Michael Hirschorn has some thoughtful and sobering comments on the “social computing” hype in the Atlantic Online: The Web 2.0 Bubble
The walled-garden attributes of MySpace and Facebook, like those of the subscriber-era AOL, can quickly become liabilities. And as the value of social-media tools becomes inevitably unsexy and commoditized, it may be only a matter […]

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I ran across a post by Nat Torkington on the excellent O’Reilly Radar blog echoing (more articulately) some of what I was trying to say in the podcast I posted about earlier today.
O’Reilly Radar > Second Life and the Future of Prototyping
The biggest appeal of Second Life from a creator’s point of view has […]

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The Wright Stuff - Popular Science
This is an excellent interview with Will Wright, creator of SimCity, The Sims, Spore, and other games.
It touches on a lot of key ideas about game design; the nature of education, play and socializing, the richness of game design, how to engage users of different types, and so forth. […]

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When I posted my missive about mashups last week, I should’ve known others were saying much of the same stuff at least a week earlier.
Adam Greenfield has a great post explaining how you have to design with the assumption that your creation will be remixed and retrofitted into a larger context:
Two things product designers […]

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Austin Govella makes the point razor-sharp in his post on Agile Development and Design:
Agile development won’t give you better design. Design models things to be made. Development makes things you’ve modeled. Agile development methods promise better model-making, but don’t promise better models. Agile development can actually devastate design.
Thanks man. I’m going to quote you in, […]

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The folks at Panic Software have a wonderful story up that, although it’s long, is really worth the read. It brings back memories of that heady period when everything seemed like a mystery over the horizon, when we felt like we could do *anything*. It has the “startup” story, the references to stuff that Mac […]

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I’m at work, trying to parse exactly how MS Word’s templates function. I knew this much better back in 1998, when I was a tech writer. I managed to master much of the workings of Word styles and templates, but it was all still pretty arcane even then. I remember having long debates over conference […]

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There are references everywhere — I saw it on the news while I was travelling — but here’s an article at USA Today
IPSWICH, England — Tear down the traffic lights, remove the road markings and sell off the signs: Less is definitely more when it comes to traffic management, some European engineers believe.
They say drivers […]

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Two remarkable things get said in the recent Boing-Boing post Disney exec: Piracy is just a business model
First, Disney’s co-exec chair admits they’ve had an enlightened paradigm shift on piracy:

We understand now that piracy is a business model,” said Sweeney, twice voted Hollywood’s most powerful woman by the Hollywood Reporter. “It exists to serve […]

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I just watched My Architect, courtesy of Netflix. The son of architect Louis I Kahn goes on a journey to know more about his father (whom he knew only a little at a time before Kahn’s death in 1974).
You know, I keep wanting to run down architecture that seems to be about the spectacle, […]

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The article I wrote for the August/September 2006 ASIS&T Bulletin is up. Thanks to Stacy Surla and the gang at the Bulletin for helping me get it into shape. I’m pleased to say it’s sharing space with a lot of really excellent writing.
It’s weird to read it now, in a way. It’s a snapshot […]

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The Science Of Desire
The beauty of ethnography, say its proponents, is that it provides a richer understanding of consumers than does traditional research. Yes, companies are still using focus groups, surveys, and demographic data to glean insights into the consumer’s mind. But closely observing people where they live and work, say executives, allows companies to […]

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