Archive for September, 2006
What’s old is new again
Friday, September 29th, 2006
I’m at the end of my present project and looking forward to some down time, looking for more opportunities in London as usual, but mostly getting back to blogging and keeping up with the world in general. I saw and ordered a set of tiny cards from the very sweet MOO project (reminded me of the conversation on the esthetics of cute actually) and I thought that it was interesting to see printing start up again in the world of photography, when the greats have kind of given up in favor of digital technologies. I think there’s a definite link here to my thesis in the way that the physicality of things affords so many interactions and as the fine people at Moo say about the internet:
“You can’t touch it, write on it, or put it on the mantle, you can’t hang it on the wall or pass it to the cute guy on the bus, you certainly can’t give it to your mom for her birthday.
We want to change this.
So we dream up new products, made up from stuff on the web, that help folks take their virtual lives offline. We hope you like them. ”
Funni how things change…
I’m at the end of my present project and looking forward to some down time, looking for more opportunities in London as usual, but mostly getting back to blogging and keeping up with the world in general. I saw and ordered a set of tiny cards from the very sweet MOO project (reminded me of the conversation on the esthetics of cute actually) and I thought that it was interesting to see printing start up again in the world of photography, when the greats have kind of given up in favor of digital technologies. I think there’s a definite link here to my thesis in the way that the physicality of things affords so many interactions and as the fine people at Moo say about the internet:
“You can’t touch it, write on it, or put it on the mantle, you can’t hang it on the wall or pass it to the cute guy on the bus, you certainly can’t give it to your mom for her birthday.
We want to change this.
So we dream up new products, made up from stuff on the web, that help folks take their virtual lives offline. We hope you like them. ”
Funni how things change…
The art of not being a tourist
Wednesday, September 27th, 2006
I hate tourists, i really do. Living in Amsterdam especially highlighted that trait in my already sporadically abrasive personality. I had to walk through the Dam every morning on my way to work and would hold my breath, as i whizzed past herds of lost tourists walking at the speed of a pot-induced crawl, looking around conveniently dazed and confused, not sure what they were supposed to look at in the first place. I would hear every language that i know (or can understand) on my way past them: italian, french, spanish, quebecer, french… it was a nightmare to go through that square with a friend as I would inevitably distracted from our conversation, my ears catching bit of pointless conversations. I hate tourists because I don’t think that a place is best lived this way, by buying the guidebook to it, going to the hotel everyone else goes to, buying the trinkets that are supposed to symbolize the culture you’ve just brushed past on your way to Mme Tussaud’s. I think that the best experience you can have of a culture is by pretending you live there.
I spent the weekend in Paris to see a good friend of mine who was on her way to Istanbul and had decided we were going to meet in Paris and chat. That’s exactly what we did. We walked and talked. We didn’t visit anything in particular as it was hardly our first trip to Paris (I lived there 11 years, she spent a few years there in the 60s and had visited several times), we walked around the Quartier Latin, Montparnasse, went to see a very bad Gerard Depardieu movie, ate the best food on the planet, drank way too much red wine and had lovely coffee and were generally very parisian. That, i think is the best way to experience a new city, by just bumping into things, letting the urban design guide you into an experience, something an ex-colleague of mine worked on for his thesis. Well that and great food always helps : )
I hate tourists, i really do. Living in Amsterdam especially highlighted that trait in my already sporadically abrasive personality. I had to walk through the Dam every morning on my way to work and would hold my breath, as i whizzed past herds of lost tourists walking at the speed of a pot-induced crawl, looking around conveniently dazed and confused, not sure what they were supposed to look at in the first place. I would hear every language that i know (or can understand) on my way past them: italian, french, spanish, quebecer, french… it was a nightmare to go through that square with a friend as I would inevitably distracted from our conversation, my ears catching bit of pointless conversations. I hate tourists because I don’t think that a place is best lived this way, by buying the guidebook to it, going to the hotel everyone else goes to, buying the trinkets that are supposed to symbolize the culture you’ve just brushed past on your way to Mme Tussaud’s. I think that the best experience you can have of a culture is by pretending you live there.
