I’m pretty well-known among my friends and peers to be a gadget geek. But over the last 5 years or so, my gadget-acquisition pace has crawled to a near standstill. Most of the electronic hardware gadgets I’ve been using lately are actually pretty ancient:

1. Mobile Phone: 2002
2. iPod (3G): 2003
3. Canon PowerShot Digital Camera: 2003
4. Alienware Desktop PC at Work: 2002
5. HP Desktop PC at Home: 2002
6. Sony PictureBook Subnotebook PC: 1999

Even my Sony headphones go back to at least 1997, and the racing bike I ride today uses the same steel Olmo frame I’ve owned since 1988 when I was in high school.

People often develop an almost emotional attachment to their everyday hardware. Sometimes people even cry when they have to finally give up on a device they love. But in my case it was simply inertia. I didn’t have the time or inclination to upgrade or replace anything.

Until now. Yes, these (admittedly crappy) photos were taken with my new iPhone. I can now strike numbers 1 and 2 from the above list, and to a large extent number 3 and number 6, too. Quoting AG, the iPhone is, like the iPod, a “gateway drug”. It is the last straw, and it has now driven me to replace everything else in that list with Apple products.

It’s finally happened.

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I am speaking at two upcoming events sponsored by several New York-based information architecture organizations. When my wife asked who the organizers were, I said “It’s the IA Union!” At both events, I will be delivering a version of my informative, fast paced, and fun IA Summit presentation, “Interaction Design Style“.

July 19: IA Summit Redux

This Thursday, July 19, the NYC IA Meetup is throwing an “IA Summit Redux”, featuring six New York-area presenters from the 2007 IA Summit, sharing abridged versions of their Summit presentations. Avenue A|Razorfish is hosting at their midtown offices at 1440 Broadway (map).

The evening’s presenters will include:

• Chris Fahey (me!)
• Garrick Schmitt
• Joe Lamantia
• Lou Rosenfeld
• Michele Tepper
• Victor Lombardi

Doors open at 6:00, speakers begin at 6:30, wrapping up around 9:30. Refreshments will be served throughout. Seating is limited, and the event may well be fully booked up by now, but if you would like to attend, the RSVP address is rsvp-UX@avenuea-razorfish.com. Make sure to send your name, company name, and job title (so when you arrive you don’t have to indignantly ask “Do you know who I am?!?”).

This event is sponsored by the IA Institute, the NYC IA Meetup, and by Avenue A|Razorfish.

July 26: NYC IxDA

This is a solo show for me, a full hour of speaking and a dazzling display of all 250+ slides. It’s the extended epic story of Style and Interaction Design. All the essential information is here, more details coming soon…

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A few months ago during an intermission at the 2007 IA Summit, Christina Wodtke and Bill Wetherell accosted me in the hallway of the Las Vegas Flamingo hotel. The next thing I knew, Christina was interviewing me for a new series of Boxes and Arrows podcasts.

The 16-minute interview has just been published, and I’ve just finished listening to it. While I can barely handle hearing myself speak, I think you might find our discussion pretty interesting, especially if you want to know a little more about the challenges facing practicioners who want to head down the entrepreneur path or if you want to learn more about how Behavior came to be and what we’re up to. Enjoy!

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Sartre would be proud.

The shocking (and to many viewers, utterly disappointing) ending of The Sopranos series finale was perfect. The tableau itself was a perfect jewel: the nuclear family all together, happy it seems for the moment, but completely surrounded by unknown and unseen danger. David Chase pumped the scene full of more tension than any other moment in the series’s history — is the whole family about to get whacked? — but ultimately there is no concrete evidence for the audience to be sure that any violence is about to happen.

Most of the predictions made about the finale, even the ones in our office pool, are still possible, as they always have been. The violence that surrounds the Soprano nuclear family has always been the subject of the series, and the finale simply wrapped that up into a single vignette, a microcosm of the whole 8-year series.

Consider the Seinfeld series finale, where the core cast found themselves in jail for, apparently, eternity. This ultimate predicament was a microcosm, too, of the series itself and the relationship between Seinfeld’s four core characters, the Seinfeld nuclear family, if you will. Seinfeld was often called a show about nothing, but it was always about the characters. Every episode we learned more about, and dove deeper into, the four main characters and explored a little bit about some unique and colorful secondary characters.

