Monthly Archive for September, 2005

The Longhorn crisis

Published on September 27, 2005 in Disruptive. 0 Comments

Well, I am personally tired of debating why to choose Macs over PCs. In every respect there are just two types of computer users: those who once lost their data and those who will loose their data. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Mac or a PC where your data was on…

But if you have been thinking about Microsoft vs. Apple vs. Linux/UNIX have a look at this article called »Windows officially broken«. It describes internal struggle of Microsoft to lay out the technical basis of their next OS release (once called Longhorn, now called Vista). If the article is correct, then Microsoft needed to completely depart from the culture that made them big once: total pragmatism vs. thoughtful engineering. Yes, get that: this article quotes several sources telling that Microsoft had been running on a flawed design for their OS for 20 years now. Longhorn started to break out in complexity and become impossible to handle.

Old-school computer science called for methodical coding practices to ensure that the large computers used by banks, governments and scientists wouldn’t break. But as personal computers took off in the 1980s, companies like Microsoft didn’t have time for that. PC users wanted cool and useful features quickly. They tolerated — or didn’t notice — the bugs riddling the software. Problems could always be patched over. With each patch and enhancement, it became harder to strap new features onto the software since new code could affect everything else in unpredictable ways.

In other words: Microsoft’s way of doing their core business is outdated and flawed. The Windows OS project got out of hand and needed to be started over. While doing this, Microsoft looses time to competitors like Google (for web applications) or Apple (for their OS) that have been adopting stricter development routines and step-by-step approaches earlier.

Podcasts from thePreparedMind.com

Published on September 26, 2005 in Design. 0 Comments

Christopher Gee is running a weblog subtitled »a blog about the graphic design industry«. He is doing interviews with people from the design profession about various topics. It is very helpful that Christopher listed some issues raised within each interview. So you get an overview before listening to the audio.

I quote from an interview Chris did with GK VanPatter (founder of NextD.org) about Innovation Leadership and misleaded design educators:

There is sort of a misdirected sense in the [design education] community that there is a place and a table for designers that will always be there. It’s a fallacy. That place, there’s someone sitting there and we have to compete for that place. And our design educators just don’t get to that. They still are educating people like »That is your destiny. That is you place and your table because you are a designer and designers are always going to lead design!«. That is history! It’s a fantasy! It does not exist! We have to compete for innovation leadership roles.

I couldn’t agree more. It has been my personal experience and I see it everywhere. And I feel the same that many design educators don’t get it and instead stick to old models of the role of designers in business.

ArsElectronica presentation as audio

Published on September 26, 2005 in Disruptive. 0 Comments

ArsElectronica 2005 (1st-6th September) titled »Hybrid — living in paradox« has published most presentations as audio. There is a link »Webcasts« in the navigation, but it doesn’t contain any content yet.

ArsElectronica has now a history since 1979. I’ve been to it in 1995 and it was quite an inspiring festival. I really think it is great they offer all their festivals in their archive (and even webcasts since last year’s festival).

Innovation in Organizations

Published on September 26, 2005 in Disruptive. 0 Comments

Interview with Dr. Bettina von Stamm: »If you view design as outcome you are likely to have a different perspective on design than if you view design as a process and set of skills. With the former the contribution of design and designers is almost exclusively limited to tangible products. If you take the latter perspective, the role and possible contribution of design and designers shift considerably; it opens up the possibility to applying their process and skills to many other aspects of an organization.«

Density, Simplicity and Continuity

Published on September 26, 2005 in Design. 0 Comments

I am currently working on defining three seminars that lay out a foundation for design education. These courses are not oriented towards the formal and technological aspects of media, but rather focus on the psychological and cognitive questions involved with almost any design work. This is what I came up with:

  • Density: Designing for effectiveness (mostly looking at Information Design)
    Questions involved: How dense can display of information get? How much information can be groked in short time? How can designers organize the attention of recipients/viewers? What do we need to know about cognitive psychology and perception research, to find the best way of communicating visually? How can we identify and build upon archetypes that are available to most humans? etc.
  • Simplicity: Designing for efficiency (mostly looking at Interface Design)
    Questions involved: How can we avoid things getting too complex? Is there an absolute measure to complexity in contrast to an obvious relative measure? Why do we instantly feel products beeing »easy to use«? How can we improve our understanding of the »usage context« when designing things? When do things become too simple and thus do harm instead of help? When does »making things simple« become an end it itself? etc.
  • Continuity: Designing for adequacy (mostly looking at Interaction Design)
    Questions involved: Is there a »psychology of interaction«? Can we learn from the concept of »flow« introduced in psychology for designing interactive systems and services? Can we identify an area inbetween intuition and concious decision making? Do we have the right epistemocogical tools at hand to identify problems in design work in regard to »fluent interaction«? etc.

