27 July 2000

I got my hands on the list of criteria Forrester uses to "evaluate" user experience. I was startled, to say the least... I didn't realize how much confidence one puts in a brand without really knowing their processes or evaluating the results. I've been horrified lately by several blatant... um, mistakes in respected industry periodicals. I already knew never to believe anything I read, and now I'm just gonna quit reading... Back to Forrester. First of all, the User Experience Evaluation is nothing of the sort. It's a heuristic evaluation by one individual, the qualifications of whom Forrester does not feel bound to reveal. Secondly, Forrester is a market research company. Their evaluation is positioned as market research-- which is startlingly disingenuous. They are presenting qualitative information in the same way they do quantitative market research. For example, there are no categories within which to compare experiences. Using the Forrester system, the experience at an American chain store site directed at pre-adolescent girls can be compared to a brokerage site for a select group of financial analysts. The metrics used to evaluate user satisfaction are identical. That is, they disregard entirely the nature of the user and allow one guy to guess at what he thinks the target user wants. They ask questions about and grade both sites on whether or not the financial transaction can be conducted in multiple currencies. Both are numerically scored on whether or not the users can conduct financial transactions... Additionally, there are no metrics to address functionality...I'm increasingly convinced that experience conducting quantitative research does not necessarily make one eligible to do qualitative research. Companies like Forrester and KPMG are using their reputations as market research companies to conduct shockingly shoddy qualitative research-- and it doesn't occur to anyone to look over their shoulders... Shneiderman would be shocked.

I asked the I Ching if I should move to Mott Haven. It responded, ""Shock comes -- oh! oh! Laughing words -- ha! ha! Terror for a hundred miles." We're there.

Who else's fault is this?

I never have the right words on hand when something really egregious happens. The second I get content, I lose my edge. Fortunately for my employer, I was rendered speechless when in a meeting with a brokerage house (read: me and about 25 white guys in suits) when someone who really should have known better stopped the meeting to ask if I'd mind being his stenographer...It was nearly funny until he called today and asked me to type up the notes and get them to him by this afternoon. I'm still shaking. I need to cultivate some of that all-encompassing rage I had going during college. I've been too successful in avoiding the sort of people I despise. There just aren't enough of that special sort of avuncular authority figures in my life anymore to keep me on my toes...

Ugh. I'm going home.

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24 July 2000

Some days I'm singing "Ain't Nobody's Business" all the way home and some days I just get home as fast as I can...

The Slow Food Movement is "for the Defence of and the Right to Pleasure." What a lovely discovery. Haven't I been saying for years that a good meal lasts a minimum of two hours? As we look for a place to live, I am having unlikely fantasies of spacious kitchens and coloured tiles and homemade yogurt... And the more I research Mott Haven, which Jonathan Kozol, in Ordinary Resurrections, calls "South Bronx's most dismal neighborhood," the more interested I become...

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20 July 2000

I was so busy looking at work-related info on dack, that I missed the lovely list of euphomisms for drunk. It even includes tight, which V and I tried valiently to revive a few years ago during a short-lived Golden Era gangster phase.

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19 July 2000

I was thinking about habits as I wandered in the direction of work this morning (there are a finite number of routes between home and office, so all I really have to do is walk forward). I think repetition doesn't necessarily imply habit. Isn't habit unconscious? Biting my nails is habit, but counting the steps is ritual... Or symptomatic.

e-2. Teh patronso f Tomoko Takahashi's Word Perhect (you can find it there). While were at it, 2wice is always worthwhile and also has a number in the name.

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18 July 2000

Restoration, American Style. I watched The Virgin Suicides and, as usual when I hear a work criticized for being too fantastical or removed from reality, I identified intensely with parts of it. I haven't read the book, but the conceit of recounting the story as an utterly flat wall around the events seems literary (it reminded me of the tall plywood walls around construction sites, pasted with posters and spray paint). If it was, the director is to be congratulated (congratulations, director). Regardless of where it came from, the effect was beautiful... I don't think my real life is very realistic.

