Design
Alex Wright gave a talk based on his book down at Google and it’s probably the longest video I’ve ever watched with full attention start to finish on the web. The Web That Wasn’t is an accessible and inspiring series of biographical sketches of historical visionaries of the web and web-like constructions. Alex describes the visions and significance of Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and others who foresaw the current www (and more) over the past 100+ years. And, in so doing, he points out the ways the current web falls short of their various visions as well as describing the gestures in the current incarnation towards such things as two-way links, and visible trails through hypertext. Well done, Alex.
Matt’s closing keynote at reboot, Products Are People Too is easily my favorite idea bomb of the past 5 years. See also: Clifford Nass and, more disturbingly, this McLuhan quote:
…man in the normal use of technology…is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires….
Envelope and Letterfolding Techniques: “One of the “Holy Grails” of envelope and letter folding is to create a fold which not only latches, but can’t be unfolded—sealing it shut like a glued envelope. No one seems to have managed this feat, so far.” (via)
The Design Encyclopedia is the latest from Under Consideration. Think of it as Wikipedia for design with all the decentralized content-creation and hypertextual non-hierarchy that that implies. Still in Beta and obviously missing lots of obvious entries, this looks to be a great resource for anyone interested in design, though it will be interesting to see how TDC differentiates itself from Wikipedia (see, for example, the two sites’ entries for BIC: TDC, Wikipedia)
These Marcel Wanders components are a welcome ornate antidote to the relentless flaccid placid futurism of the Apple ID group. And the TV/microwave is a lovely bit of design art: now you can watch TV while you wait for your TV dinner to cook (so you can eat while you watch TV). Brilliant.
I think this Frog Design article on “dissonant designs” is pure hokum. People buy Bugaboo strollers for the same two reasons people buy any luxury item: one, they’re nicer than the average stroller (as in they feel good to push around… you know, that user experience thing all the kids are talking about); and two, they’re a status symbol. That’s it.
Oh, and, this bit on the Escalade is just patronizing hogwash:
Urban hip-hoppers now drive Cadillac Escalades because of the ironic twist they create by juxtaposing their cutting-edge culture with Cadillac’s stodgy, older brand image. Because the brand was not originally intended for them, driving Escalades enables them to poke fun at the brand’s old expectations. With the adoption of the Escalade as an urban icon, Cadillac’s brand has been rejuvenated after several decades of declining relevance.My guess is that “Urban hip-hoppers” (if you mean “black people” just say it) drive Escalades not because they’re ironic but precisely because they’re the classic American status symbol car. And they’ve been marketed at young urbanites from day one. Sorry to get so snippy, but this one got under my skin.
thoughtlessacts.com includes images from the book as well as letting visitors contribute their own photos.
“Groceteria.com is a site about supermarket history and architecture, roughly covering the period from the 1920s to the 1970s.”
This series of “future” apple products by Pentagram is surprisingly weak: a wireless iPod that lets you “remotely connect to… the music kept on [your] computer,” or the “wrist-worn iPod”? Er, didn’t Casio do that like 3 years a go or something? Apparently Pentagram is no IDEO when it comes to dreaming up crazy new products.
I was killing some time in the SFMoma store and picked up a copy of Thoughtless Acts, which is a sweet little book of photos documenting the ways humans interact with the designed world around them, from reacting to affordances to exploiting unforseen attributes and manipulating artifacts for their own ends. I bought the book because it highlights something missing for me in software design, the sense of being able to repurpose digital artifacts, design for creative (mis)use. There’s just so rarely that many things you can do with a web site’s controls (yes, jodi.org, blah, blah, but I’m not talking about making sculpture from a wire hanger, I’m talking about hanging your dry cleaning on the back of a chair, or even making a crack pipe from a car antenna). Anyhow, lovely synchronicity, here’s a perfect example from sxsw. So, now, how do we go about designing for this kind of thing. And, do we want to?
