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29
June,1999
Don't
play cards with Satan... I wanted to link to Dead Dog's
Eyeball, which I was listening to on the walk to work this
morning, but not even everycd
has it. Humph. I think Sorry
Entertainer is good too, though.
And
if that makes you happy, kid,
You'll be the first it ever did.
More
thoughts that emerged during a conversation with Jacquie
on User-Centered Design:
...The
other issue is understanding your audience so that your
solution is pertinent, i.e. designing with the familiar
in mind... Not designing the familiar... again. Knowing
what morphs to exploit and where to challenge your audience
without losing them. Why challenge the user at all?
1. To refine or better an existing experience
2. For the sake of the experience itself
Mark
that now, once more, thou standest on fate's fine edge.
Is there
such a thing as a tactile object-oriented programming environment?
Off to
adventures in New York tomorrow. No more chat 'til Tuesday.
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28
June, 1999
Speaking
of Alice
Waters and Chez
Panisse, yesterday I watched the documentary film by Les
Blank, Werner
Herzog Eats His Shoe.
I'm
learning about people. I'm learning that if she divines my
weakness and keeps it to herself, she loves me. The compulsion
to remind me that he knows my fragility is a bid for power.
I'm
submerging myself in information on toys
and I'm thinking hard about smart
toys... Specifically defining parameters for usability
in toys.
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25
June 1999
Too
much of what is touted as User-Centered Design today is insultingly
puerile. It's a phrase everybody likes to throw around lately
to feel popular, but what it too often means is designing
for the lowest common denominator and in the process, insulting
the rest of your users. The idea of challenging or stimulating
the user has gone out of vogue. The inoffensive is hailed
as the pinnacle of innovation. Yes, it's essential to understand
the goals of your user. But with that understanding we should
be inventing solutions that surpass those goals and begins
to challenge the user to address wholly new considerations.
Don't add to the bleak wasteland of which the majority of
our built and digital environment consists... After
all that ranting, a favorite (nice and basic) recommended
resource
on Usability.
Feed
is turgid with fascinating
information on the brain.
Joy!
The hypothetical hardware has arrived! And it works! I feel
like WRITING IN ALL CAPS! And taking a nap.
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24
June, 1999
For
better living: Never contractually oblige yourself to develop
software for hardware that doesn't exist yet, no matter how
enticing the interactions sound. It's really hard... Hypothetically.
I
had a repeat dream. It was supposed to be about the concept
of solitude again, but I never can tell. I'm aware
that my subconscious is frothing with metaphors... Anyhow,
in my dream, solitude was an infection. It was called
Solidad (why Spanish, and why a name I've always loved?).
It killed those it infected immediately... unless they refrained
from intaking nourishment. In that case, they died of starvation,
slowly... It was a very disturbing dream. I love dreaming.
I love sleeping.
I
just got a brand
new cookbook. I have been reading myself to sleep with
it at night because I don't have time to actually cook (Alice's
Waters' cookbooks
are good for that too). I was thinking this morning about
a short story I dimly recall (maybe in Birds
of America, which I already need to reread), in which
someone was married to a woman who was supposed to be the
epitome of tedium. This was illustrated by the fact that she
read cookbooks in bed... Hmm... I happen to think food is
very exciting.
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23
June, 1999
The
Soft Moon, from Calvino's
t
zero. Also, texts
from Invisible
Cities:
From
one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective,
multiplying its repretory of images: but instead it has
no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse,
like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which
can neither be separated nor look at each other.
The yellow
was getting to me. Maybe next month.
Wow. Ellen
sent me this
url... Of course. Ellen knows everything and if there's
anything she doesn't know, she's in the process of knowing
it.
PLANS
& SHOP DRAWINGS FOR CONVER- TING AN ORDINARY ZIPPO LIGHTER
TO SHOOT A .22 SHORT
An intelligent
review
of An
Intimate History of Killing, which I've heard a bit
about but haven't read.
I will
go swimming tonight. The springs are bitingly cold and after
swimming, I sleep heavily.
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22
June, 1999
A
definition from the Surrealist
dictionary that I forgot to mention:
BREAST.
"The breast is the chest elevated to the state of mystery
- the chest moralised."
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21
June, 1999
Evidently,
I didn't say what you wanted to hear.
I
was reminded of something beautiful in the Sunday
Times this week. I love the work of surrealist,
Georges Hugnet... Which brings me to this lovely surrealist
dictionary. Por a relevant ejemplo:
COLLAGE."If
it is plumes that make plumage, it is not the glue that
makes a gluing." (Max Ernst) "It is something like the alchemy
of the visual image. The miracle of total transfiguration
of beings and objects with or without modification of their
physical or anatomical appearance." (Max Ernst)
or
SPONTANEITY.
(adage of). "The bachelor grinds his chocolate himself."
(Marcel Duchamp)
Thoughtful.
From the ID
Interactive Media design review.
Oh-- this
makes me happy! Gavin (are you a link?) told me where
I can order Lik M Aid or Fun Dip. He said that the packaging
was updated last time he saw it, but last time I saw it in
Windsor, Ontario at the variety store down the street from
my Grampa's house; the packaging was exactly the same: soft
colours on white with (I think) a drawing of a guy eating
the candy. I'm on a mission. Got to find it... Preferably
without ordering 48 packs... Yup, I think 48 packs would take
the romance right out of it.
