designcult

Quick Links: Wiki Zeitgeist Edition

Sometimes you gotta pay attention to what the Internet oracle is saying, and right now it's apparently saying "wiki!"

We'll start with yesterday, when I was pointed to the corollary to my science fiction about search engines post by boingboing: science fiction about wikis! Specifically, the story Wikiworld by Paul Di Filippo:

Realizing that such a task was beyond my own capabilities, I called in my wikis: The Dark Galactics. The PEP Boyz. The Chindogurus. Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons. The Bishojos. The Glamazons. The Provincetown Pickers. And several more. All of them owed me simoleons for the usual—goods received, or time and expertise invested—and now they’d be eager to balance the accounts.

Then a friend pointed my at a cartoon that summed up the problem with wikipedia.

Finally, Dahlia Lithwick at Slate explained to me -- and i think she's right -- that babies invented community-based collaborative authorship:

I took my small sons to visit family over the holidays. As invariably happens when one wants to show off one's young, the smaller one's face exploded into great green ropes of snot only seconds after deplaning. The consumptive Victorian wheeze followed mere hours later. And suddenly, he was no longer my baby. He was a server-side wiki.

So there you go. I'm not sure why the Internet decided it's wiki zeitgeist week, but it clearly must be.

Quick links #7

• Social networking site messaging pulses like a heart
• Strange Maps - Maps fictional, historical, and just odd -- including a tourist map of Gotham, and a map of the world's shortest-lived country. 
• Swedish Campground (via Ilen) - "Twenty years later, even in OS X, the Macintosh still has a little bit of a Swedish campground in it."

Quick links #7

• The Neighborhood Project - "The Neighborhood Project is creating a map of city   neighborhoods based on the collective opinions of internet   users." Saw this ages ago, couldn't find it recently, and someone sent the link out again. Using collective intelligence to figure out neighborhood boundaries is a wonderful concept. It still doesn't tell me where the "TenderNob" is, though ...
• Project Cartoon (via TNH)- Classic product development cartoon (the one with the tree) has been ... Web 2.0-ified? Strange.
• The Secret Life of Machines (via Faisal) - How things work!
• LibraryThing Unsuggestor (via SIMS fun list) - "It analyzes the seven million books LibraryThing members have recorded as owned or read, and comes back with books least likely to share a library with the book you suggest." I am apparently unlikely to read Confessions of a Shopaholic (true), Desiring God (true), and Terry Pratchett books (not true).
• zipdecode (via SIMS fun list) - Crazy awesome zip code visualization.
• Lectures from Marti Hearst's Search classes - Sergey Brin! Dan Rose! Hal Varian! Geoffrey Nunberg!
• Map (via SIMS fun list) - Ever wondered how Google gets those cool icons onto their maps? The secret is plywood!

Quick links #6

Quick links -- the numbers edition!

• The 8 types of bad creative critics (via the SIMS fun list)- I'm "The blender." When I'm not on the receiving end, that is.
• 10 tips for presenters (from Jessamyn at librarian.net) - Helpful tips on presenting at conferences. More on the nitty gritty details that can trip you up than the presentation itself.
• The 18 mistakes that kill startups (via kottke) - "When you raise a lot of money, your company moves to the suburbs and has kids."
• America's most fonted- the 7 worst fonts (also via kottke) - "Comic Sans MS. This is indeed the AOL of fonts; the very accessibility that made it popular and novel in the 1990s became its downfall."

Quick links #5

As fun & useful as it is to get all hand-wavey about big design issues (design thinking! innovation! stop designing products! soylent green is people!), sometimes it's equally fun & useful to take a good hard look at just one design element.

• History of the Button - "Tracing the history of interaction design through the history of the button, from flashlights to websites and beyond." (thanks Phil!)
• The dashed line in use - "Even though the dashed line has emerged from a designer’s shorthand and from the limitations of monotone printing techniques, it has a clear and simple visual magic, the ability to express something three- or four-dimensional in two dimensions."
• And an oldie but a goodie from Luke: The History of Amazon's Tab Navigation. Long live the uber-tab.

