Things have been very busy for me lately. But instead of just apologizing I give you some links to see some stuff that is coming out of that:
99stories.com – sly-fi.com – str33t.org – mi145.com
Most of that is “viewing only” at the moment. This will change radically… 
One of the most interesting topics for information architecture is search. There are ways to find, explore, browse and discover things in digital domains. The value of information increases with the possibility of being found. So design for findability becomes the most important strategy to increase the value of information.
One of the distinct experts in the field of Information Architecture is Peter Morville. He gave an interesting one-hour talk at Google about »Ambient Findability and the Future of Search«:
He talks a lot about the problem of search in general (he is speaking at a search engine company). How to enable better search and findability is a question of a) metadata and b) representation.
It is the representation aspect of searching and finding, that is still a huge area for design innovations. While improving the Google search result page may be too difficult, there are a lot of very specific problems where searching and navigating an information domain gets a very interesting and particular design issue.
A designer needs a good understanding of the fact that users have different approaches of locating things depending on
Isn’t that amazing that this clip about the Bush administration lying about weapons of mass destruction needs to be compiled by someone and uploaded to YouTube instead of the professional journalists went for this one?
There constantly is a discussion about making the computer feel more “natural” to the user. I do think that this approach led to the graphical user interface we are all used to today and it is philosophically the right approach to deal with technology. But I also do believe technology is not yet ready to allow “natural” interaction in most occasions.
If you don’t believe me this video will hopefully bring this discussion to an end:
And don’t miss this Second Life parody:
One of the tools I love to use is Tinderbox. The homepage says: “Tinderbox is a personal content assistant that helps you organize, analyze, and share your notes.”
I just downloaded the latest beta version (3.6.3 b17) and found that it has a list of improvements that push it forward again.
If you never heard of Tinderbox try looking at some of the screencasts that are online.
Tinderbox is a tool that has been around for ages now and while the technical progress is slow compared to other tools it remains unmatched for a lot of tasks. The sad part of it is, that it does have some limits and missing features that people expect from a writing tool. But besides of that it’s potential has not yet been fully exploited by its community.
The tricky thing with Tinderbox is, that it does “take off” unless you know how to use the tool wiseley. For a newbie it may feel like just another note-taking tool that misses some core features. But once you discovered some of the core concepts of Tinderbox a whole new set of options.
Findamentally it is a tool that keeps asking you: What do you want to do with your thoughts? How do you create relevance out of randomness? What does order in a chaotic world of fragmented information mean?
Tinderbox somehow forces you to answer these questions and define a concept how you want to process everything you write down. You may start with no such concept and try to develop it while playing around with Tinderbox. But once the level of interdependence of notes, actions, templates and such gets high (which can happen quickly) you need to become smart about how you manage you material.
As there are more and more programs offering podcasts I think there is more interesting content appearing in this subscription format that is interesting for design:
There are much more for sure. I’ll just leave it here now. If you know a podcast of interest for designers, let me know.
This is a very nice project by Yann-Arthus Bertrand that shows video portraits of 6000 randomly picked people in 65 countires that are talking about personal things.
Hobnox (the internet start-up I am CD for) is hiring:
Work location is Cologne, Germany. More information here. The project is related to WebTV and the entertainment-/music business.
It is an international company. So if you are English only and you are prepared to work in Cologne, Germany, you may also apply.
There is also an open position for a team assistant in Munich.
Here I promote an almost two hour documentary by Aaron Russo about the US Federal Reserve System (which is a private bank and not a government agency as many believe) controlling the US currency. His claim is that the Federal Reserve Bank creates paper money “out of thin air” while there is no proof that it is backed with gold in Fort Knox.
This is a “flaw by design” which ultimately turns private banks onto a track to a “one world government” by implementing tools for control, that mimic those of facist and communist states. Russo does start the story by reporting that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is threatening people that deny to pay income tax even though there is no constitutional law that protects this. To me as a foreigner is not so easy to get this, because I pay income tax. The story here is that the goverment tolerates violation of consitutional rights. And I suppose it is a good way to play the card.
