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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, January 31, 2002
Decoupling an information architect's role from the discipline Information architect Jesse James Garrett has begun posting what will be a series of essays examining the state of information architecture. The first installment describes the need to separate the role of IA from the discipline. This really hits home since my role as an IA at e.magination is at the edge of what consultancies like Adaptive Path and Carbon IQ strive to practice as a discipline. While I aspire to their highly refined practices, my life is that of a lone information architect, and some days more information plumber, bolted onto a large Microsoft-certified web applications development company. I deal with the shaky rope bridge between visual designers and software engineers, helping both sides to understand the other's vital roles in web experience delivery. And lately, I've been diving in to champion usability (and hopefully visual sophistication) in the complex interfaces of the applications themselves. My role is ever-changing, and I'm happy to hear Jesse's call to decouple the roles so that we can better define the discipline of IA. Wednesday, January 30, 2002
Wearable electronics My copy of New Nomads: An Exploration of Wearable Electronics by Philips just arrived from 010 Publishers in Rotterdam. The book is a companion to the web site on Philips' conceptual explorations into the convergence of wearable computing and fashion design. The book opens with a few essays on the sociological implications of computers embedded in clothing, and then offers a full-color gallery of various lifestyle-related technology concepts. One of the more ironic concepts is a toxic environment suit with built-in music player. The suit would have sold like hotcakes during the anthrax scare with its full-head hood, and integrated gas mask. The book costs about $29 USD, and arrived in about a week. This volume is undoubtedly a limited print run, so if you're interested in product design or mobile electronics, it's probably worth adding to your library. Surfing around for some related reading on personal product design, I found this interesting paper from 1996: Sensuality in Product Design: A Structured Approach. And there's a current story at New Scientist on a new type of chip that can be triggered to explode if a device is stolen. Talk about sensual! Tuesday, January 29, 2002
Nixie chic Boing Boing links to a gallery of nixie tube clocks which displays the usual banks of glass tubes on metal boxes. But scroll part way down the page to see the most delicious piece of retro tech I've seen in a long time ... a nixie tube watch! Oh, what I'd give to wear this at a client meeting. There's a page of nixie tube info on the same site. Poking a little deeper, I discovered a link out to a guy in Arizona who's building a pocket-sized oscilloscope watch! His big scope clock is cool too. I'm e-mailing him right away. The last time I saw nixies in action was back in the mid 70s in a desktop calculator we had in 9th grade physics class. These displays carry a sort of digital victorian charm from the years just before the advent of LEDs. Positively primordial Surfing back in the recent archives of the Astronomy Picture of the Day site, I eased into this powerful image from Iceland of an erupting volcano under auroras. This is what I imagine the first little critter saw hundreds of millions of years ago when it crawled out of the ocean. Good thing it decided to investigate further. I would have jumped back in the ocean. Monday, January 28, 2002
Light meditation  A crisp, clear evening arrived to end an unseasonably warm day here in Baltimore. Perfect environs to reflect on the day's doings. I finally caught a sailboat in the sunset glint off Henderson's Wharf across the water from our building.  Here the Moon rises over a blue pylon sculpture called Beacon Garden by Alex Castro that marks the corner of the Tide Point promenade where the Seaport Taxi docks. Sunday, January 27, 2002
A world inside snow crystals I won't steal Snowcrystal.net's thunder ... you'll just have to immediately go there to see the astounding new gallery of photomicrographs of snowflakes. This link via Jerry Kindall and Speedysnail. Saturday, January 26, 2002
Photoshop's lucky number? Adobe pretty much let the cat out of the bag on Photoshop 7 at the Macworld keynote. They showed the new OS X savvy version with the new spellcheck feature. A couple sites had leaked information out in December but were shut down by Adobe lawyers. MacOSX.org still has a page up with screenshots. In a nutshell:
