unraveled

January 2002 Archive

No Information Design

As a curmudgeon, I am delighted to point out that the popular term, Information Design, is a misnomer. Information cannot be designed; what can be designed are the modes of transfer and the representations of information.

It would have been more appropriate to call this field Designing Information Representation.

Jef Raskin, from his latest shaking article, There is No Such Thing as Information Design.

By questioning the meaning of their very job, Raskin has a lot of information designers pretty upset. I think many information designers are focusing too much on the clumsy title of the article and missing the bigger picture here. My interpretation is this: many information designers are too caught up in all the digital and creative aspects of their field that they forget about the scientific aspect. This science is based in understanding human factors and how those factors can be applied to produce better representations of information. In other words, human factors is the most important aspect of designing information representation to convey intended meaning. So don’t get all hoity-toity folks, just read the summary.

Denim

DENIM is a system that helps web site designers in the early stages of design. And from what I hear, it’s the only one. It provides five main levels to view your prototype, all within a pen-based interface. Sweet.

Update: Denim, although a bit crude, is one amazing tool. Every information architect should have this software.

High-tech’s Disability Mandate

But by simply considering the needs of the disabled, we do much more; we force ourselves to look beyond the first or most obvious way of doing things. There is, or should be, more than one way to accomplish any given task. We need to keep that in mind at all times and make it a design principle.

A nice article by Patricia C. Sueltz of Sun Microsystems. She lists the business benefits as major reasons for using technologies that help the disabled. Unfortunately, she forgot to mention the human benefits.

The Wayback Machine

Unraveled was born in July 1998. At the time I was inspired by Lance Arthur’s Soulflare (offline), Auriea Harvey’s entropy8 and Michael Samyn’s zuper! (Auriea and Michael now work together at entropy8zuper). So my plan was to make Unraveled a virtual gallery of sorts.

To accomplish this, I assembled a group of five people who were interested displaying their writing and art. The gallery launched October 1999, but up until then I displayed only a splash page. I always had a bad habit of deleting web pages that I designed. I’m not sure why. Maybe because it was so easy to do? So sometime after the site launched, I deleted that splash page. I thought I would never see it again. So I practically cried when I recently found an archive of Unraveled on the amazing Wayback Machine.

The Wayback Machine, built by a partnership between the Internet Archive and Alexa Internet, contains a five-year, 100-terrabyte collection of Web pages. Just how big is 100-terrabytes? About five times as large as The Library of Congress, which contains about 20 million books. Yeah, that’s pretty big.

So while you’re thinking about it, take this opportunity to visit The Archive and find the website you loved browsing back in the day. It’s like watching the home video’s that your parents made when you were a kid, only this library happens to contain about five billion images.

Chemical Beats

Hell yeah! Chemical Brothers back in the house! Come With Us, the brothers fifth studio album, is a galactic trip through big bass, clickity beats, and vibrant bounce. This is what dance music is all about.

Opensewer 11 Columbus

Opensewer Gatherings (“OSG”) are in-real-life discussion salons for people who are dissatisfied with the low level of intellectual curiosity and meaningful dialogue in America today. We are active-minded individuals who gather in several different cities three or four times per year for raucous, meaningful discussion. While we’re at it, we sometimes enjoy a beverage.

The venue for Opensewer 11 Columbus has been confirmed! We’ll be meeting on Thursday, February 21, 7:00 PM at Victorian’s Mignight Cafe. The topic of this gathering is Bioethics: The Human Cloning Controversy. Reading material has been recently updated.

Magnetic Spam

Just like Magnetic Poetry, but better.

I never thought I would have a reason to save spam, until now.

Apple’s Form Fetish

Can Jobs “Think Outside the Pretty Box”? An interview with Jef Raskin, author of The Human Interface.

Raskin believes that Apple and Steve Jobs should spend more time thinking out of the box about interface design — and less time thinking about how to build a pretty box.

Yeah baby. Let the cat fight begin!

Friday Five: The Smelly Edition

Friday Five: The Smelly Edition.

  1. What cologne or perfume do you wear? None usually.
  2. What cologne or perfume do you like best on the opposite sex? I really don’t know anything about perfume.
  3. What one smell can you not stomach? There are probably many. Sewage is pretty nasty.
  4. What smell do you like that others might consider weird? Playdough.
  5. How do you plan to spend your weekend? Read a lot and work on top secret projects.

Innovation Architecture

Come gather ‘round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

The Times They Are A-Changin’
By Bob Dylan

Thanks BlackBeltJones

E Ink

Researchers at Cambridge, MA-based E Ink have completed the first working prototype of an electronic ink display attached to a flexible, silicon-based thin-film transistor backplane, the sheet of electronics that controls display pixels.