More thoughts
I thunk after contemplating the Navihedron
(and during this morning's interminable staff meeting): What
about navigating the actual information?..i.e. the planes
(which are not finite), rather than the vertices (which are
finite). Consider in this context: Rietveldt (spec. Schröder
House), Edwin Abbot's Flatlanders...
What happens with a series of parallel planes of hierarchical
information along the y axis, when one is tweaked to convergence?...
What happens at those intersections and how do I model it?
Swift
and Abbott’s Use of Geometric Imagery to Dissect Their Worlds
looks interesting, although I haven't read it yet. I sure
do like the title. It reminds me of my favorite
quote (12 May).
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20
June, 1999
I
was remembering Mary's convenience store today. It wasn't
really called Mary's. The name was derived from Mary's convoluted
Italian last name. It started with C. When you found a penny
on the ground, you could immediately rush to Mary's where
you could finger all the circus peanuts or malt balls in an
open crate until you found exactly the best value for your
money. Then you would take your delicacy to the scrubby linoleum
counter and pay for it. Best of all was when I would unaccountably
be in possession of ten cents. Then I would buy my favorite
candy: Likemaide (I think that's how it's spelled and
I can't find it on the internet... yet). It was a candy stick
that you could dip in one of three flavours of powdery stuff
and then lick off. It actually didn't taste too good. But
now it all makes sense. It was my favorite because it was
designed to be interactive... Except that sometimes I would
forego the Likemaide and buy a whole pack of bubble
gum and chew it all at the same time... I dunno what that
means.
Someone
just asked me what's up with my pomegranate and if living
in Austin make me feel like Persephone
'cause it's humid as hell. Well it didn't, but now it does.
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18
June, 1999
Drug
resistance is frightening.
There's
been lots of chat lately on the CHI
list about metaphors. It's interesting to me that the
conversation is surrounding the use of what I've lately been
somewhat obliquely referring to as literal metaphors...
(everybody gets it until they think about it). I had to
coin that nonsensical phrase to communicate my ideas because
the word metaphor has never had any sort of visual
or functional literal connotations for me. It certainly doesn't
conjure up visions of beveled edges and shiny car console-looking
thingies. In my world, metaphor (in the context of
user experience design, digital or otherwise) means conceptual
metaphor.
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16
June, 1999
I
feel terrible. I think I frightened the poor woman whom I
interviewed yesterday. I prefer to chat with anyone I'm interviewing
rather than asking a preset suite of stupid questions that
leaves the wretched interviewee no choice but to blink rapidly
and declare herself a people person... However, I s'pose
I didn't really make that clear. I was blithely prattling
on in my usual incoherent manner; about the medium in general
and wondering about the idea of adaptive reuse in digital
environments, blah, blah, blah... When I stopped for a breath,
she froze and stammered, "I can't answer that."
I hastened to make clear that I wasn't expecting an essay-style
answer-- just chat. She was silent for a moment then, looking
levelly at me, responded, "I work well with others."
I
was chatting with Steve and (the famous) Walt at lunch today
and we were making fun of our reading material as miserable,
histrionic teenagers. I reread the fly fishing section of
The
Sun Also Rises until I knew it by heart. Walt didn't
get it. He detests Hemmingway. Steve can hardly read Rimbaud
now without being reminded of a bleak adolescence. I can imagine
him at fourteen, tearing his hair and gnashing his teeth over
Night
in Hell. I recall being especially captivated by e.e.cummings'
poem, Humanity
i love you. I thought the last line infinitely poignant.
It spoke to me. It still does. It reminds me that even
the greatest writer can use a good editor to keep him in check.
she
being Brand
-new...
Mostly
I'm sad that I never got to take an English class in college.
I'm missing great lumps of the canon. However, I begin to
suspish (you know, like suspicioning) that there may have
been advantages... I never learned to grow bored with poets
like e.e. cummings.
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15
June, 1999
Victor
and I had an interesting chat last night about the rhetoric
associated with the work (in any medium) we love. We discussed
the difference between the rhetoric associated with a visual
/ experiential work and that associated with text. He said
something that I thought was profound in that obvious way
that nobody ever gets: "Architecture should embody rather
than express ideas." Experiential media are clumsy elements
with which to build a linear narrative... Meaning is derived
in a completely different manner from an experiential work
than from a textual work. So what about hypertext? It's an
experiential, textual medium. The user navigates an infinitely
nonlinear structure composed of text... Tangentially,
as an example of ideas embodied rather than expressed, we
discussed the use of lines and planes versus the use of volumes.
It goes along with my ideas below about fragmentation and
all the implied infinities between fragments... And that leads
me to something Peter
reminded me of this morning in an email: The Amaze Navehedra.
They are using definable geometric volumes to express a finite
amount of information... To tell a story? What's the next
step? How does this navigation become even more sophisticated?
How does one deconstruct the volume to imply infinity between
the planes?
Joy!
Jotto is coming out with a new book this fall. Penguin
Dreams.
Oh--
It's Bloomsday.
I am going out to eat a Guinness for supper in honor of that
one guy who wrote that
book about that fictional guy, Leopold Bloom... pick,
pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling
softly in the brimming bowl.
A
Guinness
is as good as a sandwich... Or maybe even vitamins
and exercise and an uninterrupted eight hours of sleep.
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further
notes from June
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