Think Secret said back in December (before Adobe lawyers called): Photoshop 7.0 will sport a new anti-aliasing engine that takes advantage of OS X's Quartz layer, along with live transformation previews, workgroup functionality, and a new file browser. It will also boast significant enhancements to text manipulation, featuring a text tool that allows you to wrap text around shapes, a spell-check function, and the usual text editing tools. Friday, January 25, 2002
Macabre copier  Project Manager Jodi pointed out a classic misuse of jargon in this LCD status display on our color laser printer. RIP is really short for Raster Image Processing in this case. You know, office equipment could really use a dose of humanization. How about running some clever haiku instead of the blinking RIP message? Thursday, January 24, 2002
Gartner predicts 2002 Workmate Jenny handed me a printout of Gartner's Top 10 Industry Predictions for 2002. The report is somewhat somber, but hopefull for the near future—pretty much the position most of the media are taking. Gartner claims they predicted the dot-com crash in early 2000, and they are also known for promoting the metaphor of certain industry verticals being in the "Trough of Disillusionment" with the hope of a "Slope of Enlightenment." The rest of the sub-site has reports on the outlook for various technology sectors. PIC2HTML  A fun ASCII art web site comes from friend Tim who saw it on Metafilter. PIC2HTML takes ASCII art one step further than simply rendering pictorial greyscales with varying density text characters. This web-based application samples greyscale or color images to wrap a font color tag around each character. The app delivers the composite as a rendered HTML web page you can just save to your hard drive! I saw this effect two years ago in a low bandwidth web page design contest, and assumed no one in their right mind would code something like this by hand. Instead of the default ones and zeros characters, I pasted in a chunk of JFKs moon speech and ran a color portrait through the process. Here's the full 314k output. Wednesday, January 23, 2002
Instructive Interaction Constantine & Lockwood's new paper Instructive Interaction: Making Interfaces for Self-Teaching offers an innovative "learn-by-doing" model for interface usability supported by three design principles: explorability, predictability, and guidance. On page 6, there's a nice table summary of Instructive Interaction Techniques. And I really like the example on progressive tool tips. Tuesday, January 22, 2002
proce55ing by the numbers  John Maeda's Design By Numbers project and book were part of his innovative plan to create a java-based courseware that would teach artists how to create visuals by algorithmic process. The project has been renamed pro55esing and has passed into the capable hands of Ben Fry and Casey Reas. There aren't enough examples on the site, but this interactive color cube is pretty cool. Given that Joshua Davis probably cranks this amount of code out every week, the pace at MIT is more studied, and certainly pedagogically sound. I also grooved on Ben's two-week plot of security camera images showing Media Lab activity. Monday, January 21, 2002
Wheels are spinning...  Within the same noon hour today, I got an e-mail from the thinking designer's muse, Jessica Helfand, commenting on an older blog entry about her article on wheel charts; and Christina sent a note telling me my information architecture poster was accepted for display at the upcoming IA Summit here in Baltimore. My wheels were certainly in fine alignment! Jessica wrote to tell me about her forthcoming book Reinventing the Wheel: Orbital calculators, movable discs, circular slide rules, and other information in the round. She'll take us on a journey back to the early incunabula (pre-1500s books) where volvelles, or circular wheel charts first appeared. There are 100 plates of more recent circular calculators, and the book closes with a speculative essay on the future of circular interfaces. When this book comes off press, a UPS truck will spin some wheels to get it from Amazon to my office. For the IA poster, titled Dimensional Deliverables: Exploring the Realm Between Paper and Screen, I busted butt for a few weeks doing research, sketching, and making prototypes. After a while, it didn't really matter that the effort was for a public conference. People walking by my desk were drawn to the odd pile of paper artifacts, and I've had some wonderful conversations with co-workers. I have the abstract and some photos posted. There's much more work to do between now and March 16th... Plotting my surface   I was messing around with the Mac version of the free image processing utility NIH Image. I ran the surface plot filter on a small self-portrait to produce the asian-looking landscape above.Sunday, January 20, 2002
