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The personal web log of Mike Lee, a web information architect, and teacher working in New York City "I surf as much as I eat." curiouslee in...   Hiptop Nation Mirror Project Google Images The City Paper UMBC TechPort email me past monthly... 2000:10.11.12 2001:01.02.03.04.05.06 07.08. 09.10.11.12 2002:01.02.03.04.05.06 07.08.09.10.11.12
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Thursday, May 31, 2001
Living and breathing i-mode A link from Joho: Chris Worth, a Managing Partner of Ogilvy Interactive in Tokyo, sends a dispatch on the i-mode cell phone phenomenon. I think he's way over-optimistic about i-mode (or even the idea) taking over the world. In the U.S., people are well connected at home and work with cell phones and computers, and it's a harder sell to convince people they need 'net access while walking the dog. His previous writings, collected as Tokyo Dreams, are worth browsing. Also, Nooper.com has a 2-part photo gallery of the latest mobile devices shown at the recent Tokyo Business Show. Wednesday, May 30, 2001
Blogs as project management tools Laura sends this link to an article in Byte magazine where consultant Jon Udell envisions how web logs and storytelling could be used in project management tool. One project manager I know keeps detailed time sheet entries in her Palm, and if each was expanded slightly with some narrative, it would become a journal of sorts. I don't think that the pressures of everyday fires would leave enough time to make these near real-time entries useful. We find weekly status reports provide a good mode for keeping the team informed. The ideas in the article are still worth some further thought... Tuesday, May 29, 2001
Blogstipation I'm about to post more than a week's worth of readings and photos from the Blogger staging page. This will happen once in a while as I get more busy at work, or am more actively engaging my world. Monday, May 28, 2001
Flag waving  I started this memorial day with a trip to see a movie about the Internet industry's own Pearl Harbor. Startup.com is a documentary of the rise and rapid fall of a dot-com. If you've been involved in a dot-com, you'll cry before you laugh. The rest of the day was filled with barbeque, beer and kids. Sunday, May 27, 2001
"Wait, let me take a picture." I saw the movie Memento today. It is a great experience to juxatpose with my reading of The Seven Sins of Memory. Go see it now at your local art theater or you'll have to wait a few months until the video/DVD release. Saturday, May 26, 2001
Your eyes: use them anew I finally picked up a copy of the book How To Use Your Eyes by art historian James Elkins. In a collection of short, illustrated chapters, Elkins casts his highly trained eyes on the some common everyday objects. The book is divided into two categories, "Things Made By Man" such as postage stamps, a culvert, and an oil painting; and "Things Made By Nature" including fingerprints, grass, sand, and sunsets. Each object is examined with from a fresh, almost naive perspective backed by detailed observational analysis. Our lives would be enriched exponentially if we regularly applied this kind of loving gaze to other things we see all the time but take for granted. You can also hear Elkins on NPR's The Connection radio show. Site consolidations PlanetIT has a story on MFS Investment Management's consolidation of 8 web sites, with 150,000 pages into a content management system. They did it in 8 months! I'm in the middle of consolidating some sites a fraction of this size, and can't imagine the crush of work this must have been. Friday, May 25, 2001
Boat juggling at sunset The changing of the boats at the Domino Sugar plant next door is probably mundane for most, but since it was my first time, I gave it some photo coverage. The Perla II steamed away on its own engines, and about 20 minutes later, two tug boats pushed the Sugar Express barge to our part of the harbor. With the confidence that comes from having to do this change five times a month, the tugs turned the 400 foot barge around 180 degrees and gently nudged it to Domino's docking pier just as the sun set behind the skyline.       Deep layers of time The story of Wilson-Leonard, an archeological dig in Texas, is told in an article at Discover Archeology. For over 11,000 years, tribes of hunter-gatherers camped at this location leaving articfacts in the layers of sediment. Scientists are devising theories as to why these people chose to keep the simple life for so long. I wonder if we'll ever have a way of life that can last this long. BBB (Before the Big Bang) The New York Times has a fascinating report on the current thinking about what might have existed before the Big Bang brought the universe into existence. Registration is required. Thursday, May 24, 2001
Where do you want to point today? Dianne left me a photocopy from the current (May 28th) issue of The New Yorker on a thorough look at the social phenomenon of PowerPoint slide presentations. PowerPoint presentations destroy depth and narritive of messages, but they are a part of being professional. Here's a snip from the article: Today, after Microsoft's decade of dizzying growth, there are great tracts of corporate America where to appear at a meeting without PowerPoint would be unwelcome and vaguely pretentious, like wearing no shoes. In darkened rooms at industrial plants and ad agencies, at sales pitches and conferences, this is how people are communicating: no paragraphs, no pronouns—the world condensed into a few upbeat slides, with seven or so words on a line, seven or so lines in a slide. And now it's happening during sermons and university lectures and family arguments, too. A New Jersey PowerPoint user recently wrote in an online discussion, "Last week I caught myself planning out (in my head) the slides I would need to explain to my wife why we couldn't afford a vacation this year." Somehow, a piece of software designed, fifteen years ago, to meet a simple business need has become a way of organizing thought at kindergarten show-and-tells. "Oh, Lord," one of the early developers said to me. "What have we done?" This piece is well worth tracking down on the newsstands or from the library. Not covered in the article is the even scarier trend of using PowerPoint to create bound paper deliverables. It's common practice in consultancies to charge tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to return with an oral presentation backed by PowerPoint slides and a color printout of the same. For that kind of money, I would want detailed written analysis and research citations. Wednesday, May 23, 2001