I spent the weekend in Paris to see a good friend of mine who was on her way to Istanbul and had decided we were going to meet in Paris and chat. That’s exactly what we did. We walked and talked. We didn’t visit anything in particular as it was hardly our first trip to Paris (I lived there 11 years, she spent a few years there in the 60s and had visited several times), we walked around the Quartier Latin, Montparnasse, went to see a very bad Gerard Depardieu movie, ate the best food on the planet, drank way too much red wine and had lovely coffee and were generally very parisian. That, i think is the best way to experience a new city, by just bumping into things, letting the urban design guide you into an experience, something an ex-colleague of mine worked on for his thesis. Well that and great food always helps : )
Reputation management
Friday, September 22nd, 2006
Another web 2.0 endeavor that i got invited to join today Ziki deal with a bolder approach to reputation and identity management online. I like the fact that at least it’s not afraid of saying what it is, something that Linkedinis , in my opinion, is very bad at.
Linkedin wants to be a networking environment but there is absolutely nothing that it offers more than a way to browse CVs and add people to your contacts. I don’t think that business contacts are meant to be shrouded with this veil of conspiracy and privacy. Why is it that you should be able to see who someone knows but not be able to contact those people unless you’re using what i’m calling “secure people channels”. Isn’t that what’s already happening in real life? That most interesting people aren’t usually accessible unless you know someone who knows them.
This is usuallyw the web is interesting for business opportunities because you don’t need these secure channels, you’ve got your soapbox, your blog, your flickr account, your del.ico.us library and you’re available to be contacted for any reason, including business, at all times.
Matt once told me that he knows what to expect from someone he meets at a conference based on whether that person adds him to Linkedin or Flickr. He usually has more positive interactions through people who add him to the latter, and that is hardly surprising.
So my list of requirements for a good networking environment based on these observations would be:
- Open to anyone to join
- People are accessible directly
- People’s relationships to others are represented
(can you tell i’ve been doing information architecture recently : P )
Another web 2.0 endeavor that i got invited to join today Ziki deal with a bolder approach to reputation and identity management online. I like the fact that at least it’s not afraid of saying what it is, something that Linkedinis , in my opinion, is very bad at.
Linkedin wants to be a networking environment but there is absolutely nothing that it offers more than a way to browse CVs and add people to your contacts. I don’t think that business contacts are meant to be shrouded with this veil of conspiracy and privacy. Why is it that you should be able to see who someone knows but not be able to contact those people unless you’re using what i’m calling “secure people channels”. Isn’t that what’s already happening in real life? That most interesting people aren’t usually accessible unless you know someone who knows them.
This is usuallyw the web is interesting for business opportunities because you don’t need these secure channels, you’ve got your soapbox, your blog, your flickr account, your del.ico.us library and you’re available to be contacted for any reason, including business, at all times.
Matt once told me that he knows what to expect from someone he meets at a conference based on whether that person adds him to Linkedin or Flickr. He usually has more positive interactions through people who add him to the latter, and that is hardly surprising.
So my list of requirements for a good networking environment based on these observations would be:
- Open to anyone to join
- People are accessible directly
- People’s relationships to others are represented
(can you tell i’ve been doing information architecture recently : P )
A thousand ways to scream i love you.
Monday, September 18th, 2006
Yes, as any interaction designer, I’m interested in Web 2.0-type things but I’m also interested in seeing how web 2.0 endeavors are scaling, accumulating and their “long tail” as it were.
It used to be (and is still the case) you’d read/listen/watch something interesting, well, you’d put it in your bookmarks, you’d send the link to a friend or you’d email it to a group of friends (yuck). Nowadays, there’s a million ways to make a virtual gesture saying that you appreciate content:
you can bookmark it of course but that certainly isn’t exciting, you link to it, you comment, you subscribe to it, you add it to your del.icio.us list, to magnolia, to kinja, you digg it, you ping technorati, bloglines, blogpulse, and god knows what else… For 4 lines of text that someone will have written in a blog I found these 21 ways to say “i love you”.