Quick links #4

• Shakespeare Searched - Stunningly useful (if you like Shakespeare) search from Clusty. The surrounding text and citation features are key. Some questions, though: Does the clustering actually add value (beyond the character and works facets)? How could you extend / combine this to make a more general literature search? Who thought "Clusty" was a good product name, anyway?
• Emotional clothing - "Bubelle, the "blushing dress" comprises two layers, the inner one is equipped with sensors that respond to changes in the wearer's emotions and projects them onto the outer textile." I'm very interested in the intersection of interaction design and clothing design -- most of the work right now seems to be in the "arty & experimental" phase like Bubelle or the firefly dress. I can't wait to figure out what the next, more practical, phases look like.
• The Funniest Grid You Ever Saw  (via Signal vs. Noise) - An incredibly elaborate, and for me frustrating, look at laying the grid out for the online edition of The Onion. Which only once, in an aside at the end of the essay, acknowledges that "some designers" might choose to give up rigid control over size. And then in the comments, people complain about those pesky users and their changing type sizes. People, this is the web. Fluid design should be the rule and fixed the exception.
• Too many people getting lost in new downtown library (via librarian.net)- "For all the architectural artistry of Rem Koolhaas' downtown Seattle library, there was just one little problem with the building: People kept getting lost inside."

(not so quick) links #3

Yep, it's been a while since my last update. I've been taking some time out to spend with my daughter, Kathryn! Hopefully posting will start up again with some frequency.

I'm even planning to combine the professional with the personal and review some interesting visualizations and interaction models in the baby-tracking space. No, I'm not kidding.

In the meantime, here's a few links to start catching up:

• A new framework - Todd W at Adaptive Path calls for a "new framework" for design: "Essentially, I am calling for an end to the decades-old framework that HCI, information architecture, and interaction design have been using for understanding users. That’s right, I say take a hike, task analysis! Good bye, user goals! These concepts are insufficient for the new kinds of systems we are designing."
  
  It's a good call! But I'm not sure it's all that new (certainly the better designers I've worked with have long since broken from using pure task analysis, for instance), I'm not sure the need for designing systems and not products is the best or only reason we should look for a new framework, and I'm not sure the essay actually lays out what the new framework should, rather than just the fact that we need one. But the comments are excellent (look for the good one by eBay's own Christian Rohrer) and overall it's a great start a needed conversation.



• Plot lines - "The end result is a staggering 76 floor plans in 221 units—with none repeated more than a dozen times and well over a dozen of them unique."
  
  Interaction designers who think structurally and in terms of components often make analogies to either Lego, or architecture. This Metropolis article about an apartment building in Copenhagen shows that what architects can do with structure and components that is elegant, but not simplistic. Read the article, but check out the insanely wonderful diagrams.



• We feel fine - "The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains."
  
  I'm a sucker for art made through clever data visualizations -- and this has 6 different visualizations of people's feelings posted online. Check out "mounds" -- it seems that even expressed emotion has a long tail!

Quick Links #2

• Building and Managing a Successful User Experience Team
• Business Week & IDSA's 2006 IDEA Awards
• Johnny Cash sings in German -- Just because. (thanks fixer)
• Redefining American Beauty, By The Yard -- “It’s about what happens on that square of land between the public street and the private house. It’s about social engagement. I wanted to get away from the idea of home as an obsessive isolating cocoon.” (thanks eac)
• A New Framework - Adaptive Path -- Sure, but what is this new framework?

Quick Links #1

• 15 undergraduate papers on MMOs - e.g. "From N00b to L33t: Learning strategies in Everquest II"
• Ideo on design & business strategy - "Prototyping is simultaneously an evaluative process -- it generates feedback and enables you to make midflight corrections -- and a storytelling process. It's a way of visually and viscerally describing your strategy."
• Thomas Vander Wal on Technosocial Architecture - "People who understand the social interactions between people and the technologies they use to mediate the interactions need to understand the focus is on the social interactions between people and the relationship that technology plays. It is in a sense being a technosocial architect."