The co-creator of Seinfeld, and star of “Curb your enthusiasm” as the latest, greatest interaction design guru? Well, sort-of…

On social software:

“David relishes everyday ambiguities, like the one that arose over the question of who would pay for the meal with the notable and his wife. ‘You know, if I don’t pick up that check, this guy’s never gonna talk to me again,’ he said. ‘And I’m not picking up the check, ’cause he invited me out to dinner!

‘Every relationship is just so tenuous and precarious,’ he went on. ‘One tiny miscommunication or mistake and it could be all over. I’m talking about siblings! A Thanksgiving thing that somehow goes wrong—bringing the wrong dish—all of a sudden, sisters aren’t talking after forty-five years!’

On ethnography, sort-of:

“He leafed through the notebook. ‘Most of the ideas stink,’ he said. ‘But you’d be surprised. See, a lot of these I’ll use, not as a big story but like a little piece of filler. And then all of a sudden it somehow leads into something.’

On interaction design, sort-of:

“When the time comes to begin writing the new season, David scans his notebook for possibilities. ‘He’ll go through the notebook and find three or four stories and extrapolate them to worst-case,’ Weide says. ‘He starts to weave them together. Sometimes you can brainstorm ideas with him—you can even pitch B stories to him. He’s used stories from Larry Charles and me. Cheryl got a story in there. And then he just sits down and sweats it out.'”

» The NewYorker: ANGRY MIDDLE-AGED MAN by James Kaplan
[via The LMG]

Does anyone reading own* good illustrative pictures of paper prototyping, either in progress (with sticky notes flying in anger) or end results; that they wouldn’t mind me using (with credit, of course) in a presentation?

Thanks!

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UPDATE: Thanks everyone!
I got some great suggestions and pictures, particularly from Marc Rettig. Thanks Marc -you’re a a life saver. The work is all finished and submitted ready for the tutorial session on Monday 9th.

The tutorial session is basically an overview of user-centred design and how it makes sense to use it on the sorts of projects that emerging tech geeks are working on.

It’s not aiming at designers, or insisting on a full-on UCD process, rather it’s along the lines of what you can do to think about the user experience of what you’re building, even if theres only one or two of you, and you only have a day or two to do something.

I’ve been characterising it to friends and fellow designers variously as “design eye for the geek guy”, “Ray Mears ultimate user-interface design survival tips” and “cheating at UCD” to their horror. I fully expect to be chased around Southern California by members of the AIGA with pitchforks. In reality it’s a primer for those who’ve not participated in a user-centred design process, with some tips / techniques that can be done quickly to whet the appetite and get some results.

I’m up against Raffi’s excellent sounding tutorial “Sampling the world”, and the song-singing at the sure-to-be-popular Emergent Democracy event (no-one from iCan, Stand or mysociety there? Anyone from Spiked or OpenDemocracy or VoxPolitics parachuting in to play devil’s advocate?) so perhaps there’ll only be a few folk there.

If you want a rest from your screen to play with paper protoypes, marker pens and post-it notes, then come along!

Just caught a report about a language of the Canary Islands called “Silbo” on BBCWorld.

From an AP story late last year:

“Juan Cabello takes pride in not using a cell phone or the Internet to communicate. Instead, he puckers up and whistles.

Cabello is a “silbador,” until recently a dying breed on tiny, mountainous La Gomera, one of Spain’s Canary Islands off West Africa. Like his father and grandfather before him, Cabello, 50, knows “Silbo Gomero,” a language that’s whistled, not spoken, and can be heard more than two miles away.”

» UK Indymedia/AP: Ancient ‘Whistling Language’ Facing a Revival

More at BBC News Online:

“It’s practically a language in itself – just like Castilian Spanish – but it relies on tones rather than vowels and consonants,” Dr Rivero stated.

“The tones are whispered at different frequencies, using Spanish grammar. If we spoke English here, we’d use an English structure for whistling.

“It’s not just disjointed words – it flows, and you can have a proper conversation.”

Is Silbo just learned by doing, or has it got a notation that allows it to be recorded, passed-on and reproduced? Silbo doesn’t seem to feature in the Ethnologue – a catalogue of the 6,800 or so living languages on the planet. I wonder if there are other sung, whistled or signed languages which are not recorded.

and hermeneutics. Off to bed now because my head hurts.

