23 November 1999

Eew. How disconcerting.

I'm thinking a lot (when I think about anything other than work) about what the concept of adaptive reuse means in a fluid medium such as the web. By designing with adaptive reuse in mind, I mean doing the impossible: anticipating use cases that I can't even begin to imagine... In any sort of medium, the designer has two options (simplistically): She can tailor the design for a highly specific use case, or she can design a very ambiguous product or space, in order to accommodate the most possible use cases. The latter leaves the job specification and personalization to the user. As a metaphor, imagine a warehouse space as opposed to a space broken down in a highly specialized manner to facilitate each step of a specific task. Recall those dreadful, tumorous-looking buildings by the early embracers of good old "form follows function?" There's no denying that the second third and fourth incarnations of those spaces is fascinating... Acrobatic even. They end up as a sort of patchwork record of that crazy and unintended uses to which the space has been put... So how to trace that record in a dynamic medium such as the web? And then, the same question as always: how to design for layers of use... Tangentially: Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn.

Oh god, I am crying with laughter. From a review of one of the products I worked on last year:

As hard as I try, I can't help thinking customizable shoes is nifty.

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14 November 1999

Oh! A list of juicy (is that really a good adjective in the context?) reading material which reminds one it's time to look over The Society of the Spectacle again... Which by a precarious free association recalls a dream I had last night. I don't think I participated in the dream at all except as a sort of observer, but Ume-the-cat (who is not famous except in my world) was there walking underfoot while Beck and Michel (from Gide's Immoralist) were engaged in a lively discussion of performance art... I'm convinced it was rife with meaning. Garbage-- nothing!

It's true. Compassion isn't the first adjective to spring to mind when one considers Giuliani.

Why is everyone so wide awake at 6.40 in the morning? I walked to work in that thin, bluish skim milk light that's usually an indication that it's fine to sleep for another hour... I thought about biographies as I walked. I don't read them very often (though I was fascinated with a biography of Simone de Beauvoir a few years ago... Was it the one by Deirdre Bair?), and I rarely read about contemporary figures. Biographies written about living people seem presumptuous... Biographies (aside from a chronological element) are fiction. A sort of grand, well-financed version of collegiate gossip, where a few facts are used to make all sorts of titillating deductions. Reading a brief review of a biography of Woody Allen, I imagined that the subjects of such works must feel a combination of outrage and smugness. I recall the feeling from school. How can anyone claim to know another person? Then, the illumination: the more you assume you know about me, the more privacy it actually affords me. You may all concentrate on my fictional self, while my real self lives her secret life.

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13 November 1999

I came into work ferociously determined to get stuff done in the silence of the weekend (the studio normally maintains itself at a cheerful roar, only slightly quieter than the construction beneath my window); but I accidently started reading Suey Chow's advice column...I'm much wiser in the matters of love, but not much closer to getting my work done.

Four hours later I feel justified in going to the bookstore to look up information on writing fiction.

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11 November 1999

Donald Kuspit writes on nakedness and why we can't look away... He explores the significance that nudity acquires in dreams and some artworks... In real life, it's not necessarily even an erotic fascination. Part of it is about knowing a secret. It's like having temporary access to information I can't take notes on.

More discussion on what defines an educated person. It's the same debate that eventually comes down to whether to emphasize facts or problem-solving skills in education... I feel strongly that an emphasis on problem solving skills helps provide the motivation to independently investigate the kind of information on which an emphasis on memorization concentrates (she admits uneasily)... But I hesitate to voice that too confidently because I suspish that I may be making the egotistical error of assuming everyone else learns the way I do... I carefully expounded my theory to one parent and was a bit taken aback by her response. Instead of the eager nods I expected, she just howled in indecent amusement. When she finally wiped the tears from her eyes and controlled her slightly hysterical hiccups, she grabbed me by the hair and in preternaturally guttural tones suggested I test my hypothesis on her little beasts... I don't have children.

