I’m not sure how I came across it, but I saw a link to a paper on B.F. Skinner’s self-management skills. Skinner is well-known as the father of behaviorism and for developing operant conditioning, where people simply respond to the environment around them, thus leading his critics to accuse him of denying the existence of […]
Month: September 2005
Designing for the Collective
After reading Dav’s post about the Future Commons event, I was inspired to start thinking about what my own Theory of Everything would be. I’ve been following up on a bunch of different threads recently, and I was thinking about ways I might tie them all together. One issue I have right from the start […]
Where the Action Is, by Paul Dourish
Amazon link This book is an attempt by Dourish to develop underlying design principles for user interfaces that take into account the situated nature of interaction. I’ve been mentioning Dourish’s book recently (e.g. here, here, and here), because I really like a lot of the concepts that he mentions throughout his book. Dourish is explicitly […]
Book mini-reviews
Archangel, by Sharon Shinn I saw this in the library and I had remembered that Beemer had once recommended it to me, so I picked it up. I liked it. Interesting world, and characters that I sympathized with. Not particularly deep, and not a book that I’m likely to rush out and buy for myself, […]
Solving hurricanes
As the second hurricane in a month is building up power over the overheated Gulf of Mexico, this is my projection as to what President Bush may be thinking: Well, the problem is that the water in the Gulf is too warm. Too warm. Too warm. Hrm. How do we cool water that is too […]
Construction vs. design
I really liked Scott Berkun’s most recent essay, entitled “Why software sucks”. Berkun is a former Microsoft project manager, who’s now an independent author of project management books. I’m not sure where I ran across his web page, but his essays are often interesting and thought-provoking. I liked the distinction he makes between construction and […]
Revisiting rereading
Following up on my writing in books post, I had another thought on BART today about how I read and how it relates to how I process information. I figured out long ago that I like to have the big picture first when I’m learning something. I often struggled in my physics classes because they’d […]
Interfaces as building blocks
Even though it’s late and I’m tired (I went to Dorkbot this evening, which was surprisingly disappointing), I’m just going to keep on trucking, because I sketched out another post while driving to work this morning, picking up on one of the threads I left hanging at the end of yesterday’s post, which is the […]
Conversational interfaces
I mentioned in my comment on yesterday’s post that “the user interface is a negotiation between the designer and user”, an idea which was definitely inspired by reading Dourish, who makes a similar point in saying that “Computation is a medium”. An interface can also be seen as a conversation, as Suchman describes. So the […]
More on feedback
So, although it will look like this is a response to Jofish’s comment, I had actually sketched out these ideas this morning before I read his comment, and just didn’t have time to write them up until this evening. One nuance that I glossed over in my discussion of feedback is one that Jofish rightly […]