• Heidegger brings hermeneutics from a theory of interpretation to a theory of existential understanding.
• He argued that it was impossible for an interpreter to fully empathise with an author.
• We continually develop and refine personal rules based on experience to help them navigate the world.
• If we didn’t , we’d have to think objectively about situations all the time and this is enough to make anyone go back to bed for a year.
• Sadly, the more we develop these rules, and the more experience we have, the harder it is to see something objectively.

This might be a stretch, but this reminded me a lot of the mental models designers and user-researchers attribute to people in their interaction with products or services.

I’m interested in how mental-models change with experience; and whether they are cumulative and crufty over a lifetime, or ‘paradigmic’ and can be disrupted by new technologies or social norms. I suspect the latter; and I’m sure someone can fill me in…

» Monkeymagic: Hermeneutics and how to interpret – I

*”Have a good new year!” in Welsh.

Just been down to Senate Square with Foe for fireworks and brassbands; after mucking around with sparklers and melting tin horseshoes in the kitchen. Foe took the picture above where I’m vibrating my face at supersonic speeds to protect my secret identity.

Wherever you are, have a great NYE.

—
Bonus link: Tips on taking photos of fireworks with digital cameras.

Optimus Claus says “Happy Newtonmas one and all, and don’t forget to tune in on December 25th to watch my distant relative, Beagle2, land on Mars!!!”

I will be glued to my telly on that morning… hope it’s going to be shown live. Have a lovely holiday, and see you back here in 2004.

For various reasons, after an interval of several years, I decided to install and try using TheBrain.

I found it broadly-inuitive in use and it required a minimum effort on my part to start to create quite dense, useful mesh of topics that have been floating around in my head. It also felt like I was creating.

It made me think, in a way that I was thinking about the ideas, their content and context; without having to think about the tool itself.

I still find myself thinking too much about formatting and markup when I am using a wiki, which I guess is my nearest comparable experience.

So far so good.

However, After my first wonderful five minutes, I wanted to share the notes with a colleague.

I have been trying to do this on-and-off for an hour and still have no idea how to do this.

Both the application and online help don’t seem to have anything more useful than telling you how to save ‘individual thoughts’ in the jargon of TheBrain (and the help is full of servicemarked terms and jargon, pretty unhelpful to dive straight into without buying all of their marketing talk from the top) – not how you could share or save the aggregate of those thoughts, which is surely the real value that the program has helped create. Nope. It’s all frustratingly locked-up it seems.

To be clear, I want to save a specific ‘node’ and it’s related child nodes in a format that will represent this well (Outliner-type format I guess) and share it with someone else who does not own a copy of TheBrain.

If anybody knows how to do this I’d be very grateful if they’d let me know

An aside – this experience reminds me how using ‘office’ IT, computers and applications used to feel pre-web/Win3.1.

The work I did in each was silo’d and separated, for you to save or more likely print in order to share or compare with work done in another application; especially between things like AutoCAD, WordPerfect and Excel – which were perhaps at the time seen as programs for very different users.

And the seagulls, and the crows…

This is the inlet about 2 minutes from my place in Helsinki. It was about -1 degree celsius this afternoon. With the exception of a few duck-inhabited zones, it was all iced over.

Only by a few millimetres but enough to support the odd strutting seagull.

• Perhaps this could get internationalised by some enterprising and altrustic souls: Penny Arcade sets up a wishlist to buy games for kids in a Seattle hospital for Christmas. Found at GameGirlAdvance.
• More gaming: GAME ON is in Helsinki.
• Ben found an Umberto Eco essay that I’ve been reading on the number 8 tram.
• Foe saw a presentation by Alex Taylor on possible next-generation mobile phone use by teenagers.
• Bonkers, but fantastic essaylet by Webb.
• I bought a Roomba… It arrives today…
• Just discovered ex-colleague Neil Clavin’s blog, OpenContainer. As I’d expect from Neil – a non-formulaic but extremely effective design… and some nice takes: like this comparison of Future Systems architecture with extradimensional monsters from the mind of Alan Moore.
• Foe on how Skype changes what a phone-call can be: a channel for audio-glancing.
• I got a Nokia 6600
• According to a comment right at the bottom on this post, a BBC design document I published on this site and got asked to take down by the PR/marketing department shortly before I left, is now apparently available on Kazaa’s p2p network…

Sometimes why I moved here makes perfect sense.