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10 November 1999

Notes from a provocative lecture by Nigel Coates on the erotic dimension of design, specifically with respect to architecture... Didn't he write a book on that too?...I dreamed I was standing on the next to last step of a wide enclosed stair with windows along either side, when I was suddenly overcome with a heavy lassitude and felt myself fall backward. As I tumbled down the stairs, I could see another set of windows moving relative to those in the walls enclosing the stairs. I remember wondering what sort of space was contained between the two.

I'm squished by what my mother, quoting someone or other, refers to as the "tyranny of the urgent". Eighty-nine unopened emails and a hundred and nine deadlines to be met by yesterday... All punctuated by the indescribable sound of the jackhammers beneath my window from 7.00 am onward...Daily...Every day... On Saturday I bounded out of bed in a rage and stalked off to find a book with whom to eat breakfast. After some indecision, I discovered a novel by Slavenka Drakulic called The Taste of a Man. I tenderly escorted it to breakfast, where I feasted on pão do queijo, fried plantains, coffee, and orange juice. Between bites, I breathlessly contemplated cannibalism as presented without losing my appetite enough to leave any traces of the pão do queijo uneaten or any pages of the book unread.

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04 November 1999

Thanks to two excruciating years in junior high, I read Latin just well enough to be deriving much amusement and many surreptitious giggles from using choice bits of St. Augustine's Confessions as the (occasionally pertinent) filler text in the present schematics I'm doing. I wonder if the clients read Latin...

Bless you, Shirky.com, for articulating so much of what I've been waving my arms and shouting about (not literally, of course-- in reality l just mope and speak only in monosyllables). My boss forwarded this article to me and a horde of fellow information designer types. It addresses what I perceive to be the biggest issue with "user-centered design". A formulaic approach to design implies that design is static, thereby dismissing the role of the designer as inventor. Good design (design that appreciates and appropriately challenges the user) cannot be defined by a set of finite guidelines. To so reduce the process miscalculates the extreme complexity of the interpretation and use of user data into an experience that effectively exploits that data to challenge or expand upon existing precedents... It's the sort of thinking that leads terror-stricken usability specialists to faint at the sight of an un-underlined link... I wave the smelling salts under their anachronistic, hide-bound old noses and dump a bucket of cold dhtml on their heads. That's the phenomenon that I didn't have the energy to respond to in physical architecture. Let's hear less of it with respect to building the web... Off to pick up the laundry (in a huff).

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02 November 1999

I read in Metropolis Magazine that Douglas Leigh was the first to light up the Empire State building, in honor of the bicentennial... Which still doesn't give me any clue to the cryptic nightly displays I can see from my wobbly fire escape.

An interview in 2wice with industrial designers Laurene Leon and Constantin Boym, in which they talk about commemorating tragedy...There's also an article (and images) on Frances Glessner Lee's Nutshell Studies of unexplained death.

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01 November 1999

From Lawrence Durrell's adaptation of Royidis's gleefully written Pope Joan (gruesome and very, very funny):

I forgot that Marguerite Duras is one of my favorite writers ever. For a while I used to reread her work on a weekly basis. I reread The Ravishing of Lol Stein this weekend for the first time in a couple of years. As always, I am startled by the beauty of the language...

More stuff to think about with respect to information: lots of talking at cross purposes, but that's okay because all the best new ideas come from misunderstandings anyhow (the cleverest and most creatively stimulating people are the ones who mumble and leave everything open to productive misinterpretation, and then everyone gives them credit for all the new ideas in the end). Think about connoisseurship (what's a better word for that?)... If information is inherently translatable, does that mean it's objective? That's all.

I'm not going to defend myself for poking around in areas quite obviously outside those of my own expertise. Neither will I defend my mid-Victorian obsession with italics... Mainly because it's indefensible. Just be thankful for my fortitude in the face of that most seductive of punctuation, that siren of syntax...the exclamation point.

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October 1999