Keep the change

I asked around and it seems that my friends also get random missing button images in the Dashboard Calculator now and then.

What's the commotion?

What are the rumors and speculation over ladies and gentlemen? That they are of different sexes?

Original Article

Was DUX teh SUX?

…most of the speakers and workshop leaders -- and I suppose, attendees -- appear to be shy of 40 years of age. That means they would have been born sometime after 1967, when systemic thinking was king and every person was treated as a cog in some larger device; and that they came of age in the mid-80s or later, as information technology was replacing systems as the predominant archetypal metaphor.

--Bob Jacobson on DUX 2007: A Great Conference but Fundamentally Off the Mark.

I didn't go to DUX 2007 or any other DUX conferences but I have read that prior DUX conferences have left attendees wanting.

Looked like Bob Jacobson felt that DUX 2007 was tainted by the prevalance of something that sounds like systems design and that the conference would have benefited from more grounding in holistic receptiveness or interest for the breadth and complexity of human experience and how experience designers can understand and interact with it.

I enjoy that Bob Jacobson cautions against confining the potential impact designers can have by (intentionally or unintentionally) excessively narrowing our focus of interest. However, I find it unusual that he would suggest that conference participants were hindered by their age, work experience, and the implications of the times they "came of age" in. Ad Hominem a bit?

Anyway, Jacobson suggests that "economic, thing-maker philosophy" and "making products and services" dominated DUX 2007 and that may well be.

If that's the case, I actually want to go next time and see what it's like. I went to CHI 2007 which I enjoyed but found it a bit more academic and research-oriented than I would have liked. (I was also in a reseach-oriented school at the time though.)

Peter Merholz, the first speaker at DUX 2007, mentioned in his blog that his biggest frustration with the conference was that it was largely paper submission-based and "[t]he moment an academic takes the stage, the conference screeches to a halt".

… pretty much all the academic research shown was simply irrelevant. The matters at the heart of experience design are simply not being addressed by academics, or being done so in a useless manner. I don’t know if its because the subject is too squishy, multi-disciplinary, subjective, or what, but it was definitely a waste of time.

Sounds like Peter would have been interested in more focused or applied presentations.

Granted, "academic" doesn't equate to holistic and human-centered, and non-academic doesnt equate to thing-making-obsessed, but it sounds like Peter and Bob may be in disagreement about what "[t]he matters at the heart of experience design" are or at least the best way to address these matters.

Too academic and theoretical or too applied and narrow-minded? Which one was DUX 2007?

I don't know if one conference can cover both theory and application very well but I would not mind if conferences were more clear on their intention with regard to application and theory.

Tangible banner ads?

Are the menu inserts popups?

Found this interesting video site called 5min and it seems pretty good so far.

Cues from nature

Yes, No; No, Yes; No. Definitely No.

Focus on what won't change

The best business advice I’ve ever heard was this: “Focus on the things that won’t change.” Today and ten years from now people will still want simple things that work. Today and ten years from now people will still want fast software. Today and ten years from now people will still want fair prices. I don’t believe we’ll have a “I want complex, slow, and expensive products” revolution in 2017.

From a 37signals post, "The 5, 10, 20 year plan". The rest of the post is a very good and short read.

Drink beer instead of speculating stocks

A Random Walk Down Wall Street says that one joke making rounds on the internet in 2001 went:

Tip of the Week

If you bought $1,000 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49. If you bought $1,000 worth of Budweiser (the beer, not the stock) one year ago, drank all of the beer and traded in the cans for the nickel deposit, you would have $79.

My advice to you . . . start drinking heavily.

And apparently, by fall of 2002, the $1,000 put into Nortel stock was worth only $3. Today? I'm using their VPN software for logging in to the intranet at work and I think the stock price is around $17, down from $1280.50 or something like that in the year 2000.

Go Bags

Is it the wannabe ethnographer curiosity in me or the gearhead lusting for goodies? Cool article from lifehacker shows people's "Go Bags" described as "the lifeline satchel that holds everything you need to operate on-the-go."

Go Bags Part 1

Go Bags Part 2

Had to post the Macbook Pro bag, natch!

Links

I feel kinda lame posting linkdumps but there have been some cool articles and I have no time.

Web Worker Payoff: Information Architect
"More commonly referred to by titles such as information architect, interaction or user experience designer or usability engineer, the job had average pay in 2006 of $82,400, according to a survey by The Information Architecture Institute."

Thin clients: The time is now
"…technological advances are finally getting ready to give the desktop PC the old heave-ho, at least in larger corporate environments. Their replacement? The thin client: a dumb, network-connected terminal capable of delivering a desktop-like experience without all that costly, energy-draining hardware on the desk."

Names in User Experience You Should Know
Also includes an up-and-coming list. They must have misspelled my name as "Other."