I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the following: Writing headlines that get dugg vs Writing headlines that get remembered Mastery of video game controllers vs Mastery of video game / problem-solving concepts Convincing people to pay for your stuff vs Creating stuff people can’t live without Google ability vs Research ability Being able to […]
There is an inherent problem with the definition of design as “solving problems”: There isn’t a problem to solve. There is only the assumption that things present themselves, walk up to you and say “Hi! I’m a problem. Solve me.” Life doesn’t announce itself. Problems don’t self-identify. Neither do their best-seller-management-book alternate, opportunities. In fact, […]
Twistori, as implemented, was a whim—I woke up that morning with the desire to ship something. I picked something I’d been thinking about a while, but had never committed pen to paper or pixels to Photoshop, and stripped it down to its bare essentials, something that could be achieved in a day. The challenge was […]
This is one side of the story of twistori. I will tell the other later. Anyone who knows me knows about my rants. I like to rant. I rant about a lot of things, and always have—but as the years have accumulated in me and changed me, so have the topics of my rants shifted […]
The below article should appear in the July issue of the UK internet mag, .net (unrelated to the Microsoft framework, ewww). Since I know few of you will have access to the issue, I thought I’d post it here, too. But in case you are so geographically inclined, it never hurts to support a decent […]
Participating in ColorWars has been a really cool experience. It’s taught me a lot. But the #1 thing I would say is it’s taught me to JUST SHIP, YOU FUCKING IDIOT. (And by YOU FUCKING IDIOT, I mean me, not you. You are not a fucking idiot. You are my reader! And clearly you are […]
You’ve probably heard of Ze Frank (if not, shame on you!). If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably heard of ColorWars, a sort of Twitter-based prank-experiment created by Ze Frank. You probably found out about ColorWars the same way I did: logging into Twitter one afternoon and going “Holy crap! What the hell is all this… […]
Somewhere on planet earth, a dude named Shimon Schocken teaches a pretty revolutionary university class called From Nand to Tetris in 12 Steps. The course starts off with little else but the idea that “God gave us NAND” (a particular kind of logic gate). From this humble beginning, students build a small computer from the […]
To (very) long-term readers, this might look familiar. It’s from 2 and a half years ago, originally. It had 1 non-spam comment and even I had forgotten I’d written it… I found it by accident looking for another article that went missing. (Mephisto’s design makes it very easy to delete articles rather than deleting their […]
Links for the past week or so (including older stuff that’s resurfaced in my del.icio.us or consciousness for whatever reason): Interaction Design Why ‘usability’ is a path to failure ‘Me’ vs ‘You’ vs ‘I’ (interface language, not touchy-feely intrapersonal relationships) Intuition, pleasure and gestures Just Doist It Lie-ins and Tigers — even if you’re not […]
