snowdeal.org - conflux

conflux

Context Magazine Future Imperfect
"When we look at wireless, we see the same exuberance we see whenever there is a new technology. People make wild predictions. What people typically miss are the deeper patterns that govern how people will actually use their new possibilities."

"Companies are chasing applications that people don�t care about�especially those that foster shopping�and the devices being produced are vastly too slow and confusing."

redux [08.13.00]
The Standard Deconstructing the Web
"The Web is disintegrating into bits. When the dust settles, what's important for a successful long-term strategy is not Web site design but the flexibility of your information architecture."

"New Internet devices and applications are different not only because they are designed to do different things, but also because the mindset of the person who uses them influences the kind of interaction that makes sense. You cannot shove a Web page onto a cell phone's tiny screen. Even if you could, it wouldn't make sense from the user's point of view. The information I want delivered to my cell phone is different from what I want on my home computer. Web pages are designed for sedentary, reflective use. The phone is for urgent, short communications."

redux [06.15.00]
Fast Company Design Vision
""We know how to do amazing things," [Thackara] says, "and we're filling the world with amazing devices. But we cannot answer the most important question: What is this stuff really for?""

"The time has also come, he says, to shift some of the focus of innovation away from work and toward everyday life. The early users of digital devices are almost always business users, so product designers have a natural inclination to create and design products with the workplace in mind. But that tendency can make for bad design, especially when those products migrate beyond business. People put up with technical difficulties in their work lives that they would never tolerate in their personal lives. So forget "personal" computing, Thackara says, and embrace "social" computing. "As computing migrates from ugly boxes on our desks to something that suffuses everything around us, a new relationship will emerge between what's real and what's virtual, what's mental and what's material. There are few limits to the number of services that we could develop if we simply took an aspect of daily life and looked for ways to make it better.""

redux [02.03.00]
NetFuture The Trouble with Ubiquitous Technology Pushers (Part 2)
"In part 1 of this series I voiced my first complaint against the ubiquitous technology pushers: by letting their work develop out of a one-sided preoccupation with the technological milieu rather than immersion in the meaningful contexts affected by their inventions, they inflict technological "answers" upon us without any serious reference to the supposed problems."

"The subtitle of this series of articles is "Why We'd Be Better Off without the MIT Media Lab". Let me broaden that here. What we'd be better off without is every organization that pushes purely technological "solutions" as if they were what could make us better off.�

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[ rhetoric ]

“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

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