Author: Christopher Fahey
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I Like to Crash
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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…
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Why I Blog About Politics
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…
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Going out of Business Spam
Spammers are always coming up with new ideas for how to get by spam filters and new ways to fool people into thinking their messages require immediate reading. And these new ideas seem to come in waves, like fashion or style trends. For example, last week (and all in one day) I received about 50…
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Don’t Ask, Don’t Translate
The Daily Show’s Jason Jones investigates why gay translators aren’t wanted by Uncle Sam. Democrats (and Republicans with guts and/or brains) should draft a new law that makes an exception to the military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy for gay soldiers who function as translators and who work in certain other intelligence-related roles. Even though…
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Class and Web Design, Part 6: Breaking The Class Barrier
(This is Part 6, the final part of this series. Please check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 3a, Part 4, and Part 5.) Despite my calls for increased class consciousness, I actually think that class may be less and less important as American culture evolves and as class exploration becomes more fluid…
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Design = Interior Design
Here’s some news for web designers, interaction designers, graphic designers, information designers, user experience designers, and whatever else you might think of yourself as: New York Magazine defines “design” as “interior design”. And of course the fashion world uses the word “design” to mean “fashion design”. I’d guess that if you asked a hundred people…
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Class and Web Design, Part 5: The Politics of Class
(This is Part 5. Please check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 3a, and Part 4) Go get ’em Mom: patiencemerriman.com I recently designed a web site for my mother, who is running for the Vermont state legislature (I’m so proud of her!). Vermont is a small, largely rural state, and there are…
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Class and Web Design, Part 4: The Vicious Circle of Desire
(This is Part 4. Please check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 3a) Earlier, I talked about the markers of class that surround us every day. A person’s cultural immersion in a narrow range of class markers can create a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, a vicious circle of desire: Poor people can’t…
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Behavior Profiled by Design Interact
Behavior is the featured studio in the latest edition of Design Interact. It’s a nice short-and-sweet introduction to Behavior, showing the diversity of our work and providing a little of the feel of how we work on projects. The profile includes some mini-interviews with me and my partners about some of the sites we’ve launched…
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Class and Web Design Part 3a: Tabloid vs. Broadsheet
What’s wrong with this picture? (This is Part 3a. Please check out Part 1 , Part 2, and Part 3) There’s a fascinating debate at Subtraction about the design of the new New York Post web site, between the AIGA’s Liz Danzico and the New York Times‘ (and Subtraction’s) Khoi Vinh. The discussion, I think,…