January 2011
27 posts
Example Title
Me: “Pro tip: When your tutorial is abstract and insists on filling every field with ‘example’, you are not teaching your users anything. #expressionengine”
Drew: “Can you elaborate on this? I’m creating an actionable tutorial for MagicList and I’d like to understand what doesn’t work.”
Yes. Totally. This needs to be more than a tweet,...
Wherein I took Benadryl.
We’re gonna learn real soon whether this was a good idea or not, but I just did a double-dose of Benadryl to put my poison oak in check, and man is the world ever getting stupendous all of a sudden.
Here’s a thing. A thing I have noticed. The most powerful force in the city is not steel, not concrete, not gravity, perhaps apathy but that’s not what we’re talking about...
"Dane and I talked about Monoliths."
Now I can’t stop thinking about how everything will be a fucking monolith in like, 20 years, and that even some of the newer symbols we use won’t make sense.
The filmstrip stopped making sense so we used a picture of a video camera, but soon (now) the video camera doesn’t even make sense. Most of the video on the web will have been taken on a phone or point-and-shoot.
I...
The Scope of Experience Design
When a dude sitting on the can is cycling through all his ringtones at full volume, I am experiencing his iPhone.
But I am not the user.
While I call myself an experience designer, I take issue with the term “user experience” for precisely this reason. It dishonestly limits the scope your work’s impact, absolving you, the designer, of responsibility for the unintended...
Being a Better Wild Trout
by Dane Petersen
reprinted from the Adaptive Path Newsletter, January 14, 2010
I joined Adaptive Path last summer after spending two years in school studying interaction design. Like a farm-raised trout introduced to the wild, my transition from academic to professional life has been a rough one.
In those first furious weeks on the job I thought I knew everything. I swam with confidence,...
“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and...”
– François Auguste René Chateaubriand
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Stunning, but hungry thirty minutes later.
I saw Tron: Legacy today. It was beautiful.
There were cultural things. They did a great job remediating early 80s computing and video games, from visuals to sounds to materials. Daft Punk’s soundtrack was splendid. Chip tunes. Subtle Nintendo sound effects. Sawtooth waves. The occasional synthesized horns, straight off Pink Floyd’s Division Bell. I loved how the enemy space craft...
Google’s decreasingly useful, spam-filled web... →
Amen, brother.
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"Good enough for who it's for."
I love books. I love the way they smell, I love the texture of their pages, I love their heft, I love the way, as you reach the end of a book, the weight of the stack of pages in your left hand seemingly pulls you toward the end of the story.
I have books that mean quite a lot to me. I have a translated copy of The Odyssey from 1927. When I was living in Hood River I went to see Jon Krakauer...
Crowdfund a mission to put a Monolith on the moon. →
In.
I’m in.
I’m so fucking in.
The Wilderness Below Your Feet →
Fuck yeah.
In my wilder days urban spelunking was one of my favorite hobbies. My friends and I explored the shit out of the undergrounds of Duluth, Superior, Minneapolis and St. Paul. We discovered underground rivers, abandoned shooting ranges, steam tunnels, burned mattresses, freak-ass Satanic graffiti, bats, police, phobia-scale cockroach swarms, milling machinery, athletic pools, ore docks,...
Media: Watching You Watching It →
To the human eye, Ms. Sonin appeared to be amused. The software agreed, said Dr. Kaliouby, though it used a finer-grained analysis, like recording that her smiles were symmetrical (signaling amusement, not embarrassment) and not smirks. The software, Ms. Kaliouby said, allows for continuous, objective measurement of viewers’ response to media, and in the future will do so in large numbers on the...
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Dog, Kinect, Rent. In that order.
Last night Kate and I celebrated New Year’s Eve by playing with a dog and an Xbox Kinect. The dog was pretty awesome, like a husky whose growth had stunted at fifteen pounds, and only became more awesome when we discovered that he knew how to sit. And lie down. And roll over.
And so, that’s what we did. We got a treat and said, “Sit.” Then, “Lie down.” Then,...
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Hello! We have a lovely small couch (née loveseat (née sofa)) that we would love to sell to you for a fair price. It has served us well for a few years, but lately it has been whispering delicate words in our ears as to its desire to see other people.
The couch measures 58 inches wide, 36 inches deep, and 29 inches tall at its tallest point. It is small but mighty. It is tough but light (no...