Just announced: I’ll be leading a seminar on ethnographic research at Creative CanUX, the Canadian User Experience Workshop
, to be held at the Banff Centre, 9/23 to 9/26/05.
This PDF file
is a (scan of a) short paper version of my 1994 M.Sc. Thesis from U of Guelph. My entire thesis was up on the web in the very very earliest days of web (back when it was NCSA Mosaic that was being used to navigate) as an experiment by a friend at Apple. If I recall, he turned the whole thing into HTML, etc. Anyway, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to read it, but if you are really hard up, perhaps this shorter paper might be of interest. If nothing else, I’ll blog it so I can find it later.
Update: full thesis has been found. See PDF here.
Abstract: An experiment compared the effectiveness of auditory, visual, and combination cues to convey document structure. Subjects demonstrated an equivalent level of understanding of the document structure and its content with either a combination cue or a visual cue. Subjects required more time to answer questions in the combination condition than in the visual condition. This suggests a greater cognitive effort is required. A sound-only condition has the poorest performance both in response time and in the subjectÔø?s answers to questions about the documentÔø?s structure and its content. Subjects were grouped based on whether or not they replayed sounds as a retention tactic. Subjects who replayed sounds did better than subjects who did not. These results contribute to our understanding of potential uses of sound in user interfaces. The specific cues used here for this particular task do not appear promising. Future research to determine how to be make use of sound must carefully consider user tactics for processing sound cues.
is an interesting cultural artifact. From a site focused on Photoshop, a journalist/fanboy/blogger/enthusiast/insider strolls around Adobe and takes pictures of the people behind the product and their offices. There’s little practical information here, but that’s not the point. It puts a face on a corporation and highlights the individuals that make the products that we use (and in this case, that the writer and his readers love).
I paged through it rapidly, and actually came across some mentions/images of my friend Lynn Shade. She and I spoke together at DUX2003 about ethnographic research in other cultures (PDF link here).
And later this week I’ll be speaking at Adobe, to Lynn and her group, in a presentation entitled Buttoned-Down Creativity, about being a creative inside a corporate environment.
writes about Steven Skov Holt, blobjects, and the SJ Museum Blobjects exhibit/book (my previous review of the Blobjects opening night is here)
As an undergraduate at Brown University in the late 1970s, Holt was not only the picture of health, but an avid athlete and cyclist whose pals teased him about his Ôø?thunder thighs.Ôø? In 1979 at age 20, however, his life took a dramatic turn: for reasons doctors never unearthed, HoltÔø?s kidneys failed. He received a transplant. After five months in the hospital, he battled back to health and finished a degree in cognitive science.
Soon after, in 1982, Holt answered an ad for a low-level job at Manhattan-based ID Magazine, the bible of industrial design. Within a year, the intense Holt was editor of the magazine that spotted and helped shape trends, and it was a time when all sorts of new high-tech products were appearing on the landscape.
In some ways, it’s amazing that TV Guide has hung on this long; I can’t remember the last time I used any sort of printed television guide, and I’ve never paid for one, going back to when they’d come free with the weekly paper (I guess they still do, but that goes right into the recycling in our house). The story is interesting, if not particularly shocking, because it marks a sharp transition point in a slow and inexorable change in technology and associated consumer behavior.
TV Guide is slashing the circulation it guarantees advertisers by about two-thirds and relaunching itself as a large format magazine with far fewer TV listings and more emphasis on lifestyle and entertainment, the magazine announced Tuesday.
The radical changes to TV Guide come as it struggles to remain relevant in an age where many TV viewers get their listings from on-screen guides provided by their cable companies or online.
The new TV Guide, which will launch with the Oct. 17 issue, will contain just 25 percent listings and 75 percent stories, versus the 75 percent listings and 25 percent stories it has now, the company said early Tuesday.
Rich Battista, the CEO of TV Guide’s parent company, Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc., said in an interview that the company’s research found that readers would be more interested in reading a magazine with fewer listings and more stories about TV shows and their stars.
Plus, we get the standard PR-speak where the company explains that their business decision was purely informed by research about consumer preference. These things write themselves!
PRESS RELEASE The Rolling Stones new CD, ‘A Bigger Bang,’ will be released September 6, 2005, on Virgin Records. Continuing their historic songwriting partnership, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards began the creative process last autumn and were later joined in the recording studio by Charlie Watts and Ron Wood. ‘A Bigger Bang’ features all new songs, and is the first studio album by The Rolling Stones since the 1997 platinum-certified ‘Bridges to Babylon.’ While in the studio recording the album last year, the band came up with the title ‘A Bigger Bang’ reflecting their fascination with the scientific theory about the origin of the universe.
That last sentence is hysterical. PR writers are the funniest people on the planet!
Maybe it went a little something like this
DISSOLVE TO Mick and Keith lying on their backs on the hood of their car, out in the parking lot behind Olympia studios.
MJ: Keef?
KR: Yeh, Mick?
MJ: Do ye ever….
KR: Wuzzat wuzza?
MJ: Ye know, like WONDER
KR: Zzz hwazuh?
…
MJ: Yeah, like wonder about how we all fit
KR: string usUP, lions cage
…
MJ: No, no, I know, I know, but where did it all ye know come FROM
…
KR:
MJ:
MJ:
MJ:
MJ: Exactly man. Big bang theory. String theory. String cheese.
KR: Big bang?
MJ: Bigger bang! That’s it.
KR: Wuzzat wuzza?
MJ: no, you tell ‘er
Last week in Newark I was taken to an interesting Portuguese restaurant. One dish we ordered (Rodizio
) involves many courses – until you say stop – of huge chunks of meat on giant skewers, three at a time, usually. The skewers were dripping. Many contained something wrapped in bacon.
See more pictures here
.
I was in Honolulu in December and took pictures of as many of the ABC stores as I could find, and have put then up in ABC Stores – a photoset on Flickr. It’s not exhaustive, but it’s fun to see a whole bunch, anyway.
Ahh, a career milestone reached. I’m blurbworthy. Recently, Nikola Design, a one-man firm in Yugoslavia, asked me for a blurb for their exhibit in Belgrade. I had no prior exposure to the principal or his work, but I took a look and offered a brief writeup. Yesterday I watched a DVD of the exhibit. The camera moves around, showing the work, with text and images overlaying the live imagery. At one point, you see the various quotes from the different critics, including myself (credited as Design Strategist and Core77 Columnist). It was pretty neat; especially given the far-flung nature of the event.
The DUX conference site is now showing my tutorial.
In this tutorial, you will learn more about improv, participant observation, listening, context, and, of course, how these things all fit together and can be used and experienced.
DUX is this November in SF at Fort Mason.