Even [lead]better than the real thing?
.dotcom backlash-backlash at cryptome.org:
What Leadbeater is pushing is what we may call New Voluntarism. Forget
the hackers story of Internet rooted in military/academic informatics.
Internet was born out of the Will to eBusiness. Shopping and
entertainment are the true nature of humankind. They are the one and
only source, engine and destiny of the Net.
“It’s insane to build a Web site for someone you never met.”
Written from a marketing perspective but a good concise justifiction
for user-research and design-particpation in new product development.
Methinks it could be useful in certain client situations… thanks Neil for pointing me to it.
ClickZ : eMarketing Strategy : The Right Time for Research: The Beginning
A cluttered sign is a bad sign
Article on the philosophy behind Manchester airports’ signage systems – thanks to Luke Scheybeler
“I didn’t know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective”
This from Cheskin:
Modernity, worldwide, essentially meant the freedom of communities from
aristocratic exploitation. This meant that the real money was to be
made by members of the community. The rapid emergence of P-to-P may be
the opening salvo in the virtual war to liberate communities from the
oppression of the overlords who want a piece of every transaction.
Point. Counterpoint.
After reading more about the Thomas Frank book, ‘One market under God’, here’s a counterpoint from Doc Searls.
Consumers and workers are rhetorical relics. The Net is uniting both,
and they’re throwing off their chains. Industrial communism and
capitalism are both terminal. They can’t survive in a networked
marketplace, where We the People means exactly what it says.
I’m with stupid
Over at the secret headquarters of the Neilsen/Norman Group, the
dogmatic duo have been getting in a flap about the backlash against
their packaged common sense.
Article in web design press here recently deliberately setting Jakob
against pimply pixel-art obsessed flashturbators for instance. He’s a
dogmatist, and annoying, but bless him, at least he can hold a cogent,
vaguely scholarly argument. Which is more than most ‘web-designers’ can
these days.
Here, Jakob answers the latest accusation levelled
against good design practice – that usable design reduces everything to
it’s lowest common denominator and that the perpetrat^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
– i mean practitioners of high design are actually spurring the
progress of human evolution with their 45 degree corners and 5 point
bitmapped text that slides-around-a-bit.
I think maybe:
[a] staring at a website is not the most desirable use of most people’s time.*
[b] therefore we click in haste and repent in leisure
[c] therefore we are all stupid sometimes
[d] so…. think a little.
* this is often cited as the ‘why don’t you’ position.
You’ll be receiving my invoice in the morning. In other neilsennews
– Jakob now seems to think that it’s a ‘usability movement’. Well, armed revolution may be the only solution.
“Technology Stifles Creativity “
Found via robotwisdom – I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before someone writes a digital media/web version…:
“Designers spend far too much time trying to figure out how to take
advantage of new machinery, adding gratuitous features just to exercise
the hardware. Even though implementing the technology is the business
of programmers, not designers, it still consumes attention that the
designer should be spending on the game’s world, rules and behaviour.”
So I was on the train back from Cardiff
And I wrote a poem about designing evolutionary architectures… I promise my next post will be less self-indulgent.
Confluences,
coincidences,
crossings,are what
cities grow around.Roads are found
before signs are made.Books are not
written
to fit-in
the Dewey Decimal system.Why are you designing
the wrong-way up?
Petafloptimism 
