cityofsound

Footprints in the snow

Ploughing through old emails (sorry to everyone who's mailed me in the last few months - extremely variable service, to say the least), found an update from my friend Rick Myers - one of the great graphic designers, illustrators, typographers, or graphic artists (delete as inappropriate) around at the moment. Rick and I worked together in Manchester on a few things, and I regret we haven't found the opportunity to work together since - here's hoping. Anyway, check out his site for some beautiful work; idiosyncratic, thoughtful, and utterly original.

Rick Myers: Footprints In The Snow

Impressions of a place

Matt linking to my post about taxi drivers and The Knowledge with a headline alluding to Soft City, and Barry Brown's comment on said post about "Italian cab drivers (who) couldn't find places on a map, but they _could_ find routes between the places", happened to coincide with me opening Raban's Old Glory and finding this:

"One man may paint a picture from a careful drawing made on the spot, and another may paint the same scene from memory, from a brief but strong impression; and the last may succeed better in giving the character, the physiognomy of the place, though all the details may be inexact."

J.F. Millet, on landscape painting from memory

Again, a small fragment on the importance of understanding how people enage with the impression of place, rather than dealing with exactitude. Links to ideas around structure of feeling, perhaps.

Can programmers design?

Interesting articles via the Cooper Interaction design newsletter. The first, on the origination of personae in interaction design, is a quick historical backdrop to the creation of this immensely valuable tool (we use them all the time - as much to get inexperienced producers' heads round the idea of the user as much as anything).

Cooper: The Origin Of Personas

I'm not sure about the second one article though, which could be crudely summarised thus:

Q. Can programmers design?
A. No.

I'm not so sure ...

I'm not sure about the assertion that programmers generally think they're in control for a start, and also that there's a dearth of interaction designers around. It's usually the opposite in my experience: that programmers get trampled by designers (just as designers can often get trampled by 'producers') and that good programmers who have voluble and valid opinions about design are loth to voice them as a result.

Many of the pleas in the adaptive design stuff I put together last year were about the increasing importance of listening to programmers in the context of design. I understand a bit of what Kim Goodwin is trying to say, but I think that's more of a question of personality types than disciplines - and I don't buy that a discipline is characterised in terms of a global personality type that neatly.

Surely a more useful philosophy is to build multidisciplinary teams, with team members deploying a variety of tools and techniques (from interaction design through object-oriented programming) - rather than think in these reductionistic, almost protectionist notions of rigid disciplines and concomitant mindsets.

Cooper: Can Programmers Do Interaction Design?

The Register on BBCi

Despite being littered with misreadings, mishearings, inaccuracies, and guff, in my humble opinion, there's arguably some useful thoughts and some fair commentary in there. Oh what it is to be the centre of so much attention right now. Lucky we're not arrogant or anything ...
The Register: BBC news site facing extinction?

Journal: Jonathan Raban at London Review bookshop

I went to hear Jonathan Raban read from his new novel Waxwings, which I mentioned earlier, at the London Review Bookshop this evening. It was good. Here's some notes.

Raban preceded the reading by slyly noting "how tiresome it is to be read to in bookstores". Well, I must be lucky. I've only ever been to two: this and William Gibson in Manchester Waterstones in about 1995. Both were great.

Raban is physically smaller than I imagined, wearing his seemingly permanently affixed baseball cap. His teeth betray his status as an Englishman defiant in America—like mine, two craggy mountain ranges. He possesses a rich, warm, sonorous voice, betraying further evidence of his Englishness, a confident, erudite speaker, and yet punctuated with ums, ahs, and a halting hesitancy.

Raban described Waxwings as "a historical novel" set in a "bygone age" of 1999, 2000. An age not of innocence, but about the end of an era nonetheless. Set in an "imaginary city", which is basically Seattle, in the midst of the dotcom bubble, it's based around the intertwining stories of 4 immigrants. Read more at Amazon or The Guardian for the synopsis. I almost fell asleep during the actual reading, not due to the text which sounded typically compelling, or Raban's sardonic but attractive reading style, but as predicted it is tiresome to be read to.

But the book sounded great. However, the Q&A woke me right up. It was way more interesting.

Creative archive, and archiving blogs

Two articles in The Grauniad strike particularly close to home today.

First up Danny O'Brien with more on the BBC, and particularly the Creative Archive idea.

