I’m no architecture critic, but when I read the New York Times review of the just-reopened Morgan Library & Museum a few weeks ago (with words like “dazzling”, “mesmerizing”, and “triumph”) I knew I had to visit as soon as I could. So immediately following my class field trip the other day, I dismissed my students and walked a single a block up Madison Avenue to see what all the talk was about.

The Morgan Library has in the past been perceived as a second-tier New York museum, not quite at the level of the Metropolitan, MoMA, or Guggenheim. But from the moment you first walk into the new Morgan Libary, the entranceway and courtyard immediately make a strong, visceral case for moving the Morgan up into that exclusive pantheon of great New York institutions.

I could not take photographs within the galleries themselves, but maybe you can get a sense of the lobby’s bright energy from these images. It is a remarkably elegant and powerful space: despite the massive scale it succeeds in making the visitor feel welcome and unrushed. I was surprised by how intimate the experience was, both in the lobby and in the exhibition galleries. MORE…

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Yesterday I took my FIT students on a field trip to see the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibition at the Science, Industry and Business Library of The New York Public Library. It’s a modest little show consisting of several dozen examples of maps, globes, and information graphics — as exemplified by Edward Tufte’s much-beloved “Napoleon’s March to Moscow” by Charles Minard (seen here), which illustrates the utter devastation of Napoleon’s army as he attacked and retreated from Moscow in the deadly winter of 1812.

I was a little surprised at the close attention my students paid to much of the work, examining and discussing some of them pretty intensely. I knew they’d be interested, but I didn’t expect them to really investigate and talk about the works in detail as they did.

But I think I understand why: The maps on display have a puzzle-like quality to them, which is I think part of the aesthetic and experiential appeal of information graphics. People like to try to figure them out. MORE…

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Today (amazingly the 410th anniversary of the deaths of both Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare) I’ve finished reading the classic Don Quixote Parts I and II. What an unforgettable journey, and what an eye-opener!

A four hundred year old book (Parts I and II were published in 1605 and 1615) that in many ways paints a character — two characters, in fact — every bit as lifelike and nuanced as anything by novelists who would come hundreds of years later. Insights into the human psyche that presage our modern understanding of the mind. Historical perspectives on Europe, Spain, and even North Africa in the century after the expulsion of the Moors from Europe. And storytelling techniques that seem nearly postmodern. MORE…

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In a previous post, I mentioned the “Technologies of Writing” show I saw during SXSW at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center. Since then, I’ve had several occasions to think about the exhibit again. So I thought I’d go a little more into some of the highlights from the show and share some of the related thoughts that have come up since then.

Before Writing

The first thing I learned when I entered the exhibition was this: Before there was any form of language-based writing at all, some early Mesopotamians used clay objects of different shapes to represent recorded word-based information. One would collect a small bundle of these objects and somehow, taken together, the group of objects would form a message.

Presumably the messages contained in these clay trinkets were somewhat prone to inaccuracy. For example, if you switch the order in which you read them, a message such as “Marduk owes Ishtar thirty shekels” could easily become “Ishtar owes Marduk thirty shekels.”

To correct for this, they started making little incisions in the clay. Soon (and by ’soon’ we’re talking many hundreds of years) these incisions evolved into a whole new writing system. The world’s first writing system, in fact: cuneiform. MORE…

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I attended a fascinating IA Summit presentation by Molecular’s Steve Mulder called “Bringing More Science to Persona Creation“. Lately I’ve been pretty interested in how different companies approach user personas, so this was a must-see for me.

I was impressed with Steve’s insights into user persona creation, but this was tempered by a fear that, if taken too literally, Steve’s perspective on personas might actually do as much harm as good to the adoption of personas more generally as a powerful design tool.

A Brief History of Personas

User Personas, defined simply, are short profiles of typical users of a product or web site, intended to help the design team reach a meaningful understanding who their end users really are. I’ll assume that if you’re reading this, you already know something about personas. MORE…

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There’s a debate going on at Adam Greenfield’s V-2.org (and elsewhere) over Bruce Sterling’s neologism “spime”, a term he coined at Etech 2006 to refer to new technological/networked objects that emerge into human consciousness without a name or an apparent history.

In 2001 a new mammal was found in China. This cladogram shows where scientists eventually classified it and how they named it.