Ghostly data There is a growing murmor about Location-Based Services (LBS) now that cell phones and PDAs can be combined with GPS and wireless network technologies. With LBS your mobile device can present information in real time about your physical location. One common example of LBS is the NeverLost System found in rental cars. Now, some creative thinkers are imagining the possibilities for attaching web data to points in physical space. You'd carry a location-aware, wireless-enabled device that would be constantly scanning for information associated with things near you. Imagine getting a vibrating alert from your PDA as you walk up to a restaurant and then seeing a bad review of the place on screen. There are lots of good and even more bad possibilities. Some links: New Scientist: Writing Messages in Empty Space Saturday, January 19, 2002
My iLamp I got approval today from my home CFO to buy the new iMac that looks like a desk lamp. I haven't unwrapped a new machine in three years because I'm pretty well equipped at work and school. I'm ready for some new plastic. It was probably a stupid idea to order it through The Apple Store, but I think I can tolerate a few weeks shipping delay or backlog. I ordered the top model with 512 megs RAM and the added Airport card. This configuration comes with 60 gigs drive space and the DVD-R Super Drive. I can't wait to run this in our PC-only office with Virtual PC 5 and Windows XP. So I'm reading up on the thing: An interview with designer Jonathan Ive, who was thinking about sunflowers Now I'm looking for the first coder who comes out with a software hack that turns the screen pure white so that you can really use the iMac as a lamp! Thursday, January 17, 2002
IBM on knowledge management The current issue of The IBM Systems Journal is all about knowledge management. Most of the articles slide into system architecture discussion and diagrams, but the article Views of Knowledge are Human Views has this useful passage: In order to understand knowledge management, it is necessary, I think, to imagine how persons of these temperaments might describe what KM is about. Wednesday, January 16, 2002
Oldest abstract art  The oldest example of abstract art, dating back 70,000 years, has been found in a cave in South Africa. I think it looks like a network diagram. The BBC reports. Here are some more bits: About Christopher Henshilwood Tennis ball garden  People tell me it's an old trick to use Tennis balls to cut down on furniture noise in the classroom. But I still think it makes for a fanciful scene. Then I found this news story: Teen charged after hitting teacher with tennis ball. Monday, January 14, 2002
Christmas II After decades of holidays, various family members don't know what to get me for X-mas anymore. So this year I got a record number of Amazon gift certificates. I cashed them in, and the shipment arrived today: Digital Domain: The Leading Edge of Special Effects [Great double-page spreads of classic special effects scenes.] Saturday, January 12, 2002
Patriotism in a post-it  I picked up a pack of 3M Post-It Note Flags from Staples today. These are real U.S. Flag flags. You could almost call this micro-viral patriotism. Friday, January 11, 2002
Internet industry partnerships map updated Valdis Krebs has updated his self-organizing map of the Internet Industry. What I'd love to see is a slider that let's you roll back to see all the companies that have tanked. Elsewhere on the site is a network map of the communities of interest that emerge around a best-selling book. Thursday, January 10, 2002
The secret life of maps The British Museum web site has a tour of the exhibit Lie of the Land: The Secret Life of Maps. Among the selection of lovingly rendered antique maps is what they describe as the first manufactured jigsaw puzzle! As with all of these web samplers, I'm left wanting to see more and wishing for a plane ticket. Wednesday, January 09, 2002
Raiders of the lost narrative  The Spielberg special issue of the UK film fanzine Empire ran this interesting graphic of the wildly varying excitement levels of all three Indiana Jones movies. It's not clear how they compiled the data and I couldn't find any similar examples on the web. Take a look at the full-size image (119k) to see if the graph matches your memory of the films. An early morning burst of beauty  I met Bill Frizzel, our new human factors expert, at the office at 7am today to take the Seaport Taxi over to The Gallery Building downtown to hear a breakfast briefing on web site accessibility. The sky was cloudy, and a standard issue chilly January wind whistled across the harbor. The taxi came right away after a cell phone call, and we pushed off for the seven minute ride to the Inner Harbor. As we rounded the National Aquarium, the eastern sky cracked open to send a burst of sunlight into the skyline. The light activated a magnificent double-rainbow against the blue-grey cloud deck. I squawked to Bill that I didn't have my camera, and was missing the shot of the year. I was left with just looking. Looking was the best thing I did all day. For this post, I've sketched in Photoshop a fairly accurate thumbnail of what I saw. Here's a larger (35k) version. Tuesday, January 08, 2002
