by RSS.
Matt Webb has started an RSS re-publication of Milo Rambaldi’s Leonardo DaVinci’s notebooks, which we can read along with him starting today, every day for 4 years.
Very very cool.
» Interconnected.org: The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci
» Matt’s weblog entry about the inception of the project
Filed under: Uncategorized
2 Comments
Edward Tufte descibes a form of word-sized, inline infoburst he calls a “sparkline”:
A hyperlinked Sparkline would make webpages like superdense, fractal, layered, zoomable resources, and make the top-level of each topic look vital and organic like a terrarium of squirming data.
The next step would be to see Sparklines in the street, not just delivering data, but harvesting it – being it.
Crawling up lamposts as electricity consumption spikes during the ad-break of Coronation Street. Or infesting the wounds of a pigeon flattened by a delivery truck, updating the national epidemiological database and the air pollution record for that borough based upon trace metal readings in the carcass.
Tufte’s aiming to create bumps in the visual texture of the page that we can run our eyes over and just know. Lowering the load on our understanding not in reductive manner of many usability methodologies but trying to transform ways in which information is transferred to create a richer substrate for understanding.
» Ask E.T.: Sparklines [via Scoble]
Filed under: Interface innovations
15 Comments
The architect, the philosopher*, the physicist and the robotics engineer.
Our merry band investigating the future of user-experience for Nokia is growing by one, with the addition of Chris “Antimega” Heathcote.
Tervetuloa Chris!
“Lately I’ve been waking up at 8:32. The weird thing is that I don’t have an alarm clock. I just open my eyes when I’m done sleeping. It doesn’t matter when I go to sleep, when I wake up and look at my watch it almost always says “8:32.” I’ve been trying to switch up my wake-up style (to get a different time) by waiting a few minutes before I look at my watch. But it’s still 8:32. So, I guess it’s not that I’m necessarily waking up at 8:32. It’s more that I look at my watch for the first time every morning at 8:32. (When I say “almost always” above, I mean 19 out of the last 23 times I’ve woken up in my bed my watch has said “8:32.”) I’m not showing off, I’m just saying that there is something precise about me in the morning.”
Filed under: Braaainnnnsssss
3 Comments
This animation of the Breedster universe mapped onto a toroid is fantastic.
Around 1 minute and 2 seconds into the animation of the expanding insect cosmos, a pattern emerges of a heart, described by hundreds of individual breedsters acting in concert. It takes about 2 seconds in the animation to form, corresponding to and remains there, more or less inviolate for the remaining 40 seconds, like some sentimental insect Arcosanti, or the Burning Man playa as sponsored by Hallmark.
The animation was compiled:
“of hourly Grid snapshots taken from 2004-04-09 02:00 until 2004-05-22 12:00, at 10 fps.”Therefore (and correct me if i’m wrong) every second is 10 hours in real time, meaning the heart emerged in 20 hours, and remained for 400 hours or nearly 17 days.
I guess my next questions would be
Hopefully, Breedster will have some longevity, and so will these pattern plotting exercises – perhaps through this playful format somethings we think we know about how cities and societies form and grow can be explored.
From the delightfully-irreverent “symposium”* “On Fornication And Genetics in The Breedster Age”
“How to write a manifesto in an age disgusted with them? The fatal weakness of manifestos is their inherent lack of evidence. Breedster’s problem is the opposite: it is a mountain range of evidence without manifesto.”
ADDENDUM:
Conversation with Foe in IM:
FOE: “see I told you breedster was about more than just copulating with strangers”FOE: “it’s pretty much dead now since they started giving us diseases though”
ME: “well, life’s like that”
ME: “you just see the civilisation and great works of art in the historical view, but not all the copulation and diseases that people were really caring about at the time…”
Move over, Simon Schama! Ach. Lunchtime.
Filed under: The evolution of cooperation
1 Comment
I’m a terrible hoarder.
I have boxes of cables, some that will only connect obsolete things to other obsolete things. A drawer of widgets – dongles for copyprotected software that can only run on PCs from 12 years ago. Drawing pins and rubber bands too. Rubber bands have become a bit of an obsessive-compulsive fixation. If I see one in the street these days, I will pick it up; and in testament to my maturity, not flick it at Foe.
Useless ideas too. I have a shelf of sketchbooks, approximately 30% full of notes from meetings that bored me enough to fill the other 70% with drawings of giant robot squirrels or stupid ideas.
It doesn’t matter what I hoard, the same mantra goes through my mind each time:
I might need it.Somebody else might need it.
It’ll be useful one day.
It’s not even a conscious thought any more. It’s an engram. It’s baked-in. It’s just a surface my behaviour runs down like water on a windscreen.
Which is why the web is my salvation, or at least a salve. It’s an infinite shelf I can leave this stuff on, because I might need it, somebody else might need it, it’ll be useful one day. Which I guess leads me to one of the stupid ideas next to the giant robot squirrels, that Ben turned into the LazyWeb, and it’s final justification to me, in an entry at 0xDefcafbad.