The Sopranos finale was similar. We’ve never asked The Sopranos for long-arc plots with carefully-planned setups, mysterious clues that come to fruition later. Generally, all that ever happens on The Sopranos is that we are drawn deeper and deeper into our understandings of the characters, particualarly Tony, and occasionally we find surprises inside of them. This is what The Sopranos is about, not plot. My wife, Peggy, noted that ultimately The Sopranos was not a “gangster movie” but a “soap opera”. And in a soap opera, ultimately, nothing ever happens. Dr. Melfi’s decision to end Tony’s therapy also reflects this realization, that despite all her efforts over eight years, Tony has not changed and will not change. The final moment of the show encapsulated this tense stasis perfectly.

The Behavior office pool got almost nothing correct, but we had one phenomenal write in winner: “Cliffhanger”. Some of us got Phil Leotardo’s hit. But that’s it. And nobody predicted that Christopher would come back from the dead as a cat.

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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.

MORE…

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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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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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As a UI developer, I want to be an “early adopter” of as many new technologies and gizmos as possible. Even if they’re clunky, non-helpful, efficiency drain tools, I feel like it’s my obligation to be well-informed about the latest gadgets and websites. So I’m often downloading trial versions, and occasionally checking out a friend’s new gizmo to see what I think of it.

But simply looking at or playing around with a new high-tech product isn’t enough, though. To be a true “early adopter” you have to adopt – you have to integrate the new technology into your life, not just play around with a trial version for a few minutes to see how it feels.

The problem, though, is that so many new technologies turn out, after you’ve tried them out, to really suck, but it sometimes takes more than just a few minutes to figure that out. Sometimes only after using it for a few weeks do you realize that the gizmo actually makes your life more complicated, not less. Sometimes you may not ever realize it at all, and find yourself stuck with a mobile phone or a productivity app that has made you less efficient than you were with the older technology. You might be using such harmful technology right now!

I remember when I used to fantasize that my PDA would replace my paper sketchbook. Ultimately I realized that simply writing stuff down on paper was far better for me. If it ain’t broke, don’t fit it.

Of course there is also the option of not having a particular kind of technology at all. Does having a mobile phone increase productivity? Some would argue that it’s not a necessity at all. Do you really need a whole separate desktop program to tell you the weather outside? If you work on a computer 10 hours a day anyway, does having a web browser on your phone really make your life any easier? Does registering for a new social bookmarking app really help you become a better, happier, more informed person?

Another way of thinking of this is by asking: Can a technology, once adopted, be subsequently eliminated from our lives? I can think of one example where it has happened: I do not, for example, use a wristwatch, and of the few people I know who do wear them, they think of them as jewelry.

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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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I am an extreme multitasker. I usually have at least fifteen windows open on my desktop at any given time, often as many as thirty. I usually have several Firefox windows open at once, too, each with a dozen or more active tabs with pages I either intend to read or need to use as a reference.

Of course, this degree of multitasking is unhealthy. For the most part, each window in front of me represents an unfinished task on my plate, taking up space on my desktop and nibbling away at CPU cycles. Some windows will just sit there for days, untouched and neglected.

At best, these piles of opened windows act as a kind of “to do” list for me, reminding me of my unfinished business. In fact, it’s a pretty safe bet that my goal each day is simply to close all the windows. Usually, however, the clutter just prevents me from finishing any one task by tempting me to revisit and make incremental changes to many other ones.

So whenever an application crashes on me and closes all of its windows or tabs, or even more dramatically when the whole computer crashes, it’s sometimes a blessing in disguise. It is like a splash of cold water to wake me up and force me to take stock of what was really important to get done — and to allow the less important stuff, and the wasteful stuff, to simply fall away and bubble to the top later on when it’s really important, according to a real plan.

I have over the years cultivated many good habits that make normal computer crashes (it’s sad that crashes can be considered “normal”) pretty harmless: I save often, and I save multiple versions of important documents. I even compose my comments for other peoples’ blogs using Outlook (which autosaves email drafts) before finally pasting them in the blog’s comment field. So when my computer crashes, it’s almost never disastrous for me at all. In fact, it’s usually quite nice. I usually gain more than I lose. Does that make me a sicko?

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