Structure and signs

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Lots of people have been linking to Peterme and Nathan Shedroff’s interview on Digitalweb, but it’s a really excellent primer for anyone involved in digital user-experience design in it’s broadest definition. Peter and Nathan are, as ever, very accessible and very quotable.

I’m planning to bash a lot of people over the head with this particular peterme-snippet:

“Navigation and information architecture are tightly related, though distinct. Think about a building. A building’s architecture refers to its structure, the placement of systems (wiring, plumbing, etc.), the placement and size of rooms, the means by which people will traverse space, etc. A building’s navigation (typically called “wayfinding”) is a system of signs and cues as to how to move within the space, to find the desired destination. The navigation is reliant on the architecture, but if the building were just rooms with unmarked doors, no one would know where anything is. The navigation adds a layer of information over the architecture, directing visitors to their desired goals.”

» Digitalweb: An interview with Peter Merholz and Nathan Shedroff on User-Centered Design

Saville wearies from the siege

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“If Saville’s look has remained constant, it’s probably because he’s allergic to the idea of design for design’s sake. ‘

‘We have a situation now where you want to clear the cultural space,” Saville says.

”Designing things is vulgar. That’s why I can’t be bothered doing it anymore, why I do it by special appointment only. Next year will be the 25th anniversary since I left college, and as far as I’m concerned, I’ll just take the gold watch and go. I don’t want to be like Phil Spector: ‘Hey, I have a great idea, let’s get that old guy.”’

» NYT: Peter Saville: Outstanding Alien [via daidala.com]

When social software research meets the creative commons…

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This is great – an entire book on trust, cooperation and social systems from the University of Oxford Dept. of Sociology has been made available for download: “Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, edited by Diego Gambetta.”

“The editor and contributors have decided that the book should be available to download free of charge. One of the original reasons for the volume was to try and understand the difficulties of developing economies, and we therefore feel that the volume should be accessible to scholars and students of less privileged countries. Given that we incurred some cost in producing the digital version, and would like to fund further electronic publishing, we would be grateful if those readers who find the volume of value (and can afford it) would send us a contribution of $10.”

Random, sample chapter headings:

  • The Biological Evolution of Cooperation and Trust: Patrick Bateson
  • Trust and political agency: John Dunn
  • Familiarity, Confidence, Trust: Problems and Alternatives: Niklas Luhmann

You get the picture.

» Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, edited by Diego Gambetta. [thanks Dan!]

Copyfight

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Matt Haughey reflects upon the Creative Commons, this being the first day of the Eldred vs Ashcroft case:

“If someday copyright was a different story, allowing people to use and reuse others’ works instead of letting them decay and rot until they someday enter the public domain (in many cases over 100 years after their creation), our culture could benefit greatly in ways we can’t possibly fathom today. The great promise of the internet was to house and make instantly available the entire scope of human knowledge. Without new works entering into the public domain, that knowledge is largely lost.”

» A wholelottanothing: Copyright and the Commons
 [via kottke]

The Former Audience = The Hiptop Nation

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Dan Gillmor’s prophesy comes one step closer: The Hiptop Nation…

“Take a few thousand people. Give them the ability to communicate wirelessly with a simple portable, always-connected device. Oh, and they have cameras too. Now give them a way to post words and pictures on a communal weblog quickly and easily, from wherever they happen to be. What happens?

Um, I don’t know the answer. But, it should be fun finding out. Welcome to Hiptop Nation. If you have a hiptop device (such as the Sideckick), then you have all you need to join in the fun here. Jump right in!”

Wow.

» HiptopNation: wireless blogging for the Hiptop masses

Mike has a sidekick.

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First up – go and bookmark Mike Lee’s blog. Brad’s right… He makes cool things.

Secondly, Mike got a sidekick/danger hiptop, and reports back on his out-of-the-box experience with it here.

I’d love to play with a hiptop, and have been reading mike’s experience’s testing one avidly. I’m a little worried about the everything-is-on-the-server model it follows though: more at JWZ’s livejournal.

Anyway – I’d still like to play with one (if anyone from Danger is reading!) – I think Mike’s hit on something when he says [my bold]:

“This device attempts to break the paradigm of a mobile communicator by exploring a hybrid form factor that is 60% wireless Internet interface and 40% cellphone with a tiny digital camera and games thrown in for fun. The design gets a lot of things right, and provides a tantalizing catalyst for imagining what’s possible in the next version.”

Instead of brandwank-led “emotional” strategies that look like nothing more than the fevered child of Dragonball-Z, the daisy age, most-shamelessly, the Apple “think different” campaign, wouldn’t marketing wireless, always-on IM be an instantly-graspable, easily-communicable differentiator for troubled 3g operators?

“Pre-fad” sprouts

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…from the 802.11b weblog of Glenn Fleishman. A neologism forged in response to an interesting Infoworld article about that chalk thing that made my summer less than relaxing:

“I think you’ve been taken in by the sheer quantity of articles that have made the case against warchalking without evaluating whether people are actually chalking much at all, and how they’re using it, and whether it’s even measurable.

Warchalking was what I like to call a “pre-fad”: it was taken over by the media before it was even spotted in the wild after a single person came up with the idea on his Web site. It’s cool, it’s fun, but it’s hardly what you made it out to be, I’m afraid.”

Heh.

» 802.11b/Wi-Fi News: News for 10/4/2002 [via BoingBoing]