Now let us consider a more humble blog like my own. Well by the aforementioned standards I would be considered as not doing enough self-promotion. But what if i really like that, to stay an under-advertised blogger with a readership of maybe less than 10? . On the edge, looking in. Maybe I’ve actually got more chances of being read and of having people engage with my blog as a body of thought (well rants) more than for its individual posts… like tending a garden, I blog for my own professional and sometimes personal benefit and I am not particularly interested in becoming paranoid about visualizing how much people love what I write. I have had very engaging offline conversations with some of my readers and that right now is the best reward. But as i look into this love parade, what will it do in the future when everyone has access to these popularity measures… will they mean anything anymore? or will they lose value because after a while 20 blogs with 6 700 diggs is still too many blogs for me to read through…right now there is no corrolation between what is good or bad, it depends on whether you are using the right promotional tools, regardless of the content… does that sound familiar? I mean isn’t this the situation with traditional marketing and media? Is that all we’re doing then? reproducing old models virtually? yes the scale is different, a blog is completely different to an oil company, but it’s all a matter of exposure isn’t it? Who will get the most out of a reader’s attention… who will be loved the most…
Yes, as any interaction designer, I’m interested in Web 2.0-type things but I’m also interested in seeing how web 2.0 endeavors are scaling, accumulating and their “long tail” as it were.
It used to be (and is still the case) you’d read/listen/watch something interesting, well, you’d put it in your bookmarks, you’d send the link to a friend or you’d email it to a group of friends (yuck). Nowadays, there’s a million ways to make a virtual gesture saying that you appreciate content:
you can bookmark it of course but that certainly isn’t exciting, you link to it, you comment, you subscribe to it, you add it to your del.icio.us list, to magnolia, to kinja, you digg it, you ping technorati, bloglines, blogpulse, and god knows what else… For 4 lines of text that someone will have written in a blog I found these 21 ways to say “i love you”.
Now let us consider a more humble blog like my own. Well by the aforementioned standards I would be considered as not doing enough self-promotion. But what if i really like that, to stay an under-advertised blogger with a readership of maybe less than 10? . On the edge, looking in. Maybe I’ve actually got more chances of being read and of having people engage with my blog as a body of thought (well rants) more than for its individual posts… like tending a garden, I blog for my own professional and sometimes personal benefit and I am not particularly interested in becoming paranoid about visualizing how much people love what I write. I have had very engaging offline conversations with some of my readers and that right now is the best reward. But as i look into this love parade, what will it do in the future when everyone has access to these popularity measures… will they mean anything anymore? or will they lose value because after a while 20 blogs with 6 700 diggs is still too many blogs for me to read through…right now there is no corrolation between what is good or bad, it depends on whether you are using the right promotional tools, regardless of the content… does that sound familiar? I mean isn’t this the situation with traditional marketing and media? Is that all we’re doing then? reproducing old models virtually? yes the scale is different, a blog is completely different to an oil company, but it’s all a matter of exposure isn’t it? Who will get the most out of a reader’s attention… who will be loved the most…
Fresh Start poster
Monday, September 18th, 2006
I showed you the Fresh Start poster a few weeks ago when I first started designing it and now the final versionthat was finished by Dave is online as well. Enjoy and do comment!
I showed you the Fresh Start poster a few weeks ago when I first started designing it and now the final versionthat was finished by Dave is online as well. Enjoy and do comment!
Site redesign
Sunday, September 17th, 2006
So I’ve been thinking of redesigning my website to cater more to my freelancing career and thought I’d post this up to see what people thought. Basically I’m trying to make it more “swarmy” and this just might be the incentive I need to learn Flash (the oh so dreaded and essential tool in my field). I thought it might be nice to have different views: client, type of work, as a way to build a kind of “tag cloud” of activities so that people would have an idea of the type of work I get involved in (a lot of different things) and where my interests lie.
So I’ve been thinking of redesigning my website to cater more to my freelancing career and thought I’d post this up to see what people thought. Basically I’m trying to make it more “swarmy” and this just might be the incentive I need to learn Flash (the oh so dreaded and essential tool in my field). I thought it might be nice to have different views: client, type of work, as a way to build a kind of “tag cloud” of activities so that people would have an idea of the type of work I get involved in (a lot of different things) and where my interests lie.
Why I believe in people
Sunday, September 17th, 2006
I had a fairly shocking meeting with a man who was supposedly interested in redesigning Youth centres in the UK. This sounded great to me especially because the landscape of childhood now, with the addition of technology, is very different from my own. Growing up in the 80s I only had contact with technology later on in life through my first walkman at age 11 maybe, my first computer at the age of 15 and was introduced to it through school computers when i was young, and then DOS and Windows 3.1 classes in Saudi Arabia. Ok so maybe i didnt have a classic childhood to begin with, but that’s not the point… : )
Now children have access to cell phones at age 6, a computer present in the house from birth, and they probably try to suck on an iPod shuffle once or twice…Age compression they call it in large toy companies, or the changes that children have gone through that make their traditional toys irrelevant more quickly, is an example of this change.
