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 […]
The importance of feedback
As previously noted, I’m reading Paul Dourish’s book, Where the Action Is, in which he explores the branch of philosophy called phenomenology as a possible theoretical basis for embodied interaction. In particular, he mentions the work of Heidegger, about which I know nothing but a couple brief summaries I have read. But the concept which […]
Plans and Situated Actions, by Lucy Suchman
Amazon link Subtitled “The problem of human-machine communication”, this book debunked the prevailing philosophy in artificial intelligence at the time it was written in 1987, which was the belief that people worked by making a plan, and then executing it. Suchman examines this seemingly common-sensical idea and pointed out several of the flawed assumptions associated […]
Built to Last, by James Collins and Jerry Porras
Amazon link This is the first book written by the Good to Great authors, so since I liked Good to Great, I figured I should pick this up from the library and read it as well. As in Good to Great, they found a group of example companies that they wanted to study. In this […]
I must live in the Bay Area
After being at work from 10-10 yesterday and 9-7 today, I couldn’t face making dinner, so I went down to the local taqueria. While eating my fish taco, I overheard snippets of conversation from the neighboring tables. On my right, they were discussing the shameful response of the Bush administration to New Orleans, and speculating […]