Springfield in great detail The two nuts who meticulously compiled a map of The Simpson's town of Springfield have posted a version in high resolution suitable for printing. And the file prints very well on 11x17 color laser indeed. Run an extra off for the next birthday present. 1/9 update: the authors have removed the super high resolution version of the map probably due to bandwidth limits. AT&T Web Site Style Guide A link to AT&T's web site style guide came from a listserve message today. The site provides the detailed manual as a PDF along with links to the rest of AT&Ts corporate identity standards. This is a great reference if you're producing content for large web sites. GE has a similar resource. Monday, January 07, 2002
The year in moon phases While doing some research on astronomical instrumentation, I found this java applet that produces a nice chart of all the Moon phases in a year. The rest of the applet collection is also amazing. The iMac classroom of tomorrow     So Apple unveiled iMac 2 today with Steve Jobs delivering his trademark hype-laden speech. I love this new computer! Its form-factor is a logical conclusion to the convergence of low-cost flat-panel screens and miniature laptop components. Apple adds to this its distinctive, no compromise industrial design. I'm glad to see the end of the era of the blobject. These will sell in the millions for sure, but I think they'll have a great effect on classroom computer labs in the next couple years. By scooping away the area occupied by a big glass CRT, and allowing, as Jobs says in Zen language, "the components to be true to their form," you have a more engaging, humanistic machine. Just the ability to swivel the flat-screen could change the way students interact with each other and teachers. You'll hear more students saying "look at this!" as they effortlessly swing their screens around to share work. I looked at some of the fan sites and some corporate pages to see if any of them came close to envisioning this design. There are some good images at The Apple Collection, and the HitMac comes somewhat close to the look of the new iMac. Over at Core77, there's a current article on Compaq's compact design strategy and a prototype laptop with a similar swivel design. Sunday, January 06, 2002
Intel pure play  I picked up Intel's new Digital Movie Creator (DMC) from Walmart over the holidays. At just $97, this is the most movie making fun in a toy package since the legendary Fisher-Price Pixelvision. While the limited tech specs probably won't make this toy a cult classic for artists, the DMC is a lot of fun, and a good storytelling tool for kids. It's the simplicity of function and kid-proof design that should make this popular in the classroom and in the home playroom. Push any button to turn it on. Press the trigger to shoot up to 1 minute of color video at 320x240, or 4 minutes at 160x120. Drop the camera into its USB cradle, and if the companion software is running, you'll be prompted to empty the clips into your computer. The camera can also store hundreds of still images. Once in the bundled editing software, there's a rich environment to artisitcally enhance, edit, and compile movies. You can even use the camera to do stop-motion animation. I've already opened mine to investigate the possibility of upping the memory. The circuitry consists of near-microscopic surface mount components, and would require some delicate procedures even if I could find the proper SDRAM chip. If I see a way forward, I'll post here. It would be amazing if the DMC's 8 meg RAM could be bumped up to 16 or 32. Elsewhere, there's some interesting reading on this product. Todd Ogasawara at MobileViews, suggests that the DMC would be a great way to make short clips for your PocketPC. And this month's Intel Developer's Journal has an excellent series of articles on the development of the DMC, the stories behind other cool toys in the line such as the popular QX3 microscope, and a detailed history of the partnership with Mattel that began the SmartToys group. The articles are bittersweet since Intel announced it is gradually phasing out the toys group leaving the future of the products in question. Saturday, January 05, 2002