There are a number of people interviewed and cited and I think many people would recognize these as authorities on the subject: Congressman Ron Paul, Mike Ruppert, Edward Griffin… just to name some. There are also important quotes by Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson about the fact that money should be controlled by the government.
Here is also an interview with Mr. Russo on his movie, where he critizises Michael Moore that his award-winning Farenheit 9/11 documentary (official site) is playing into the system by just polarizing Republicans versus the Democrats. Russo’s film does target beyond that political game and questions the system on a more fundamental level.
There is also an interview with Mr. Russo, where he claims Nick Rockefeller told him eleven month ahead of 9/11 that there is “going to be an event after which US will invade Afghanistan and Iraq”. Mr. Russo leaves no doubt actually, that Mr. Rockefeller knew at least a year ahead of the “war on terror” what is going to happen:
And if you have any doubt if it is possible to fool “average American” by media spin about this subjects look at this clip oth this clip here and ask yourself how these people came about to know (or not know) what they think they know (or don’t know).
There has been no post here for over a month now. I really feel bad about that as I can see from different stats, that there are more than 550 subscribers to this blog (slowly growing) – which is not too much compared to some other blogs… but a hell lot of people for me. And with a 20% reach (people that actually click or act on a blog post) I think it is not wise to neglect a blog for so long. But then again I need to thank all subscribers for the confidence I sense from that.
Truth is that I have been way too busy the last month. I stopped working as a professor at the computer science department of the Cologne University of Applied Science (I still do teach Design though) and started to work on an international project related to the music and TV entertainment busniess. I probably will contemplate and write about that sooner or later, because there are really a lot of stories that I’d like to share in future.
So keep me on the radar… I am still alive!
While researching some information about user interfaces for video sharing websites I stumbled over a statement in an article at news.com by Alonso Vera of NASA Ames Research:
»Design is starting to change who succeeds and who fails. A few years ago that wasn’t true. If I had a better algorithm, I would win!«
I had a conversation about this yesterday. Users are fed up with lousy interfaces. Whenever I do a research into a UI field – mobile phones, websites, software applications – I run into these strange situations, that the user is left alone with an error message and litterally no practical advice what to do. It really baffles me, that obvious pitfalls are left open until release of the software or product and kept unadressed for month if not years. So if Design comes a market driver, that is a very good sign!
Example: If you are a Macintosh Users (and some are indeed) and you go to hi5.com – a music/video community website with 50 million users (!) and you want to upload a video file (one of the core features), you will be presented with a form where you can enter title, tags and category for your video. Fine.
But after clicking you will see this error screen (above) telling you that someone named VideoEgg (What by the way do they have to do with it?) does not support the browser you are using and that you need to go to videoegg.com to check a list of supported browsers.
While I wondered that I was not presented with that list (or at least a link to that list) directly (Again when were Hyperlinks introduced to the World Wide Web??), I almost got angry after unsuccsessfully trying to find such a list anywhere on the proposed site. Remember: Hi5.com claims to serve 50 million users!
I took me half an hour to try all browsers available on my system – costing me time and quite some nerves AND money. And the effect of this really obvious and simple UI problem: I won’t give hi5.com a second shot on me or recommend that site.
What does that mean? Maybe the “web 2.0″ market is one where idiots happyily buy stuff from slightly smarter idiots?
I played around with Yahoo Pipes a bit. I created a pipe that collects several RSS feeds of different blogs I write, comments I make on other blogs, new bookmarks and photos, etc. It’s basically a summary of (almost) everything I do in the blogsphere, and it was quite easy to do.
This is the result: Blogsphere activities by Oliver Wrede [also as RSS feed]
On the »SHIFT« conference Luke Wroblowski presented his ideas about »Design thinking« (see his post here).
I think there is a lot of refreshed awareness in die business community about what »design thinking« might be and if it can help to improve business processes, services and products.
Right now it seems there is a lot of very hypothetical talk about that. And as Luke Wroblowski shows by quoting other designers, it is also a very open what »design thinking« is. But there are some prominent figures propagating the concept, so I expect business people and economists will start to discuss what (or what not) »design thinking« may be good for.
Here is an open letter by Steve Jobs about why the music industry might consider selling their msuic online free from any digital rights management system (DRM).