Adam suggests an alternative, “onto”, meaning “an individual networked object endowed with the power of self- description”, and “ontome” for the totality of all those objects (like what a genome is to a single gene).

This got me thinking about the word “taxonomy”, derived from the Greek “taxo”, meaning to order. In a taxonomic system consisting branches and nodes, a “taxon” is a single node. So “onto” should probably be “onton” (which also alleviates the unfortunate fact that “onto” is an English homonym).

But then I thought about the original purpose of taxonomies: to classify animals. That’s kind of like what we’re trying to do here: to classify things, to give names to strange new nameless things. More specifically, Bruce seems to be trying to come up with a name for a general type of thing without a name. MORE…

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Three great new books, all of which came out within the last month or so, were hot topics at SXSW 2006. What’s especially exciting to me is that all three of them are about subjects I am deeply interested in, and all of them are written by people I know and respect.

I’m reading all three of them pretty much in parallel right now (in addition to plowing through the final chapters of Don Quixote), so here’s a little (p)review of each of them.

Ambient Findability
This is Peter Morville’s first solo effort, and it’s a trip. Peter, with Lou Rosenfeld, is the co-author of O’Reilley’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web… aka, “the Polar Bear Book”. Peter is an outspoken advocate of “findability”, or the ability of a system to help people find what they’re looking for.

“Ambient” findability is Peter’s way of envisioning a future world (or perhaps describing the current world) in which information is findable — in theory — by anyone, anytime, anywhere. Ambient Findability the book is a sweeping portrait of findability in all its forms: he goes deep into findability on the web and the mobile space, but he also examines how findability has functioned for humanity historically and even biologically.

This new O’Reilly book, already being called “the Lemur Book”, is the first O’Reilly animal book that I have seen printed in full color, both on the cover and internally. It’s jam-packed with interesting material, but still short enough to finish on a plane trip or a weekend (or in my case 5 or 6 subway rides).

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
Adam Greenfield’s Everyware, like Ambient Findability, covers a lot of ground, but in Everyware’s case within the seemingly narrow topic of ubiquitous computing, the not-so-theoretical idea that in the future computers will be embedded into our physical spaces so deeply and thoroughly that meatspace and cyberspace will in many ways become indistinguishable.

I’ll just say up front that I think Adam Greenfield is a genius (and, apparently, a ninja). He’s managed to write a technology book woven out of a dozen diverse themes, including futurism, science fiction, culture, art, humanism, and even ethics. The book goes beyond simple technophilia vs. technophobia, and should be a required read for any person interested in even one of the above themes. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to predict that some of what Adam says in Everyware will be cited and quoted by future thinkers for many years to come as we continue to deal with the ramifications of ubicomp.

In addition to being a scintillating writer (his blog, v-2.org, is fantastic), Adam is a compelling conversationalist and speaker, as well: I had the pleasure of chatting with Adam 3 times at SXSW, and his one-man “panel” presentation of the Everyware concept was riveting and deeply thought-provoking for everyone in the audience.

Getting Real
37signals has been evangelizing the concept of “getting real” for several years now, at conferences, at workshops and on their blog. Finally, they’ve compiled their thoughts into a digital book, downloadable from their web site. Getting Real was also a large part of 37signals’ Jason Fried and Coudal Partners‘ Jim Coudal’s keynote address at SXSW.

“Getting Real” simply means that a company should examine every one of their supposedly standard ways of doing things and consider whether or not they are really necessary at all. Everything from creating a detailed functional spec to holding team meetings is called into question. It’s project management minimalism, a direct extension of the minimalism espoused by many interface designers, including 37signals.

Whether on the blog or at a conference, the “getting real” concept generates a lot of heated discussion. I also have some strong opinions about many of the “getting real” ideas, both pro and con. But I ultimately think the book is a useful read, even if you don’t actually put any of their advice into practice. We all waste time and energy doing unnecessary work and building unnecessary features just to please a boss, a client, or an imagined customer need. Having a philosphy that allows a team to step back for a second to make sure they’re focusing on the real problems can only help.

