intriguing

The Central City --- ----
Inner City---- ----Sound City -----> by STANZA.

artsoundworks

Flow is rapidly approaching. Find out about related stuff at the Doors of Perception:Magazine

including some v. interesting looking articles
one from no other than Manuel Castells
Redesigning democracy
http://www.doorsofperception.com/features/details/39

Manuel was also the key speaker at the very interesting virtual society end of project conference that I went to ages ago
http://virtualsociety.sbs.ox.ac.uk/events/promise.htm

shadows of the infinite
flash version (large) but recommended

highlights (for me) are the education interactives:
http://www.infinite.linst.ac.uk/interactive/engsoundmixer.htm
http://www.infinite.linst.ac.uk/interactive/engchaos.htm
and the top of the tree
http://www.infinite.linst.ac.uk/interactive/englight.htm

these are from the education section
http://www.infinite.linst.ac.uk/english/education/chaos.php

The Atlantic Systems Guild is a consulting organization specializing in the complex processes of system building, with particular emphasis on the human dimension.

There some Articles by guild members - some of which are about gathering requirements.

This is also from the elements resources page.

I like Joel on Software's writing - you can get the whole of
User Interface Design For Programmers

which I had seen before but was reminded by a link from

http://www.jjg.net/elements/resources

hope to see the book itself in slightly better close up than this soon
funny that they don't just use the pdf pages for this chapter

came across some old virtual identify links

"Virtual Communities" and "Viritual Identities"
Articles by: H. Rheingold, S. Turkle, M. Slouka
http://www.abacon.com/vitanza/cyber/ch2.html

Virtual Environments for Education, Research and Life
http://tecfa.unige.ch/moo/paris96/papers/daniel.html

Virtual Playground: Architectures for a Shared Virtual World
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/publications/r-98-12/

Howard Rhiengold's Virtual Reality (interview)
http://www.cyberstage.org/archive/cstage11/hlr11.html

Book by Howard Rheingold examines the impact of the online world on political liberties, and
on real world experiences.
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/

Getting the Seats of Your Pants Dirty: Strategies for Ethnographic Research on Virtual Communities
http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol3/issue1/paccagnella.html

Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community
http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/Identity/IdentityDeception.html

Did I mention I am reading this at present?
Inhabiting the Virtual City: The Design of Social Environments for Electronic Communities
http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/Thesis/

----

one recent additon
http://www.smartmobs.com/

----

Coincidentally, having just linked to an image site, came across
Happy Earth Day 4/23/2001
Just one of the many great cartoons by Clay Bennett

explodingdog 2002
"hi my name is sam,
i draw pictures, from your titles.
send me a title, or any thing
else you want to talk to me
about"

Sam is one of the speakers at the *gel* conference
http://www.goodexperience.com/gel
which has a pretty impressive line up so I thought I'd check out his site - and it was worth it :)

"On the web, everyone’s a woman."

a great quote from page two of
First Principles: Some Rules of Thumb, and Some Thumbing of Rules - Sample chapter from 'Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web' again by Christina Wodtke

Bruce Damer's Personal Histories of the Desktop User Interface A re-visiting and revising [of] the famous Bushy Tree diagram of the lineage of visual interactive computing systems.

Spring: Home"The Spring Desktop is concept-centric, not file, folder, site, or brand-centric. It's designed for the way you naturally think."

Nice piece by Christina, on Boxes and Arrows, which starts by talking about French town signs... and goes on to point out the need to be ballanced.

Boxes and Arrows: Leaving the Autoroute "You have to have a broad grounding in the related fields along with a deep understanding of your area of specialization. IBM calls these folks T-shaped people, and seeks them out when hiring time rolls around."

London Artists Book Fair 2002
next weekend 25th – 27th October

I am a big fan of Tom Philips' work, who is one of the artists that will be giving talks, but I won't be able to go as I will be away. If you go and hear Tom talk, could you report back via the e-group?

Admission free,
Friday 11am-6pm, Saturday 11am-7pm, Sunday 11am-5pm
The London Institute at Millbank, McGrigor Courtyard, Atterbury Street, Millbank,
London, SW1.

