June 2004

Virtual Self-Storage

June 30, 2004

This sentence in the recent Trendwatching newsletter made me sit up and take notice: TRENDWATCHING.COM expects services like Gmail to morph into the digital equivalent of self storage spaces now found in most big cities. That’s what’s really going on...Continue reading...

MakingStuff Preview

June 17, 2004

A quick prototype of makingstuff.org, a project that’s been on the backburner lately…my goal for it is to be a private, online gallery of daily design and manufacturing works by members of a small group of designers. The actual...Continue reading...

Movie Binge Week

June 14, 2004

Movies I like tend to be released in bunches, a schedule almost certainly determined by the Communists who also make the weather unbearably gorgeous at the same time. Because of the latter, I have yet to see any of this...Continue reading...

Notes on Robert Lucas' The Industrial Revolution

June 10, 2004

Economist and Nobel Laureate Robert E. Lucas Jr. makes some interesting observations about economic growth in the Industrial Revolution and the inequality it has wrought in his essay The Industrial Revolution: Past and Future. Much of it reminded me of...Continue reading...

Notes on Collective Intelligence, Social Consequences of Technology, and the Decline of Culture

June 06, 2004

Wisdom of Crowds excerpt http://www.randomhouse.com/features/wisdomofcrowds/excerpt.html This new book by James Surowiecki explains how groups make better decisions than any individual in certain circumstances; a situation where individual excellence is less important. As a designer, it would be good to understand...Continue reading...

Emotional Decision-Making

The Peter Principle says that workers are promoted through the ranks until they reach a position they are incompetent in. Essentially, this is because promotions are based on meeting a standard, something that is often suddenly recognized by a manager....Continue reading...

A Horse is a Horse (Draft)

Here are some disappointing things I’ve noticed recently: Value of a stock is related to how much people want to buy a stock, not how good or nice the company is. Google may have issues with this. Doing well on...Continue reading...

My Friends

June 05, 2004

For some reason, I have the most brilliant friends. Let me make this clear. I myself am not brilliant. Lucky, yes. Right place, right time kinda’ guy, you bet. But brilliance has never been my forte. Steven Johnson writes about...Continue reading...

Everything Old is New Again (Draft)

Everyone laughs at the scene in Tom Sawyer when Tom convinces his friends to paint the fence for him by telling them that it’s a lot of fun. But deep down, we don’t really expect something like that to work,...Continue reading...

The Web Desktop (Draft)

One of the design challenges I’ve thought about recently is redesiging the interface for personal computers. For years, we’ve worked on computers using the “desktop” metaphor, invented by Douglas Englebart, refined by Xerox, and made popular by Apple and Microsoft....Continue reading...

Power Laws of Information (Draft)

Forbes has an interesting article this month that explores the vast quantity of information our society produces (furled). In 2002 it is estimated that the world created about 5 exabytes of data. For comparison, one exabyte is what a digitized...Continue reading...

How Doing Interaction Design Helped My Product Design (Draft)

This article on how “aesthetics recede as behavior becomes more important”, a view put forth by Bill Moggridge, a founder of IDEO, points to an important emerging trend in the design world. The work of Naoto Fukasawa, a Japanese designer...Continue reading...

Language and Faith

June 04, 2004

For a while now I’ve been interested in the place of language in faith—how important it is to say the right things, how the vocabulary you have allows you to believe different things. But for much longer, I’ve been concerned...Continue reading...

Warning, Unfinished Work Ahead!

I’ve got quite a few entries that have sat in the “draft” box long enough; at the same time I’ve wanted to build on their ideas but feel that I can’t until I post the first entries. I know this...Continue reading...