I am user experience designer for EightShapes in Washington, DC. I specialize in design documentation, information architecture and interaction design. I have been a researcher, a developer, a librarian and a project manager, but my first love has always been Design.
At this year’s Information Architecture Summit, I presented a poster.The poster presents:
Feedback welcome! (comments are open)
I just finished reading Joe Lamantia’s excellent post Designing Post-Humanity: Everyware in the Far Future. I don’t have anything brilliant to add – just pointers to other stories that explore similar issues.
The most thoroughly realized examples of trans-human/post-human futurism are Masamune Shirow’s Appleseed and Ghost in the Shell. Cyberpunk forerunners like William Gibson relied on the reader’s imagination to fill in the gaps. Shirow’s manga explores every gritty detail. Both stories deal with the social and legal issues of trans-humanism through crime-fighting female protagonists (it’s Japanese – ’nuff said). You can read them as manga or watch TV shows and movies. Continue reading »
On the IAI list yesterday, David Malouf asked about the aesthetics of information architecture. I don’t claim to have a competent answer but the question got me thinking. What language do we use to critique an IA? All the material I have read focuses purely on utility, not elegance or satisfaction. This goes way back. As a community, we lack a published base of formal frameworks for communicating design critique. I’m not filling that void today, but I do think the community uses useful terms and frameworks in our practice and we should start collecting and publishing them. Continue reading »
I have recently been placed in charge of a project to design and manage a pattern library for my organization. The library will contain high-level interaction patterns, components, and style guidance from a range of internal and external projects. I plan to reference existing patterns wherever possible, particularly the work from Yahoo! The biggest part of the gig right now is setting a vision for the project and deciding on a strategy to get there. The scope is ambitious, so I will need help. To that end, another major part of my immediate task is outreach and training. That’s where this page comes in. It’s a starting point, a placeholder, until I can set up our internal resources.
In an effort to inspire myself to write here more, I am doing a bit of a code refresh. I have simplified the style considerably and thrown away a lot of odds and ends. No more bookmarks. No more sidebar. Practically no navigation at all. I even ditched the polar bear. As I start using the site again, I may reintroduce some of these things. If you see anything missing, drop me a comment.