The cover of Bill Moggridge’s excellent Designing Interactions features a sketch/diagram that looks intriguing at first glance. But then when you actually try to figure out what it means, you’re stumped. I tried, but I couldn’t even scratch the surface.

Inside the book itself, we learn that the diagram is based on sketches that Bill Verplank drew while simultaneously discussing some of his thoughts about interaction design — it is what I call a “performative diagram”, a diagram that is created as an integral part of a real-time performance or presentation. After reading the chapter, we learn that the inner circle’s three icons represent three different basic ideas about what a computer is (an intelligent person, a useful tool, a expressive medium) while the other icons (life, vehicle, fashion) are metaphors or examples for how each notion manifests itself in an interaction design.

These are interesting concepts, to be sure. But that diagram really doesn’t “say” what the words say at all, especially when viewed all by itself and out of the context of Verplank’s voice, his gestures, and his actual words.

Diagrams are usually intended to take difficult concepts and make them easier to understand, but this diagram doesn’t exactly do that. Instead, it is an artifact of an explanatory process, the fossilized remains of a performative pedagogical technique combining spoken words and real-time performative gesturing and drawing. MORE…

• Leave a Note (2)

Christmas tree photo by Peggy

During the holidays, as many Americans visit and spend time with their extended families, those of us in the web design industry get a chance to do a little user research — with our own loved ones as test subjects. Sure, most of us have watched other people use computers and software during normal usability testing for the products and sites we build… but there’s something different about watching a family member clicking around that I think offers an interesting new perspective.

What was most interesting wasn’t so much how my family actually uses their computers (although watching Mom double-click everything was intriguing!), but what their computer’s working environment actually looked and felt like — how they organize their stuff on the desktop, what programs they have shortcuts to, etc.

And it’s the little things you notice: Half of my mother’s iTunes playlists consisted of only one song. My father had seven AOL programs running at all times even though he hasn’t used AOL for anything but email for several years.

Take these idiosyncrasies and differences and multiply them by thousands — or millions — and you have a pretty good idea of what we’re targeting out there.

• Leave a Note (2)

I haven’t posted in a little over a month. I’ve been telling myself that my first new post wouldn’t be a narcissistic navel-gazer about why I haven’t posted — that I would instead just get back to the business of writing posts about real things, starting where I left off as if there were no big missing gap. I figured I would resume by gradually talking about all the stuff that’s happened in the last 4 weeks, one day at a time, starting with something awesome.

But upon reflection I realized that it would be best to just do it all in one post, to just list all the stuff that’s happened in this one month of my life. By writing about a dozen things at once I won’t have to pick which thing should be the first thing I write about, and that’s a big releif for me: The decision regarding my first new post is no small matter. As many procrastinators know, the longer you wait to deliver something, the more you think will be expected of you. It’s a sad, vicious circle: the longer you delay, the more work you think you need to do to compensate for the absence, and thus the longer your delay will be.

The funny thing is that I thought the list would be short, but as I started listing them I noticed that, hey, I did accomplish something after all:

• Did a lot of running in the early mornings and on weekends: I’m up to about 19 miles per week.
• Finished building my lovely wife Peggy’s professional web site: tinydiva.com
• Went to Thanksgiving dinner with Peggy’s family in Northern Virginia.
• Went to a close friend’s memorial service and really lost it.
• Visited a couple of good friends whom we haven’t hung out with in a long time — something we really will do more of.
• Marked Behavior’s 5-year anniversary!
• We launched a humongous e-commerce web site that has been essentially my primary project for most of the last year.
• Got closer to launching an amazing new cable TV network web site — should be any day now!
• Did some important new business development, helping to win two major and exciting new clients in Washington, D.C.
• Learned that I’ve been selected to run a panel at an upcoming web conference!
• Read one business book, one sci-fi novel, and two interaction design books.
• Did some long-delayed major household projects.
• Lost my sketchbook (I think).
• Kicked off a major new personal project for this site, but then put it on hold while I did all of the other stuff listed above.

And to top it all off, apparently I am Time Magazine’s Person of the Year!

• Leave a Note (3)

WWBFD? Benjamin Franklin took for granted that part of his role as a technologist with access to mass media (he was, after all, a printer and publisher) was to make public arguments about his own political views. If he were around today, and I know that this isn’t an original thought, he’d almost certainly be a blogger. Ben Franklin is far and away my favorite “Founding Father”. BFF!

