Hello, you! I’m just writing a quick post to let you know that I am soon going to retire carmentastreet.com and redirect it to my new site, julieharpring.com. The new site isn’t completely done yet, and I’m sure I’ll continue to tinker with it, but all my new blog posts will go there from now on. Thanks for reading!
-Julie
The addiction to objects is of course best cured by learning to discipline consciousness. If one develops control over the processes of the mind, the need to keep thoughts and feelings in shape by leaning on things decreases. This is the main advantage of a genuinely rich symbolic culture: It gives people poetry, songs, crafts, prayers, and rituals that keep psychic entropy at bay. … We very much need to learn more about how this inner control can be achieved. Then objects can again be used primarily as instruments rather than as projections of our selves, which, like the servants created by the sorcerer’s apprentice, threaten to drown their masters with relentless zeal.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1993). Why we need things. In Lubar, S. & Kingery D. (eds). History from Things: Essays on Material Culture.
The Ottowa Citizen recently posted a story about a developer in Texas who used some participatory design techniques to involve local women from the community in the creation of a new shopping center. I love that the final design is a mixed-use space that integrates more than just shopping and has a major focus on greenery instead of concrete.
Mr. Montesi added that Watters Creek was not any more expensive to build than other projects; it’s just that the money was allocated differently. For example, in response to the women who were consulted, more money was spent on landscaping than is typical for such a project, and less on making the buildings look impressive.
“They said: ‘We don’t much care about the buildings, we care about the landscaping.’ “
All of which was a revelation to Mr. Montesi, who concluded that attracting a female shopper “definitely wasn’t about painting the buildings in pastels. It wasn’t about making the buildings look feminine, it was about making the place more friendly to the women who use it.”
via Ian via Brand Avenue
I am loving this new article in A List Apart, “Look at It Another Way,” written by Indi Young of Adaptive Path. It’s incredibly reflective of what we talk about every day in my master’s program.
Defining groups by their relationship to your product blinds you to the relationship they might have with products you haven’t thought of yet.
It’s awesome to see a piece like this, written by a UX rock star, on A List Apart (and it’s her second article here in the past year, no less), which is read by so many people who spend a great deal of their time at work getting their hands dirty with code. It reaffirms my belief that the web design industry as a whole is waking up to the need for solid interaction design that puts people first.
We could talk all day about why terrible tools are so prevalent. (In my experience, the reason why a terrible tool isn’t replaced is because someone senior paid $500,000 for it and sure as hell isn’t going to admit a mistake and scrap it.)
- From Accessibility in a Suit and Tie by Bruce Lawson, for Vitamin
So much of this article rang true for me in my experience as a university web designer. Although I was at a nonprofit, many of the issues related to getting buy-in from the top were the same.
I particularly appreciated what Bruce says about teaching CMS contributors to write their content in HTML. I think many people overlook the fact that HTML that has been created using web standards should make sense to any good writer — at its base, HTML just gives us a way to label the parts of our work (the main heading, the subheadings, the paragraphs, the figures/images, etc.), which we all learned to do in third grade or so. In my experience, writers don’t get fired for thinking explicitly about the structure and organization of their prose.
My favorite line of the New York Times story about Igor, the infamous Toronto bike thief:
As the police gathered the mounds of bikes, they also found cocaine, crack cocaine, about 15 pounds of marijuana and a stolen bronze sculpture of a centaur and a snake in battle.
Because even heartless bike thieves appreciate the finer things.
The newspaper graphics for the Boston Globe on Javier Zarracina’s portfolio site are out of this world. I came across them in the perfect way — a post from Lifehacker about the naps graphic (watch out for the window resizing when you click through), not highlighting the design itself, but the information it conveys. I was totally engrossed and spent significant time with it, reading every word.
When I was in journalism school, there seemed to be a general feeling that newspapers like USA Today ushered in an era of dumbed-down print media through greater use of graphics and lower word counts at the expense of the almighty writer’s more detailed coverage. Although I agree that some stories require the unique type of in-depth investigation that a long-form story can provide, Zarracina’s graphics exemplify the effectiveness of human-centered design created through collaboration of writers and artists.
In the video below, Ira Glass talks about accepting and getting through that time we all experience, where the work we produce is not as good as our own ideas of what good work looks like. Even though he’s talking specifically about radio writing and reporting here, as many other bloggers have pointed out, his pep talk can be applied to any skill we are in the process of developing.
I’ve just finished my first year as a master’s student studying interaction research and design, and it has definitely been a humbling experience for me. The type of work I hope to build a career around requires a keen critical eye in combination with research and design skills that will take me years to fully develop. This video was a comforting reminder that hard work and dedication really does pay off in the end, even if you have to spend significant time bumbling around a bit in the interim.
Have you ever considered, while watching … well, basically any commercial that’s marketed to women, the ridiculousness that is the “commercial lady dance?” She sways, she twirls, and if she’s really loving whatever crap the commercial is telling us we’re not good enough without, she throws her hands up in the air and really breaks out the smooth moves! It’s hilarious and cringe-inducing at the same time. In that spirit, Current TV and infoMania bring us an ode to the yogurt commercial.
via Feministing
Hold on to your hats – I’ve got lots more cycling stuff to come! My group for a course called Experience Design is iterating on a prototype for a museum exhibit about what a true bike culture is like, and I thought I’d post one of our early, low-fidelity versions. We’re going to do the final one this weekend life-size, but this one gives a good idea of where we’re going with the project.
The video you will see in the background is used with the permission of David Hembrow, who has also shot lots of other fun first-person videos while cycling around Assen, the Netherlands, where he lives and operates some awesome-looking cycling tours. Thanks, David!
Once again, it’s important to note that this is a low-fidelity, early-version prototype. The goal of creating this one was to make sure it had the feeling we were going for before we spent significant time building something large-scale and fully developed.