Kai's fractals and castles   I went back to Kai Krause's web site after reviewing an old CuriousLee post about the new Byteburg thinktank he's starting in a thousand-year-old castle on the Rhein River in Germany. Kai made his fortune in the late 90s creating innovative filters for Photoshop, and digital effects software with wild user interfaces such as Bryce. But a couple years ago, apparently disgusted with corporate greed, he suddenly disappeared from the digital art scene. It looks like he's starting to come out from his 18 month self-imposed, spirit-nurturing exile. Buried in the German version of his site is a new betaBook that presents in English a long ramble about his past, present and future. It's basically a recruitment brochure and media tease wrapped in his literate, rennaisance man style of narrative. Most will see this book as a ramble rather than an insight into how you need to think in order to meet the world on your own terms. I'm always fascinated by iconoclasts. Here's a passage where Kai talks about the childhood memories that drive his search for workplace freedom: The influence of the ambience of the workspace on the quality of the work is to me plain obvious. Ever since I was yay high (In German the exact translation of that will be since-I- was-a-three-cheese-high) I blessed the days when I was "sick but not tooo sick", just enough to surround myself with 9 pillows and everything I needed for a good days work in bed. Some cars, some books, little figures, paper and pencil and various amounts of chocolate and sweets. And they needed to be just so, within reach. In German: "Happiness was dripping from the ceiling". For any of you out there that remember Kai, I've mirrored an accessible version of his betaBook text here. For the rest of Byteburg you can use AltaVista's Babblefish to translate site pages from German to English. On his "fun" page, I found this funny photo on the interface differences between man and woman. Friday, January 04, 2002
Throb-vertisement I was on the trail for news and rumors about Apple's big announcement set for Monday, and got distracted by this strange vertical ad banner. My mouse cursor hovered over the ad headline about "passion" and this bizzare red blob starting groping at the cursor arrow. I couldn't decide if this thing was verging on pornographic or just plain gross. The link to the ad is a copy of the Flash on a screen capture of the web page that I've mirrored to this site for posterity. If the Flash file doesn't work, here's a small screenshot. Thursday, January 03, 2002
Manhattan on a roll I picked up a copy of architect Matteo Pericoli 's delightful book Manhattan Unfurled on our last trip to the city. I finally made it over to his personal site and was further charmed by more of his architectural illustrations. Life would be a lot different if the Towers could bend like this. You can see a small version of his complete east and west side panoramic drawing of Manhattan Island in both a web framed and java applet presentation. There's also a snip of Paul Goldberger's comments on the book from The New Yorker. Wednesday, January 02, 2002
Der blinkenlights  I just remembered to post this link as I've had an affinity to modulated building lights in previous posts. The Chaos Computer Club's Blinkenlights project applies computer control to the room lights (144 to be exact) on an entire face of a building in Berlin. Not content with the mere presentation of static bitmapped images, they've added a pong game that you can play from a cell phone on the street, animations and a paint program! A project like this would be a great addition to Baltimore's skyline. Wired has some coverage too.. Banished words Lake Superior State University has published its annual list of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness. Most of the candidates are right-on, but I disagree with the exile of the word FRIGGING. Alien font generator Via Jim's blog I discover The Alphabet Synthesis Machine, a digital art project created for the Art21 project at PBS. This java applet prompts you to make a mouse gesture to seed a genetic algorithm that generates font mutation. Next you play with some sliders to tweak variables, and watch the font morph on-the-fly. When you're satisfied, you can export the result to your hard drive as a TrueType font. Some will question the value of this conceptual geek toy, but I can envision using these fonts to set repeating background patterns or to enlarge fragments of individual strokes as design elements. The programmer, Golan Levin has his own site full of algorithmic eye-candy, and most recently, he created an interactive snowflake sketcher for an ad agency. Tuesday, January 01, 2002
20-oh-2 Well I finally heaved out several weeks of fragmentary posts which I've now completed. Lots of good stuff to see and read. Review the January '02 posts, and then use the December and November archive links to poke back to November 22.  I recently saw the movie The Fisher King. In the film, a character played by Robin Williams makes a chair out of a wire cork retainer. I gave the trick a try last night, but had to use my Swiss Army Knife.
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