The complete blurb is here:
http://intranet.linst.ac.uk/news/allstories.php?id=74

A "NEW" LOGO FOR A BAR CODE SOCIETY?
via RRE

If you read HyDeSign, and would like to send me comments or take part in a dialogue with others who are interested in the things posted here, then please subscribe to the HyDeSign e-group

Should I start pushing? In the future, I may send the blog entries to the e-group - that is if anyone subscribes and indicates that they would appreciate this...

Ben S. pointed out this global bug tracking software during his presentation [also as a ppt] last night - which incidentally was a much briefer version of this presentation and didn't need the slides of error dialogue boxes 'cause these happened all on their own. Including a great dialogue box about /no help being available/.

Unfortunately, the software that is supposed to track the crashes seems to be a pretty major culprit itself. See:
Bugtoaster - Do Something about Computer Crashes

Why install yet another cause of crashes - even if it does help to raise awareness?

Rather, all apps should have a crash reporting facility built in - like Netscape - then the company could be told to make the stats public. Rather than the reporting coming from a random sample of users it would come from the complete user base. Data could be stored in a temp file and then sent in the background the next time the user is online.

I was disappointed that Ben glossed over how to make computer companies improve their products and service to users.

Encouraging more vocal complaints seems like a cop out. What about leading academics and professionals people such as himself taking a stand and calling for regulation (shock horror).

Rather than holding up his hands and saying how bad it is that certain states in the US allow software companies to create end user license agreements that basically give the customer no protection at all. I can't remember the name of the legislation... If anyone does can you let me know? The next post will explain how...

It is maybe a shame the event was recorded or streamed like the free public lectures at gresham college - but then again that might have discouraged the pretty vocal and interesting question and answer session. Maybe there are sometimes downsides to everything being connected or recorded ;)

valcasey.com . Interaction

some great links and catagorised snipits

yet more of the Big Picture "It's like
when people began thinking about flying: The natural
way to fly was to build an artificial bird, just as the natural
way to organize information on a computer was to build
an electronic office with a file cabinet and a desktop. But
it turned out that an artificial bird was the wrong way to
make to an airplane, and that airplanes have their own
rules.

And we believe that an artificial office and artificial file
cabinet and artificial garbage can and desktop and so
forth was an obvious first guess but not the right way for
information to be organized on a computer, and that a
narrative or a time stream, which makes perfect sense
intellectually or cognitively, may not work in a paper
office, but it does work when we have the software to
make it happen."

been reading the first chapter in Leonardo's Laptop, not that Ben's ideas are dated, by it reminded me of the two brilliant papers by 'Lick' - see: http://memex.org/licklider.pdf more info about 'Lick' here: http://www.livinginternet.com/?i/ii_licklider.htm and about Taylor here: http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_ipto.htm

oh well - the maimm site has gone coy on me ;)

so these link don't work anymore - shame as they were a good advert for my mind??

alan...

-- what a nice way to know all of u here! -- is one of the students sites on the MAIMM site at LCP


Phil Baines also from Linst has an interesting article about open type + on the eye mag site - which is also designed by a student from LCP

Dancing with wolves, part 2

Lets define the following categories of obfuscation for interfaces
- Innocent Obfuscation or IO
Overly complex interface designed accidentally by untrained person or organisation
- Negligent Obfuscation or NO
Overly complex interface designed by person or organisation that should know better
- Fraudulent Obfuscation or FO
Overly complex interface designed deliberately to mislead

These, along with some other pretty funny observations, are from:
Les Hatton's keynote slides
from HCI 2002

More Rethinking the GUI "[...] if they don't know the big
picture, if they can't add it up, if they don't see where it's
leading, if they don't understand the story line.

Yet ironically, we have the wrong information structures,
the wrong knowledge structures, so increasing the
amount of data makes us worse and not better
informed, because we're buried under more and more
stuff and we have less time to put the pieces together,
we have less time to think about it, we have less time to
mull over the big picture and let it emerge."

