May
24
Paper Bits
Digital, Paper, Notes, Bits.
May
23
“
A customer is a novel and stable pattern of human behavior.
[…]
An innovation is a stimulus that causes a novel and stable pattern of human behavior to emerge.
” Marketing, Innovation and the Creation of Customers
“Marketing and innovation play a zero-sum game driven by the clarity of the “customer.” When the “customer” has been created with great clarity, marketing leads innovation and you get sustaining and/or incremental innovations. When the customer is a mystery, innovation leads, and you get disruptive and/or radical innovations.”
Marketing, Innovation and the Creation of Customers
May
22
“Never underestimate the basic laziness of people before handing them tools.”
Scott Foe’s Web Log: Opinion: What The Fuck N-Gage?
“For a few minutes, the most-watched stock in the world behaved like a malfunctioning computer program. The stock that convinced untold thousands of regular people with E-Trade accounts to get back into investing behaved according to rules that literally none of them understood, traded at volumes that none of them could conceive of and effectively followed contradictory orders from two sets of screaming robots. This is what future shock feels like.”
How Facebook’s IPO Got Hijacked by Computers (via iamdanw)
(via iamdanw)
Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset
A growth mindset will help you achieve more, according to Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck.
Challenges: embrace them
Obstacles: persist in the face of setbacks
Effort: see it as the path to mastery
Criticism: learn from them
Success of others: find lessons and inspiration in others’ success
(via notational)
May
18
“Writing is the connective tissue that creates understanding.”
Please Learn to Write is Rands at his concise best.
“Design must be functional and functionality must be translated into visual aesthetics, without any reliance on gimmicks that have to be explained.”
F.A. Porsche on Design
May
11
“
If you think about the tone of my story, some of the main themes were time pressure, worry, risk-taking, embarrassment, and recovery from embarrassment. For me at least, this is what real life user experience design is like. It’s nothing like the vision we normally portray outwardly to graduates and newcomers to the field.
There’s no pristine CSI laboratory stuff going on here – and we didn’t magically innovate using multi-coloured post-it notes and impressively well drawn sketches. We simply had the stamina to keep going through that cycle of making mistakes, analysing them and trying again.
” [From Print to iPad: Designing a Reading Experience
May
10
“[T]he world that produced Friedman and Thomas no longer exists. Their expertise and their insight have become completely obsolete. Rather than admit that they no longer possess relevant expertise and set themselves to being curious about the future, these writers are choosing to express advice from a bygone age, one in which they still possess authority. To do otherwise would be far too personally painful. And to a majority of their audience, which formed its ideology in an America than no longer exists, hearing the old myths repeated brings comfort. After all, in the America of the 20th Century, a solid work ethic and an education was enough to bring most people a career that would provide a lifestyle filled with the goods and services of the Middle Class. It was a good system, and it attracted the attention of the world. Who wouldn’t want to go back to that land, however mythical, in their mind?”
The coming bubble of obsolete advice | Eric Garland
“Only recently have I come to understand that the real-life feeling of “romance” is really just the tension and release that occurs when a series of seemingly unrelated events suddenly all make sense. Think of a relationship like a long flip book—yours might be filled with years of makeouts and petty fights and amazing records and intellectual arguments and good sex and bad sex and takeout Thai curries and Netflix Instant screenings. But as time passes, our memory has a tendency to dog-ear select pages, so that when we flip through again we only see certain story lines. If we’re not careful, our flip book will be flagged into one of those big romantic narratives. It will encourage us to dwell on the private moments that conform most closely with public ideas about how a relationship should be, and where it should go.”
How to Ditch Happily-Ever-After and Build Your Own Romantic Narrative - Lifestyle - GOOD
May
9
“The plethora of online Photoshop tutorials demonstrate its power and its flexibility, but I believe they also demonstrate its poor design. Think about it like this: what if each time you plunked down in front of World of Warcraft, you had to spend an hour trying to remember, wait, how do I play this?”
Rands In Repose: Two Universes (via nikf)
Paging James Paul Gee…
May
7
“Exposition and condensation are in fact the fundamental learned behaviors that constitute literacy, not reading and writing. One behavior dissolves densely packed words using the solvent that is the extant oral culture, enriching it, while the other distills the essence into a form that can be transmitted across cultures.”
Rediscovering Literacy
“
I was shocked to read [Ted Nelson’s] justification for why Xanadu must be built from scratch, completely and perfectly: “Existing systems do not combine well; hooking them together creates something like the New York subway system.”
The New York Subway system?!
In my System Design class, we lauded this as one of the most functional examples of emergent design ever. New York could’ve suffered from some clunky, overdetermined, shortsighted, top-down transportation plan. Instead, a number of transportation companies competed to get the people where they needed to go. Competition between companies and the lack of an overall design vision led to a shift in emphasis: not what makes sense, but what works well.
”Casey A. Gollan: Notes + Links: Weeks 12, 13, and almost 14.
These posts are long (I must have spent ten to fifteen minutes this morning reading this one) but I love the insight into what he’s thinking about. This part in particular of a longer set of thoughts on Ted Nelson’s Xanadu and similar systems was well worth the read.
(See also: A Big Idea Called Legibility, by Venkatesh Rao:
- Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
- Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
- Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
- Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
- Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
- Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
- Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly
as widely quoted from by notational and paperbits)
Oh, Ted Nelson. You are forever the love child of Gary Gygax and Don Quixote.
One day, I hope to have a museum of utopian visions of computer systems. It will feature Nelson’s Xanadu, Engelbart’s NLS (and Hyperscope), Donald Bitzer’s PLATO, and Jef Raskin’s Canon Cat and Archy.
Beautiful, doomed visions of what might have been, all of them.
(via blech)
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