on IA in Sweden at HyperIsland, a very cool small design school. Thanks to my friend Zac for hooking me up with them! I had planned on about 30 students, and a total of about 8 hours of lectures, exercies, and discussion. Unfortunately, I arrived at the end of one of the semesters, so students had stayed up all night working on projects, and had had two lectures the day before. Needless to say, turnout was lower than I'd hoped. I hope I can go back next semester though!
Cities of Text is a great essay (via Peter Morville's IA course syllabus) about Intranets and urban planning from 1997. It's dated in a a few ways, but it's really insightful and funny, definately worth a look.
Friday, April 26, 2002
Kottke must have been tickled to think up this line (in the last sentence of the post).
Today I'm sitting in the Hyper Island School of New Media Design in Karlskrona, Sweden getting ready to give a lecture tonight and a workshop tomorrow. It's sunny and gorgeous here, I wish I were outside.
Friday, April 19, 2002
This might not be of much interest to others, but I'll link it anyway: Journeyman: Getting Into and Out of Academe is Alex Soojung-Kim Pang's thoughtful and readable (and long) essay about his decision to get a PhD, and then to leave academia for other kinds of jobs. I have an MA in Art History, and I encourage people not to go to graduate school in the Humanities. I really feel that universities do a huge disservice to students by training them only to be professors in their fields at other universities. (Short version: don't even think about it unless you have a completely free ride, including living expenses, for the entire grad school experience. If a unversity isn't giving you money the whole time, then they're giving it to your peers who they think are better investments.)
In my experience, there's essentially no encouragement or interest in encouraging graduate students to take their skills and knowledge into any other profession. Instead, students are expected to count on finding teaching positions, a job which is essentially non-existant in most fields, and get no experience doing any other kind of work. Ok, there might be ten openings for medieval historians in a year for, what, hundreds of new PhDs every year in the US?
Thursday, April 18, 2002
Did you know how dangerous the Back button is? Stunning. Why not just say "being in the presence of Internet Explorer opens a user's computer to maclicious code."
Wednesday, April 17, 2002
Tim O'Reilly's piece today reprints a letter he got from Grady Booch, who is asking people in the computer industry to help him preserve classic software. Booch says that "...the code and designs that these executables manifest tell us much about the state of the software practice, the minds of their inventors, and the technical, social, and economic forces that shaped these products in their time." I certainly agree; as an ex-art historian I believe that even highly formalized texts (whether written, visual, or performed) can reveal a lot about "technical, social, and economic forces."
I wonder if it's possible to do an analysis of software source code--the actual written stuff--in order to do a social history of software? People like Stephen Johnson have done social histories of GUIs, and Neal Stephenson's 'In the beginning was the command line..." is a great historical examination of interfaces (and operating systems). But I wonder if one could actually get at the code itself and go further? For example, what specifically constitues 'elegance' in software writing, and how have ideas about 'elegant code' changed over the years? What external, contextual factors influenced those changing beliefs? Everyone says that programmers have distinct styles of coding, but has anyone ever done a stylistic analysis of source code? I'm thinking of something like John Lions' 'literary analysis of Unix source code, but with more stylistic analysis than that Salon article implies is in Lions' work.
Anyone got any links or ideas about this?
Tuesday, April 16, 2002
I just realized that I spend virtually all my day in Microsoft products. I've finally ditched Eudora for the surprisingly good Entourage, and of course IE and Word are open pretty much all day long. I'm actually really enjoying the integration between them, like Entourage knows about all your open IE windows, so if you want to insert a URL, you can choose from current windows, your IE bookmarks, or your history. I drank the Kool-aid and I'm loving it.
Monday, April 15, 2002
It's been a while since I saw any good Flash-based generative abstract art sites like onModular. If you can figure it out, you're way ahead of me, but that thing sure is cool. I wonder if this is one of those things that actually looks complex but is actually very simple? No, probably not.
Yeah, um... can the person responsible for cloning the Doors of Perception conference three different ways please start letting me know? Here's < a href="http://www.numer.org/2002/english/numer02/index.html">another conference (in Paris) that's awfully similar to the Design Recast conference I just missed, and to the DIS 2002 conference which seems to want a rather lot of money to go.
Wednesday, April 10, 2002
Zac and I built our first iMode site yesterday: the DEFCOM Computer Legends site. Two hours of design in the bar on Monday night, and about 10 hours of old-sckool HTML 1.0 code written yesterday. It looks dumb in a browser of course, but on an iMode phone, you can almost taste the future of wireless content!
Actually I think our site is better than most of the other German or English sites we looked at. It has real content: 32 fact cards about classic computers, a little quiz about them, and a way to order a set of Computer Legends trading cards.
Still, my brief experience with iMode phones was horrendous. I've never seen anything so frickin' hard to use! The keypad doesn't behave like other mobile phones (especially when entering punctuation), changing preferences in the phone forces you to wade through 10 or 15 animated icons, and everything you do requires lots and lots of button presses. When you load a new page, you have to stare at a full-screen "loading" icon, for pete's sake. Five minutes after picking it up, I knew I didn't ever want to use it again.
Here's a thought: HTML is a bad format for this thing. How much better would a compact binary file type (like, hmmm..., Flash?) be for iMode? It would give you slightly more control over what sites look like, as opposed to using the deprecated HTML developers forgot two years ago. It would do away with the annoying page-loading icon, and since the developer can be smart about content preloading and caching, it would reduce the waiting associated with screen scrolling.
Plus the fact that no one will want iModes for what they're good at: sending cute stupid crap to other iMode phones. Adam Greenfield wrote about this problem at V-2.
Of course, if any clients wants to pay for a lovely, cool, exciting, iMode site, I wouldn't say no. If some VC wants to dump some cash into this thing, I'll cash my paychecks. It is the future of the internet, after all.
Monday, April 08, 2002
Fuck fuck fuck this low-income thing is annoying. I decided not to go to a free conference in Maastricht because it just didn't seem like I should spend 450Euros to get myself there. And I couldn't possibly justify $650 to attend CHI-DIS in London (which would be the cheapest part of three days in London).
Speaking of conferences, Blur 02 looks really interesting.
Thursday, April 04, 2002
Despite that new desk chair I mentioned last week, there's not much else that's good news at work. Today we had "the talk": the one where even though it's going on in German, I could read the expressions of everyone in the room. Has anyone else noticed that it's kind of hard to find clients these days? And that small design studios are hard to keep running? I'm just hoping that they can keep paying my tiny compensation (I think they dig behind the couch cushions once a month) for another six weeks until my project's done.
