Stop SOPA and PIPA

If you’re reading this on January 18, 2012, and wondering why there’s a black bar over the logo of this site, please visit americancensorship.org to learn more about the bills currently in front of the U.S. Congress that are serious threats to the Internet’s future, and what you can do about them.

If you’re in New York City, please join me and a couple thousand of my friends at the emergency NY Tech Meetup at the offices of Sens. Schuster and Gillibrand. I’m disgusted they are supporting this legislation, and I intend to let them know. I hope you’ll reach out to your representatives as well. 

A brief programming note

While sorting through a bunch of comments I hadn’t realized were waiting for approval (sorry!), I looked at my Squarespace stats and realized that my post on the way Sherlock’s first season uses your screen to display the characters’ text messages is still one of the most highly trafficked pages on this site. So I’ll take this opportunity to post a big pretty picture of Benedict Cumberbatch let anyone who might be waiting for a followup know that I haven’t yet had a chance to watch all of the second season.

The first episode, which has a lot of on-screen text, and a mobile phone as a major plot point, suggests there’s a lot to talk about, but I want to see what happens in the next two episodes before making any grand claims about Paul McGuigan’s baroque period.

How to Not Suck at Design Research

The title of this talk was “How to Get Out of the Building Without Taking the Building With You” - that is, how to do design research without getting hamstrung by the presuppositions you bring to the process. Thanks to enthusiasm from my beta listeners, though, I ended up putting in a long section on design research synthesis, and in retrospect, I think a broader title would have served it better. If I do it again, I’m calling it “How to Not Suck at Design Research.” 

Update: My friend Steve Portigal notes that the day we met, sharing the stage at SHIFT, he gave a talk called “Seventeen Ways to Not Suck at Research.” Clearly, a talk that made an impression! So maybe I will stick with the original name after all….

Many many thanks to the great Ryan McCarrigan of the Lean Startup Meetup and Lean Startup Machine for inviting me to talk and making the event such a pleasure to attend, and to Josh Seiden of Proof for suggesting that I try giving an Ignite talk in the first place. The constraints of the form - 5 minute talk with a slide change every 15 seconds, whether you’re ready for it or not - are terrifying, but as any good designer knows, constraints can help with creativity, and the talk was a joy to create.

Computers and the "real" world

The world we live in today is made of computers. We don’t have cars anymore; we have computers we ride in. We don’t have airplanes anymore, we have flying Solaris boxes with a big bucketful of SCADA controllers; a 3D printer is not a device, it’s a peripheral, and it only works connected to a computer; a radio is no longer a crystal, it’s a general-purpose computer with a fast ADC and a fast DAC and some software.

- Cory Doctorow, The Coming War on General Computation

This is a fundamental change, and like most fundamental inflection points in the way we see the world, it will take most of us a while to catch up to it. But as interaction designers, it’s useful to be reminded of why our work matters, and why thinking of it as something that only happens in web browsers and traditional apps is so limiting. There are interactions everywhere; go make them better.

Info-viz Everywhere

In the "why did nobody think of this sooner?" product development category comes the Knitter's Pride Dreamz from Webs, a large knitting supplies store. The needles, made of a laminate birch wood, are color-coded by size.

This may seem like a small thing to non-knitters, but if you've ever sorted through a set of similar sock needles, the sizes of which can vary by just a few millimeters in diameter, searching for a set of five that match, it's something of a Eureka! moment.

There's also an interesting product development story deducible from this launch. One of Webs' competitors, KnitPicks, also makes wooden needles out of a birch laminate, but theirs are multi-colored. Webs had market validation that knitters would buy brightly-colored needles made of this material, and likely no desire to step into the interesting legal thicket surrounding the KnitPicks design. Whether it was because they were consciously looking for a differentiator, or the opportunity for making knitters' lives easier just independently struck someone on their team, it's a super-smart choice, and deserves a spot on the top of any knitting designer's holiday wish list. (cough, cough)

(image from yarn.com)