Basically he claims that more than 90% of the music sold is DRM free (on DRM-free Audio CDs) and that only 3% of music on an average iPod is copy protected.
Tobias Jordans pointed to a new astonishing video of a 8-by-3 inch two-panel multi-touch sensitive wall mounted screen:
The video makes evident, that the interaction feels continuous and natural. And since Apple has shown with the iPhone that multi-touch can improve small interfaces as well, I think this technology could replace the mouse one day.
There as an article at Fastcompany.com stating that Jefferson Han was already approached by media companies and intelligence agencies to partner.
Update: There is also a short presentation in February 2006 by Jeff Han on The TED 2006 conference.
I always had a special interest in tools that help authors to think. Outliners were fine, but they very often lacked visual context. Some mind mapping tools were fine – but these often did not do a good job maintaining a coherent structure in the text or good typography.
Scrivener just seems to be a superb tool for people that collect material and thoughts to finally create a text from that.
Yesterday Apple introduced the new iPhone. It features a very precise touch screen and some other sensors. On the first look it may only seem like a fancy phone that manages to get rid of buttons and integrate features of an iPod. But I think it is much more than that.
I believe Apple has really defined a new type of device. Just think for a second that it is not called iPhone — let’s say you don’t have any idea what an iPod, PDA or Smartphone is. So you have a device, that does communicate wirelessly through certain protocols, stores 8 Gigabyte of data, comes with this multi-touch display, mircophone, earphones, camera, speaker, volume control and a singular button on the front. The iPhone is not only a universal device — is a principle.
Now – just imagine apple would have just delivered the hardware to the open source community maybe with that OS X basis and some development tools to create apps. The screen could show any interface for whatever application you can think of. It is called “phone” so people can connect it to certain activities and they see an instant reason why they may buy one.
But let’s assume it is called “iHeld” or “iTouch”. Can you see why people will loose the competition against Apple in the very moment they try to make a competing phone?
I am very eager to see what tools Apple is going to provide for developers to create new applications for the “iPhone principle”.
Update: This GIZMODO story says the iPhone won’t be an open system that one can develop for (similar to iPods today). That would really be a pitty and it would disqualify iPhone for a lot of things that are possible with SymbianOS used on Nokia phones today. If the iPhone is not hackable, I potentially don’t want to have one.
I think the current Privacy/We-blog seminar (see blog) is turning out very well. The students are working on a project that is very “web2.0-ish” and a profound reflection on the business models that drive this market (or new bubble if you will).
One of the questions that constantly return to me is what is the function if design as seen from strategists. There is a discourse about design is being in charge of providing “emotional value” to products – or in other words: to sense desires of consumers.
I have addressed the core strategies of design in several seminars. They were called: Perception, Mind (called “Remembering and Design” back then), Density, Simplicity and Continuity. And it always appered to me that I one day I will have to address the topic of »Desire«.
The problem with “desire” is that it appears to be a mainstream topic – but in fact is not. It is a pandora’s box and it will ultimatley lead to political implications of design. And that is probably why I postponed it several times although I am totally convinced that there is no real way to get around this issue.
One place to start is Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud. Bernays invented the term “public relations” and spawned research that led to the idea of “life style” and “focus groups”. His influence has been portrayed in this four hour BBC documentary “The Century of the Self” (Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4). If you watch that documentary you’ll see the dilemma.
The documentary ends with the impression that the affirmative politicians in western societies have eroded the notion of democracy by replacing political policy with public relations (thus tuning their speeches and programs towards the short term desires of swing voters). Like Bill Clinton has asked one of his advisors: “What is a mandate if you can’t get elected with it?”
I want to point readers, that managed read this post until here, to a document called “Design and democracy” [PDF, 148 KB / german], a lecture given by Gui Bonsiepe in 2005 at the UTEM, Santiago de Chile (and be assured that the issue of democracy is not only a matter of desinging better election ballots).
Hobnox Evolution launched
Finally Hobnox has launched a »warm-up site«: The Hobnox Evolution. Creatives can suggest productions there and win several budgets totaling €75,000.
I will return to regular non-Hobnox posts soon, promised!