As children grow up, their social dynamics are now shaped by the tools they have: cell phones, texting, emails, chat, online communities such as MySpace (or Bebo in the UK) etc…
With all this in mind you would think that anyone attempting to redesign Youth Centres would be interested , even a little, in the ways that “growing up” have changed. You would also think that as an adult designer, you would want to have a very user-centrered design approach to that problem. Why aren’t joung kids using these youth centres. What is their perception of them. What so they seek elsewhere that the centre doesn’t provide? What would they like out of an urban structure that is supposedly catering to them? Those would be just a few of a miriad of quesions that one could ask kids of all ages. Wouldn’t this be the perfect way to make sure you’re not perpetrating the “patriarchal designer” model… the “i know best” model which has proven to fail and has led to the web-2.0-user-generated- content generation of applications to emerge?
But no. I sat there in Greenwitch park listening to a man who thinks that when designing youth centres “people don’t know what they want”, “children are not my client, society is my client”, “i dont understand the web”, “we need to work with experts in child development”, ” a child doesnt know what it needs to grow up properly”. I’m not saying that i disagree with all of what he was suggesting… but this is such a dangerous approach to take. It was like talking to a product designer who doesn’t know that people use his product. It was like going back in time and as i spoke to him about Fresh Start and experience prototyping, iterative design, etc… I saw how far removed I am from the normal world. I think I need to dumb things down these days for anyone outside of my field to understand me. I’m not sure what this means for me as a professional, but what I do know is that as Ezio Manzini (who I admire greatly) said :
“[Start with the premise that] people are smart” and what you will design with ultimately be better.
I had a fairly shocking meeting with a man who was supposedly interested in redesigning Youth centres in the UK. This sounded great to me especially because the landscape of childhood now, with the addition of technology, is very different from my own. Growing up in the 80s I only had contact with technology later on in life through my first walkman at age 11 maybe, my first computer at the age of 15 and was introduced to it through school computers when i was young, and then DOS and Windows 3.1 classes in Saudi Arabia. Ok so maybe i didnt have a classic childhood to begin with, but that’s not the point… : )
Now children have access to cell phones at age 6, a computer present in the house from birth, and they probably try to suck on an iPod shuffle once or twice…Age compression they call it in large toy companies, or the changes that children have gone through that make their traditional toys irrelevant more quickly, is an example of this change.
As children grow up, their social dynamics are now shaped by the tools they have: cell phones, texting, emails, chat, online communities such as MySpace (or
With all this in mind you would think that anyone attempting to redesign Youth Centres would be interested , even a little, in the ways that “growing up” have changed. You would also think that as an adult designer, you would want to have a very user-centrered design approach to that problem. Why aren’t joung kids using these youth centres. What is their perception of them. What so they seek elsewhere that the centre doesn’t provide? What would they like out of an urban structure that is supposedly catering to them? Those would be just a few of a miriad of quesions that one could ask kids of all ages. Wouldn’t this be the perfect way to make sure you’re not perpetrating the “patriarchal designer” model… the “i know best” model which has proven to fail and has led to the web-2.0-user-generated- content generation of applications to emerge?
But no. I sat there in Greenwitch park listening to a man who thinks that when designing youth centres “people don’t know what they want”, “children are not my client, society is my client”, “i dont understand the web”, “we need to work with experts in child development”, ” a child doesnt know what it needs to grow up properly”. I’m not saying that i disagree with all of what he was suggesting… but this is such a dangerous approach to take. It was like talking to a product designer who doesn’t know that people use his product. It was like going back in time and as i spoke to him about Fresh Start and experience prototyping, iterative design, etc… I saw how far removed I am from the normal world. I think I need to dumb things down these days for anyone outside of my field to understand me. I’m not sure what this means for me as a professional, but what I do know is that as Ezio Manzini (who I admire greatly) said :
“[Start with the premise that] people are smart” and what you will design with ultimately be better.
Not my country please…
Thursday, September 14th, 2006
A few days ago, some of my ex-idii colleagues started an email back and forth about the general state of affairs in the US with a ridiculous dose of Canadian-envy. I hate these types of conversations. People like to think of Canada as a “sleeping giant” in my industry, generally though we’re usually thought of as nice and naive people… as if coming from a country where nature is part of our heritage and ladnscape made our IQ sink and our sensibility became something laughable. There’s nothing enviable about a country that only makes the news when sad events happen. There’s nothing enviable here…
Today, I wish i were home.
