I am speaking next Monday at the 2007 ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit in Las Vegas.

My topic will be “Interaction Design Style“. It will be a highly visual romp through a variety of topic having to do with the concept of style and how it fits into the design of interactive systems:

• The definition of style.
• The history and meaning of the concept of “style”, across many disciplines including art, architecture, music, design, writing, and more. Style is not not just fashion!
• How a consciousness of style can and should fit into a user-centered design process.
• How style constrains the design process, through both the anxiety of influence and through the availability of overly easy solutions.
• How style inspires the design process, opening us to new ideas we might never have thought of.
• How style guides the design process through pattern libraries, best practices, and more.

I was inspired in part by Stewart Brand’s 2003 IA keynote speech, in which he dismissed style (and fashion, and art) as an ephemeral, superficial, and ultimately flimsy basis for design strategies, an assertion that rubbed me a little wrong. Lately this has come back to me because style, broadly defined, is not brushed aside at all in so many other worlds of design and development. It’s not a dirty word.

Maybe, I thought, there are in fact major stylistic drivers behind much of what interaction designers and information architects do, in the same way that style drives much of architecture, music, etc. Maybe we shouldn’t reject stylistic influences, but should instead embrace them.

I’m working feverishly to make the most thought-provoking and interesting 45 minutes I can craft. It’s not going to be a research paper nor will it be a case study — it will be something I hope will be at least a little entertaining and educational, but most importantly a little eye-opening and inspiring. There will be lots and lots of pretty pictures!

Monday at 9:30 in the “Mesquite Room”. I hope to see you there!

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My SXSW panel, High Class and Low Class Web Design, is over now, and I can now share a little bit of about how I and a few others think it went.

Some bloggers who attended the panel have already published their own notes and reviews, too, so if you want to skip what I think and just read some outside opinions, please do so.

• Sam Felder (very thorough raw notes)
  
• Fast Company/Brian Reich (good comment/discussion here)
• Scot Hacker (raw notes plus interesting commenters)
• David Panarelli (nonplussed)
  
• Laura Creekmore (nice real-time commentary)
  
• Liz Henry (very thoughtful insights)
  
• Mani Sheriar (some personal insights)
• Gordon Luk (unique and interesting perspective)
• Brett Roegiers
• Kathleen Waugh
• Matthew Magain
• Scott Fiddelke (very long raw notes)
• Sara Smith
• (more as I find them…)

And if you attended the panel yourself, I’d love to hear your thoughts, both about the panel and the subject itself, in the comment area.

MORE…

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I had the creepiest IM conversation recently, from an IM handle I have never seen before (handle has been changed to protect, um, whoever) :

(11:01:18) M****N: hi
(11:01:28) Christopher Fahey: who’s this?
(11:01:31) M****N: hi
(11:01:36) Christopher Fahey: who’s this?
(11:01:41) M****N: m****n
(11:01:47) Christopher Fahey: obviously
(11:01:53) M****N: ok
(11:02:00) M****N: i dont know u
(11:02:22) Christopher Fahey: you shouldn’t talk to strangers
(11:02:34) M****N: i no u shouldnt
(11:02:37) M****N: bye
(11:02:42) M****N: creep
(11:09:55) M****N logged out.

First of all, I’m the creep?!? I wasn’t the one chatting up a stranger.

Secondly, this is not the first time I’ve gotten unsolicited IMs from strangers. What is up with people who strike up chats with other random AIM users? Where on earth do they get our IM handles from, and what drives them in the first place to seek out strangers for chatting?

There are all kinds of ways of imagining the sordid stories behind these messages, and I don’t like any of them because they all lead to the same three basic possibilities:

1. Some people type randomly into IM clients until they reach a real person
2. There’s a spider/harvester program out there crawling the net for IM handles and publishing them somewhere so people like M****N can find strangers to talk to.
3. Someone I know (a friend or a colleague?) gave my name to someone (who gave it to someone, etc.) who gave it to M***N.

None of these make me happy.

I’m going to start posting songs about my posts. Many of them will be from The Fall. Here’s The Fall’s song about creeps, entitled C.R.E.E.P.:

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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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I saw Dreamgirls this weekend — it was great!

I’ve been to my fair share of movies where the audience broke out into enthusiastic and spontaneous applause before, but they’ve almost always applauded some kind of triumphant action scene, never clapping and cheering for an individual performer. Which is to say that they are applauding the film itself, not the humans in it.

That is, until this weekend. Jennifer Hudson got at least three full rounds of applause from my Brooklyn audience, whose boisterous cheering for the performance (and singing along occasionally) almost seemed to suggest that Ms. Hudson was actually up there on stage in front of us to hear our appreciation.

For most of my “young adult” life (that is, my teens and twenties) I despised musicals. I thought they were phony and vapid — why in the world would a pair of New York street gangs suddenly form up into chorus lines and sing in the middle of the alley? Why would a group of sailors on shore leave suddenly burst into song and synchronized tapdancing on restaurant tables? It was silly to me, not worthy of the serious taste I liked to think I had.

And yet countless critical “top ten” lists include Singin’ in the Rain. This always baffled me. How can this be?

Well, over the years I’ve started to notice that I think I actually do like a lot of musicals. I may in fact, have liked a lot of musicals all along — but only certain kinds: I’ve realized that I pretty much only like musicals about musicals, or at least musicals about people who sing and dance and perform. MORE…

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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!

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On election night last week, we were channel surfing and comparing the coverage by the various networks. We ended up for a spell at Comedy Central, where Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert exchanged snappy banter with each other in a kind of parody of network news coverage.

Surprisingly, there was a part of me that found it a little tiresome, and I thought to myself “Why don’t these guys just talk like normal people and tell us about the election results, instead of all this rehearsed repartee?”. They were acting out scripted set-peices and skits, or riffing on the results by digging into a selection of pre-planned gags and jokes.

Of course, this is Comedy Central, so the scripted quality of the “reportage” is to be expected. Still, despite our deep appreciation for CC’s two “anchors”, we grew impatient and craved the hard news coverage that only a real network can offer. So we resumed by surfing on over to Oppositeland: Fox News.

I immediately noticed that the narrative and theatrical quality and structure of Fox’s coverage was really no different from Comedy Central’s. Each pundit was talking to the other pundits as if the other person didn’t already know what they were going to say, and yet it was clear that everyone knew exactly what everyone else was going to say. Their conversations were fake in every way — not quite scripted, exactly, but so incredibly contrived as to be basically a kind of vaudeville act. MORE…

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