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Tuesday, August 27, 2002
Via the cool city of sound blog, a link to Tom Moran's DIS2002 presentation. Damn, another thing I wish I'd seen at the absurdly overpriced DIS this year. Moran discusses "Adaptive Design", a sort of bottom-up, vernacular, make-do approach to design that everyone does all the time: making new folders in an email client for example. In particular his identification of four facets of design: Usefulness, Reliabilty, Usability, and Delight. I liked Moran's thing a lot (as much as one can enjoy a powerpoint reduction of a talk), and it dovetails nicely with one of my favorites, Cites of Text about the "urban planning" of intranets and other interactive infrastructures.
I'll be in London doing usability testing from 8/29 to 9/05. Any London IAs or others free to get together some evening? Drop me a note.
Very interesting report on the Open Source UI development efforts with Mozilla: Ten Lessons Learned from Netscape's Flirtation with Open Source UI Development (via JoelonSoftware. Oddly enough, it sounds a lot like regular smaller-scale, closed-source projects. From Lesson 1: "Due to impossible time constraints, an explicit design phase was largely skipped (along with requirements gathering and functional specification)." Hmm, that sounds like the reason I just turned down a recent short job even though I have the time and need the money. Lesson 2: "Identify intended target users, build the product for them, not us." Sounding familiar yet?
Monday, August 26, 2002
If you act fast, you can still register for the early-bird deadline of the Doors of Perception conference happening this November 14-16. Doors was kind enough to give me a scholarship this year (thanks, worldwide recession!), but I'd reccommend the conference even if I had to pay to attend. The theme this year is "Flow: the design challenge of pervasive computing." The last two that I attended were on the themes "Play" and "Lightness", the first basically about gaming and game design, and the second about environmental design. Doors is unlike any other conference I've attended: there's always an amazing lineup of speakers and performers, architects, designers, academics, and surprise gems like piano tuners talking about their craft. Out of two conferences, I think there was one person (Gary van Patter from Scient at the height of their arrogant rise), who lectured about his company and how great they were; he was very nearly booed off the stage. You won't find any of the "Micropayments from Webcam Sites" or "Famous Flash Designers Bashing Interfaces that aren't Cool Enough" junk that you snuck out of at SXSW, either. Take a look at the site for this year's conference, and the listing of speakers. Two of the best from last time, Malcolm McCullough and Natalie Jeremijenko are back again this year. Doors is design in the broadest and most exciting sense, and I expect that it would be really appealing to most IAs and interactive designers.(And the closing party is always great.)
Wednesday, August 14, 2002
In my previous life, I was a grad student in art history at UT Austin. I've been meaning to get around to putting my old papers and MA thesis online now since about 1998 (sorry, just never got around to it). But here they are. This is really just a link so that Google will find the pages eventually.
Wednesday, August 07, 2002
It's a strange thing to see a piece of my resume show up at Webword, and some comments by Stefan already there when I found it.
