Prof. Dipl.-Des. Oliver Wrede

Blog

  • Between life and death: There are just three design principles

    Students love to ask this question: “Is there any common strategy to design?”. Then I usually reply: “Yes, clearly there are three simple common strategies!”. They are:

    1. Creating order from chaos
    2. Creating chaos from order
    3. Copy from the best examples

    Information designers usually have to create order from chaos. Information overload does not mean “too much information” but more precisely “too much information one can handle”. The information designers job is a) attach handles to the information (restructuring, contextualization and renaming) and b) reduce information that is not needed. This always is at risk to go too far and snuff out the life that was there.

    Whereas the graphic designers job often is to animate dead things: Information that does not speak much. Attach handles and add context that make information live up. This is always includes the possibility to go too far as well: things turn back, start to live on its own life and hardly help anyone getting anywhere with it.

    The problem is: there rarely is just graphic design or just information design. Mostly both ghosts sitting on each shoulder whispering into the designers ears.

    That is where principle #3 kicks in: “copy from the best examples” does not mean stealing, but it means to look as closely as possible at how to balance life and death, so neither one can win.

  • Follow up on Social Computing meeting

    Kevin Shofield posts a follow-up of the social computing conference at Microsoft Research:

    There were many good parts, but my favorite was a breakout group on the second afternoon specifically focused on discussing priorities for the research agenda. The top six areas we came up with:

    The video recordings of the conference are said to be online somewhere next week.

  • Progress on site

    I have been playing around with Tinderbox to manage this site for quite some time now. I am bumping into a homemade problem from time to time: I am publishing to a ZOPE server — the pages are stored as Zope Page Templates. While this gives me a lot of options (that I do not use yet), it can also break things if the HTML code generated by Tinderbox is not 100% valid.

    Things I have acomplished so far:

    • background synchronisation and one-key saving & updating of this site
    • Posting via AppleScript from NetNewsWire to Tinderbox (requires target window to be frontmost, does not beautify the HTML yet)
    • context sensitive column on the right via user attribute
    • category pages and usable permanent URLs

    What is still ahead is the import of all the old posts. I also need to add a bunch of articles (and I’d like to translate some others).

  • Tinderbox to database publishing?

    Right now I set up this weblog to be rendered on my laptop and upstreamed to the server with normal HTML pages. This somehow put the burden of organizing the site on Tinderbox. But somehow I get interested in the idea to let the server care for the public face of my content and rather use Tinderbox in a “freestyle” way. The server should only get a “content feed” from which it should construct a site.

    One rather simple way would be to publish the Tinderbox content directly into a database on the server. The quickest (and dirtiest) way to do that would be to render SQL files and use a script on the server to import these. The HTML rendering would be completely the job of the server (and of course I’d need to set up templates & everything there).

    A more sophisticated approach would be to render XML files that are parsed into the database. This would maybe allow to reduce the amount that needs to be uploaded per update.

    Unfortunately I don’t think I am going to have the time to check this out. But somehow I hear a distant voice telling me that this would even allow several Tinderbox users to work on one site together (or at least publish into the same space).

  • e-Learning centre

    George Siemens (who doesn’t state his name anywhere on his blog) discovered a new e-Learning resource that is editerd by Jane Knight:

    e-Learning Centre is the most complete elearning resource I’ve encountered. The site goes on and on and on…
    There news page with an RSS feed.

    [via elearnspace]

  • That did not help

    But I was wondering about this weblog anyway: Graphic Designers for Dean.

  • The concept of presence

    This is an interesting article about presence.

    A number of emerging technologies including virtual reality, simulation rides, video conferencing, home theater, and high definition television are designed to provide media users with an illusion that a mediated experience is not mediated, a perception defined here as presence. Traditional media such as the telephone, radio, television, film, and many others offer a lesser degree of presence as well.
    This article examines the key concept of presence. It begins by noting practical and theoretical reasons for studying this concept. Six conceptualizations of presence found in a diverse set of literatures are identified and a detailed explication of the concept that incorporates these conceptualizations is presented. Existing research and speculation about the factors that encourage or discourage a sense of presence in media users as well as the physiological and psychological effects of presence are then outlined. Finally, suggestions concerning future systematic research about presence are presented.

