The corollary here is that the harder something is to get at or repair, the more likely that it will fail at an inopportune moment. Adams on Murphy. Adams on Murphy – “The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing [...]
Dave Pollard has put together his cut at what blogging tools ought to be able to do from an average user perspective. While Dave is anything but an average blogger, this is an interesting line of thought. Everyone has their own specifications for what they’d like blogs to do. Advanced users, comfortable with the technology [...]
Quotes about design. Here is a list of quotes about design collected from designfeast.com. [owrede_log : interfacedesign.org]
If you think that technological systems are complex, imagine what that implies for the combination of technological and social systems. The socio-technical systems arena has been a rich vein that’s been mined in the organizational design and development world for decades. In general, though, that literature has been ignorant of the world of systems design [...]
There seem to be a whole series of great entries showing up in my aggregator around the theme of how technology interacts with the world at large (that’s the point of using RSS aggregators isn’t it?). The more time I spend trying to mesh technology with organizations, the more cautious I become. I still believe [...]
Like Jerry Michalski I’ve long been a fan of Ackoff’s. Here are two posts of Jerry’s from October that provide access to some of Ackoff’s insight and wisdom about how to think about complex design problems. All of these items are worth your time. Idealized redesign I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I’m a big fan of [...]
Scalable Software (). Jaron Lanier tries to get his arms around the issue of software scalability. The reason we’re stuck on temporal protocols is probably that information systems do meet our expectations when they are small. They only start to degrade as they… [The Bottom Line] There was a time when I thought Lanier was [...]
Information on the Assembly Line. Rats…it’s a class night, and I’ve got to catch up on a couple chapters. So I can’t do much more than make a quick blog entry for Jason Nichols’ very intriguing looking masters thesis called Information on the Assembly Line (subtitled A review of Information Design and its Implications for… [...]
A Taxonomy of Cognitive Stress: I have. A Taxonomy of Cognitive Stress: I have been thinking about UI design lately. With some help from my friend Rob Landley, I’ve come up with a classification schema for the levels at which users are willing to invest effort to build competence. The base assumption is that for [...]
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 [...]
