• - Extraction of thumbnails, descriptions, and tags for Flickr images, Amazon products, and Vimeo videos.
• - Extraction of media embeds for YouTube, Current TV, and Vimeo videos.
• - Tagging and collections for all saved items
• - Up to 10 email lists of 10 recipients each

Posted by ben at 2:38 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Posted by ben at 5:31 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

See update at bottom.

Having a "design process" for Web projects is an appealing idea. It codifies principles that designers like into rationales for involving design in major decisions. Since design is imagining, a lot has been written about doing innovation through design. Since I'm getting really old now I have seen many different attempts at making an innovative design process. I can say right up front that the only thing that actually works is working with a designer on a small team that is driven, wants to create something new, and has the courage to go where that leads. As a former advocate and practitioner (for years) of these design processes, it's my experience that they contribute little of value to the success or failure of a design.

1. User and market research doesn't work. As Douglas Rushkoff sez:

"...because you can only research the market's past, not its future, consumer research doesn't ever lead to true innovation. It only helps companies to sort out some of last year's trends in order to create an illusion of sales predictability." -- pg 235, Get Back in the Box (Thanks to Bob Baxley for this quote!)

2. Brainstorming doesn't work. Creation of many ideas and scenarios divorced from reality is good, but limiting this to a two-hour meeting every so often insures that ideation is not part of major decisions. Occasional brainstorming with project teams is often used as a team-building exercise, so everyone is happy when the ideas they produce are close-in, not new or disruptive directions. Make brainstorming part of making the product, not a separate meeting.

3. "Wizard of Oz" videos don't work. Fleshing-out an idea in a speculative (i.e. faked) animated scenario is a tactic used by some designers to sell an idea that has no existing engineering or business basis. Without constraints, real innovation does not happen, just out-of-control "idearrhea." Actual innovation is build-able in some way, anything else should be taken as suspect.

4. Personae don't work. Defining users as archetypes and attempting to see the product through their eyes has some use for avoiding massive disaster, especially for non-designers. But they are of limited use for designers making hard decisions. Personae should not be over-sold as the answer to making the product user-centric, that has to happen in other ways.

5. "Agile" methodology doesn't work. Scrum is a huge success in helping large companies redefine engineering to give ownership of products to teams and to deliver better products. But the process fails when applied to design and ideation. A two or three-week sprint is simply not enough time to try a few design directions and prototype working code (and I have tried on at least a dozen occasions). Any kind of exploration has to go out the window. A very experienced Scrum master and advocate I've worked with agrees that Scrum is best for delivering against a well-defined specification, and even then produces huge amounts of stress on designers (who have to stay somewhat ahead of the other team members in their deliverables).

A good objection to all of the above would be that IDEO and other great companies have been very successful at innovating through design and have many solid methods they use that they detail in books, etc. I would point out that most of the examples people use for success are physical products (like, as is mentioned again and again, the iPod), not Web sites. I think this is because it is much, much easier to create a prototype of a physical product and see how it feels to use it that to do the equivalent with Web work, where application pieces, data structures, and lots of other very abstract design work needs to be done before you can see how something feels in use.

Another good objection would be that for utilitarian, task-oriented projects, the goals are clear enough that all of these techniques are valuable, and that's true enough. But these kinds of commodity projects (e.g. building a new shopping cart or a content management system) are not what most designers can contribute to in valuable ways.

Creating products is not a rational process; much depends on tiny aspects, timing, and emotional dynamics between people. Designers should embrace this and stop trying to define their value through processes. Designers should ideate through building, directly with engineers on small teams.

Update: Thanks to Kai Turner who made several valuable points, I've edited the post to not sound old and cynical quite as much. I should also make the disclaimer that this is a polemic and deliberately foamy-at-the-mouth.

Posted by ben at 2:30 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Posted by ben at 4:11 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Posted by ben at 6:39 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

...philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the holy, the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: "My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law."

If there is anything to the idea that the best intellectual position is one which is attacked with equal vigour from the political right and the political left, then I am in good shape. I am often cited by conservative culture warriors as one of the relativistic, irrationalist, deconstructing, sneering, smirking intellectuals whose writings are weakening the moral fibre of the young. Neal Kozody, writing in the monthly bulletin of the Committee for the Free World, an organization known for its vigilance against symptoms of moral weakness, denounces my 'cynical and nihilistic view' and says 'it is not enough for him [Rorty] that American students should be merely mindless; he would have them positively mobilized for mindlessness'. Richard Neuhaus, a theologian who doubts that atheists can be good American citizens, says that the 'ironist vocabulary' I advocate 'can neither provide a public language for the citizens of a democracy, nor contend intellectually against the enemies of democracy, nor transmit the reasons for democracy to the next generation'. My criticisms of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind led Harvey Mansfield - recently appointed by President Bush to the National Council for the Humanities - to say that I have 'given up on America' and that I 'manage to diminish even Dewey'. (Mansfield recently described Dewey as a 'medium-sized malefactor'.) His colleague on the council, my fellow philosopher John Searle, thinks that standards can only be restored to American higher education if people abandon the views on truth, knowledge and objectivity that I do my best to inculcate.

technorati tags:rorty, pragmatism, philosophy

Posted by ben at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

The Mets have come into their own as a team, finally. They have a convincing claim on leadership of the East, built with hard work and despite missing their best pitcher, while the Yankees cannot find a win with a huge roster of monster talents and an almost hysterical desperation. It shouldn't be this way looking at it from the "moneyball" point of view, or the momentum point of view, or any point of view really. The Mets are comprised of a decent payroll of good players, a couple of stars, and a good coach, but they have no superheros among them to speak of. They play doggedly year after year, occasionally miraculously, mostly unevenly, sometimes heart-breakingly badly, but come back again and again somehow to compete in the most tantilizing, frustrating place in the world: just outside the Yankee's spotlight (clearly, a great place to get slowly and quietly good, though).

