Category: Links

Saffer bemoans the level of current design school students. The can think, but they can’t make or do. Is Dan getting old, or are US design schools indeed loosing their way?

Nicolas Nova’s notes on Geoware (a locative media conference). Most noteworthy is the claim that location should be more implicit in stead of explicit.

Collega Iskander reviewt TV-killer Joost en komt tot de conclusie dat het technisch allemaal wel kosjer is, maar vooral nog aan wat virtuele warmte ontbreekt.

Alper says goodbye to Twitter and joins Jaiku. Welcome!

This great piece by Jones almost reads like a manifesto (or at least, I’d like it to be). Lots of good stuff here on hackers, playgrounds/sandboxes, gaming, flow and urban environments. Lots of parallels to my own fascinations!

Dimon claims to be on the brink of discovering the holy grail of interface design documentation.

Porter warns against using IA as an approach to design because it focusses on information not activities. I agree design should focus on user goals, I don’t agree this is why IA is dying. I think that as an UX design activity it will remain valuable.

Elaborate description of the Generation C trend that involves Content, Creativity, Casual Collapse, Control, and Celebrity. Basically people massively creating arts and crafts using cheap and abundantly available tools.

O’Reilly points to Threadless.com as an other example of generation c creating and producing products on their own terms. For what? Mainly reputation it seems.

“Een bundel met daarin meer dan 30 bijdragen met het thema ‘horror’ van de meest afschuwwekkende tekenaars en enkele zieke, zieke schrijvers.” Hell yea! Via Edgar.

Een borrel voor web 2.0 freaks in Den Haag… waarom was ik daar niet bij?! Een volgende borrel zal ik eens kijken of ik langs kan droppen.

Simon Oliver discusses a presentation by Brian Eno and Will Wright on generative content. Really should take a look at this (it’s not clear what the long now angle is on this talk, though.)

Gruber digs into a bunch of replies to Steve Jobs anti-DRM piece and comes across as Jobs’s personal blogging bodyguard. Some good points on DRM and the music industry here, though.

Land in Second Life in de vorm van Nederland, schijnbaar neergekwakt door ING. Wanneer houdt die onzinnige Second Life hype eens op?

Cool typographical animation using some dialogue of one of my favourite films.

Useful resource for WordPress users looking for a new theme. Instantly try out themes and filter them on a number of features.

Old set of notes on Rashmi Sinha’s talk at the 2006 IA Summit on social information architecture.

Classic short film demonstrating similarities between inner and outer space. Had to look this up for a post I’m writing on Spore because it inspired Will Wright to design that game. Google must’ve been looking at it when creating Google Earth!

Some weird research done by the UK’s MOD on remote viewing. The PDFs are a treat to browse (despite the huge amounts of blacked out material).

Malcolm Gladwell uses the Enron case to illustrates the problems of information abundance and how problems nowadays are more often enigmas in stead of puzzles.

“[…] the Last.fm guys mentioned Last.tv during their presentation at The Future of Web Apps.”

A deck of PowerPoint slides that goes with Jyri Engeström’s Reboot 7 talk on object-centered sociality. Luckily includes some explanatory notes.

A new way to style images using Flash and JavaScript while remaining accessible…

Nieuwe minister van onderwijs Ronald Plasterk blijkt een Apple gebruiker te zijn (via Alper).

Ah jeez, this panel sounds good. There’s still a small chance I might be going to the summit. If I do, this is one panel I’ll attend…

A new tool for IxD’s and IA’s has launched. It’s a Visio add-on for creating flows, sitemaps, wireframes and such. Need to give this a try.

Post by Gladwell on the way perceived difficulty can divide in- and outsiders.

Jason Echols describes nightly restlessness I have quite often. The only cure is indeed turning on the light en jotting down what’s dancing around my brain.

Saffer read a preview copy of a new book on mobile UX design and finds it lacking. I guess I’ll stick with the heavier mobile IxD book.

Comparison of tagging on Amazon and LibraryThing. Includes some great analysis of why tagging only works when there’s a ‘selfish’ motivation for users to do so. Great stuff.

Cool tool that generates a Pecha Kucha presentation based on your last 20 del.icio.us bookmarks. I can imagine this would be fun to do on an event. Via Peter.

An interview with the designer of alternate reality games such as I Love Bees (for Halo 2) and The Beast (for Spielberg’s AI).

Large interview with Will Wright, designer of Sim City, The Sims and now Spore (a game I’m really looking forward to playing). Lots and lots of cool stuff on the future of games here.

Nicolas Nova puts down some thoughts on the interview with Will Wright in Popular Science. He zooms in on trends like user generated content and games as procedural education.

Greg Lastowka thinks some of the most interesting themes from the Wright interview are “cooperative gaming, educational gaming, game development finances, strategies for integrating user-generated content, what went wrong with The Sims Online, and what WW

First in a series of articles on selection, opinion and comparison systems. Great resource for social software designers.

Finally a blogging platform made specifically for tumblelogs. I’m planning on playing with this the coming week and review it later.

Matt and Jack are out of control. Here they let loose a semiotic square on the concept of comics. The result is hard to read and even harder to understand, but obvious proof that these guys are either genius or insane (probably both).

This modal dialog box script might come in handy the next time I sit down and do some coding…

I’m bookmarking this mainly because I’m missing this feature in Reader too. Where can I sign the petition?

Pretty looking plain GTD templates for use with a Moleskine.

R. Emory Williamson-Lundberg has gone to the trouble to do a lengthy write-up of his GTD system and it’s inspiring, funny and very useful. I took away a few good ideas from this one.

Ahhh… I’m running into too much interesting new GTD stuff lately. Here’s a GTD system implemented in Ruby on Rails. Looks pretty.

This workshop sounds really good. There’s a very small chance I might be able to attend it. Otherwise I’ll wait for the write-ups, slides and podcasts (crosses fingers).

I agree with Christopher Fahey that we should be flexible in choosing our ways of communicating interaction designs. I agree to a large extent, although some standardization and templating (in the form of a toolbox) can come in handy.