Got it. Murakami's Underground, that is.

A short paper on phenomenological anthropology. Some interesting ideas (starting points?) on documenting qualitative ethnographic research... Although sometimes it's really hard to distinguish bullshit from qualitative research... And transpersonal phenomenology potentially renders them indistinguishable. Speaking of ethnographic research, presenceweb.org has established an amazing dialogue with three groups of users representing the older population of the EU. It looks like they've commenced prototyping all sorts of nifty devices. Oh-- it's done right! I want to work on that project! Yum... Also, of course, Maypole.

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13 July 2000

A conference cryptically entitled Diagrams.

Nano is a very clever idea. It sort of works even in beta. Sort of along the same lines as flyswat.

A whole lot of my clever, visionary friends are out of jobs. Maybe the student loans that have been ominously shaping my life for the last several years aren't as awful as I thought...

I am reading over the shoulder of someone who is taking the Gotham Writer's Workshop course on fiction writing. I find the lectures paralyzing. They are well written, informative, and organized, but... daunting in their dissection of the structure and elements of a story. It turns out I haven't ever written a Story.

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12 July 2000

Ellen's roadtrip makes me miss Texas.

It's starting to be too easy to jot down pages of squiffy couplets during corporate offsite meetings. What's next? Snide sestinas or cranky sonnets?

The main entrance of K Trimmings on Broadway is flanked by two of dirty plastic covered boards to which are attached a bunch of dog-eared sheets of buttons. "The Trimmings Museum," a scraggly sign splendidly proclaims. Inside is a tall narrow space that runs the width of the block between Broadway and Mercer. The entrance area has recently been reorganized. The jungle of ribbons and trimmings has been hacked back to reveal a few startling square meters of bare floor. There are usually a couple of customers blocking the door near the front, presumably too awestruck to continue. Along the front space are stands that hold spools of ribbon and packaged notions. On the left are two tables containing hundreds of tiny boxes of loose notions. There are AAA patches, golden belt buckles, snaps disguised as sequined birds, and little clusters of bright pink pearls. The rest of the narrow space is filled by twelve-foot stacks. The whir of the fans and the vicious buzz of the florescent lights are instantly muffled between the stacks. The proprietors / librarians aren't much in evidence past the front of the store. Most of them wear white beards. They are knowledgeable and cranky. They don't stop short of swatting at a customer's hand if she reaches for something she ought not to. Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be any sort of consistent pattern of acceptable behavior. Abject humility is safest, considering the prices appear to be directly proportional to the degree of obsequiousness displayed by the customer.

I was reading in an interview with Duras (that goes with Destroy, She Said) in which she mentioned that Sartre claimed, in his response to someone-or-other (I'll look it up) that the reader cannot identify with more than one character, including the narrator... Perhaps, no more than one at a time?

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29 June 2000

The sodaconstructor is the most absorbing thing I've seen online in ages. The models, no matter how arbitrary, are so disturbingly anthropomorphic. I accidentally made a strange, ingratiating little creature with a pathetic limp... Ewww.

Out of town, country, and modem reach until the 9th.

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27 June 2000

Hey, I think I'm the only one in the world who hasn't read Douglas Coupland. I started to once, but I think I got nauseous because I was trying to read and drive. I might try again and see what all the fuss is about. I'm so curious... It's confounding to try to form an opinion about his work without reading it when the reviewing gods send down conflicting stone tablets. C'mon guys. Don't make us read the actual books.

There are muddy diagonals softening the corners of the grassy rectangle in the courtyard, because the little girl and the other people in the neighborhood who are not grown-ups always cut the corners. When it rains the water pools there and very large worms squirm out of their holes. The little girl crouches at the edge of the puddle and gently pets the night crawlers.

