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18 August 2003 |
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13 August 2003 |
includes good stats for Peopleware fans. As you'd expect, generally an inverse relationship between how personal and 'intense' the type of interruption is (phonecall, email etc) and time-to-recover-from-interruption, except that IM (which has more presence than email) may extract a lower interruption tax. Another reason to use it in the office?
11:59:28 AM 
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Businesses: managing real-time communications is as important as managing real-time processes. Put another way: PR is increasingly an internal exercise because external PR just happens, leaks out of the company via your employees. So, Ross says, trust your employees, teach them and empower them. Trust being the key verb here. (cf Cluetrain of course, and Semler/Semco.)
11:55:05 AM
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Politics considered helpful in the selling-your-design game.
The title itself -- Make It Bigger-- refers to Paula's endless battle to help clients be able to see the design clearly, and accept it without the layers of hierarchy pissing on it (my words, not hers). By end running the hierarchy and then selling down rather than up, she is able to avoid watered-down design arriving for final approval.
11:49:04 AM
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12 August 2003 |
Someone asked ET about the London tube map which prompted a linkful and thoughtful discussion. The interchange symbols on the Madrid map apparently indicate how far you have to walk to change lines - something the London tube might usefully provide because whilst some interchanges are conveniently across the platform, but others are loooong, eg: Bank-Monument, or (various examples) on the Northern line due to semi-permanent repair works happening in the stations.
The Moscow metro map is a little forbidding. But this one for the city of ??? is interesting: some stations have rotational symbols to indicate that you can change there, and it looks as if there are two, differently named stations ('I' and 'II') at those interchanges. Relic of bureacracy or cutting edge solution to problems with people-flow?
Also found whilst we were on ET.com:
11:54:54 AM
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08 August 2003 |
Darren Hobbs sez that agile means being ready to ship (literally, shrinkwrap and shelve up) whatever work you've done at any point throughout the project. Guards against the risk of the project being cancelled, though arguably if something is ready to go at all times and that thing meets some of the project goals, the project probably won't get whacked. Also: possible risk of not making sufficient progress in fear of breaking the product?
Looking at "agile" as it relates to the team rather than the project itself, the other "thing" that is ready to ship when a project is whacked is the team, what it has learned (individually and collectively), and its willingness/interest in going on to the next project and doing good. Not that these are necessarily all positive values: disillusionment and fear of failure are big risks in teams that have had projects cancelled.
See also the Agile Alliance, and its manifesto:
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
Worth reading.
4:54:56 PM
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Softava's Q12 seems to be the first cousin of Unitap and Fastap before it. Looks like it has privileged button and keypress simplicity at the cost of requiring great digit precision [via MobileBurn]
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Fingerworks seems to move mouse gesturing away form mouse-and-screen, and place it on the keyboard [via DarrenHobbs]
1:40:25 PM
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07 August 2003 |
Notes taken at this event, ably led by Nico MacDonald.
7:34:39 PM
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3:15:39 PM
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04 August 2003 |
5000 London Taxi Points and 4000 black cabs allow mobile users to text and book the nearest available cab, night or day.
28 July 2003: Anyone who has struggled to find a black cab in London will soon be able to locate the nearest available taxi and book it, all using SMS. With SMS connectivity supplied by Netsize, London's new Taxi Point service removes the need to wait on the street searching for a cab. Instead, customers can use one of the new 'Taxi Points' - actual signs that use a unique four-digit code to identify an exact location within central London. People wishing to use the service text the location code to the London Taxi Point short code (83220). Using GPS tracking, the service will identify and book the nearest black cab from the participating taxi fleets, delivering a confirmation SMS, and an alert when the taxi has arrived.
The service will cost the user £1 and Taxi Point signs will be positioned in locations such as public and private buildings, restaurants, theatres and bars. More than 5000 Taxi Point locations will be created in London over the next three years.
Just as the 5000 Taxi Point locations finished being rolled out, the mobileworld will finally tip over and most location mapping will be done by the network, not via an intermediary sign.
Or is this done for ease of cabs: so they need to know 'merely' 5000 locations, rather than attempting to find where you are from location data that isn't granular or accurate enough? We don't understand.
[via antimega]
5:02:10 PM
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30 July 2003 |
Rodcorp's books read in 2003 (now you know what we've been doing instead of working) and 2002.
9:45:23 PM
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28 July 2003 |
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23 July 2003 |
Gizmodo notes the new Unitap keyboard, which "works by having a grid of small dot-like keys, so rather than having each dot associated with a specific letter or number, you just press the four dots that surround the letter or number you want". Like Digit Wireless' Fastap keyboard, it is a 'single-tap' method (as distinct from the T9-style predictive text or old-school 'triple-tap') of entering text. Whilst Fastap seems closer to having product in the market, Unitap claims to offer cost and form-size improvements over it, though generally form-factors are going up as applications require larger screens, which may lessen the need for micro-keyboards.