    I found this article via Sebblogging quoting Therese Örnberg (and her weblog Emerging Communication). She has written about Linguistic Presence on the Internet (PDF) which is also a fine read.

  • Bilingual?

    I am currently thinking about if I should run my german weblog here too. I decided to be bilingual – and currently the german weblog is more a weblog for my teaching activities. I don’t want to mix it like Erik does.

  • Creating an online help with Tinderbox

    Matt Neuburg published a tutorial on “Creating Online Help with Tinderbox“. [via Schockwellenreiter]

  • RSS feed repaired

    The RSS feed is repaired. It’ll work on the old location, but it should be updated. It is now here feed://wrede.interfacedesign.org/xml/rss.xml (as http-Link).

    There’s still a template missing for the single items at ther permanent URL.

  • Social Computing symposium at Microsoft Research

    Microsoft Research is doing a 70-people invitation-only symposium about social computing on Monday and Tuesday.

    Kevin Shofield is one of the organizers who runs an own weblog. He writes:

    “We really wanted to have the symposium webcast live on the Internet, but because we’re holding it at a ‘non-traditional’ facility, we couldn’t make that work. We are still videotaping all of the sessions, and will post them on the Internet as soon a possible.
    We will have wireless Internet access available, so I am sure it will be blogged live, and I would assume IRC’ed too.”

  • COREblog review in Linux Journal

    Linux-Journal has published a review of COREblog online. COREblog is a weblog product for the Open Source Zope application server.

    COREblog is developed by a Japanese programmer and an many members of the COREblog user community don’t communicate in English, but Klaus Alexander Seistrup in Denmark started an english mailing list.

  • How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web

    Wiliam Denton has put together a facet-map howto:

    “This paper will attempt to bridge the gap by giving procedures and advice on all the steps involved in making a faceted classification and putting it on the web. Web people will benefit by having a rigorous seven-step process to follow for creating faceted classifications, and librarians will benefit by understanding how to store such a classification on a computer and make it available on the web. The paper is meant for both webmasters and information architects who do not know a lot about library and information science, and librarians who do not know a lot about building databases and web sites.”

    More on Facetmaps on the facetmap.com site.

  • Publishing or conversation?

    Jeff Ward is asking if weblogs are publishing or actually some kind of converstation. He is pointing to Lilia Efimova who is warning about potential degradation of communication by superficial reading & writing (or listening & replying).

    “I cannot adopt the concept that “conversation” alone is a good reason to invest this much time in blogging. Conversation is great when you have the leisure time to expend. What I get from reading and publishing a blog goes far beyond that. I learn from myself every time I write; I learn from others every time I read. When others take time to respond to things I written, I learn from that too. But I don’t always have the time to pursue or contribute to conversations.”

    I agree.

  • Tinderbox in class

    Jon Buscall describes how he uses Tinderbox in class:

    “As a teacher, it takes ages to create a set of worthy lesson plans. If you keep lesson plans/details as a hard copy you often have to make changes, can’t get a quick overview of your work and they tend to get tatty stuck on your shelf. It can also take a lot of time sifting through your email program, print outs, handscribbled notes to keep track of what you are doing.
    Once you start to use Tinderbox you realise that you can simply drag everything into this nifty program, set attributes to categorize your information and set up agents to organize your work into subject or date related fields or anything that you care to use.”

    I am sure I am going to use Tinderbox more (since I started to publish the weblog with it). It is definitely helpful to read about best practices. I have started a section with my own experiences as well.

  • Self reference

    I found this year-old posting over at Mark Bernstein about Clement Mok writing this in “Designers: Time for Change”:

    “In the ensuing years, the deadening effects of social turmoil followed by stagnation and, later, the sheer volume of work created by waves of economic expansion engendered an environment of complacency. Designers increasingly just scrubbed and brushed what they already had for each successive client and project. They added more bells and whistles as was required by their clients, and chimed all the way to the bank.”
    and
    “The design profession functions as if each individual designer is selling his or her services in some sort of terminological vacuum, with nothing more substantial than his or her personal charisma or taste to serve as the foundation for vast edifices of public influence.”

    Clement Mok is right, but I can’t really see that this is a behavior of designers in particular.