A new industrial light on the harbor Tonight was the grand-opening of our office complex, Tide Point. The developer, Bill Struever, was joined by Mayor O'Malley and several hundred friends to celebrate the official opening of a historical display and lighting of the neon signs.  Bill Struever offers his thoughts on the grand scheme of a "digital harbor."  Mayor O'Malley speaks about government partnerships with private real estate developers to support technology businesses in the Baltimore City area.  The signs were lit and complimented by the activation of one of the largest water mist systems outside of Disney World.  We ended the evening with a ride around the Inner Harbor on the Seaport Taxi, and celebrated the new lights. Tuesday, May 22, 2001
FEED: Gerlernter on Lifestreams Yale Computer Science Professor David Gerlernter is moderating a discussion thread at FEED on desktop interface metaphors. He's well-known for his concept of representing the computer desktop as a reverse chronological stream of time to which information is attached. His Lifestreams concept was renamed Scopeware and has had to face to realities of investor interests and commercial application. When the interface concept was announced years ago I found in it a close parallel to how I use e-mail. I tend to think in terms of recent life and work events that have associated with them file assets, and go looking for them in my mail client software. Wouldn't it be great if a program like Outlook could help you roll back to previous versions of documents and cross-associate the files with relevant people and calendar events? Monday, May 21, 2001
The economics of software complexity In this posting from last year, a developer of some open source software tools considers the economics and complexity of software. He's not an economics expert but makes some valid points. Disclaim-mail The Register asked its readership for examples of e-mail disclaimer clauses and got an overwhelming response. The clause that won for longest disclaimer is amazing. Sunday, May 20, 2001
Sins of memory Friday night, I caught the beginning of a fascinating radio interview on the mechanisms of human memory with Dr. David Schacter, Chair of Harvard's Department of Psychology. He's promoting his new book, The Seven Sins of Memory, which provides a vivid framework for the everyday memory miscues we encounter. The Connection web site offers the first chapter of the book which provides a summary of the seven sins: I propose that memory’s malfunctions can be divided into seven fundamental transgressions or "sins," which I call transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. Just like the ancient seven deadly sins, the memory sins occur frequently in everyday life and can have serious consequences for all of us. I contend with many of the memory effects described above in my daily work in web user interface design and information architecture, so I picked up a copy of the book Saturday. I'm looking forward to soaking in the information. Saturday, May 19, 2001
How information makes a world David Berlinski's essay in April's Commentary Magazine What brings a world into being? takes you on a far-reaching journey across physical scales and time to consider the fundamental nature of information. The essay glides through topics such as Shannon's creation of information theory, human cognitive process and computational biology pointing out how little we know about the fundamental force that governs the transfer of information in these realms. Finishing at the beginning of time, Berlinksi imagines the uber-unit of information that caused the universe to come into being. This is a good piece to print out and read while relaxing with a glass of wine. Web logs as grassroots knowledge management eLearningPost presents a case and high-level model for managing grassroots knowledge management through web logs. The article provides a significant amount of background on web logs in general, and suggests storytelling as the central driver of the system. The article only visualizes the abstract structure of a solution, but leaves a lot of food for thought. Friday, May 18, 2001
The 30,000 sheet view A little production vignette from work this week confirms again that doctors hate the Internet. One of our project managers has been working with a medical publisher to database tens of thousands of older articles, and now it's time to have the content edited, and peer-reviewed by doctors. It was decided that the PM would print 30,000 pages from our high-speed laser copier returning batches of paper-clipped articles to the client at a rate of about 2,500 pages a day. One of our programmers wrote a script that automates the printing process from the database queries. The articles will be marked up by editors, photocopied and then faxed or mailed to doctors to review and make notes. On return, the changes will be reviewed and re-keyed into the database. At first, I thought this was an amazingly inefficient process that could easily have been automated by simply using the collaborative editing features in Microsoft Word, but the doctors I know are insanely busy. Using the paper process simplifies version tracking, and the workflow caters to the convenience of the doctors by requiring no computers or Internet. From the doctor's perspective, a staffer hands them some paper, they mark it up with a pen, and the document is returned via conventional methods. Paper lets them focus only on the task at hand without contending with technology. Thursday, May 17, 2001