4:50:10 PM
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21 July 2003 |
illuminates the process by which designers transform their often groundbreaking ideas into functional, manufacturable products. Drawings, cardboard models stuck together with tape and ultramodern computer animations are more significant here than the finished products, for they illuminate the designer's process in a way that the finished product--unless it is a deconstructive design object!--does not
Buy in UK. Incidentally, some interesting looking related books here too.
[via MachineLake]
9:07:12 PM
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"For designers who collect, the cluttered workspace is a library of inspiration". The desks of designers Rob Cristofaro,
Maira Kalman, Scott Stowell and Milton Glaser.
[via MachineLake, itself via manAmplified]
9:06:44 PM
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Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, interviews with Master of Design MIT Tech Review (free reg reqd). Two interesting nuggets: first a slightly confusing vision of email + blog-like timeline = good way to organise (confusing to us anyway: we're not sure how this is significantly different from sorting emails by Received):
There's something about e-mail that demands a reply, demands a response. But when you're getting thousands of these things, it becomes an impossibility to respond to everything. So we've got to shift the etiquette, and maybe make e-mail more like publishing: that is, you send something out and you might get one percent response. I think that the paradigm of e-mail as letters, as objects, is inappropriate. I'm waiting for a shift to the timeline, rather than the object, as the organizing principle. If you think about a blog for instance, that's a timeline. And it's a really good way of organizing huge amounts of information, because we're quite good at sequencing. We're quite good at remembering when things happen. That has meaning for us. But imagine creating an individual document around every one of those individual blog entries and just having them there on your desktop or in a folder. It would be completely meaningless to you. And that's how we treat e-mail now. But imagine keeping e-mail a bit more like a blog. Then suddenly, you've got instant messaging qualities and e-mail qualities happening at the same time. So I'm guessing that we'll start to see that sort of timeline become more and more important. Because I think it's the way that we as human beings tend to organize massive amounts of data.
And here's the well-known IDEO formulation of design as an often-*subtractive* process:
The naive view of designing is that it's purely an additive process, about adding more and more and more. Actually, design is a funnel-shaped thing. It becomes an editing process: What is appropriate? What can be stripped away? So design is a holistic way of thinking. It's about being able to create the whole of something, and in such a way that somebody who’s using that product, whether for the first time or the tenth time, understands it can interact with it as seamlessly as possible
8:33:06 PM
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18 July 2003 |
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Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies: One hundred worthwhile dilemmas, "each of which is a suggestion of a course of action or thinking to assist in creative situations"
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Charles and Ray Eames' House of Cards: Comes in five flavours. "The images are of what Eameses called 'good stuff', chosen to celebrate 'familiar and nostalgic objects from the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms'. The six slots on each card enable the player to interlock the cards so as to build structures of myriad shapes and sizes"
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IDEO's new Method Cards: "Each card describes one method and includes a brief story about how and when to use it. This is not a 'how to' guide. It's a design tool meant to help you explore new approaches and develop your own. Use the deck to take a new view, to inspire creativity, to communicate with your team, or to turn a corner"
9:32:53 AM
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17 July 2003 |
In what must be an attempt to correct the recent tendency of birds to change their song in response to cities and mobile ringtones, the British Library is working with iTouch and Mobiletones to provide authentic bird and animal ringtones for Samsung handsets. Separately, the RSPB is working with Mobileavenue to provide birdsong ringtones for Nokias. The BL's tones are "real tones", the RSPB's are standard polyphonic.
10:33:52 AM
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16 July 2003 |
2:31:48 PM
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02 July 2003 |
Kurt Starsinic: "Redundancy" as it's usually practiced in software design is compared to the same in structural engineering, and found wanting.
[via Searls]
5:38:46 PM
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01 July 2003 |
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Hektor is an inkjet printer made out of a can of spraypaint and a series of clever, machine-controlled pulleys
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with this handheld printing device you swipe your hand back and forth and it lays the print (of whatever you bluetoothed to it) down
[both via boing boing]
7:37:39 PM
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Grafik magazine is the re-branded and re-designed Graphics International. Worth a look for articles on the interstices between art and graphic design: Julian Opie (of the Blur album cover) and Simon Patterson (of The Great Bear tube map).
The Grafik website is sadly less interesting though.
2:12:52 PM
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© Copyright 2003 rodcorp.
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We're moving:
Rodcorp's new home
Product Design
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