Blog

Don’t Kill Your Channels

A channel is a way you can reach your users. It can be email, notifications, stories in a Facebook stream or even […]

Earthquakes

In 1923, Frank Lloyd Wright completed the Imperial Hotel, a building commissioned in Japan. In 1923, there was a 8.3 magnitude earthquake. The hotel survived.
earthquake-impreial

Wright was a midwesterner like myself, and had no experience with Earthquakes. When he arrived in Japan, that lack of familiarity was his strength; he passionately researched earthquake damage, and designed his hotel with multiple safeguards.

Terms of Art for the Heart

A term of art is a word when used in a professional context has a very precise meaning. I’ve been reading a lot about game mechanics and theory, inspired by Amy Jo Kim’s terrific talk given recently at Linkedin. Right now I’m half-way through A Theory of Fun by Raph Kosterner. It’s an odd, rambling book, and most it is familiar to anyone who’s been doing interaction design for awhile. But I do notice that game designers talk about emotion much more than we do, and they are crafting new terms of art and taxonomies that could be useful to anyone doing interactive (and particularly social) design.

Good Morning, Everyone

Welcome to a new and simple eleganthack design, finally live. The old eleganthack I’m moved to archives.eleganthack.com, and this lifestream blog I made my main interface. I kept thinking I’d do some fine tuning then starting writing here again. Six months later I realize the important thing is not to fuss around with it endlessly, but to get to writing again (and fussing endlessly will come when I’m procrastinating on writing.) You will have to resubscribe to the RSS, sorry.

So you’ve been wondering, what have you been up to, wodtke? Well, reading a lot about architecture, which is a passion I pickup after I wrote the chapter on social for my book. The result (so far) has been some insights on how the classic understanding of space can be applied online. I’ve presented this at IDEA, and I hope to further develop and extend these ideas at Interactions 10 Here are the slides from IDEA.

My new baby.

My new baby., originally uploaded by Box and Arrow.

Context is King!

Nasty as they wanna be? Policing Flickr.com Except rules are tricky things with an operation like Flickr’s. The […]

Size Matters

early draft of a section from 2nd edition of blueprints We all would like to think there was […]

The Third Place

via Joel on Software’s Building Communities with Software The social scientist Ray Oldenburg talks about how humans need […]