Stalk Your User (Web Techniques, June 2001)
"After all, sitting down with users and watching them try to accomplish tasks with the product can be incredibly valuable. However, usability testing assumes that there's something to test%u2014either a prototype or final version of a product that's on the path to being launched. But how do you know what to build in the first place?
Architecture Week 2001 Official Site
Architecture Week brings architects, writers, dancers, filmmakers and others together for a nationwide celebration of contemporary architecture. You have the opportunity to get involved with events which include building previews and tours, lectures, exhibitions and installations.
from 1964's First Things First Manifesto
"Many of us have grown increasingly uncomfortable with this view of design. Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse."
That a set of individuals-- any individuals-- owned up to being partially to blame for creating a world in which we are "citizen-consumers" makes me tingle with excitement... responsibility! Ownership! Willingess to clean up after your own mess!
but I am sad to read the addendum, created when the manifesto-- worthy manifesto-- was signed by recent designers...
"22 visual communicators signed the original call for our skills to be put to worthwhile use."
"Put our skills to worthwhile use"? What are you waiting for? Put your own goddamn skills to worthwhile use. Control your fate. Make a difference, don't make a difference, make your own trouble... too good for advertising? Make advertising better. Too good for product design? Make the products better.
Make the world better one toothbrush at a time.
(no, I am not kidding)
in other news
I can't remember the last time the news moved me to tears. A blog has never moved me to tears. But Mike's recent blog entry on a news article-- a news article I might have read and just shrugged at, helpless again at the horror of the world-- Mike allowed me to feel the horror of the news and cry. Maybe that is the job of art sometimes, to make us feel again.
I wasn't going to glean today; I've got so much work to do BUT the universe has sent me some interesting stuff, so I share with you!
I'm mad about Ada, btw...
Ada Lovelace, Countess of Controversy
"Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, is something of a giant in the world of technology. The daughter of celebrated poet Lord Byron, Lovelace was a Victorian society hostess, the mother of three, and a mathematician widely credited as being the world's first computer programmer."
Was Ada Really the First Programmer?
"In the notes, which ended up being three times longer than the original Menabrea paper, Ada outlined how the Analytical Engine might have worked had it ever been built. She explained how the Bernoulli numbers, a complex numerical system first described by 18th century Swiss mathematician Jakob Bernoulli, might be broken down into simple formulas that could be coded as instructions for the machine. Perhaps more importantly, her poetic prowess endowed Babbage's dry technical details with grandeur. "
I've been reading the book on her, "The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron's Daughter" and highly recommend it.
Blurb Gallery (via webword.com)
"Surveying the variety of ways we display introductions to longer articles...
I keep finding myself working on sites that have news or portal-like layouts, and each time I start from scratch thinking about how to display the headlines and summaries. No more, I started this gallery to capture the many ways it's done, and perhaps I'll eventually map these to the audience and business goals."
Designing Help Text (also via webword.com)
"Some users will have difficulty no matter how effectively and thoughtfully an interface is built. Others will need assistance whilst learning how to use a complex and extensive application that contains a number of features.
Given that help text might be required, how is it best implemented? As mentioned above, it is preferable to include as much assistance as possible permanently on-screen. " I so agree to this. An ounce of "tip" is worth a pound of "support documentation"
The Open Directory Project has a robust IA section
Grow Your Site, Keep Your Users Computerworld News & Features Story
sites of eBay's size and growth rate always have special usability concerns
dot-dot-dot, graphic design - visual culture magazine
Gray's Anatomy online!! Now that is fodder for art and design....
Gray, Henry. 1918. Anatomy of the Human Body
2001.DESIGNERSITE.CHKLST.
tee hee
The New Yorker Shouts and Murmurs
"The sound bite, that form of speech we encounter in the media every day, seems a unique contribution of our technological age."
I went with BearShare, and have been very happy.
SF apartment ads. What scares me is that the second didn't seem like a parody.