If you search for Omni Magazine using Google Search: omni magazine … you will discover that it will list my blog as the second major link. Is that amazing or what? Just because I had a link to it, and a blog entry about it, people who started looking for it on Google ended up finding my blog. How weird. Very.
I still remember so vividly the illustrations… especially the ones depicting Dune. Even before I ever read the books… the visuals were stunning.
Anyway, yeah…I was an Omni geek. So I feel kind of weirdly honored this is happening.
This is an excellent article:
Boxes and Arrows: We Are All Connected: The Path from Architecture to Information Architecture
I’m still intrigued by the connection, and it’s always been the best way for me to describe what I do to people.
Until I try describing it to architects, or those who are very familiar with architects… who usually say “you don’t wanna call yourself an architect, you’ll give yourself a bad name” (grin). But if you ignore the high-style version of architecture, buildings as relatively useless sculpture, and get back to basics, as this article discusses somewhat, there are powerful parallels… I mean, it really *is* architecture, but the way it *should* be, in my oh-so-humble opinion.
Thanks to B&A for this and the other excellent articles they’ve published recently.
(Ok, does my plug get me some more time on the book review I was supposed to do???)
Challis Hodge and some others are doing interesting things here: InteractionDesigner.com
Imagine my surprise when I heard Bob Edwards on NPR’s Morning Edition today interviewing one of my writing mentors from 10 years ago, Sena Jeter Naslund. NPR : ‘Four Spirits’
She’s a terrific person, and a fine writer, and has several other impressive popular but complex books to her name as well as this new one. Congrats Sena!!!
Ok. I may have found something that explains a lot of stuff about me. Great article: The Atlantic | March 2003 | Caring for Your Introvert | Rauch
The horror writer Poppy Z. Brite keeps a journal online… and she finally went apeshit at fans who keep begging her to revisit old ground. She posted this two-paragraph “sequel” to her book Lost Souls: docbrite: OK, OK …
If you’ve read any of the book, it’s funny. Either way though it’s funny. I think so anyway.
Peter Van Dijck’s new book arrived today. And it’s a handsome, nicely produced volume. I’m proud to have a case study in there! For more info see: information architecture for designers – the site for the book.
But looking at this reminded me the challenges I faced on the job described, several years ago now. And, I wondered…do I still do this work? Does anybody care about how the human interactions in their organizations can be healed and evolved through careful architecture of information environments?
SRC was the first and last client to both ‘get’ it and to understand how it would help them, and then go so far as to make the necessary bits take place fully enough to see great results. Others have axed major parts of the architectures we propose in order to save time or not piss somebody off, then they end up with a very mediocre solution that only barely gets them by.
And that hasn’t changed.
But, I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
Love is a burning thing,
It makes a firey ring,
Bound by wild desire,
I fell in a ring of fire,
I fell into a burning ring of fire,
I went down, down, down and the flames went higher,
I burned, burned, burned,
A ring of fire, a ring of fire,
The taste of love is sweet,
And hearts like ours meet,
I fell for you just like a child,
And oh, the fire went wild,
I fell into a burning ring of fire,
I went down, down, down and the flames went higher,
And burned, burned, burned,
A ring of fire, a ring of fire,
I fell into a burning ring of fire,
I went down, down, down and the flames went higher,
And burned, burned, burned,
A ring of fire,
A ring of fire,
The taste of love is sweet,
And hearts like ours meet,
I fell for you just like a child,
And oh, the fire went wild,
I fell into a burning ring of fire,
I went down, down, down and the flames went higher,
And burned, burned, burned,
A ring of fire.
Two years ago today, I was on a plane from Greensboro to Atlanta, and landed at around 8:40am. When I got off the plane, I went to a bookshop/cafe that I usually go to on Concourse B. There were several TVs with different networks on each. NBC’s Today Show was the only one discussing the fact that flames were pouring out of one side of one of the buildints at the WTC. Hardly anyone was paying attention to this in the cafe. It seemed odd to me.
Then I bought a bottle of water and some gum for my subway ride to my client’s location, and as I was standing in line, I saw from a distance that more networks were showing the WTC. And there appeared to be more flames than before. I though…how bizarre. How strange. What a horrible tragedy. Surely whatever it is…they thought a small plane?… will be figured out, the flames extinguished, minimal loss of life. But why all the additional flames? Why the panicked looks in the announcer’s faces?
As I paid for my water and gum, I started calling friends to tell them, co-workers in Atlanta and Greensboro. I realized that if this was indeed something more serious, I should get out of the airport. I walked quickly out of the terminal and to the train… it was only once I’d gotten there and started checking my phone’s web browser, and hearing things from others arriving from the terminal to the train, that it was all so much more serious than I’d even allowed myself to imagine.
I still have the ticket stub from that flight, and the receipt from my water and gum. How strange that I could be buying water and gum at the same moment that a second plane struck the second tower… Not significant to anyone, really, but unsettling that everywhere, all around us, little machines were tap tap tapping the time and date onto paper and cathode screens, unaware of what was happening elsewhere. I’m not sure why this fascinates me. Why I keep working it in my mind like a loose tooth. But there it is.
A few days later, a coworker told me about a project some designers were working on, just making desktop graphics or something commemorating and grieving. This is the one I made: …an overcoat of clay.
Time to go to work.
[09/11/08 Edited to add: strange that I didn’t remember I’d written a similar post a year earlier.]
Louise Gluck is our new poet laureate in the US… I’ve had the pleasure of meeting her a couple of times. Intense, deep woman. Amazing amazing poet. Louise Gl¸ck – The Academy of American Poets
As a father of a now 7 yr old kid who is well on her way to being a very wild kid, I don’t nkow if I can deal with Thirteen.
About this blog
Welcome to inkblurt, the online home of Andrew Hinton. Read something, drop a comment, or say hello!
BTW I also tweet at @inkblurt.