Icograda | graphic design worldwide This Is What I Have Learned
by Milton Glaser
there is also a PDF version

this article really makes you think about you practice and your position...

for me it contains too many reminders of what I am currently, more often than not, trying to forget :(

...somethings I'd rather not have pointed out to me

Technical Communication Library: Articles: Learning from Games: Seven Principles of Effective Design Why do players of computer games seem to approach those applications without fear, eagerly exploring and learning as they go, while users of business applications will go out of their way to keep from using the tools? [...] Why can’t business applications be more like games? In this article, we attempt to lay the ground work for future research by defining seven design principles found in games that we believe contribute to the creation of more usable applications."

FREE - registration required

Rethinking the GUI for the Big Picture"Gelernter and his team
have developed a software program intended to
revolutionize how personal computers save and display
information.
The goal: to present all information—word-processing
documents, e-mail, pictures, music, everything—as a
stream of time-ordered files that can be reorganized
instantly into substreams by topic."

There is a nice overview of TextArc in the latest issue of InfoVis Mag

Cannot find the people browser in CSCWplace


which looks similar to but less sophisticated than visual who

Though entitled Current Vita
this page actually contains 'Some Papers' by J.M. Carroll.

Highlights for me are:
Community computing as human ± computer
interaction
Articulating collaboration in a learning
community

and the classic from 1994
Binding Objects to Scenarios of Use

Digital Web Magazine - An interview with Peter Merholz and Nathan Shedroff on User-Centered Design "developers ignore important issues and feedback as they discount things they don't really want to address"
"Oftentimes, what is *most* useful, usable, and meaningful to the end-user is untenable from a business perspective, and the product, while maybe popular, is a financial failure."

Some not so Subtle Similarities
between the

and

logos

Interview with The Don in New Scientist "[Software design is done] best by
having a dictator. From the user's point of view, you must have a
coherent design philosophy, and I don't see how that could come
about from open source software. The person who's done it best is
Steve Jobs, and he's well-known for being a tyrant."

Having just come across the Gnome GUI for Linux, I would suggest Don allows OpenSource time to settle before making such proclemations. There are differences between dictatorial and machiavelian approaches. Raymond, proposes the 'Charismatic Coordinator Theory' of OpenSource. And there is always the small but slow coupling approach put forward in Dust or Magic by Bob Hughes.

Even though Don confesses to being a tinkerer himself. The key issue [FMM] that wasn't touched on in the interview, is the question of gradual improvement, constant but subtle tinkering. The impact should only be noticable in that something is easier. The changes should not disrupt the previously learned behaviour.

The SIGCHI Bulletin
has some very good articles in it
but...

...t'is a shame about the online access issues - particularly considering they are an HCI special interest group - pdf's designed for print, some of which are 2MBs - though at least they recently added bookmarks to them ;)

these are in stark contrast to the very nicely formatted versions of William Hudson's articles (in the same) which he posts here: syntagm.co.uk/design/articles.htm

pleased to come across this, what with my current increased interest in aural-visualisations (if there are such things)

Unlocking the Mysteries of Science by Diana Phillips Mahoney, Computer Graphics World, July 1995.
Scroll to the bottom for other visualisations such as this

mountain plot of ozone pollutant concentrations.

This was alongside (should I say rooted with) a similarly old, but also far from dated piece about
Principles of good GUI Design
which just appeared (without a publication date) on bogieland.com/infodesign

GUUUI - InfoRomanticism on the Internet"It is a brave new canvas for the interface and interaction designer, whose endogenous qualities of imagination and passion are needed to make data accessible on both an aesthetic and pragmatic level. This is Romanticism with transforming data into usable Information. Such Romanticism is vital in contributing to the meliorism of the internet age and the information ages to come!"

GUUUI - InfoRomanticism on the Internet
Celebrating the Creature of Data

• Celebrating data as living information
  
• Treating data as a body, organic and evolutionary and as an entity bigger than ourselves"
  

Great new issue of guuui - no mention of Ben tho' |-]
Better fix that.