Better route maps Via Xblog, this paper from Stanford titled Rendering Effective Route Maps: Improving Usability Through Generalization describes a new user interface rendering technique to make electronic route maps more usable. The researchers observed how people draw routes on paper emphasizing the scales of the points of origin and arrival, and have reproduced this in their LineDrive drawing software for MapBlast. The paper is an illustrated 2.2 Mb PDF file. Wednesday, May 16, 2001
The state of PDA displays An article in the current MIT Technology Review surveys the current state of screen displays and text input schemes for PDAs. Product designers are struggling to find the balance between hand-friendly form factor and good screen resolution. Affordable high resolution screen technologies lag behind the current need, but there are some interesting technologies such as paper-thin rollable screens on the way. Tuesday, May 15, 2001
Dreamweaver vs. FrontPage Web Reference compares two of the most popular WYSIWYG web page editors. I'd say that unless you're in a Microsoft-only environment, Dreamweaver would be the better choice inlight of the nifty new integration with Fireworks. FrontPage just comes with the cheezy ImageComposer utility. Monday, May 14, 2001
Warrior symbology  Another random find: Military Standard 2525B is a Department of Defense Interface Standard that defines common warfighting symbology. The various branches of the armed forces got together a few years ago and created this single, definitive standard set of symbols and application rules for electronic tactical displays. One goal was to create a standard to computerize the generation and management of the symbols providing warfighters "with a seamless, real-time, true representation of the battlespace." Another major benefit stated in the document is the enhanced "interoperability during joint service operations." I'd say that's a good outcome, especially if I were the guy sitting in a vehicle represented by an ambiguous symbol on someone's tactical screen. Sunday, May 13, 2001
Induction coaster   After a nice Mother's Day lunch, we went to Six Flags America in Largo, Maryland in search of some thrills (mom decided to stay home). The weather was great—bright sun, 70s and low humidity. And since it was early in the season, the lines for rides were short. Since this was my first trip to this park, I enjoyed the new steel rollercoasters, and I was especially taken with the engineering of the Joker's Jinx. Designed by Premiere Rides, Inc. here in Maryland, it is one of the first rollercoasters to use Linear Induction Motor (LIM) technology. In a burst of magnetic energy, the motors launch the cars into the computer designed maze of steel tracks, accelerating the passengers from zero to 60 miles-per-hour in about three seconds. I had been on four other coasters already, including The Mind Eraser and Two Face, so I sat this one out to shoot some studies of the intricate joins of the steel support structure. I'm looking forward to riding this one next month. Saturday, May 12, 2001
Friday, May 11, 2001
When meetings work Great meetings are memorable, since there are so few of them. I presented a package of information architecture materials to a client today—they were involved and engaged in the deliverables throughtout the session, and in a great collective mood to boot. The documents provided an understandable and appropriate framework to spark discussion and feedback about their content, and we came away with a clear list of next steps. I have to believe I'm getting better at this stuff, and hope these meetings will become more frequent. A picture is worth 84.1 words This paper is really a survey of research into the prefered level of diagramatic granularity in the design of visual/iconic programming languages. The conclusion of 84.1 words equaling one picture is drawn from the author's own study and is thrown in as a quip to close the paper. In less academic terms, this is the search for the proper amount of information to represent in a single graphic symbol, and to define the preferred number of symbols in an illustrated process. The paper is about five years old, but high-level, visual programming languages are increasingly common as software development becomes more abstract and object-oriented. Many integrated software development environments offer a visual environment where components are dragged on to a grid and linked together with lines and logic. Thursday, May 10, 2001
Checklist typography  A tech writers mailing list entry from a few years back mentioned what the poster termed as some seminal papers by NASA contractor Asaf Degani on the best practices for typography in aircraft flight-deck checklists. The flight-deck checklist's function is to ensure that the crew will properly configure the plane for flight, and maintain this level of quality throughout the flight, and in every flight. The photo above is from one of the reports, and vividly illustrates the amount of documentation required to plan a plane flight from Washington, D.C. to London. Some of the items shown are checklists. The author makes a case that these lists would benefit from standardized typography and information design practices. Worst case, badly designed checklists have been a contributing cause to several accidents. And the author never would have imagined that a badly designed list would undo a presidential election. The papers are no longer on NASA's web site, but someone has archived them on a page of typography resources. Scroll half-way down and look for the NASA logo. The most interesting of the papers, On