It’s almost cliche by now to talk about how the Internet has empowered regular people by giving them the tools to reach a broader audience than was possible in ye olde tymes, particularly in the realm of politics. I am still surprised, however, that so few popular bloggers bother to express their political thoughts online.

I write about politics here fairly often, for two reasons.

The first reason is self-centered: Writing about politics is personally clarifying and cathartic. It allows me to take my jumbled thoughts and emotions regarding what I read in the news and form them into a concrete opinion, which in turn gives me a sense of clarity about my views, forcing me to attempt to answer the not-so-obvious questions. It also simply lets me rant and get things off my chest (something that can probably be said about almost every blog post ever written by anyone, political or not).

The second reason is outwardly-focused, and perhaps a little idealistic: I want to use my voice to actually effect change in the world, to have some impact on the thoughts and opinions of other people by inspiring them to say and do things knowing that there are other people who think the same way. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t imagine that my little blog posts will reach the desks of important politicians and inspire them to change their positions on issues I care about. Nor do I think that my scintillating political writing will inspire millions of people and sway elections. I’m not delusional.

But I do think I can have a more modest kind of impact among the hundreds of people who read graphpaper.com regularly: By publicly articulating my opinions, I hope to (a) give some degree of moral support and maybe even a little boost of courage to others who share that opinion, and (b) provide the rhetoric and logical arguments to help them clarify their ideas and even to share them with other citizens via discussion or even debate.

You see, I believe that one of the main reasons politics is so messed up in America today is because most of us are afraid to discuss politics in public. We’re afraid of talking about it with our friends, coworkers, and families. And because we don’t discuss it, we don’t think about it and we don’t take action. And because of this lack of debate, bad stuff happens.

For example, the reason why the Iraq War happened in the first place, and the reason why it was allowed to be managed so incompetantly for so long, was in some part because the taboo against talking about politics prevented people from saying out loud, or even articulating internally to themselves, what they suspected in their hearts: that Bush’s vision for success in Iraq was (at best) a shot-in-the-dark fantasy. Those who might have opposed the war in the first place looked out among their friends and across America for voices of opposition and heard almost nothing, primarily because not enough people were taking the simplest of all political actions, talking.

I think it’s every American’s duty to make their political opinions known to their friends and peers, and to engage in political discussions, whether in the form of civil debate or plain old righteous argument, with their closest associates. I think this responsibility extends particularly to those of us with above average voices, that is, to those of us who blog.

• Leave a Note (6)

I’ve been pretty busy this past couple of weeks — this is why graphpaper.com hasn’t been updated in a while.

Work, house guests, travel, feeling under the weather, spending quality time with loved ones, and a near-tragedy in my family, have taken up so much of my time that I’ve not been able to finish any new blog posts.

Not that I’ve been asleep at the graphpaper till. I’ve been creating skeleton drafts of new blog posts almost every day, but I’ve not had the time to finish any of them. If you don’t believe me, check out my list of blog drafts on the right for proof. I hope to be rolling some of these out over the next few days as my life calms down a little.

• Leave a Note (0)

The Wordpress blog admin “Dashboard”, where I am currently typing these words. If you look closely, maybe you can see what kinds of things I might be posting here in the future.

I have what I fancy to be interesting ideas just about all the time, and usually when this happens I like to start scribbling in my little portable paper sketchbook.

After blogging for only a few months, however, I now find myself rushing here instead, to my Wordpress dashboard, to quickly jot down a few words — sometimes as little as a three-word title — and saving it into my growing list of unfinished blog drafts.

For those unfamiliar with Wordpress or other content managment software, most blogs let authors save many unfinished posts as drafts before we actually “publish” them. I do this all the time. Later, I can work on these unfinished fragments from anywhere, whenever I feel ready to do so. I have over twenty of these fragments right now, some days old, some months old.

This is exactly how I work in my physical sketchbook, too. In fact, sometimes I wonder if using Wordpress to express my ideas will diminish my output of drawings on paper, or if, instead, blogging will simply provide an additional channel — especially since the whole point of this site is to allow me to publish my sketchbook ideas fluidly and seamlessly alongside those ideas that come out as words. I think the latter is happening. I think I’m starting to get a feel for the voice and the beat of my blog, my publishing rhythm.

[Bonus: Can you find the paradox in this post?]

• Leave a Note (9)