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Ho boy… can’t wait to give this puppy a try on my iBook. Panic continues to release cool stuff. The way they balance features with simplicity is inspiring.
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Porter takes a look at The Economist’s piece on how social networking is becoming more popular than porn on the web. So we’re going from smut to chatter. Porter also predicts that the next step in social networking is subject specific sites.
Month: April 2007
Web of data — third of five IA Summit 2007 themes
(Here’s the third post on the 2007 IA Summit. You can find the first one that introduces the series and describes the first theme ‘tangible’ here and the second one on ‘social’ here.)
Typically, IAs have concerned themselves with the design of web sites. The metaphor most suited and used for the web so far has been space. Even the term ‘information architecture’ points to this. Nowadays, besides having to tackle the social dimension (as per the previous trend mentioned) IAs are forced to rethink the spatial metaphor in favour of a new one: the web as platform. This means designing for a web of data, where sites become data sources and tools to view and manipulate that data. This is a far cry from the old hierarchical model. Like design for social software, IAs are still exploring this new territory.
There was an excellent panel on this subject (notes and audio at The Chicken Test), with amongst others Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph (both previously employed by the BBC). Coates’ presentations (Native to a Web of Data and Greater than the sum of its parts) are essential resources. He gave a super short overview of what designing for the web of data is all about. Matt went beyond screen based media into the realm of physical computing (see the first trend) showing some cool examples of Arduino prototypes feeding into Second Life.
Jared Spool talked about the usability challenges of web 2.0 and focussed on (among many things) the shortcomings of RSS and the dangers of mash-ups. RSS as a technology is pretty cool, but no normal user intuitively understands its application. This is a technology still looking for a killer app. Mash-ups are typically made by enthusiastic amateurs looking to combine available data sources or interfaces. This means we’ll see a wave of sites with serious usability issues. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing per se, but still something to look out for.
links for 2007-04-24
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Garrett describes a neat trick Adaptive Path uses to get as many designers involved on projects as possible without it dissolving into chaos.
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Coates discovers a hidden ‘feature’ of iPhoto that allows you to free up considerable amounts of disk space.
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Greenfield mercilessly criticizes Maeda’s book. Scratch that one off my wishlist…
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Rosenfeld’s checklist of useful research documentation to ask of clients.
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One of the coolest projects to come out of the Utrecht School of Arts EMMA program for some time gets some much deserved exposure.
Social — second of five IA Summit 2007 themes
(Here’s the second post on the 2007 IA Summit. You can find the first one that introduces the series and describes the first theme ‘tangible’ here.)
The recent web revival, that I will not name, pushed one trend to the forefront – social software. The most challenging aspect of designing social sites and applications is that you’re not ‘just’ designing for single users, but also for groups as a whole. The IA community is still in the beginning phases of creating a body of knowledge about how to best go about this.
Andrew Hinton gave one of the best talks of the event, first describing the unique properties of network-like communities of practice and how to design for them. From there he made the point that IA itself is a community of practice, not a formal discipline, which means it should try to stay open and flexible.
Bonus: Gene Smith took a stab at the building blocks of social information architectures and came up with this nice model.
links for 2007-04-21
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Upcoming.org gets a much needed overhaul. Too bad we have to say goodbye to old-school accounts here as well, but I do like the new geographic set-up.
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Alper’s thoughts on improvements of college lectures. Interesting thoughts, but I think his old-school college still has to catch on with new ways of teaching. Lectures are horrible teaching in many respects; one person’s talking, the rest are sleeping.
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Pretty looking Flash based clock.
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Open source strumming interface using the Wii’s peripherals. Awesome stuff. Can’t wait to see the explosion of new game interfaces that the Wii’ll unleash in the coming year.
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Mark Wieczorek urges GTDers to reduce their contexts to the absolute minimum possible.
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Gene synthesizes a lot of stuff I’ve been chewing on for a while in a smart way. I like his honeycomb approach to social software aspects.
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Old but good post that started some useful theory building on aspects of social software. Matt Webb and Gene Smith based some of their stuff on it.
Tangible — first of five IA Summit 2007 themes
I’ll be posting a top 5 of the themes I noticed during the past 2007 IA Summit in Las Vegas. It’s a little late maybe, but hopefully still offers some value. Here are the 5 themes. My thoughts on the first one (tangible) are below the list:
- Tangible (this post)
- Social
- Web of data
- Strategy
- Interface design
1. Tangible
The IA community is making a strange dance around the topic of design for physical spaces and objects. On the one hand IAs seem reluctant to move away from the web, on the other hand they seem very curious about what value they can bring to the table when designing buildings, appliances, etc.
The opening keynote was delivered by Joshua Prince-Ramus, of REX (notes by Rob Fay and Jennifer Keach). He made some interesting points about how ‘real’ architects are struggling with including informational concerns in their practice. Michele Tepper, a designer at Frog talked us through the creation of a specialized communications device for day traders where industrial design, interaction design and information architecture went hand in hand.
More to come!
links for 2007-04-19
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Cool three-day event that seeks to join the worlds of wireless mobile locative tech and music production. Can’t be anything but a bunch of fun.
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Robinson is working on streamlining Blue Flavor’s deliverables. Some nice thoughts on how to go about setting up a framework for creating deliverables (although I doubt I’d ever want one myself).
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Iskander wordt geconfronteerd met de verschillen tussen Twitter en Jaiku: microblogging versus presence.
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Gene Smith on “research […] that looks at how social influence (knowledge about what other users are doing) affects the popularity of items in an online music store.” Food for thought for social IA’s.
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Verslag van Hugo Raaijmakers (die ik even sprak in Quark’s Bar) over de social IA workshop (van Gene Smith) op de 2007 IA Summit. Aardig overzicht, curieus dit te vinden op Marketingfacts.
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Interesting post by Brian Fling on Blue Flavor’s high level process. Not sure if the chain metaphor really works to explain what he’s aiming for, but some nice ideas nonetheless.
links for 2007-04-17
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A presentation containing some nice examples of games that exploit the unique properties of the mobile platform, some I wasn’t aware of.
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A pretty complete article on organizing face to face open card sorts.
links for 2007-04-12
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Jaiku’s getting a lot more traffic after a mention on a big tech blog. Good on them.
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Can’t never have enough patterns at your disposal. Chris Messina uses Flickr to collect lots of screenshots of interfaces – quite a few of which are social in nature.
links for 2007-04-07
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Aram Bartholl has people walkign around the city with WoW style name bubbles above their heads. The result is weird, but not as effective as I’d expected. He should’ve dressed the people carying the poles Kuroko style.
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Boyd thinks the next wave on the web will be locative stuff. The web becoming more and more connected to the physical reality.
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Julian Bleecker writes about his über cool device that records time, motion and touch in a slowed down manner. He calls them Flavonoids. He’s going to make weird mobile games with them.
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Cool ideas by Bleecker on where we could take mobile gaming — moving into everyday life, on the go.
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Shirky on the Second Life hype: “If most of the people who try Second Life bail (and they do), we should adopt a considerably more skeptical attitude about proclamations that the oft-delayed Virtual Worlds revolution has now arrived.”
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Useful post by Joshua Porter on the mechanics behind the success of del.icio.us’s tagging: “don’t try and make [tagging] the primary thing to do. Instead, make sure personal value preceeds network value. Then you’ll have plenty to aggregate.”
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Another piece on lack of standards in mobile gaming. This really needs to be addressed before the industry can take outside of Asia.