I can’t tell you how many (talented) designers I’ve met who talk breathlessly about the Fibonacci Sequence and corresponding Golden Ratio (or who like to use Golden Ratios in their designs without talking about them), but can’t explain what it is. It’s like they’ve been taught that it’s important (or harmonious or whatever), but never bothered to understand. Anyhow, Dean Allen has put together a concise, extremely clear explanation called What the Hell is the Fibonacci Series?. And he ends by pardoning those who use the ratio without grokking it: “I don’t know much about math, but I know what I like.”
designboom is an industrial design ezine with some actual honest-to-Clyde content, from recycling water bottles to profiles of some of my favorite designers. (thanks to andrew for the link)
On Ivrea’s new site: The seven virtues of the interaction designer. They are: pragmatism, audacity, lightness of touch, conviviality, quality, elegance, and friction.
What is the value of experience to a design project? Or, more specifically, how can the value of experience be described? I’ve thought of a few specifics: anticipation (the ability to see future problems earlier) and more efficient generation of solutions (based on previous work), but I imagine someone somewhere has analyzed experience with more rigor (and I don’t mean this). There are also probably drawbacks to experience (such as inflexibility of approach, hubris, etc). Any ideas?
I’d swear I posted this long ago, but can’t find it now. Anyhow, Why good design comes from bad design is a nice little piece about the need to leave space in your design process for failure. The author, Scott Berkun, quotes an industrial design student as saying “I don’t know what a good idea looks like until I’ve seen the bad ones.” The main point is that if you’re afraid to fail, it’s hard to succeed. I couldn’t agree more.
“Hey, Norman says it’s OK to be pretty….” Emotion and Design (via eh)
I don’t think I ever linked to either Bruce Mau’s Manifesto for Growth OR An Annotated Manifesto for Growth. Both worth reading.
Design aphorism of the day: Basing your design on the Fibonacci sequence is not the same thing as having a concept.
Alex Wright’s very thoughtful look at cost-justifying web design: Designing for the Bottom Line
Phil Agre has some good thoughts on airline security as a design problem: Red Rock Eater Digest—attack
Yet another Web Design Patterns collection, this one better than average. There’s also a list of HTML and accessibility validators. (via christina)
Andrew, a high-school classmate of mine with a useful-looking weblog, pointed me to Phil Agre’s absolutely worth-reading Notes on the New Design Space
More good resource lists, this time from Erin Malone:
Design, interface, and usability books and sites.
Back in town, but it’s gonna take me a while to catch up on all this “All your base are belong to us” crap and sort through all the INCREDIBLE OFFERs in my inbox. I feel so out of phase, but it’s good to remember that even old stuff (like this great NYTimes article on design) can be worthwhile.
So far, I’ve been pretty impressed with ONE. It carefully treads the appealing boundary between Wallpaper’s design pornography and the more straightlaced approach of ID or Blueprint (although the latter is still my fave). Check out the online version of Design Language, for example. Let’s just hope the revenue folks over there don’t turn it into amazon.com/design.
More pattern-languagey goodness: A Lingua Franca for Design (via info design).
More pattern-languagey goodness: A Lingua Franca for Design (via info design).
From Noise Between Stations, an Introduction to Pattern Languages for Technology Interaction Design (.doc file). A couple of interesting related links in the bibliography:
Any fan of Christopher Alexander will be intrigued by the Hypermedia Design Pattern Repository. This has a lot of potential, I think, but currently suffers from a lack of entries. Aside from quantity, the hard thing will be keeping structural integrity: Alexander’s A Pattern Language took about 10 years to pull together.
There should really be a book or better yet a website in the form of a web UI cookbook, with annotated recipes for common interface situations. For example, shopping cart and checkout interfaces. The “recipes” don’t have to be perfect, but it’s so damn useful to have a starting point. Why should we have to keep redesigning shopping carts and search results from scratch?