I plan to sketch out these three topics as being foundation courses – not as a research agenda. You might start from there into any direction within the design profession. One might work on this theoretically, but one might also use any kind of pracitcal design problem or test case to explore the questions raised.

Privacy at stake…?

Published on September 25, 2005 in Politics. 0 Comments

Bruce Schneier in Wired discusses the challenge that surveillance technology raise for constitutional rights:

Sometime in the near future, a young man is walking around the Washington Monument for 30 minutes. Cameras capture his face, which yields an identity. That identity is queried in a series of commercial databases, producing his travel records, his magazine subscriptions and other personal details. This is all fed into a computerized scoring system, which singles him out as a potential terrorist threat. He is stopped by the police, who open his backpack and find a bag of marijuana. Is the opening of that backpack a legal search as defined by the Constitution?

Ecolanguage.net

Published on September 25, 2005 in Design. 0 Comments

Ecolanguage.net uses visual animations to explain economical and ecological processes. The animations are planned for a common visual code to represent all issues involved with economy and ecology. They have just three types of transaction: yellow represent energy, red represents money and black represents information.

It comes pretty close to what I intended with the seminar called »Density«. In fact the assignments of that seminar started with visualizing the Grandfather Economic Reports by Michael Hodges. But in »Density« the focus was not so much on the visual code, but rather how visual representations allow rapid understanding. These two ideas are pretty close together. But »Density« is exploring the cognitive limits of understanding information in short time.

Study.log

Published on September 24, 2005 in Tools. 0 Comments

I had a brief look at study.log. It is a personal information manager (developed with Macromedia Director). It is generally a very interesting concept. But the implementation has issues: there are show stopper bugs, it is very slow you can’t drag & drop objects from the OS layer into the application. Director possibly is not the right way to develop this kind of application.

Thinking about extending the standard GUI with some functionality seems to me a much more promising approach to achieve the goals defined within study.log. And there is a design concept for this already: »Feed me« by Katharina Birkenbach…

Generally it is a good question if the visual layer that tools like study.log provide are really helping the user or if they are just visual clutter of limited use. Haystack is another project that is supposed to be a “universal information client”. But Haystack is may be too formal for users need an informal level for creative thinking.

TiddlyWiki?

Published on September 24, 2005 in Tools. 0 Comments

I came across the TiddlyWiki tool. It is some kind of interactive Wiki opening pages with animation once you clicked a link. It is basically just a very clever JavaScript enhanced HTML-page containing the whole Wiki. You save the page (after allowing the script to do so), upload it to a server and you’re done. The JavaScript is huge. But it feels als simple as the whole Wiki principle itself.

The problem with TiddlyWiki: things may appear at unexpected places. I also don’t think that the principle to open new items on top of the column. It’s an unusual way to navigate a site and so it may not be very intuitive. But it’s a very clever idea with a fancy DHTML implementation.

There are server side implementations as well.

Enabled comments via Haloscan

Published on September 22, 2005 in Contemplation. 0 Comments

Marco Kalz complained about a missing comment feature. So, Marco, especially for you: Comments!

I did not want to implement a comment feature myself, so I use the free Haloscan service to add comments and trackbacks. The drawback of this is, that comments may get lost once I want to quit the service.

Podcasting symposium

Published on September 22, 2005 in Weblog Theory. 0 Comments

There is a podcasting conference at ISIS institute at Duke University (in North Carolina) next week. I also found this podcasting directory for educators and some information about podcasting in education from Apple UK.

Speaking of podcasting: If there would be a video feed containing clips like this I’d instantly subscribe to it!

My bookmarks on podcasting:

[

It doesn’t get worse than this

Published on September 22, 2005 in Ecology. 0 Comments

Michael Ruppert doesn’t hesitate to comment on Rita – the second category 5 Hurricane that is making landfall this year. It will possibly be desasterous to US economy:

The remaining half of Gulf energy production undamaged by Katrina is directly in Rita’s crosshairs.

