1. The strip is designed to keep you inside casinos. Inside my hotel (the Flamingo, because we information architects like to kick it old-school), every path you can take is designed to take you through or into a casino. The rooms don’t even have those terrible hotel-room coffee makers, which I presume is to get you downstairs, near where you could spend money, without caffeine. It’s bizarrely fascinating.
2. The keynote speaker at the conference has an office literally down the block from where I work. I walk past his building at least a couple of times a week. And yet I don’t think I would ever have just walked in to say hello. Now we’ve exchanged cards, and I’m hoping he or someone from his firm will come address our brown-bag series in the works.
3. Steven, in comments to my last post, directed me to the geeky story behind the Bellagio water display, which has made me unreasonably happy. Thank you, Steven!
4. I’ve seen the room where I’m presenting. I’m definitely going to need to run for a presentation-clicker. (I bought one in New York, which is… um, I think still on my bed at home.)
Oooh, Las Vegas, ain’t no place for a poor boy like me
If I had to choose, I don’t think my first viewing of the Las Vegas strip would have been jet-lagged and stomach-achey from a turbulent flight. Still, I can’t imagine it wouldn’t have been overwhelming anyway. And this from a woman who functions at her best in New York.
The Bellagio water spectacle, so beautifully captured at the end of Ocean’s 11, is even more impressive visually in person, but it’s spoiled by being choreographed to “I’m Proud to Be An American.” I have been reminded more than once on this trip so far how different New York is from most of the rest of the country, but I’m in the sort of mood where that seems pretty all right.
I may end up posting some notes from the conference here: apologies in advance if your geekiness doesn’t intersect with mine.
New Yorker design non-mystery solved
My flashback to the old Lingua Franca site on first laying eyes on the new New Yorker site now makes even more sense -- I discovered, via Emdashes, that both were designed by the same people.
Though it's amazing how much more design you can get out of a 1024 screen and a Condé Nast budget...
Design flashback
I am one of maybe five people in the entire world, if that, who looked at the new New Yorker site and had a flashback to the navigational structure of this site. But that's only to be expected.
(Thesis: there are interface design paradigms that speak deeply to lit geeks. Discuss.)
Academic instincts
Now that it's safely over, and Jason can't drive out here to cause trouble, I can report that my talk to the Usability Professionals Association, "Information Architecture Meets Industrial Design: Working Collaboratively Across Disciplines" was very well-received, and more fun to write than I'd expected. I talked about my experience working on the IQ/MAX turret, a specialized phone for financial traders.
It was a presentation. It was written in Keynote. And yet I keep calling it a "paper." Old habits are very strong indeed.
I'll be giving a revised version of the same paper talk at the IA Summit next month, so, should you be really interested in information design, come on down -- I'm speaking on Monday morning, late enough that I'll be fully caffienated, but not so late (I hope) that people will be ready to leave.