A few days ago, some of my ex-idii colleagues started an email back and forth about the general state of affairs in the US with a ridiculous dose of Canadian-envy. I hate these types of conversations. People like to think of Canada as a “sleeping giant” in my industry, generally though we’re usually thought of as nice and naive people… as if coming from a country where nature is part of our heritage and ladnscape made our IQ sink and our sensibility became something laughable. There’s nothing enviable about a country that only makes the news when sad events happen. There’s nothing enviable here…
Today, I wish i were home.
Fresh Start online
Thursday, September 14th, 2006
Finally Fresh Start is online! Nearly 2 years after the initial (7 weeks) project we’ve been working hard to present this to the Emergence poster sessionin Pittsburgh and Dave went and also live-blogged the event. Loads of interesting thoughts.
Finally Fresh Start is online! Nearly 2 years after the initial (7 weeks) project we’ve been working hard to present this to the Emergence poster sessionin Pittsburgh and Dave went and also live-blogged the event. Loads of interesting thoughts.
Something to work on
Sunday, September 3rd, 2006
I have been traveling quite a lot in my life and i think that i will work on illustrating my travels in different ways. One must note that I am only including my moves and not my touristic traveling. So as I leave Amsterdam tomorrow, this will be my 14th move… ouch…
So this is example one… too stale, this might be the perfect excuse to hack a Google map!
I have been traveling quite a lot in my life and i think that i will work on illustrating my travels in different ways. One must note that I am only including my moves and not my touristic traveling. So as I leave Amsterdam tomorrow, this will be my 14th move… ouch…
So this is example one… too stale, this might be the perfect excuse to hack a Google map!
Ode to the material world
Sunday, September 3rd, 2006
I’m cleaning my stuff for the flight tomorrow and came across this torn bit of paper that’s a printout off of someone’s work… need to find the source…
“Like Marcel who narrates through his recollections of places and things in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, visual connections between objects and memory are as much a symbiotic exchange as they are a token of human dependancy. To consider a world without objects is to take away a part of our identity, which helps us understand and comprehend the world in which we live.”
Amen to that.
I’m cleaning my stuff for the flight tomorrow and came across this torn bit of paper that’s a printout off of someone’s work… need to find the source…
“Like Marcel who narrates through his recollections of places and things in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, visual connections between objects and memory are as much a symbiotic exchange as they are a token of human dependancy. To consider a world without objects is to take away a part of our identity, which helps us understand and comprehend the world in which we live.”
Amen to that.
Illustrating a service design process
Friday, September 1st, 2006
I wont be attending Emergence but I had the pleasure on working on illustrating our design process for the poster session where Fresh Start will be presented and i suddenly found it a fascinating exercise. How do you represent what starts out by being boxes and arrows and make it compelling? I had to think about the flow of the process for one. We went through some design steps that influenced the way we analyzed prior assumptions (so the loop) and iterative processes around core design elements (around experience prototyping for example) that completely shaped the final product. So I tried to convey the dynamic essence of that process without losing sight of the visual flow i wanted to keep, i.e. some respect of a left to right, top to bottom way of reading.
So what i came up with eventually was reshaped because we had a lot of copy to include for each step as well as pictures, but i still really like the visual illustration of 7 weeks of hard work, that solely focuses on process and not on detailing the service. On an academic level it’s really interesting and worthwhile.
The final poster version will be present at the conference of course, but consider this the teaser ;)
I wont be attending Emergence but I had the pleasure on working on illustrating our design process for the poster session where Fresh Start will be presented and i suddenly found it a fascinating exercise. How do you represent what starts out by being boxes and arrows and make it compelling? I had to think about the flow of the process for one. We went through some design steps that influenced the way we analyzed prior assumptions (so the loop) and iterative processes around core design elements (around experience prototyping for example) that completely shaped the final product. So I tried to convey the dynamic essence of that process without losing sight of the visual flow i wanted to keep, i.e. some respect of a left to right, top to bottom way of reading.
So what i came up with eventually was reshaped because we had a lot of copy to include for each step as well as pictures, but i still really like the visual illustration of 7 weeks of hard work, that solely focuses on process and not on detailing the service. On an academic level it’s really interesting and worthwhile.
The final poster version will be present at the conference of course, but consider this the teaser ;)
