Whitney Museum (March 16)

Today I got off to a slow start. My fourth day in New York, and I’d already worn myself out. So I took the morning off, reading and relaxing. I ventured out for lunch, stopping by a Korean place I’d seen the night before in the East Village. I liked it – I got the […]

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Cooper-Hewitt and Squid:Labs (March 15)

My friends at Squid:Labs are doing an installation at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum for an exhibition on “Extreme Textiles”. Their exhibit is called “Rope and Sound”, and it’s essentially a three-dimensional harp with three steel pillars each holding each other up with rope strung between them. The rope is Squid:Labs’ electronic rope, so the ropes […]

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MOMA and Patti LuPone (March 14)

Monday morning, I had a brief crisis, when I woke up and found that the screen on my Sidekick had failed. It turns out that a Sidekick without a screen is completely useless. I used my host’s computer to find a nearby T-mobile store, and found out that my options were to (1) get a […]

New York City, March 13

I took the red-eye flight out of San Francisco. Normally, it’s not too big a deal for me because I can sleep on planes, but for some reason, I had a hard time sleeping this time around. Probably because I gloated to a coworker that I could sleep on planes. I did sleep for most […]

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Cognitive trust

[Bonus post that I wrote at the airport last night] I liked this quote from Emotional Design: “Cooperation relies on trust. For a team to work effectively each individual needs to be able to count on team members to behave as expected. Establishing trust is complex, but it involves, among other things, implicit and explicit […]

Cognitive subroutines and learning

I was reading Emotional Design by Don Norman the other day, and he was contemplating ways in which we could leverage emotional machines to improve the learning process. This got me kick-started again on thinking about applications of the cognitive subroutines theory that I’ve been playing with. As a side note, I think I’m finally […]

Emotional Design, by Donald Norman

Amazon link I go back and forth on my feelings about Donald Norman. I think that his observation of The Design of Everyday Things was a really important insight in understanding how omnipresent the role of design is. I liked his idea of information appliances in The Invisible Computer. But I’ve always been left a […]

Clay Shirky on cognitive maps

Clay Shirky had an interesting idea in an article over at Many-to-Many, where he divides the world between radial and Cartesian thinkers. Here’s how he makes the distinction: Radial people assume that any technological change starts from where we are now – reality is at the center of the map, and every possible change is […]

Wonderfalls

As I mentioned in my post on Firefly, I also got the DVD set of Wonderfalls in the same Amazon order. And I’ve watched that whole series now as well. My original review actually stands up pretty well even after watching the rest of the unaired episodes, in terms of describing the overall feel of […]

Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk

Amazon link Picked this up in my big library trip of a couple weeks ago. Again, recommended by a friend. Plus, I’ve been curious about Palahniuk since seeing Fight Club. I really like his stylized writing in a lot of ways, and it’s easy to see the resemblance to the style of Fight Club. I […]