the challenge of wild eating

Nice story of Becky Lerner planning to go a week on food she can forage from the wild. She needed to cut it short to 5 days, and lessons emerged: plan ahead, work in community.

thinking differently about books

In the past few years, I've noticed I had been considering books a burden of promises.

Though books by themselves don't make any promises, I have been using them as a sort of lifeline to the future: that I'll read that book, and some magic will happen, like I'll know some important bit of information that will make all the difference. Or I realize some secret path. Or I'll be able to offer some new way for my family to interact, or for my neighborhood to become more vibrant, or my experience of nature to be more intimate, or my understanding of history or human society will become profound and I'll be able to ...

Book sellers, authors, and book lovers encourage the mystery and promise of a book, but I'm now finding the majority of the books in my possession feel like items in a to-do list that are always in the low priority group.

After realizing I was doing this, I started to watch for other ways to relate to books. I often encounter situations for which there are not handy words - or even that there might not be words for. I've read enough Heidegger to have tainted my thoughts as to how new language might emerge. Recently I read an article that mentioned the use of a certain theoretical framework, and they called out that framework as something that allowed conversation on a topic.

Once employed the framework in the book "gives us a grammar to..." talk about topic X. I like that.

So, now I find I'm starting to think of books a bit more like a toolset, or vocabulary framework, to employ when thinking about or discussing a problem.

Do I need that tool on the shelf there? If not, should it move aside to make space for tools I do need?

The shift from "unfulfilled promise" to "framework tool" is a great relief.

Local UX events

A reminder that news about user experience events in the Ann Arbor area are regularly posted to UXnet Ann Arbor page. If you want to see a different city, click the "Locales" link at the top, then on the locales page, choose a city close to you.

If you are itching to go to a local developer + UX conference this spring, try Kalamazoo X conference - just a few weeks away.

IA Summit - Detroit Re-cap Session

For those of us information architect types who are missing the 10th Information Architecture Summit in Memphis (March 20-22), there will be a local recap of the IA Summit at Wayne State on Thursday, March 26th at 11am. There is a write up of the event on the Wayne State ASIS&T student chapter website: http://wsuasist.blogspot.com/2009/03/information-architecture-summit-09.html

Panelists will include Peter Morville, Keith Instone, Chris Farnum, and Heidi Blanton.

SI Alumni gathering in A2 on March 12th

Hey - for those who are SI Alumni -

Please join fellow School of Information area alumni as we celebrate this year’s graduating students and welcome them into the alumni community! Let’s show them there really IS life after SI!!

Mix-and-mingle with fellow alumni and meet the soon-to-be graduating students. We’ll be gathering on Thursday, March 12, 7:00-8:30 p.m. in the private room on the second floor of the Cottage Inn on William Street.

variable interface complexity

or, maybe it should be "variable interface clutter"? I don't know, but I like the idea of turning it up or down - at this site for the Beastie Boys album, Paul's Boutique

http://paulsboutique.beastieboys.com/


(thanks Charlie)

best display of 2008 election results

The NPR site was easily the best overall presentation of 2008 presidential election results. The user interface there answered questions before they were asked.

A man of his time

Obama talking about online social networks facilitating a change in power.



got this from Amanda Mooney's blog, via Melida.

Candidates tax plans

Nice visualization. Be interesting to have a Regan era tax plan up there for comparison.

Dance of Social Frameworks

Dave Pollard at How to Save the World has a fine post applying his framework for finding people to work with, to the challenge of finding people to live with, assuming living in an intentional community is attractive. Cool. Feels like a post to refer back to.

Trusting Computer Generated Advice

Was getting directions to go to a thing.
Went to Google Maps.
was goin' from Ann Arbor, MI to 2600 S Telegraph Rd # 100, Bloomfield Hills, MI 48302
It gave me this:

View Larger Map

Now, if I was doing w/o the benefit of this sufficiently complex magic mapping tool, I would have taken 23 to 14 to 275 to 696 to Telegraph. Sounds simple, compared to what they suggested.

Turns out the path they sent me on was probably a bit faster, wasn't very complex, and had nice scenery.

I had the distinct impression that this was the route a person local to my destination would have suggested. It even had us coming up to the driveway to the building from behind the building, so we didn't see the business sign - just trusted the directions given.

I was impressed by this. And I wasn't alone. A couple other people had a similar experience - taking the same route suggested by The Goog. My favorite comment came from Les Orchard who said "I feel like I just gained experience points."

It was freaky. A revealing of what would have otherwise been "localized knowledge". I like benefiting from that. But it does make me feel drawn in, and this triggered some defenses. Do I trust somewhat wacky directions in the future? When I get this information from a human who lives where I'm headed, I trust. When it comes from a data crunching machine, what then? Trust?

