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Interfaces are one of the principal sources from which a person learns about his or her work. That understanding gets turned into diagrams, charts, and maps that, whether accurate or not, come to define the work that person does each day… . This brings a new dimension of responsibility to our table as interaction designers. Not only do we need to worry about our interfaces being simple, or elegant, or usable, or accessible; we also have to make sure they’re honest. Do they accurately portray our clients’ processes? Do they faithfully represent the relationships between different bodies of information? Do they tell the truth, or do they lie? Ultimately, whatever they say is going to define how our users think of their work, how they understand it, and how they do it.
Posted on February 8, 2010
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It is common today to locate one’s “true self” in one’s leisure choices. Accordingly, good work is taken to be work that maximizes one’s means for pursing these other activities, where life becomes meaningful. The mortgage broker works hard all year, then he goes and climbs Mount Everest. The exaggerated psychic content of his summer vacation sustains him through the fall, winter, and spring… . There is a disconnect between his work life and his leisure life; in the one he accumulates money and in the other he accumulates psychic nourishment. Each part depends on and enables the other, but does so in the manner of a transaction between sub-selves, rather than as the intelligibly linked parts of a coherent life.
Crawford, 2009, on work, leisure and full engagement, p181.Posted on February 7, 2010
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The things we know best are the ones we contend with in some realm of regular practice. Heidegger famously noted that the way we come to know a hammer is not by staring at it, but by grabbing hold of it and using it. For him, this was a deep point about our apprehension of the world in general. The preoccupation with knowing things “as they are in themselves” he found to be wrongheaded, tied to a dichotomy between subject and object that isn’t true to our experience. The way things actually “show up” for us is not as mere objects without context, but as equipment for action (like the hammer) or solicitations to action (like the beautiful stranger) within some worldly situation. One of the central questions of cognitive science, rooted in the prevailing epistemology, has been to figure out how the mind “represents” the world, since mind and world are conceived to be entirely distinct. For Heidegger, there is no problem of re-presenting the world, because the world presents itself originally as something we are already in and of. His insights into the situated character of our everyday cognition shed light on the kind of expert knowledge that is also inherently situated, like the firefighter’s or the mechanic’s.
Crawford, 2009, on thinking as doing, p163-4.Posted on February 6, 2010
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Vectors are your friends
Directionality, such as one for the other, is as important as Proportionality, the relationship of values of the items in question.
Posted on February 5, 2010
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given that we fleshly beings can think abstractly, abstraction itself is not a bad thing. But pursued to its limits, its dehumanizing effects are the fruit of Modernity.
Posted on February 5, 2010
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Typography + Archtecture
Posted on February 5, 2010
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I wonder if this kind of approach would be interesting to use on an Old Testament view of the internal and external timelines of the books.
Posted on February 4, 2010
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When strangers “comment” on blog posts, it’s not a conversation, it’s an abstraction of a conversation. Which makes Facebook Friending rather interesting.
Posted on February 3, 2010
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Every chapter of Romans has at least three Old Testament references. It would be so interesting to see this kind of graph applied to Romans & the OT.
It would be even more interesting to see an Old Testament, New Testament graph like this.
Because, really, if you want to know the New Testament, you’ve got to know the Old Testament, and such a presentation of the data would show that so clearly. (Probably someone has already done this, I just can’t get the search terms right it on google or flickr.)
Posted on February 3, 2010
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The inductive Bible Study method might not have been invented by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, but if IV didn’t invent the manuscript study with colored pencils, boxes, lines and squiggles, they sure did perfect it.
It occurred to me the other day that looking at the Scripture this way is a kind of Information Design thinking. There is so much data in the manuscript! But recurring elements, patterns, references and themes become so much more clear with an overlay of highlights and vectors.
Posted on February 2, 2010
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ideas are not linear, and i am not original
Posted on February 1, 2010
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Conversion, Salvation and Love
The choosing/chosen problem exists for those who find themselves, truly, “in love.”
While there is a perfectly coherent way to describe the experience of the persons “choosing” the other. There is also a perfectly coherent description of experience where the two people find themselves inexplicably drawn, bound, and captured by the other such that, in retrospect, you wonder how it could have been any other way.
Strangely, this doesn’t seem to be objectionable to people in love the way it can be objectionable to High Calvinists and Arminians.
Naturally, I align myself with the lovers, not the Calvinists or Arminians. This is where we get the phrase, “I’m a lover, not a predestination/free-will argumentatist.”
And it lets one live in the place where you say to your friend, “I found the perfect match for you!” and then do all the things that good friends do to bring their friend in the presence of this perfect match.
Posted on January 30, 2010
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Perfect.
(via Clay Larsen)
Yes, the Rotarians were on to something:
- Is it the truth?
- Is it fair to all concerned?
- Will it build good will and better friendships?
- Will it be beneficial to all concerned?
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Pacific Anarchy?
IF 1-coercion is a type of violence 2-The State is a State, in part, because it holds the power of coercion 3-The State retains its Statehood, in part, because it uses its power of coercion 4-pacifists are against the use of violence 5-the alternative to States is ungoverned anarchy
THEN Are Pacifists Anarchists?
Posted on January 25, 2010
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