the Typography of Flight-Deck Documentation (this and the next two links are PDF downloads), published in 1992, surveys the literature available at the time on typographic design and human factors to suggest some guidelines for checklist design. The other one worth reviewing is Human Factors of Flight-Deck Checklists, which is an earlier work examining the larger issues affecting the usage of the normal flight-deck checklist. The paper begins by surveying mechanical checklist devices, and then proceeds through issues relating to philosophy of use, psychological effects, and bureaucratic/management directives. The third, On the Design of Flight-Deck Procedures, covers the issues of procedure use and design from a broad viewpoint. First gas, and now CDRs PCWorld reports that blank CDRs will triple in price this summer. The article goes into great detail on the causes: a complex mix of consolidation among manufacturers, high patent royalties, and recent soaring demand. I guess I should stock up now. Wednesday, May 09, 2001
The key to understanding people: watch them USA Today reports on a gradual shift of anthropologists from the academic to corporate arena as technology companies realize the value of knowing how people really use their products. What amazed me is how few are out there. An anthropologist at Wayne State University estimates 9,000 anthropologists in academia and 2,200 in applied anthropology positions industry. I wish every development team could have an anthropologist to serve as an expert observer of human behaviors. Way too much work is based on assumptions and anecdotal evidence. Manhole covers: hatchways to the Internet's infrastructure Thinking further about my previous entry on sewer nets, I went looking for information on manhole covers. These heavy cast iron slabs increasingly represent the surface of a vast network of data lines. MIT Press published one of the only books on the subject, and the Engines of Change site has a short article about it. And others have created galleries of photos from around the world, and specifically Tokyo and London. Tuesday, May 08, 2001
The kids in the lab AIGA DC is hosting three students from The MIT Media Lab's Aesthetics and Computation Group on May 22nd. Casey Reas, Ben Fry, and Golan Levin will present their discoveries on new ways to interact with computers. If you want to see well-funded, deep conceptual investigations on human-computer interaction and data visualization, attend this event or visit their sites. Fantastic realms await you. Monday, May 07, 2001
Eyes of the storm: web project managers Webmonkey has an excellent article by Pam Statz of Red Industries on what it takes to be a project manager in web site development. I think her coverage is pretty accurate, but I would say that in smaller organizations, a project manager might even wear more hats—working more with strategy and content. In some cases, I think a versatile project manager can have an expansive role more like that of a traditional broadcast media producer. Sunday, May 06, 2001
Saturday, May 05, 2001
Impoverished interfaces "We live on the border where bits meet atoms. In the flood of pixels from the ubiquitous GUI screens, we are losing our sense of body and places. They impoverish human senses."—Hiroshi Ishii, Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Lab Friday, May 04, 2001
Business landscapes An article in The Industry Standard surveys tools for visualizing competitive business landscapes. All of the products are expensive, but the samples are nice eye-candy nonetheless. Here are the products mentioned:
And a couple of my old favorites:
I think the value of some of these visualizations is somewhat dubious, but they do make large and complex datasets more accessible to executives. DCIA: The first gathering of information architects in Washington, DC Last night, I rode down with the IAs from CDP and Gr8 to Xando, a coffee shop near Dupont Circle in DC, for the first meeting of the DC Information Architect's group. There were about 30 people there for the informal mixer. I chatted with 5 or 6 IAs from various firms. There was a big contingent from Aspen Systems Corporation, as well as a couple people from Info.Design. I spoke for a while to Julie Perlmutter, a freelance recruiter who operates the popular Just Show Up networking event. She says that the Internet side of her business has been wiped out, but she's doing well on the print side. She observes that the refugees from the dot-com bloodbath are feeding a mini-boom in re-training. Two impressions from the evening: a) information architects come from all kinds of backgrounds, and have no consistent job description; b) the attendees seemed to come predominantly from firms who do government work, or from non-profits. Their next meeting is on May 30, 2001, featuring Thom Haller from Info.Design. Contact: dcia_info@yahoo.com for more information. Thursday, May 03, 2001
Wednesday, May 02, 2001
Sewer nets I happened on this story about a company called CityNet deploying fiber-optic network cable in Vienna through the city's sewer system. CityNet has recieved a huge wad of funding to support the development of their brilliant scheme which uses robots to wire difficult-to-reach locations via sewer pipes. Sewers are another kind of conduit that goes wherever people are, and have the advantage of being the deepest buried. The site has an illustration of the process and some photos. CityNet is based near here in Silver Spring, Maryland. Tuesday, May 01, 2001
Global internet access at 379 million ABC News reports on new research from Nielsen/NetRatings that estimates a record 379 millions Internet users around the world. Interestingly, they find that out of those with access, 211 million regularly use the Internet, a 3.9 percent increase. Also noted: South Koreans skim web pages the fastest, while Australians are the most studious.
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