How designers work. I haven't looked at lots of dissertations, but this one is a beaut. It's Henrik Gedenryd's How designers work: Making sense of authentic cognitive activities. Here's the abstract: In recent years, the growing scientific interest in design has led to great advances in our knowledge of authentic design processes. However,... [IDblog]

More from the abstract

At the same time, there is a growing movement of research on authentic cognitive activities, which has among other things documented the central roles of action and the physical environment in these activities, something that existing cognitive theories have overlooked and cannot properly account for. This creates an explanatory gap analogous to the one found in design.

This is definitely something for the short term reading list.

5:59:31 PM •  • comment  

The record of the race. Vannevar Bush: As We May Think. "Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race." (397 words) [dive into mark]

Mark also picks up on this Vannevar Bush/Memex meme associated with the Google/Pyra announcement. More interestingly, scroll down to the bottom of his post for an interesting example of a weblog "trace." 

4:15:44 PM •  • comment  

Google + Blogger = Stimergy. Matt Webb: Imagine, searching at Google, and then:

• this trail is highly followed
• do you only want to see what people suggest, or where people went?
• here's a worn track in the interweb. Follow the Google Pixie!
• this trail is uncommon, but made by someone we see (by your weblog) that you value

Or, more succinctly, stimergy. [Sam Ruby]

Lots and lots of reaction to Google buying Pyra. This post plus another from Cory at Boing, Boing hit on the most provocative interpretation I've seen; that Google is building the Memex.  Here's Matt's key observation:

GOOGLE ARE BUILDING THE MEMEX.

They've got one-to-one connections. Links. Now they've realised - like Ted Nelson - that the fundamental unit of the web isn't the link, but the trail. And the only place that's online is... weblogs.

There are two levels to the trail:

1 - what you see
2 - what you do
("And what you feel on another track" -- what song is that?)

And the trail is, in its simplest form, organised chronologically. Later it gets more complex. Look to see Google introduce categories based on DMOZ as a next step.

What Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, weblogs, and now Google are all demonstrating is that the boundaries between organizations and disciplines are arbitrary. It's the connections and the trails that matter. It's just taken a lot longer to build it than we would have liked. With a bit of luck we'll find out that we've managed to build it in time.

12:39:58 PM •  • comment