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26 June 2000

I want to go and live at John King books in Detroit. It is easily the most impressive bookstore I have ever encountered (and I hit the Strand nearly every Saturday morning). I was forced to limit myself to an hour or I would have done more serious damage to my delicately balanced finances. The four storey warehouse contains more books than I can begin to imagine. There are thousands of books I didn't even know I wanted. I got a 1956 copy of the Paris Review (spring) and a beautiful old illustrated copy of Tristam Shandy. It gave me a combination of that crazy, kleptomaniac feeling of panic and an urge to binge usually only brought on by a certain chocolate cake from Gourmet Garage. And if the selection left me flabbergasted, the service left me... cornswoggled or something (superlatively indicating boundless delight). Everyone who works there is so clever and knowledgeable and nice. It is one of my favorite places to be in the whole wide world.

A lovely paper on affordances in software design. The language is simple and the concepts are clearly explained. It's a good resource to which to refer people who don't spend all day long thinking about this sort of nonsense (read this, you client people).

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22 June 2000

For starters, don't trust the dates. I have less of an idea about what day it actually is than almost anyone I know. They are a mere approximation and that's fine.

Thinking about Abbot's ideas of dimensionality with respect to representations of 3-d within a 2-d medium, I came across the work of Charles Howard Hinton. Hinton references Abbot in the introduction to his work, "A Plane World." Hinton's thinking apparently had a good deal of influence on the modernist movement.

She kept writing him after it was over. The first time. Then when it was over the second time, she still kept writing. She's facile with words and devastatingly intimate. I read two of the postcards. You were watching me. I put them down. When you left the room, I picked up her photograph and studied it. You always refer to her very formally, using both her first and last names.

One of the narrative choices went like this: A 20 year old woman has an affair with a 39 year old biologist specializing in (what species was it?) snails. They celebrate his 40th birthday together.

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20 June 2000

This is the thing: I have been making things. I still am. First I was toiling slavishly on a particularly riveting work project and subsequently I am going through a phase in which I am now dying to make complete things of my own. This is not a complete thing. It is a series of placeholders... And I was too tired to spend energy on a placeholder. But I miss having a list, and it's good practice. So a fresh list starts with:

I have also been thinking about the myth of Medea because of something I watched in the middle of the night. It was an interview with the sheriff who solved the case involving Susan Smith and the death of her two children. He mentioned some of the consistencies among crimes in which a mother kills her young children. The one that impressed me and has been giving me nightmares is the eerie frequency with which the victims are found submerged in water...The idea of the child drowned in amniotic fluid...reminds me of a controversy around something Duras wrote or said about the murder of a child found drowned... "Sublime, necessarily sublime..." She posits the mother as the murderer.

The little girl is drawing arrows with chalk on the sidewalk in front of the house. Her parents are sitting, talking on the front steps. The little girl stops to examine some ants on the sidewalk. She remembers a man on TV who described honey ants. She's not sure if all ants have honey in them. She eats a couple but they are hard to taste. Suddenly she hears her father say a bad word. She starts and then sits very still. He calls someone stupid. She is deeply impressed and a little frightened. After a while she eats another ant.

The making a digital model and the making a physical model of a physical object or space are both useful, but they aren't useful in the same way. The experiential advantage of the physical simulacrum is clear: it's easier to understand a three-dimensional object through a three-dimensional medium. It takes energy to extrapolate the idea of a three-dimensional object through a two-dimensional medium. It's a strange, reflexive activity. Instead of trying to fake the experience of a 3-d object, I want to determine what's particularly interesting about the 2-d experience? What's real in the perception and manipulation in 2-d of the representation of a 3-d object? How can the user be self-conscious about it? Why is that irony significant?

We may have finally found a lawsuit worth the bother:

Thank god for the AIA. They make it their business to ensure that nobody is frightened when they walk down the street... or sentient. I hope somebody sues them and takes their collective pants.

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March, April, May