It's worth mentioning the way The New York Times has dealt with this switch in fortunes: amazingly badly. Here's a grudging, fourth-paragraph quote from their main story as the Mets took their second win in the series with the Yankees, and pulled away from the Braves to first place in their division as the Yankees fell apart: "But nothing about this game [...] could alter what those around here already suspected: The Mets are a better team, and not only because of their record, which improved to 28-14, the best in the National League..." As the capper, the headline for the article is "Another Injury to Another Pitcher And Another Loss for the Yankees." Give me a fucking break. They should stop reading team popularity polls and cover what's actually happening.

Regardless of what happens this year (the Yankees will eventually do something, the Brewers and the Indians look pretty good; it seems wide open), these Mets look like they are settled down and playing for themselves, and it's great to watch.

UPDATE: Wow, what a difference three weeks makes! Despite all the injuries, I'm still loving watching those Mets...

UPDATE 2: Oh my fucking God what the fuck was that?????!?!?! Utter, complete, total humiliation!!!!

Posted by ben at 2:32 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Thank you to Joy, Ash, Bradley, Caterina, Salim, and Larry, who said yes go ahead, and thank you to Mike Chang, Aaron Koblin, and Juliana Yamashita, who made all of the utterly amazing visuals and demos, thank you to Brian, Brooke, Eliote, Christine, Jennifer, and Carrie who did the hard work, and thank you to Kiersten, Lucy, Larissa, and Monica for actually making it happen. It is wonderful to work with great, talented, and generous people!

technorati tags:openhouse, yahoo, brickhouse

Posted by ben at 1:33 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

I pinned the poster for the AIGA's latest studio visit series up outside my cube at work. I listened as two people stopped to look at it, at first confused about what it was for; then finally figuring out it was for a design event. "Oh, now I know I can safely ignore it," said one. As they were walking away, the other one said "XML is the future, I guess we won't need any graphics or posters..."

Posted by ben at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Posted by ben at 9:21 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

So Agency.com wants to be agency of record for Subway sandwiches, and they decide to make a video for Subway about their team, as a 'viral video' that they will upload to YouTube, etc. They make the video, and it's really sort of sad to watch probably smart and talented people try to graft something human and quirky (stupid videos on the internet) on to the desperate anxiety of lucrative business relationships. The video is not funny and does not take any risks (it even has two people on camera saying that the video has to be funny and that it shows they take risks). Glass-house-dweller Coudal Partners takes them down easily.

But I feel bad for the Agency.com folks, and some solidarity. The fact that they made this video shows that they haven't given up, they still have that desire and ambition to make something that anyone would want to see, even within the special confines of corporate ad hell. It's poignant to see them get lost in their own self-consciousness and idea that their business is somehow teh funny. It makes me think of the elaborate graffiti scratched into the paint-proof subway car, the Western adventure novel written in while on unemployment assistance, the rheumy old man sending flowers to the comely young mail carrier.

From the depths of my own corporate design cubicle, I woozily tip some Wild Turkey Green Vibrance into my coffee. I raise my cup, silently. The fluorescent lights beat down. Pan left. Cut to wide shot. Fade out.

Posted by ben at 8:15 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

There's nothing quite like taking care of my daughter to blast away selfishness, bitch-slap my inner child, napalm my therapist, etc. And I'm doing just great. Right about the time I'm congratulating myself on how far I've come is great timing for another reminder, though.

Just the other day, we had a blow out. I had fed her (well, she's pretty good at feeding herself, I was just there to make sure she didn't decide to throw the bowl) and I was eating my own food, which she wanted some of. I refused to give her any, and she put her head right down on the cold floor and wailed and cried. She kept it up, no matter how I try to distract her, and trying to hold her just made it worse. Even after a half-hour of this I couldn't comfort her, and only my wife was able to hold her and calm her down. Over my wife's shoulder she looked at me with the burning eyes of someone safe from the enemy.

We make up of course, she's fine (she's always great). But damn it all if I wasn't left with hurt feelings. In some ridiculous way I want taking care of her to be personally fulfilling. What a crock of shit! It's one of those times when I have to look at my psyche and just shake my head, sadly. (I'm not alone though. Every month we get Parents magazine for some reason -- we didn't order it and never renew it -- and in every issue there is an article about how to get the most fulfillment out of raising a child.) The latest version of my personal mantra is to take care of her:

1. ...without being a rigid asshole
2. ...while staying open and intimate with her
3. ...without being wishy-washy, negotiating with her, or becoming pedantic
4. ...while staying in sync with my wife's style and expectations of her

and above all:

5. ...with the ability to let go of any desires for personal gratification I might want for what I do for her.

Technorati Tags: baby, parent, psyche

Posted by ben at 8:08 AM | Permalink | Comments ()