He is quoting several articles. For instance this quote by John Kilduff, vice president of risk management at Fimat USA in New York:

Rita is developing into our worst-case scenario. This is headed right into our other major refining center just after all the damage done to facilities in Louisiana. From an energy perspective it doesn’t get any worse than this.

Workshop on Blogging

Published on September 21, 2005 in Weblog Theory. 0 Comments

I am in Hamburg at the Campus Innovation conference to offer a small 90-minute workshop on blogging together with Nico Lumma. There are many attendees from the E-Learning community and universities here. I hope I can spur some ideas…

Notiz an die Teilnehmer:
Die Folien des Vortrags finden Sie hier [PDF; 3,6 MB]

Return from Hamburg

Published on September 21, 2005 in Contemplation. 0 Comments

I am in the train back to Cologne. I am thinking about, what I was seeing and hearing the last two days at the Campus Innovation conference. The conference theme was trying to bring educatiors and administration closer together in context of e-Education. Talking about the different sessions would make this a very long post. I’ll skip that. I just want to state that I got the impression that politicians and university administrators try to turn higher education in some kind of electronic commerce. »Education = content delivery«? No wonder faculty and university administrators are like oil and water: you need to steadily stirr them to keep them together.

Yesterday I had dinner with Marco Kalz from FU Hagen and three other people. They were attending another conference in Hamburg. They were “Wiki people” giving presentations of how to use Wikis in e-Learning. One guy was from Switzerland (I didn’t get his name right first). We were debating the issues of structuring content in Wikis over some beers when I said I know a brilliant example of structured content for almost 10 years and he should have a look at that: Biblionetz by Beat Döbeli. He started to laugh and Marco said: »Oliver, you’re just talking to him!!«.

Even while I was the idiot here, it was kind of a nice way to meet someone.

(BTW the other two were Helmut Leitner and Anja Ebersbach)

Webdesign changed

Published on September 20, 2005 in Design. 0 Comments

I have been doing HTML pages since 1994 when xMosaic 1.0 hit the FTP servers worldwide. The only really radical changes to webdesign for a very very long time had been a) JavaScript, b) tables and c) frames. I hesitate to include CSS, because it was kind of buggy and browser specific for a long time. There have been many other smaller things around but these I would not consider seriously because those brought only few advatages while the payoff was huge: you needed Plug-Ins or it was not working on any browser. Flash might be a small exception, because that worked well across browsers, but Flash itself was very useful for eye candy, little games and ads – not so much for content delivery or web apps (it broke the URL scheme so searching didn’t work and it hadn’t the performance required for user interfaces).

But in the last two years things have changed dramatically.

CSS

Got widely adopted pretty cleanly by anyone (but Microsoft). It actually took a long time to get CSS to be able to replace the TABLE-based templates designers used to trick layouts. But now it’s there. There are still some problems, but generally one could rightfully say that design with CSS is a viable path. (Having said that I admit that my own page here does still use tables. It’s on my ToDo list for month now!)

The XmlHttpRequest object (XHR/AJAX)

XHR is a browser native technology that allows to depart from the traditional interaction model of the web with an request/response cycle the user could physically experience (causing wait states after each click). In fact, I did something like this in 1998 with a frame that had a width of 0 (which essentially made it invisible). The visible page would reload the hidden frame and recieve a new JavaScript there which in turn manipulated parts of the content in the visible frame. From a user perspective this was pretty much like what AJAX is now. I didn’t do enough with that (it was IE-specific), but I speculate, that it had similar implications to the web design of a page. But AJAX is a far more elegant and quicker way to send and recieve data from the server without reloading.

JavaScript & DOM

Got more reliable in the last years. This is a big necessitiy for the DHTML stuff required to have dynamic pages (potentially using XHR). Because all this was flaky in the past designers did not consider designing much for “dynamic layout” and an interactive web interface. Thus it didn’t become a widespread practice. Good JavaScript skills were a plus for web designers and web developers. This probably is going to change: you need to know JavaScript.

SVG

The Standardized Vector Graphics format has been around for a long time now. It had also some cross-plattform issues to solve in the first implementations. Now SVG is going to be supported directly from the browser and it might be good to replace Flash where ever it is not necessary to author content but to have simple scripts that output the required XML data.

