Read this post on if:book today re: using Heidegger to contest Birkerts’ arguments against the Kindle. Not too interested in that argument, but Heidegger’s terms here resonate somewhat with me. The idea of “readiness-to-hand” and the way all tools exist in a network/environment connects with Gibson’s idea of affordances. Here’s Piepenbring’s gloss on Heidegger:
In his [...]
Basics – Bending Your Computer’s Keyboard to Your Needs – NYTimes.com.
Article mentions even the weird Maltron, which typically doesn’t get mainstream attention.
Nota Bene: The OneNote Blog : Learn from a pro: Real-world draft management in OneNote 2007.
Video screencast of a writer discussing their use of OneNote for draft management. This video underlines my growing dissatisfaction with this program–the writer is essentially overtaken by the binder metaphor, and ends up thinking of it explicitly like a file [...]
Interesting way to frame the impetus behind moving in these ways. Useful for upcoming C&W talk on ergonomics and typing pain.
Tagged wrist pain, yogaLast Norman quote of the day: here Norman argues that designers should focus more on adding signifiers to their objects, rather than affordances, which may or may not be easily perceived or used. Signifiers, on the other hand, are obvious, and make use obvious.
People need some way of understanding the product or service, some sign [...]
More Norman:
Simplicity is not the goal. We do not wish to give up the power and flexibility of our technologies. The garage door opener may be simple, but it hardly does anything. If my cellphone only had one button it certainly would be simple, but, umm, all I could do would be to turn it [...]
Don Norman on “socializing our interactions with technology” (what sounds to me like a very Latour-ian phrasing):
The next peeve on the machines’ list, just after their dislike of people, is paper handling. They just can’t move paper about reliably and efficiently, especially things like tickets that their owners have touched. People don’t have any trouble [...]
Kutiman, Big Media, and the Future of Creative Entrepreneurship | 43 Folders.
Merlin Mann turns me on to Kutiman in the post linked above [click through for link to a cool Kutiman video], and thoughtfully questions the role of old media production/distribution companies:
In the mean time, though, you have to wonder how much artists like Kutiman [...]
Alex Reid has been posting some really interesting work on his blog lately, and a post today really caught my attention. He points out that older folks assume that radical poetry of the 1960s is necessary for current radicalism but miss the idea that such poetry was an emergent form at its time, like Twitter [...]
Tagged emergent media, techne, Twitter