It’s been a little less than a week since my IA Summit presentation. To my great surprise, it went really well. I mean really well. In the next day or so I will be posting a summary of my experiences preparing and discussing my topic, which was, in a word, style.

Many people came to me after my presentation asking me not only to post the slides themselves, but also to post the reading list since I did discuss a lot of books and sites that deeply influenced my thinking. So here’s all the stuff:

Slideshow

• Slideshow as PDF (19mb PDF)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 1 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 2 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 3 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 4 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 5 of 5)

Reading List

These readings are in roughly the same pedagogical sequence that the concepts appeared in my presentation. Note that not all of these were actually cited in the talk, but I did have all of them either at hand or in mind as I wrote.

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Everywhere you go, you see 16:9 widescreen television screens playing regular 4:3 video programs stretched out to fit across the whole screen. You see these in airports, banks, bars, and offices. Maybe you even see this in your own home.

Presumably, the owners of these TV screens can’t bear to see all those extra black pixels on the left and right sides going to waste. The thought of not using those pixels — pixels that cost hundreds of dollars! — is so unbearable that the owner is willing to tolerate the fact that everyone and everything they see on the screen is literally 50% wider/fatter than they are supposed to be.

To me, the sight of such a stretched-out, distorted screen is utterly unbearable. Totally unwatchable. It might as well be upside down to me, the people look so wrong. And yet to millions of people, this is normal and acceptable. Can they not see that it looks completely wrong? I mean, honestly: Can they not tell the difference? MORE…

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You know who you are. You are my friends, colleagues, and clients. You’re really smart about how to use computers and stuff. You’re great people.

But I just can’t stand it when you put dates in your file names. Whether you put dashes between the numbers, use two- or four-digit years, I still can’t stand it.

There are sooo many problems with this technique. Let me count the ways: MORE…

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Just thought I’d post a couple world maps to compare with my own drawing.

First, let’s see what the big shots say over at Rand McNally:

Not bad. Almost as accurate as mine.

Let’s see how I compare to the 17th century cartographer Nicolas Visscher:

I think I kicked his ass.

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I’m getting some traffic today from kottke, so I figured I’d actually show y’all what the heck it is he’s talking about when he wrote:

The first time I saw a world map drawn from memory was at Christopher Fahey’s apartment. I forget how long it took him to draw, but it was remarkably accurate and fairly large (a few feet across).

So there it is. This is a photo I took just tonight of the map, hanging on the wall of the aforementioned apartment. It’s about four by six feet, entirely in pencil, and I made it over the course of about two weeks in 1993 during my senior year at Cooper Union. During those two weeks, I studiously avoided looking at maps on posters or in newspapers, to ensure that each time I resumed working on the map I would not have artificially pumped myself full of fresh map knowledge. The result is a map not just using my memory, but also using the added elements of (a) time and (b) the basic techniques of drawing.

UPDATE: Some answers to questions, and some added insights: MORE…

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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…

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In a recent blog post, Garret Dimon claims to be hot on the trail of something fabulous:

I don’t have the details worked out yet, but I’m slowly putting together a vision of how we can really document web applications in a pragmatic way. The primary driver is to create something that people can understand, and to make documents that engineers actually look forward to using. It’s a hybrid of wireframes, page description diagrams, and functional specs.

I call this the “Holy Grail of Information Architecture”. It’s a versatile, powerful, and entirely mythical document format that almost every IA has fantasized about. Depending on who you talk to, embodies most or all of the following qualities:

• It combines site mapping, process flow logic, and wireframming into a single entity
• It allows atomic-level interface modules to be modified or replaced globally
• It is accessible via a web browser
• It can be printed
• It simulates the user experience via click-throughs from page to page or feature to feature
• It permits extensive feature annotation for programmers, bordering on functional specifications
• It is fast and fluid for the document creator

The 2006 IA Summit had two sessions entirely devoted to this. I wrote about it at the time, and honestly back then I still thought that the “Holy Grail” existed.

But I don’t think so any more. Until someone actually shows us the goods, I’m not holding my breath. MORE…

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