Information Architecture, User Experience & Other Obsessions
Levittown, Pa. | Building the Suburban Dream
Very cool site exploring the cultural history of Levittown, PA. This particular page shows the “Levittown Kitchen” which looks pretty unsurprising today, but when compared to the typical prewar kitchen at the bottom, it’s amazing how many advances were made in a few years’ time.
I’m sitting in the Taxonomy pre-conference thingie here at the IA Summit. For four years I’ve been wanting to take this one, and even though I have some basics I figured I’d do the whole course. It’s just Friday, the rest of the conference is just…well…regular conference stuff.
Austin is flat. And they have a new building downtown that looks like it came from the set of a Batman movie.
That’s all for now.
Denby ticked me off when he reviewed Fight Club so ham-handedly some years back. But he redeems himself here in his review of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion.”
In this recent article, Wired News: Interreality Business Machines, we learn that IBM is taking virtual economies seriously by developing heavy-hitting software for dealing with the logistics of “pretend” economies in online multiplayer game environments.
Keeping track of thousands of people buying and selling and bartering in real time is chip-melting stuff, if you’re trying to do it while simultaneously keeping track of how each transaction is affecting the world it happens in as well. So, this is one step toward enabling even bigger multiplayer environments.
But it’s also a step toward connecting real-world economies with virtual ones. It’s already happening, but awkwardly, with virtual trade leaking out of the ‘game’ and into other environments, like eBay.
I’m a big believer that reality is socially constructed. No, I’m no hard-bitten post-structuralist… I’m just acknowledging a very powerful truth. I’ve also been exposed to just enough Marx that I happen to believe that our money is a big part of what dictates the contours of ‘reality’ for us.
This development is just one more factor effacing the distinction between “real” and “virtual” for human experience.
Probably the prettiest Google logo I’ve seen yet… it’s the one that happens to be up today, and it links to an image search of julia fractal patterns. Yum.
Mappa.Mundi Magazine – Memory Palaces
This article summarizes some very important stuff that keeps haunting me as I obsess over how to conceptualize information environments.
I read Frances Yates’ book on The Art of Memory as an undergraduate, and used it as part of a paper I wrote on Vico’s science of the imagination. Since then I keep thinking of this powerful, ancient idea of the “memory palace” and how we still use spatial representations of place in our heads, even when we’re not navigating actual “space.” (An example: when you compare the nutritional information of two snacks, you usually would hold them side by side, looking at the tables printed on their packaging. But if you weren’t able to hold them side by side in real time, you’d unconsciously list the info from product A in your head and compare it in that imagined list’s ‘space’ against product B… )
Anyway, we make these little rooms still, even if we don’t do it on purpose. We especially use them to get around websites and environments that aren’t even physical… making something physical out of them in our imaginations.
I’m about to start trying to visually model one of the largest financial services web properties in the world… and maybe I’m reaching back to this idea like an old friend, or “comfort food” — something to reassure me that what I’m doing isn’t that scary?
Anyway, I really dig the muted post horn reference toward the bottom of this article. Pynchon lives!
I have found myself in Pennsylvania. How? I got a job. This is a good thing, the getting a job part.
The weird part is that it’s at Vanguard, just outside Philadelphia… far away from where I was living. It’s complicated my life, but hopefully in a good way.
Not much going on here at the kitchen lately due to all this chaos. But part of the good news here is that I’ll be able to get involved with the IA community again, and keep up with research and such. I’m so far behind.
Oh, and I may have to change it so that I have to screen comments because I keep getting spam comments attached to older posts… ugh.
Just updated my resume. (pdf download)
And no, I didn’t take the time to figure out the accent HTML code to make “resume” look right. I’m too busy trying to find a job!
A great quote from John Bogle in The Marriage of Information Technology and Investing Oct 22, 2001
“In a wonderful interaction of Internet technology and human values, the message was clear: Even in this world of electronic communications, human contact remains the desideratum. Information technology will be for the better only as it provides better communicationócommunication that educates as well as informs, that reminds us of our obligation to serve the needs of honest-to-God, down-to-earth human beings, who have entrusted their hard-earned assets to our care, each with their own hopes, fears, and investment goals.”
Even though we have the Internet, we’re still flesh and blood, right?
One year ago this month, the website for AIFIA finally launched. *sniff*
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