Super ambitious architect and designer William McDonough gave a talk at TED about designing for all children of all species for all time. He mentioned his book on the subject called Cradle to Cradle, which he points out was not printed on paper. In his deadpan sense of humor he explains,
Imagine this design assignment. Design […]
Semantics! I’m not talking about the semantic web, but semantics in general. I’m sure you know, but the idea of semantics is the concern of meaning. For example, when I use language to communicate, I really want it to convey my meaning because that’s the reason I’m communicating. Hence, the importance of semantics and meaning.
On […]
A while back I discovered the MDA framework for game design, which, like a Will Wright presentation, struck a chord. As a recap, it’s a conceptual framework that breaks games down into mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics as a much needed formal vocabulary for game design. In the context of games, the components of MDA are […]
This has got to be the most aesthetically pleasing music video I’ve seen in a long time. Anybody interested in information design and visualization should really appreciate this. It’s made entirely of animated infographics. Together they tell the story of a day in the life of a working girl in London. If Tufte ever made […]
I just realized what would make OS X Leopard’s Time Machine really useful. More useful than it’s supposed to be. Right now, it archives and allows you to go back in time for files and data in applications that decide to use their API. For some people this might be useful, but for most I […]
Mental models represent a very important way to view the way we think. More importantly, models in general represent a very useful way to represent known knowledge. The significance of models might not be obvious, but I’m going to try and paint a picture that will help you understand them as I do. First though, […]
I remember when programming was a fun thing to do in a silo. You know, building non-networked programs. I remember just sitting down to a BASIC prompt and saying, “What can I make on this thing?” I guess the equivalent of that today is building little desktop applications.
Actually, it really bothers me that I […]
Let me start by explaining something I want to build (when I find time) called Mailhook. The idea came from building an email service (as opposed to webservice) prototype called Transmutiy that would take images via email and send you back a converted image based on the email address you sent it to. So sending […]
Update: Let’s get serious about this shall we? A wiki has been set up to support the growing community interested in web hooks.
A while ago I realized something about our ecosystem of web applications that sort of blew me away. Since then, I’ve been trying to run it by smart people whenever I get the […]
Presentation Zen just linked to a bunch of presentation related videos, including some classic Steve Jobs demos. I hadn’t seen the NeXTSTEP demo yet, so I had to check it out. It’s really interesting to see some of the features of the circa 1992 NeXTSTEP system because most of them now exist in MacOS X. […]