brightly colored food

A political assessment of the past year in global affairs.

From the always excellent Viridian Design.

I’m in Iowa right now, relaxing amidst the corn and swine. Did you know that Christina is an Iowan too? Ask her about the butter cow sometime - everyone should visit the Iowa State Fair at least once in their life.

This week I’ve been reading some of the literature on space/place. Don’t bother with A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time or The Experience of Place, but do consider Rudolf Arnheim’s The Dynamics of Architectural Form and Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Next is The Poetics of Space.

Also, I found this great little booklet in a used bookstore here in Des Moines. It’s by Paul Mijksenaar, called Visual Function: An Introduction to Information Design, and it contains the clearest discussion I’ve yet read of the whole “form/function” hairball. Did you know that it wasn’t actually the architect Louis Sullivan who coined the phrase “form follows function”? It was the sculptor Horatio Greenough, and he was talking about clipper ships. Paul wrote Open Here: The Art of Instructional Design, which I’ve heard is good as well.

So, places. I’m going to be in the San Francisco Bay Area for the next week, 12/31 through 1/6. I have no plans other than seeing friends and eating well. If you’d like to meet up, drop me an email at chad at the domain name above. I’ll have my Hiptop/Sidekick, so I’m always in touch.

A Directory of Sources for Input Technologies

Bill Buxton is developing this taxonomy of input devices for a book that he’s working on.

An input device I’ve been using lately is a little MIDI keyboard called an Oxygen 8. It has lots of knobs that allow you to control various parameters in music sampling, sequencing, or synthesis programs like Reason or Live (check out the demos - there’s plenty of interesting interface design stuff going on). I’ve been using the Oxygen 8 to change elements of a sound, stuff like the pitch, volume, and tone quality, in an effort to learn more about how they’re perceived when heard in a spatialized audio environment (think 3D sound through headphones).

To learn more about how people might interact with sound(s) in a spatialized audio environment, as opposed to just listening, we’ve been playing with the Griffin Powermate, which is this big, beautiful metal knob that connects via USB to your computer. We’re using it in a couple of ways, mostly focused around the selection of a given sound: rotating multiple sounds placed around the head, moving effects (filters, for example) to indicate focus, or moving a sound that serves as a kind of auditory pointer. One of the engineers I work with got ambitious and hooked it up to an office chair, so that the chair is the input device. Fun stuff.

Right now the challenge is to take the work we did and figure out how to communicate it to others, possibly for submission to a conference as a paper. I did a brief presentation about it a few weeks ago, and found John Thackara’s article Does Your Design Research Exist? to be helpful.

For those who’ve read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, here’s a critique of the book, which focuses on how Scott defines the term “comics”.

And it looks like Scott is doing the weblog thing.

3600 Research Essays about the Net. It’s like stringing together all your favorite keywords and then slapping them on one page. Also from the same site: 750 Internet Researchers and 1800 Net Art Links.

From Red Rock Eater Digest

It somehow slipped my mind, but this site does have an RSS feed. I’ll post one of those XML/RSS buttons that’ll serve as a permanent link when I get a chance, but this week is likely going to be a bit rough, so it may have to wait.

I’ve been using NetNewsWire Lite for OS X as my RSS newsreader. If you visit a lot of the same sites often, you might want to check it out.