Ah, such navel-gazing. I always get a bit embarrassed when my non-design friends tell me they read this weblog – sorry friends, we’re a profession that likes to publicize our infighting. Move along, nothing to see here.

In a parallel life I’m a freshwater biologist, forever weblogging about my fascination with evolutionary stable strategies, particularly the mating system of one lepomis macrochirus, the bluegill sunfish. In another I’m a teacher, too busy for this silliness, and in yet another life I’m off in a band somewhere, completely and entirely oblivious about weblogging.

But in this strand of spacetime I’m now headed off to finish my slides for my final presentation to Big Blue tomorrow. School starts two weeks from today and my time here in Boston is just about up. Hopefully I’ll be able to talk about my summer here a bit more sometime later, once everything is finished.

My favorites so far: Observation Designer, User-friendly Manipulator, Coalescence Deviser, and Interaction Philosopher.

How much is goodwill worth? Apple is only estimating that 10% of the users with a .mac address will upgrade. Any idea how much this might be? Maybe a couple million? How much is not pissing off the other 90% worth? It’s a poor business decision, especially for a company that relies on brand as much as Apple does.

Kevin’s a newly-minted friend from the West Coast who will be joining us shortly here at Carnegie Mellon. He’ll be in the HCI Masters program, and we’ve already committed each other to the task of tightening the bonds between the HCI program and the Interaction Design program, where I reside. He’s a terribly bright guy, and previously worked as an interaction designer at Yahoo! on their instant messenger app. He also possesses quite a fine apartment in the Squirrel Hill area of Pittsburgh. I know it’s a nice place because I’m subletting it from him until my own place opens up (one day left). I only wish it came furnished – I’ve been sleeping on a tiny camping mattress for a month now and eating my meals picnic-style on the floor. Very glamorous, let me tell you.

Did you know that in Texas it’s illegal to have “Engineer” in your job title unless you have a college degree in some type of engineering?

To give “New Architect” a little credit, their articles are pretty decent, even if their branding may be a bit off the mark. As editor Amit Asaravala mentions, in addition to their feature articles they have case studies, legal analysis, product reviews, Q&A to strategic questions, and guest editors. That’s a pretty good mix, I must admit.

The site has transcripts of all of the speeches given at the conference. There’s some good discussion around using design as a force for social change. Naomi Klein, Rem Koolhaas, and John Maeda are some of the contributers you might recognize.

Have you ever seen a marketing person conduct a usability test? Have you ever seen someone fishing for data? I have, and it’s not a pretty sight. I’m not against using anyone but a “usability specialist” to run a test – anyone with a couple hours of training can do a decent job – but it’s so easy to go fishing, to lead the participant, to come to your own conclusions. As George mentions, it’s fine to use well-designed, quantitative marketing approaches to get at attitudes, but asking eight participants which design they prefer doesn’t qualify as a usability test.