“I plan to work on small- to mid-sized projects, presented in a periodic column format with entries around 2500-5000 words each. One of my first challenges is to brainstorm a list of topics; Iâve already got a handful of things I could work on, but I might need to troll the lazyweb to find a few more inspirations.”
It’ll be useful one day, see.
» 0xDecafbad: I was a pre-teen Transactor author wannabe (and still am!)
Filed under: Web/Tech
2 Comments
Two from Tom Hume:
On how creativity is often shaped by ones tools:
“When I first moved my weblog over to MovableType from Radio Userland, I wondered what difference a new tool would make. Nearly 6 months on, I think I know.”
And a great post on mobile application design:
“Interaction design for mobiles is IMHO more like appliance design than web, or even application, design. Focus on core tasks, simplicity, and elegance… try to avoid forcing the end-user to think more about interfaces than getting the job done.”
Filed under: Blog watch
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Danny Brown has won the Design Museum’s “Designer of the year” award. From The FT’s report on the awards:
“A 27-year-old multimedia designer who first started creating images from his home computer at the age of five was yesterday named Designer of the Year.Liverpool-born Daniel Brown received the £25,000 award at London’s Design Museum. It was presented by Jonathan Ive, head of design at Apple and winner of the inaugural prize in 2003, who said Mr Brown’s work ‘changes the way we look at and engage with digital imagery.
It is technically innovative and emotionally engaging, but also gives us an extraordinary amount of freedom in the way we experience it’.”
I could launch into a giant rant about the nature of design vs applied art, art itself, and the generally crappy job the Design Museum* does both at distinguishing between them and promoting that beyond the industry. But, after all, Danny’s stuff is at it’s best just breathtaking, and deserves this recognition.
Well done, Mr. Brown…
Filed under: Design industry and people
1 Comment
P17 of the June issue of Wired (with Pixar’s “The Incredibles” on the cover) has an advert for a joint promotion between Wired, W Hotels and Apple:
Plug in and play along to your own digital soundscape from W Hotels and iTunes®, the world’s best digital jukebox.
Your W Wired Package includes:
As broadband and wifi become as much as a free, expected part of a satisfying hotel stay as a good shower – the next step has to be stuff like this – creating personal, luxurious, digital media cocoon.
Filed under: Sufficiently-Advanced Lifestyle
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Monkeymagic has been listening to Dr. Robin Dunbar:
“Dunbar was talking about his new book, The Human Story. One of the ideas in it was that religion, myth and story-telling are cohesive forces – they offer ways to help us make the trade-off between short-term desires and long-term gains, and they oil the wheels in our social machinery.Religious ecstasy, feeling at one with the (socially constructed) world, and that buzz of being in an audience watching something good all seem to be signs that opiates are beginning to float round our circuitry.
These chemical carrots exist as an aid to group-forming. But here’s the rub. These same carrots might also ensure that the group acts against any individual who might take away their high. The bigger the high, the bigger the aggression.”
The internet must be such a great petri dish for scientists like Dr. Dunbar. I met him once at a Cap-Gemini event examining how religions are built, but I forgot to ask him if he took note of online groupthink and flamewars.
» MonkeyMagic: The Flipside of the Collective is War.
Filed under: Braaainnnnsssss
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Via John Battelle’s SearchBlog, the chief of Amazon’s A9 search engine Udi Manber declares:
“Think about how the Web has changed your life in the last 10 years. Now, try to extrapolate 10 years forward and you should feel dizzy. We’re still in day one of developing and innovating in search. There’s still a lot of exciting discoveries to be made,”
In his keynote to the WWW Conference in NYC, he goes on to say:
“For most users, they expect it to be as simple as possible and that’s a barrier. If music was invented 20 years ago, we’d all be playing one-string instruments,”which struck me at first as a statement that would make a crowd of developers chuckle, but otherwise isn’t particularly helpful.
First up: if music was invented 20 years ago then there wouldn’t be much differentiation in expertise between players and the listeners. They would probably be very happy with the one-stringed instruments, grinning like loons, thinking that this new ‘music’ stuff was where it was at.
Secondly: complaining that your ‘users’ are holding you back is not a argument most users have a lot of sympathy with, cf. Boo.
However, if one interprets it as a comment on the medium – on the difficulty in communicating with computers and through digital interfaces – then perhaps it makes sense.
If A9 and Amazon commit their resources to understanding how to play a few more strings and still get their audience humming along with them, then the search engine wars won’t be over till the fat lady sings.
Or something.
Filed under: Interface innovations
1 Comment
Dan moblogs the new Batman movie being filmed with Bloomsbury as a backdrop.
“I didn’t see any of the glittering cast (dir. Christopher Nolan, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Katie Holmes, Morgan Freeman, Rutger Hauer etc.) though I did see plenty of replica US police cars with Gotham Police Department insignia on the side. Rather incongruous in genteel Bloomsbury, I can tell you.”
Well, if a Welshman can be Bruce Wayne, why can’t Gotham City be Bloomsbury? Come to think of it, there are some great contenders for Arkham Asylum in Wales… this in my hometown, for instance.