Web services and APIs

It has become somewhat of a habit for web application developers to offer programmable/hackable interfaces to their service logic. So other developers could build on that resource. In other words: if your web application does not offer an API it might not be interoperable enough to withstand competitors that do. Think of a Learning Management System that needs to be integrated into a larger Service Oriented Intranet. No API – no go! Well, sort of… / I remember a project once where we could have used a clever indexing system to automatically create category trees. It would have taken me few hours to attach our weblog system to that logic. But there was no API and the developers of the indexing system couldn’t care less about that (they were focussing on their indexing logic). End of the story: they have a system few people use and we don’t have automatic categorization yet.

The Canvas object (new!)

The upcomding Firefox/Mozilla releases (like Safari) will support a canvas object. Canvas objects can be used to create simple graphics with JavaScript within the client. It might remedy the problem to dynamically generating images on the server.

Greasemonkey (new!)

Right now Greasemonkey is rather exotic: It is a way to inject third party JavaScript applications into pages. A Greasemonkey script for instance could enhance the web application of a vendor with new functionality (for instance integrating Google Maps into Flickr wihtout having the need for a special provision or allowance by Flickr for that). This had been done before. But the technique used was to proxy pages and have the proxy server simply patching the HTML page to the needs of the service. ThirdVoice was once a way to stick little yellow notes to pages and make those visible to all other visitors of that page that used ThirdVoice. This technological design never really hooked people a lot because it required to call pages through a proxy server (and thus delaying the responses). I am not quite sure if that will spread out. There may be security concerns inhibiting users to install the Greasemonkey extension. But as a concept it is really a glue for “Web 2.0″ applications.

If you think about these technologies, you’ll easily recognize the potential. It raises the bar for students and educators, because the possibilities are endless. People were staring at Google Maps and thinking this must have been very dificult to implement. But truth is, that it is not as complex as it seems. Actually these technologies straighten out disordered things from the past and add options for developers and designers at the same time. Things become possible that haven’t even been considered before.

It might seem so much easier to simply do the “rich interfaces” directly in Flash. But then you depart from HTML completely. With AJAX you can just add as much dynamic to an ordinary web page as needed. Flipping things here, getting rid of a reload there, save states without submitting a form, etc etc.

Essentially it will turn “web design” into “interaction design” thus the notion of “web design” might diminish one day. If you see a book in the store titled “web design”, you might think: “Oh, that is old stuff, I need the new ones…”

AIGA conference summary by Jason Kottke

Published on September 18, 2005 in Design. 0 Comments

Jason Kottke is an invited weblog author at AIGA conference in San Francisco. He wrote some useful commentary and round-ups: Preparation, Lonely in a packed room, 20 courses not taken in design school, Friday round-up.

Map of natural desasters

Published on September 17, 2005 in Ecology. 0 Comments

Munich Re Group has a map with probabilities of natrual desasters.

Sleepwalking to the end of earth

Published on September 17, 2005 in Ecology. 0 Comments

Geoffrey Lean reports from a gathering of climate scientists in Exeter (invited by Tony Blair) after alarming signs have been discovered that the climate change could be faster and much worse than ever expected – with a point of no return reached before 2020.

I don’t even want to quote from this article – you got to read it yourself. The second half is a illustration about the emerging consequences: water wars, disappearing nations, flooding, uninhabitable earth, rainforest fires, the big freeze, starvation, acid oceans, diseases and hurricanes. You name it – they have it.

Science published a study yesterday, that offers evidence that global warming already causes stronger hurricanes like Katrina. So eventually Katrina could be the first encounter of a whole series of such hurricanes in the coming years – thus maybe hampering the USA to fully recover from its loss of 25% oil production caused by the destruction to oil platforms, pipelines and refineries.

I remember a quote by George Bush Sr. (the same old man that is now traveling the US to collect money for a Katrina relief fund) at the Earth Summint 102 (and this quote was repeated by Dick Cheney in October 2001):

The American way of life is not negotiable.

BTW, Don’t miss this cartoon.

Now – Europe has it’s own bill to pay here, but the US is a) the biggest producer of carbondioxide (25%) and the only nation that ignores the calls of the international commnunity. Why is the Bush administration so relentless? Is it stupidity? Calculation?

