About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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Issue 3 of Ambidextrous Magazine has just come out (so recently that it’s not even listed on their website yet), and an article I wrote is in there. This is very exciting for me, as it is the first time I have been published.
The article was something I concocted based off of a quote from James Howard Kunstler:
“Charm is the quality of inviting us to participate in another pattern, for instance, to glimpse the pattern of another personality through the veil of manners, customs, pretence.”
The theme of the issue was the East, so I decided to use the example of a tea garden to explore what principles of design might be associated with charm. The editors liked it, and here we are.
They even sent me a PDF version of the article (warning, 4MB download) that I have permission to post, so if any of you want to see how the article turned out, download away.
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woooohooooo! that’s excellent.
congratulations. that is a bomb ass place to publish.
actually, that’s a really sweeet article as well. i like the going back and forth between garden and software metaphors. very nice indeed.
Congrats! That’s wonderful!
[…] There’s a tension in design here. On the one hand, having more features and more customizability lets us make things work exactly the way we want. But if a design presents too many features and too much customizability, it becomes intimidating and hard to get started. I think there’s value in presenting a well-marked path forward for the novice user, so that they don’t have to make decisions they are not competent to make yet. Then present them with more options when they have enough experience that they can make those decisions. Actually, this approach reminds me a lot of my Ambidextrous article. […]