Filed under: Comic Books
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“Anyone who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep.” – Frederick Goudy
The Typepad templates insist on letter-spacing or tracking the type of the section headers in my side bar. I don’t have a clue how to get round this other than to upgrade to the $150 pro level, which is far to much money to spend on the self-indulgence of blogging, let alone the self-indulgence of being a typography nerd, when most people probably read this tripe with the type their RSS-reader dictates.
I’ve fiddled as much as I can to try and get the design to something I like (no way I can find to make the main body of text any wider – which really ticks me off as it’s not quite a comfortable reading width for a single column, and it’s a fixed, not ‘fluid’ design) within the constraints of the Typepad UI, which really, really encourages fiddling. The ‘safety’ it inspires, along with the myriad tiny but tempting changes one can make lead to hours of fiddling.
6Apart should sell some AdWords space in their interface, the amount of time my eyeballs are in it…
Filed under: Visual and graphic design
2 Comments
Om Malik and Rajesh Jain have been thinking about a Massputer, a $300 device that
“should be able to do basic tasks like writing documents, Internet surfing, email and perhaps some business-related tasks like data entry.”
I am guessing that this is different to the much-touted “Simputer” of a couple of years ago, in that it is not designed to be mobile, ruggedised or adapted in any way other than to be affordable.
Om writes:
“The $300 sticker is vital- it keeps the devices affordable, and at the same time allows the corporation selling this massputer makes a decent profit. Gizmos such as color televisions, washing machines, refrigerators and air conditioners were snapped up in large numbers once they were priced right around $300. The proliferation of mobile phones in the emerging world is proof that at the right and affordable price people everywhere will adopt the right technology. There was a time when a mobile phone cost $400 and a mere 10 million people had the service. Now more than 400 million phones will be sold this year and 1.4 billion people, many in not very rich countries, will make mobile calls. That is because the price of the phone at $100 is now affordable in these emerging countries. More users means the price-per-minute has come down as well. In short, everyone benefits.
The social implications of Massputer cannot be underscored. Popularity of cell phones and text messaging promoted social revolutions, and peaceful protests in hitherto turbulent societies in Asia. Philippines comes to mind. I believe the availability of a Massputer connected to the Internet will help develop more educated, more informed and more open societies. If rest of the world has to embrace the principles of free markets, they need the tools. Massputer is a perfect example.”
Unlike the Massputer, The Simputer and other projects to create affordable, accessable ICTs have followed the dedicated, simplified ‘information appliance’ design route, assuming that the societies that need access to ICT need robust and simplified products to begin with.
Sugata Mitra’s work at the NIIT showed that even in rural areas with little exposure to technology and lower level of literacy – people, especially children learned to use computers (albeit with ruggedized input devices) in short order with no training.
Ultimately, people who want access to information and computing power want access to the same as everyone else, not a ‘special’ user-experience which keeps them on the wrong side of a new type of digital divide. Om and Rajesh make a great business argument for the Massputer also – let’s hope someone takes them up on it.
Filed under: Product design
5 Comments
I have moved over to Typepad, as my MT installation was getting broken, complicated and onerous to fix.
It means I have lost the design temporarily that Tom coded for me, but I’ll try and edge back towards that as time and Typepad’s training-wheels allow.
Comments should work again now, although I’m a little wary of the lack of comment-spam control that Typepad has, and the reports of deeply unpleasant amounts of deeply unpleasant comment-spam that friends have gotten, so we’ll see how we go.
The RSS feed for this site is now http://blackbeltjones.typepad.com/work/index.rdf
Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for reading.
Filed under: Blog watch
2 Comments
Robert Scoble of Microsoft uses persona-driven design in illustrating the potential of RSS.
Has there been any serious user-research and investigation of RSS from a user-experience or information science point-of-view?
Not just the UX of the aggregators or readers, but how people might use RSS in their daily information foraging behaviour, and as part of a greater mix of media that we’re all swimming in these days.
Or has anyone looked further outside that to ‘pain-points’ in people’s everyday lives where an rss-type delivery of information or services might bring benefit?
Filed under: Information foraging
4 Comments
The rich actively enjoy filling in forms, and therefore attack such things as tax and expense claims with gusto and competence.
I am not rich.
Filed under: Misc.
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In a feature puffing this week’s e3 and bemoaning lack of plot or gameplay in current videogame offerings, USAToday gets this bizarre quote:
‘’Consumers expect to have another experience based on a (game) franchise. The same is true, on a psychological basis, in the music business,’’ [Sony Computer Entertainment America president Kaz] Hirai says. ‘’You don’t call Born in the USA ‘Bruce Springsteen 7.’ But if you want to go back and experience the world of Bruce Springsteen again, you buy his new album. It is catering to consumer wants and needs to re-experience that artist, that franchise or that motion picture.’’ The key, he says, is that developers must also continue to ‘’keep pushing the envelope with new franchises so they will be next year’s sequels.’‘
Bruce Springsteen is not a world.
I think.
Filed under: Games and play
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Came back from Australia to find the commenting on this site faulty. They’re being lost somewhere, somehow. I don’t have the time or the facillity to sort it out, so for now if you have something to add, mail me. The world will probably scrape by with one less place to debate search-box positioning, cities, bad kerning and comic book physics.
Filed under: Misc.
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