Stan Moore a year ago:

In the end, after a period of indeterminable length, but possibly quite short, the American way of life will fade into history. If mankind survives the related upheaval, and if future archaeologists and sociologists and anthropologists examine the remains of the former American civilization and its impact on the world, it will be determined to have been yet another blow out of an empire — consumed with wealth accumulation, beset by corruption, and ultimately unsustainable. But just because serious thinkers and leaders of the current status quo know it is not sustainable, does not mean that they can resist the alluring attempt to continue sustaining it.

Consistency in Design is (part of) the right approach

Published on September 16, 2005 in Interface. 0 Comments

Jared Spool points out that consistency is a matter of dealing with user’s current knowledge – not with formal elements of the visual design. Unfortunatly he uses a very misleading headline for is article which is really not in line with the point he is trying to make. The headline is »Consistency in Design is the Wrong Approach« and he writes:

The problem with thinking in terms of consistency is that those thoughts focus purely on the design and the user can get lost. “Is what I’m designing consistent with other things we’ve designed (or others have designed)?” is the wrong question to ask.
Instead, the right question is, “Will the user’s current knowledge help them understand how to use what I’m designing?” Current knowledge is the knowledge the user has when they approach the design. It’s the sum of all their previous experiences with relevant products and designs.

And then he proposes to focus on current knowledge of a user during the design process and concludes:

Funny thing about thinking about current knowledge: when you’re done, your interface will feel consistent.

Wait! What was the headline saying? Wasn’t it talking about consistency being a wrong approach? He continues:

My recommendation: anytime someone on your team starts talking about making things consistent, change the conversation to be about what the users’ current knowledge is.

Well, finally what Mr. Spool is saying in his article is just that consistency is not a question of form, but rather question of cognition. But maybe a headline like »Consistency is about cognition and not form« wouldn’t have been “news” enough to attract readers. To spin headlines into something more flashy that will potentially catch the eye when it appears in a list of news items is a common practice among web authors. I’d say the message in the headline should be consistent with the message of the article to really allow users to decide if it is worth click (or an actual read) or not.

Anyway, the problem with current knowledge is, that it might not be the right question at all to solve the cognitive problem, because current knowledge is hypotetical most of the time or a statistical measure at best. So after two team members bang their heads about »consistency vs. current knowledge« you might consider to change the conversation to »learnability« (e.g. asking how »user’s current knowledge« actually could be established and how users understand new things instead of speculating there is something they already have understood). And suddenly you are looping back to formal consistency, because learnability also is a question of reinforcing things through similarity and repetition – especially if the signs used are kind of arbitrary (which is more often the case than necessary I admit).

So I think the conclusion suggesting that current knowledge is a better way to think about the cognitive issue is not a good way to address the problem. It is just one way to think about the problem (among two or three valid others).

I fully agree with Jared Spool in this: The idea of formal consistency can lead to a mindset that shortens out the conceptual implications. The constrain to just formal variables has become a bad habit. It’s like you can see that people talk about »look & feel« while actually just talking about »look« and not »feel«.

Update:

The article by Jared Spool has been linked by elearningpost and GUUUI.com.

Scapegoat 1.0 Pro

Published on September 14, 2005 in Design. 0 Comments

I am reading John Maeda’s Simplicity-Weblog from time to time – especially because I offered a seminar about this topic a while ago. Most of the posts of John are typical day-in-day out observations of a designer sensible for the details: sometimes I feel he can make an article out of anything (which tends to be a boring read of interesting thoughts, so enough beef to be worth it).

But his post about a MIT meeting about a proposal for developing a super-new-conflict-info-visualizing-and-planning-tool for the US government is just hilarious:

In the same way that VisiCalc was the so-called “killer app” that heralded the concept of a spreadsheet and ignited the business computing boom, I figure that another software system that is waiting to be launched as another “killer app” would be called Scapegoat 1.0. This system would be positioned to run on a normal desktop computer with 512Mb of RAM, average graphics card, standard networking, and so forth. Its purpose would be to be shift the blame away from yourself in any political fallout situation to another targeted faction with point-and-click ease. It could be used in a purely defensive manner (the so-called “Lite” version), and the Professional Edition could ship with preemptive and offensive capabilities. A service contract add-on option would be available where you could have access to real lobbyists.

Hehe!