rodcorp: rodcorp: Product design

Rodcorp is moving home

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 10:41:17 GMT

Ross Mayfield: interruption 'taxes' in IM, email, phonecalls

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 10:59:28 GMT

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?

Businesses: managing real-time communications critical

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 10:55:05 GMT

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.)

Designers: selling down not up

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 10:49:04 GMT

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.

Edward Tufte on London Underground Map

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 10:54:54 GMT

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:

ET reviews Ken Garland's Mr Beck's Underground Map
Minard: the classic Napoleon's invasion of and retreat from Russia, 1812 map, and the less classic (but good) Hannibal into Italy map. See also Minard biblio.
Still on the subject of war, A Narrative Graphic of The U-Boat war in the Atlantic 1939-1945
ET explains the forum moderation policy: We particularly seek to avoid the chronic internet disease of "All Opinions, All the Time"
discussion on ISO paper sizes
Project management graphics

Agile development = being ready to ship at any time?

Fri, 08 Aug 2003 15:54:56 GMT

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.

New desktop and mobile keyboards: ugly but ergonomic?

Fri, 08 Aug 2003 12:40:25 GMT

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]
Fingerworks seems to move mouse gesturing away form mouse-and-screen, and place it on the keyboard [via DarrenHobbs]

AIGA: Understanding The Future Of Mobile Devices

Thu, 07 Aug 2003 18:34:39 GMT

Notes taken at this event, ably led by Nico MacDonald.

Mobile cameras. But not camphones.

Thu, 07 Aug 2003 14:15:39 GMT

Shaun Irving's Peanut is a mail-delivery truck converted to take 4x8 feet pinhole photos
Rodney Graham's Millennial Time Machine is is a 19th century horse-drawn landau, whose carriage has been converted into a camera obscura [via Wm. Gibson]

SMS-mapped London will let you hail a cab by txt

Mon, 04 Aug 2003 16:02:10 GMT

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]

Books read in 2002, 2003

Wed, 30 Jul 2003 20:45:23 GMT

Rodcorp's books read in 2003 (now you know what we've been doing instead of working) and 2002.

Chicago Manual of Style enters the 21st century

Mon, 28 Jul 2003 16:15:40 GMT

Not online sadly. Related: Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton's Web Style Guide.
[via ?]

UniTap keyboard: smallest single-tap solution?

Wed, 23 Jul 2003 15:50:10 GMT

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.

The Origins of Things: Sketches, Models, Prototypes

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 20:07:12 GMT

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]

Cabinets of Curiosity: desktops of designers

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 20:06:44 GMT

"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]

IDEO: Give email a timeline

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 19:33:06 GMT

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

Three sets of cards to help your head make connections faster

Fri, 18 Jul 2003 08:32:53 GMT

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"
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"
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"

Birds and ringtones imitating each other

Thu, 17 Jul 2003 09:33:52 GMT

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.

BBC: Birds hit the high notes in cities
Birds imitate mobile ringtones - birds in Denmark have started imitating ringtones. The standard Nokia tone is the most popular.
CNet: Birds sing a new tune in wireless era - "A few Starlings armed with a Nokia tune crowing on a crowded city block 'could bring a place like San Francisco to a stand still'"
Mobile phones becoming sounds of love - "The electronic tweeting of mobile phones is so widespread that some Australian birds are mimicking the sound as part of their mating and territorial songs, bird experts says."
BL: Ringtones go wild - British Library Sound Archive Wildlife Collection goes mobile
Mobiletones: Get your Green Woodpecker yaffle call here - for Samsungs
RSPB ringtones at Mobileavenue - for Nokias
Telegraph: Nightingale rings in Berkeley Sq - "Not that the development is likely to please that born mimic, the starling. The birds have started to imitate mobile phone rings but now face the prospect of impersonating themselves."

Kevin Kelly Recomendo has good mapping tools etc

Wed, 16 Jul 2003 13:31:48 GMT

Diagrammatic chart of world history: Displays with utmost intelligence 50 centuries of civilization, as revealed in the complex rise and fall of ancient powers. Not as linear as the (out of print) histomap (some interesting writing/maths histomaps here)
Offroute: custom topographic maps
world map wallpaper
The Tiny Book of Tiny Houses: "Each very tiny house -- or should we say each shack and shed -- is photographed and sufficiently rendered in orthogonal view that one could construct it, or at least borrow designs from it [...] George Berhard Shaw designed [his] hut himself as a tiny office built on a central steel-pole frame so that it could be manually rotated to follow the arc of the sun" (something similar at Amazon.co.uk, Allconsuming)
Ancient Civilisations: the best one-volume survey of earlier civilizations he's found (Amazon.co.uk, Allconsuming)
and... Tools are the revolution: pdfs of pages from the Recomendo-inspired Whole Earth issue

Redundancy in software and structural engineering

Wed, 02 Jul 2003 16:38:46 GMT

Kurt Starsinic: "Redundancy" as it's usually practiced in software design is compared to the same in structural engineering, and found wanting.
[via Searls]

Interesting printers

Tue, 01 Jul 2003 18:37:39 GMT

Hektor is an inkjet printer made out of a can of spraypaint and a series of clever, machine-controlled pulleys
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]

Grafik magazine

Tue, 01 Jul 2003 13:12:52 GMT

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.

Unintrusive, delay-friendly: How IM augments conversations

Wed, 18 Jun 2003 10:11:04 GMT

Instant messaging's mostly-synchronous nature mean that "it is OK to not answer an IM until you are ready—a pause of 30 seconds is perfectly acceptable where it wouldn’t be in voice (and the answerer doesn’t even have to hold the question in their mind while doing something else, but can refer back to it later)". Stewart Butterfield's office uses it to communicate across geographically distant teams (where presence is a useful feature), but "even in the office here, we often use them when we are only few feet away: to ask quick questions without breaking other peoples’ concentration".

Terry Bell: The right hand of Frank Gehry

Wed, 18 Jun 2003 01:34:06 GMT

LA Times feature on the managing architect/project manager who makes Gehry's buildings happen. Architect as project manager rather than visionary.

Apart from "knowing how to build stuff," says Gehry, the key to Bell's role is "knowing how to keep a crew of workmen together, and earning a certain amount of respect for his position, because the construction guys always try to diss the architect." In another sense, Gehry continues, Bell's job is "like being the conductor: You've got the score. Now, how do you do it?"

[via ?]

Ambient Devices limit information so that it can be understood with just a glance

Tue, 10 Jun 2003 11:59:03 GMT

"We're going to increase the number of devices in your life but you won't think of them as devices."

[...] Ambient started with a $299 color-shifting glass orb sold primarily through Hammacher Schlemmer and Web sites like ThinkGeek. The direction of the stock market — deep red when the Dow Jones Industrial Average is headed down, shading to bright green when it is surging — has been the most common subject of interest for the 800 or so early purchasers, Mr. Rose said.

[...] Ambient's focus is different, though, because it is gambling that consumers want information to be made noticeable without it commanding attention

[...] But independent researchers caution that it is difficult to test the impact of devices designed to be unobtrusive. "It's surprisingly hard to evaluate the usefulness of information people are not focusing on,"

[via ?]