All these roads we drive on are connected (other than some closed, corporate road correlate to the "dark web"), so it makes sense using that assumption that one should be able to just find the shortest path based on knowing the localized rules. So, I guess trust of certain advice coming from computers is bound to increase as it improves. Slippery road, trusting computer advice. Thar be dragons. (...but dragons give good experience points, hmmm...)

visualizing items in categories

Someone on an IA mailing list I'm on was asking a visualization question. They wrote:

I'm planning a project where participants will grade example items according to how well they fit their idea of what a certain category is. The grading will be on a 1-10 scale, similar to the (in)famous hot-or-not grading system.

I anticipate about fifty or more items to be tested, and for there to be a range of agreement. What data visualisations formats could I consider for showing this?

Compelled to reply, I wrote:

Will you want to show items spanning multiple categories? I'm trying to sus out what you want to get out of this. I'm guessing you want to present back to someone(s) evidence for what categories make sense re: their set of items.

Of the 50 or more items, perhaps another dimension could be the importance of the item to the stake holders. Ex: the items that either make the most $ for the stakeholders, or are the most valuable for their mission, etc. would be "higher" value than other items.

If you could determine that, then you could make that the up/down dimension, with the top being "higher" value items. If you showed the categories as columns on a 2D surface, all with the same width, then placed all items on that surface in top/down order (could think of them as sorted rows on the sheet), leaving space to one side of each category... ah I should just make a picture... OK, attached is a picture.

The picture just shows the top items, but I presume your final visualization would include all items. Each "row" is an item. If it shows up multiple times, that's because it was considered to be more than 50% within the category (or some rule you will come up with).

You could show items that fell further outside that threshold, but only show them dimly. Or show all items with their transparency set to the percentage they were within the category. (if you do that, still show the physical placement of the item in relation to the category, as that is easier for us humans to pull data from.)

An important indicator of success for the categories would be if the top priority/value items all fit snugly into one (or more) categories. It might be ok if lower value items didn't fit the categories as well.

impact of new offshore drilling on U.S. oil consumption

this from a post on TreeHugger.

ArbCamp 2008

ArbCamp 2008 is approaching at the speed of time. The topic "Publishing" is broadly framing this year's event.

ArbCamp is an annual un-conference (BarCamp) of, for, and by folks who want to "build communities worth having" both online and off. Everybody who attends will collectively set the agenda for the conference, with food, meeting spaces, and a basic schedule provided.

Bring your friends.

When: October 18-19. 9AM – 5PM both days.

Where: Morris Lawrence Building at Washtenaw Community College 4700 East Huron River Drive Ann Arbor, Michigan 48105

http://arbcamp.org for more dirt.

Respect the Archivists

I have some old paper material to deal with. You might notice it if you look closely at the right side of my desk.

My hope is to finish going through the last 2ft of this in the next couple hours. I don't expect to succeed.

See, many of the little bleached paper sheets here are also the articles and papers I kept from grad school. But it's time they either serve a new purpose or get to know our local recycling program. Still, I like the topics and I keep getting drawn in.

One of the papers that stopped me as I tried to let it go, was written by one of my professors at the school, "Understanding Electronic Incunabula: A Framework for Research on Electronic Records" by Margaret Hedstrom. Not having known much about archives when I started at SI back in 1998, this was what alerted me to the awareness and forsight some were bringing to the archive field. This brought on the respect for the archivists that has only increased to this day.

ok, back to culling the stack.

Black Iron Days

There appears to be a large gathering of blacksmiths, called Black Iron Days, taking place this weekend up in Grayling Michigan.

Surfing bricks with clicks

The Google Consumer Response Tag + newer smart phones seem to be finally the right sort of combo to fulfill the vision of physical items leading to online information or webpages - first grasped at by the Cuecat, which was shipped to WIRED readers about 8 years ago.

I have an older Sony Ericsson that isn't really up to efficient websurfing, so it's not something I'll try out now, but certainly a new opportunity space.

The Demise of The Carbon Age

It feels good to hear a bold insightful vision from someone that commands people's attention.



"I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100% of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon free sources within 10 years." - Al Gore

information lantern word cloud

Complements of Wordle

Ann Arbor Startup Weekend, June 20 - 22

In a couple weeks we will have an interesting event happening in our little town; an event which is poised to introduce valuable tools and a new spin on business development to the Southeast Michigan region. Attendees of Ann Arbor Startup Weekend will gather for 2+ days to create (in parallel) a number of start ups, that should stand on their own at the end of the weekend.

This is a "learning-by-doing" model that the good folk at Startup Weekend have been taking to cities around the country to leverage smart, motivated people who want to create companies, products, services, etc., but don't know exactly how to go about achieving their goals.

Details about Ann Arbor Startup Weekend are both on their blog site and in their Upcoming! event listing.