“Wombling”

Paul, who is director of technology where I work sent the article
below round the company this morning, with some comments about the Wombles –
creatures from 70’s children’s TV in the UK, who “made good use of the
things that they find, things which the everyday folk leave behind” .
Paul called the tech product in the article something that used ‘the wombling approach to engineering’. Made me think that wombling is not just confined to smart engineers and product designers, but the user community also wombles
– finds the best ways to use your system, backdoors, forgetten
features, and spreads them through the community… SMS was wombled…
amazon’s wishlists were wombled into blog-content… wombling is consumer-hacking…

How to successfully design for wombles? Structure your design and build
and learn and adapt processes to leave good things around then let the
community use them, evolve them…?? How do you make that into good
business sense in these non-experimental times?? I think you can, and
that’s the case I’m trying to figure out at the moment…

“Elegance is the key. It is only maybe once a year that we at Interface
see something so beautifully conceived. This is one of those times. If
engineering perfection is found when there is nothing left to be taken
away, then Dr Dror Lapidot and his Israel-based company Decell are as
close as they come.”

Cutting a path through the traffic – The Times

More on wombling…
Raster wombling? Is that when Orinoco had dreads during his ‘experimental’ late-teens?

Or is it something far more magical…?

“You tell me what constitutes an unusual event, and I will alert you if I see it.”

Words to live by.

Rather than being a 70’s gunfreak axe-hero , a ‘neugent’ is something else entirely. This news piece = neural networks for dummies. (me.)

vnunet.com Neural networks – the power of fuzzy thinking

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.

The Bandwidth Dilemma

“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

THE NEW FACE OF EUROPEAN SIGNAGE – Airport Magazine

“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.

What’s Old is New: The Web Goes Medieval

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.

November Linux For Suits Editorial: Let Freedom Ping

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.

Are Users Stupid? (Alertbox Feb. 2001)

“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.”

Dogma 2001: A Challenge to Game Designers

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?