The trick, for me, to reading this book is simple: You have to understand where it came from. A few years ago, 37signals transformed from a client-focused web design shop into an independent software developer. They’ve been steadily documenting their insights and opinions about this profound business metamorphosis, focusing particularly on how their ability to product high-quality products has improved dramatically once they were able to control their own process. Their enthusiasm, some would say smug glee, at this liberation is palpable in everything they do. But if you can get over that obstacle and look for tips that apply to your practice, there’s a lot to glean. For example at Behavior we take much of Getting Real with a big grain of salt: As a web development shop with diverse clients with genuine service needs, a lot of Getting Real is too lean and too mean. But for internal projects, smaller and more intimate clients, and ad hoc situations where nimble thinking is required to get past problems, Getting Real has a lot to offer.

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You’re chatting with someone over an instant messaging app, when this happens:

you: How can I help you?
foobar: I need some ideas for a Flash nav… Can you send me that link we saw last week?
(you then start typing a very long reply, only to see this next question pop up before you’re done typing your original response:)
foobar: Oh, and I need your URL right now, can you send that to me?.

Now what? How can you respond to the first request without confusing it with the second. What happens if foobar asks a third question before you’re done typing the answer to the first?

We all have our idiosyncratic ways of replying in these situations, for example by specifically identifying which questions each response is answering, or by adding sequential code numbers to each reply, or by cutting and pasting your in-progress response into a text/notepad temporarily so you can answer the most recent question first.

Maybe a better way would be to treat the chat window as a live collaborative editorial space, where either party can go back and use their cursor to insert comments and edits at any time, anywhere in the sequence, like a real-time wiki. The yellow fade technique, or something a little more persistent even, could be used to indicate each recent change so out-of-sequence changes can be easily detected.

Of course, does this make it no longer “chatting” but something a little too alien to successfully facilitating fluid, natural communication? Should the chatters have the ability to edit comments they’ve already made, or to remove them completely? Or to edit other people’s comments?

This could be a pretty interesting alternative to traditional chat, more like a collaborative scriptwriting session, where all parties participate in the creation of the transcript of a really interesting, scintillating, and flawless conversation — a conversation that never really happened.

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I definitely like the new Cylons better than the old ones, although I wonder where the big lizard-head guy went.

Please forgive me as I geek out a little here, but… People are saying that Battlestar Galactica’s plot is starting to show evidence of lacking any real long-term plan or direction. That is, they fear that that the creators don’t have an “endgame” in mind for for the humans and the Cylons; indeed they may even be making it up as they go along, episode to episode, not having any ultimate fate in mind whatsoever.

Most people who have watched a TV series with a long-term story arc, particularly one in the genre of “speculative fiction” (the same-acronym-but-new-name for the despised sci-fi/fantasy genre), beleives that the best stories need to posess an integral “mystery to the universe”. And that mystery must, inevitably, be fully resolved in some climactic revelation — peace between enemies, a new frontier revealed, the birth of the savior, the defeat of the demon, the union of the lovers, the puzzle solved.

This resolution, of course, is almost never fulfilled. MORE…

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Hezbollah has published a video game called “Special Force“, in which the player’s job is to, well, kill Israeli Jews. Many are surprised to see politics injected into the fantasy world of video games.

To me this isn’t surprising nor is it new. Any game which simulates real-world events is inherently political. A typical example of this is “Sim City“, where your city’s success is dependent on certain sociopolitical assumptions that are, in the real world, still subject to a lot of debate. Even “The Sims” has political issues inherent in the behavior of its citizenry, which only promise to get more controversial as the Expansion packs expand their simulated social horizons.

War simulations are no less political. The more representational (of real-world nations and events) the simulation is, the more political it is.
The “Special Force” game seems especially political because the protagonist (and the game designers) are “the bad guys”… but games made by “the good guys” are political, too. There are countless games where the goal is to defeat The Soviet Union, the Nazis, etc.

There’s a *huge* number of games where the goal is to defeat Hezbollah-like groups, as the “Special Force” creators are quick to note. Are these games not also political?

To muddy the “good guy/bad guy” waters a little bit, there was a popular game a few years ago in which you played a Russian soldier and the enemies were Chechen terrorists. Or Chechen freedom fighters.

In the art/game area, John Klima’s “Serbian Skylight” and “The Great Game” use video game motifs to explore the politics of war.

I used to be a nationally-ranked online Quake player, but when it comes to playing war simulation games in which I am fighting my way through a poor village on our own planet Earth, fighting other human beings, using real-world weapons (as opposed to plasma rifles), the politics of the simulation usually becomes too much for me.

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