The company’s ultimate goal is to produce RadioPaper, sheets of reusable e-paper containing radio frequency ID tags that download a new edition of, for example, the Wall Street Journal each morning into the same physical display.

Read all about it at Technology Review (via ia/)

The Ben Brown Show

Have you met Ben Brown yet? Ben Brown has been making Web sites for a long long time. And let me tell ya folks, he does it all. He writes, he codes, he draws! Unfortunately for him, he’s currently unemployed. So what is a multitalented unemployed superstar to do? Produce his very own daily show of course! Today on the Ben Brown show: The Science Episode, where Ben Brown debunks a popular myth. Catch all the crazy action at benbrowndotcom.

IE Mac No Like Me

The word on the street is that this page looks like an abstract artistic statement on IE 5 Mac. I’m not sure, but I’m assuming this because I’m using full XHTML and CSS rather than tables for layout. Unfortunately, I don’t have a Mac nearby, so I’m pretty much helpless to diagnose and fix the problem, whatever it may be. If anyone has a Mac and is willing to give me a tip on what’s breaking my page, that would be great. In the meantime, I can only suggest using a browser that was built for the standards, not for the masses.

Only One Scientist

Jeffrey Zeldman experiments with sound. Just add the beat-box and you’ve got yourself a hit.

More fun and excitement to come.

Font Usability Mania!

Since Netscape implemented the font tag, Web designers have been battling over fonts. Long afterwards, people are finally doing real usability research to determine best practices. I’ve been reading a lot about online fonts lately so I thought I’d pass on what I feel are some of the best links:

Beyond Windows

Imagine that you need to save a file on your computer. But instead of browsing a complex directory structure, your moving through a 3-D “landscape.” Meaning will no longer be attached to the name of a folder where you save the file. Meaning will be assigned by you, depending on where you place the file.

Researchers from the likes of MIT and Microsoft give us a glimpse into the interface of the future. (via Tomalak’s Realm)

CSS is Boring

Thank you Chris Casciano for stating the obvious: Your CSS Bores Me.

Since the browsers are finally up to standards, many designers have taken a cookie-cutter approach to building sites. Chris wants to know what happened to design. (via Zeldman)

Friday Five

In an attempt to make my admittedly unexciting weblog more exciting, I’m going to start participating in the Friday Five. Thanks to Mena Trott, who happens to be a co-author of the amazing Movable Type, for bringing this cute idea to my attention.

  1. What do you have your browser start page set to? about:blank
  2. What are your favorite news sites? Google News Headlines, Yahoo! News, and the New York Times.
  3. Favorite search engine? Google, easily.
  4. When did you first get online? In 1994 as a freshman at Penn State University. During my first semester, I had an AOL account. Soon afterwards I found out about Ethernet and there was no turning back.
  5. How do you plan to spend your weekend? See a movie, read a lot and work on the site.

Your turn.

Link Feedback

So one of the assertions in Stephen Johnson’s excellent book Emergence is that the web alone doesn’t show any self-organizing behavior because it’s missing feedback, i.e., all the links are one-way.

This neat widget by Sean Nolan will automatically track incoming links and then display them to your site visitors. I believe some very interesting applications of this widget are afoot. (via ia/)

Information Architecture for the Rest of Us

If you have been confused about information architecture and what it is all about, this is exactly the article you should read.

A very clear and simple article indeed, from WebWord.

Salt Lake 2002

I find it utterly unbelievable that a major world-wide event such as the 2002 Winter Olympics has a completely inaccessible Web site.

Read the in depth review at Brainstorms and Raves. (via Digital Web)

Dear Weblog

Hi. My name is Joshua Kaufman. Welcome to my first personal Web site and weblog entry.

For as long as I’ve been reading and building independent sites, it’s amazing to me that I haven’t done this sooner. So why now? I built this site for several reasons:

  1. I enjoy writing, and I’ve been told that I write well. So I thought it was about time that I started publishing somewhere.
  2. I love information architecture and the study of human computer interaction, and I wanted to contribute to the IA/HCI community. This is the main purpose of the weblog and Web style guide.
  3. There are several personal projects - on my hard drive and in my head - that I’ve wanted to publish for a long time.
  4. As a Web professional, I wanted to have a place for my resume, bio and writings.
  5. One can only read Lance Arthur for so long without doing something themselves.

Currently, the only thing here is my weblog. (You’re reading my weblog right now. If you’re unfamiliar with weblogs, Rebecca Blood has a written a short history and perspective.) The other sections of the site will be appearing over the next few months or as soon as I get around to it.

I look forward to continuing work on this site, and I appreciate you stopping by. Please come again.

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