Check me out on today’s Gizmodo:
Question (is) Everything: Design that answers unimagined questions
Note please the Half-Life shout-out at the end (hi, Harry!).
If you want to read Eric Von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation, cited in the essay and a major inspiration for my own thinking on the topic, it’s available from his site under a Creative Commons license.
The essay began as some idle thoughts, while drawing several variant sitemaps for the same project, about everyone’s favorite theoretical trope, the problematic (defined by noted Marxist-structuralist wackjob Louis Althusser as “the system of questions commanding the answers given.”) There is no sign of Althusser in the final version, or indeed of sitemaps, in case you were worrying.
Theory brain
Yesterday, sitting under the beehive dryer at Devachan, listening to The Sunset Tree on my iPod nano, the disconnect between the comfortable pampering of my surroundings and the painful autobiographical stories that underlay the genius music I was listening to, the music that I was using to keep myself occupied during the twenty minutes I had to sit and sip filtered water and wait for my hair to dry perfectly, became strong enough to seem funny. Right, I thought, the commodification of experience under capitalism. I seem to remember reading something about this.
My job makes the papers
Today, information design is a chi-chi professional trade that is so rarefied it has split into a series of subdisciplines with names like “user experience design,” “library and information design” and “user interface design.”
(Cory Doctorow, “Flights of Fancy on Flexible Chips,” NYT 12/7/05)
“Chi-chi”? Oy vey.
In my experience, the User Experience Designer, the Information Designer, and the User Interface Designer are all the same person, working at different firms or agencies. I’ve been a user experience specialist, an information architect, and a design analyst, and I just keep doing the same wireframes and sitemaps and card-sorting tests.
The irony that a field whose basic mission encompasses naming and categorizing cannot decide what to call itself we shall, of course, pass over in silence.
(Cory’s piece, by the way, is an interesting take on the same custom-fabrication trend Clive has written about, focused on home-toasting computer chips. Tasty.)
The fundamental difference
When New York appears on screen, the establishing shots are familiar, but once you’re in close-up, it looks nothing like the real thing.
When Los Angeles appears on screen, the close-up shots all look familiar, but the establishing shots are all of somewhere else.*
(*This is becoming even more true of Vancouver, apparently, where many lower-cost TV shows are filmed.)
Yes, yes, plenty of TV shows and films do shoot in New York, and plenty of movies are set in LA. But there is something eerie about visiting LA and recognizing so many places that you first “saw” be somewhere else.
Admin note
Off for the world’s quickest business trip to Los Angeles.
A friend thinks my hotel is the one where Alias’s Mr. Sloane first encountered his evil doppelgänger last season; if so, I intend to spend all my free time riding up and down in the ominous external elevators.