"And if the BBC takes this route, it will have the biggest, most responsive file-distribution on the planet to help shift this treasure trove of material: the file-sharing networks. Presenting its archive material without restrictions would allow the BBC to occupy a niche that no other commercial company would dare to assume. It would allow them to tap a vast distribution system that no other company feels confident enough to use. It would serve a public good, in refilling the public domain diminished by companies attempting to restrict their customers' use of their works."

Can't say too much about this at the mo, for obvious reasons, but the situation is slightly more complex than Danny makes clear - but that's probably a problem with the format of the newspaper article rather than any failing on Danny's part. He clearly gets the opportunity afforded by this idea, that's for sure.

The Guardian: Auntie's digital revelation

M'colleague Tom Coates writes about blog aggregation. We had a quick chat about this at work the other day, and I think he's bang on in the assertion that the next challenge will be one of aggregation, filtering, and pattern recognition across a multiplicity of blogs - but beyond Google and its smart but even-handed treatment of blogs as simply pages, towards something that takes into account the particular characteristics of blogs themselves.

The Guardian: Second sight

Oh, and Tom's right - he doesn't look like that. Honest.

Mike Lee on patterns

Excellent post on patterns, over at Mike Lee's place.

"Reading through some of the patterns, I recognized many of the tricks I've stumbled upon over the last few years to sell information architecture, usability, accessibility, and user-centered design to my employers and their clients. Some example patterns for introducing new ideas..."

curiousLee: Patterns help introduce patterns (or any new idea)
[via Matt]

Buses and taxis

Fascinating (if you like that kind of thing, which I do) post over at Chris Heathcote's AntiMega, on discovering coded markings attached to bus stops in London - and then wondering what it all means.

AntiMega: location finding and street furniture

I had a brief chat with a taxi driver today, talking about 'the knowledge' and how they learn the city. I've always been kind of intrigued by The Knowledge - the mysterious and necessarily arcane test that London taxi drivers undergo in order to earn their badge.

"Candidates will then be asked to attend an acceptance interview where they will be presented with the infamous "Blue Book" which is a book listing 400 routes through London which the candidate must learn, including all places of interest, museums, hospitals, police stations, cinema's, statues, monuments, restaurants, government buildings and any place that a fare paying passenger might require to go along these routes."

Apparently, according to my cabbie, once passed you never have to revise it. You do it once, that's it - it covers an insanely large area of London, from Stretford in the east to Acton in the west, way north to way south - all the main roads, and main locations. From then on, it's all practice, reinforcing your knowledge of the city by driving it, reinforcing certain routes just as neural networks do.

I also asked him whether he has particular routes or patches or patterns which repeat (you can just hear me saying it, can't you! Sigh). He said "No". He could go anywhere, anyday, and does. He'd been to Milton Keynes that AM, before taking me from Broadcasting House to Gower Street. I was looking for his version of the soft city, rather obviously, and when pressed he admitted he does have a patch he returns to if no one is looking for a ride (in his case, Warwick Avenue, where there are some good intersecting roads, plus a nice cabbie shelter where he can have a chat etc.) I like the idea that the cabbies have their own patches across the city, their own invisible comfort zones and secrets, areas they consider a 'home' in some sense, albeit transient. And that The Knowledge becomes their version of the city over time.

BBC Creative Archive

"We intend to allow parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download so long as they don't use them for commercial purposes. Under a simple licensing system, we will allow users to adapt BBC content for their own use. We are calling this the BBC Creative Archive."

Amidst the mire of a really crappy day at work, this was a shining light. Great news to have the boss stand up there and deliver, while we're trying to work out how we do it right now, in terms of our very basic (currently) Radio Player. I keep promising more info on the Radio Player, its future development, and how you can have your say in that, I know. I will do, soon ...

As Matt points out, there's some great analysis at Oblamovka and Hanging Day. There's some doubt too, and it's certainly non-trivial, but Cory knows a bit more as he, like Lessig, came to talk to us recently and we talked him through some problems and opportunities. Watch that space.

BBC News: Dyke to open up BBC archive

Tories would close BBC website

Very interesting comments emerging over at Tom's place. I can't comment for the same reasons Tom can't but go read the debate if you care about the notion of public service and the web.

Plasticbag: Tories would close BBC website