Now I realise why he’s so keen on going to other planets:
“The extended human presence on the Moon will enable astronauts to develop new technologies and harness the Moon’s abundant resources to allow manned exploration of more challenging environments.”
There’s oil in them thar craters!
» President Bush Announces New Vision for Space Exploration Program
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!
—-
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!
…the reaction of a 3 year old kid who has never known linear, broadcast TV on encountering a Tivo-less household. Via Clegg, Martin, and Foe who have more commentary.
My reaction to having to give away my Tivo (on moving to Finland) has not been to go back to watching linear TV – and not because there isn’t any to watch. We have cable here, and there is plenty of english language with finnish subtitled programming.
I watch DVDs and play games on the TV in the living room, almost exclusively; and listen to a lot of internet radio on our various PCs. Watching my favourite TV series on my PC that I’ve acquired from p2p networks such as bittorrent is of dubious legality, so of course I don’t do that at all.
Radio has taken the place of the TV for unscheduled, ambient enjoyment. Radio 4 and 6music are left on most of the day; with some shows played on-demand, such as The Blue Room (seek out Skeewiff – ‘Skeewiff Where Art Thou’ [realmedia sample]), Late Junction and “Thinking Allowed”.
Unless you are still watching a broken TV, what is your A/V media mix?
The BBC News “On this day” site reveals that today is the anniversary of the first award of degrees from the UK’s Open University.
Growing up in the 1970’s, there were often OU programmes sandwiched into TV schedules, juxtaposed against childrens programming usually. Kids would get theoretical physics with their Fingerbobs. The awe-inspiring theme of the OU [Divertimento for Brass Sextet, by Leonard Salzedo, apparently] was a portent of the strange and new to me.
I remember scrawling green felt-tip nonsense pseudo-equations on the frontispieces of our family dictionary, after watching some OU Maths programme where I really liked what the grown-ups were drawing.
More on this golden age at the ever-excellent tv.cream.org [scroll down about 3/4s], with plenty about one of my childhood heroes, the estimable Dr. Stuart Freake, who to this day still fights the good fight for the public understanding of physics.
I’d still like to get my green pen out, maybe for courses such as AT308 Cities and Technology: from Babylon to Singapore:
“The course examines not only how towns and cities have been shaped by applications of technology, but also how such applications have been influenced by politics, economics, culture and the natural environment. The study ranges from pre-industrial mud-brick settlements of the Near East, through the influence of industrialization on cities as diverse as Manchester and Moscow, to today’s ‘wired’ cities. In your examination of the applications of the main technologies – building construction, transport systems, energy sources, communications – you will develop critical skills, such as comparative analysis and the evaluation of explanatory models of urban development.”
A snip at 450 GBP!
More “Why starfleet?” evidence from Michael Benson in The Atlantic Monthly:
“In the evenings, when my particular piece of Earth has turned away from the Sun, and is exposed instead to the rest of the cosmos, I sit in front of a keyboard, log on, and seek out the windows that look down at the planets and out at the stars. It’s a markedly different experience from looking at reproductions on paper. What I see is closer to the source. In fact, it’s indistinguishable from the source.”
Found via John Naughton who remarks:
“Beautiful essay by Michael Benson in The Atlantic which brilliantly captures the sense of awe and wonder about the Net that first prompted me to write my book.”
It seems it is the “awe and wonder about the Net” and the infinities of cybernetic inner space rather than outer space that have caught our imagination.
On BBC Radio 4’s excellent “Thinking Allowed”, this replacement of the exploration of outer space with the introspection and interconnections of inner space in the zeitgiest was recently discussed.
Next week, it looks like Dubya is going to try and make us flip our focus to look “out there” again. Why him! Gah.
Whether it’s stories of inner or outer space, the goal is the same. “Awe and wonder” at the immense.
Whether it’s the dark infinity of The Matrix or The Filth, or the cumbyas of “emergent democracy” and “The second superpower”. The Moon or Mars.
Gaston Bachelard, from an article by Giles Foden:
“Immensity is a philosophical category of daydream. Daydream undoubtedly feeds on all kinds of sights, but through a sort of natural inclination, it contemplates grandeur. And this contemplation produces an attitude that is so special, an inner state that is so unlike any other, that the daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.”
I’m a trillion dollar sucker for it – are you?
Tim Oren [my emboldening]:
“Having spent some years working with unstructured text and hypertext databases, I’m willing to suggest that the core notion of semiotics is in fact a useful engineering maxim, a True Theory of how humans behave in the context of symbolic systems.
Like the laws of thermodynamics in energy systems, semiotics proposes a hard limit to the efficiency of any situation involving externalized representations of human thought.
You can process character strings or other computational representations as long as you want, but just as the map is not the territory, the symbol is not the thought of its author, nor the thought elicited in an eventual reader. Even if all the ambiguity inherent in messy languages like English were eliminated, this would remain.
I like the idea of saying to a client: “you’re looking at the blueprints of a graphical machine with estimated 98.8% semiotic efficiency, and the only exhaust products are a small stream of delighted sighs, quite harmless to the information environment”
» Tim Oren/Due Diligence: Metadata, Semiotics, and the Tower of Babel
—-
See also, “Semiotics: a primer for designers” on boxesandarrows.com. Umberto raps: “Don’t be idiotic! Study semiotics!”
Event at the Tate Modern [via RodCorp]:
“The Institute for Meteorological Mediation is part of Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project. The Institute consists of three sessions on the relationships between society, space and nature, and how they are currently being transformed both theoretically and by technological and environmental changes in the world. Each session features a keynote presentation by a major theorist whose work bridges art and science, followed by discussions involving Olafur Eliasson* and Doreen Massey (Professor of Geography at the Open University)”
” The keynote speaker for the first of the three sessions is Manuel DeLanda – a New York based philosopher and science writer with an exceptionally cross-disciplinary body of work. His publications include War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, One Thousand Years of Non-Linear History and Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy.”
* Olafur Eliasson being the artist behind The Weather Project.
Unfortunately, it looks like I will have to settle for the webcast. This sounds interesting too – an artist who re-draws maps from memory.
on…
well… not rock and roll it seems. This from the online prospectus for a course by the London Consortium MRes/Phd course: “Shit and civilization: our ambivalent relationship to ordure in the city, culture and the psyche”:
“Our societies are, quite literally, founded on shit. Civilization means living in cities and cities are confronted, in a way more dispersed settlements are not, with heaps of garbage and ordure.
The course brings together two distinct disciplinary registers, architecture and the analysis of the built environment, and anthropology and psychoanalysis, to show this ambivalence. Thus the phenomena of the built environment and the cultural rules and psychical formations that seek to contain the pollution of matter out of place will be examined together. Shit in contemporary art and film will also be considered in the course.”
Petafloptimism 