Dear Diary,
Here I am in Irvine, California for a workshop on “studying professional software design” which is probably more accurately called “studying how professional software designers approach design problems”.
The flight here was boring, as all good flights should be. Checking in was a minor disaster as Qantas’ Brisbane check in system had fallen over and could not be made to stand back up. I was in line to check in at about 9.20 for the midday flight but stood still for more than an hour. Eventually Qantas gave out some coffee vouchers so they could clear the queues. They had to manually check in a plane-load of people to Hong Kong, I would guess a 767s’ worth, before they could start processing the 747 to LA. Once checked in getting through Brisbane International is fairly easy and I was through security, passport control and secondary TSA-mandated screening in good time. The plane was in to LA only a hour late and a brief van ride on LA’s simply ridiculous highways got me to the hotel relatively safely.
Lunch at the Hotel restaurant (not worth it) and dinner at some sort of Mexican place up the street that advertised itself as “authentico” and now it is time for bed.
My wife, on one of the differences between clients (she was a lawyer for the federal government) and staying home with our kids.
But:
It’s short and oh so sweet and when it’s over I’m really going to miss it.
Search; replace
Two paragraphs below. In one, the word “design” is used; in the other “marketing”. One is from the original article.
If design lives up to its mission – creating innovative products and services and finding meaningful ways to make them valuable for customers and society at large – it needs to be a step ahead of customers. Customer research can inspire and validate but it can never replace the inventiveness and ingenuity of excellent design. Designers who only rely on customer research may yield good enough results with good enough tools. That’s fine. But if you set out to “rethink” design, you must shoot a little higher.
If marketing lives up to its mission – creating innovative products and services and finding meaningful ways to make them valuable for customers and society at large – it needs to be a step ahead of customers. Customer research can inspire and validate but it can never replace the inventiveness and ingenuity of excellent marketing. Marketers who only rely on customer research may yield good enough results with good enough tools. That’s fine. But if you set out to “rethink” marketing, you must shoot a little higher.
The question is: are they different?
Gleeful Emo Collapsism in The Age of Ordinary
Russel Davies:
I suspect what’s actually happening is that many of us are really, really keen to be living though dramatic and important times. We want to believe that now is a watershed, that this is An Age Of Something, that we live in Interesting Times. So we leap on extremely common occurrences (recessions, scandals) and pronounce them epoch-making.
“Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.” — Robert M Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Pirsig’s friend, who didn’t want to learn about motorcycle maintenance, had a BMW R60, though I have the feeling that the bike in the book has a pillion seat.
(This photo is 3031cf-R1-15-sepia by oregon ducatisti on Flickr)
“The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.” — Robert M Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The bike Pirsig rode on the journey in the book was a Honda CB77, just like this one.
(This photo is Parked After a Short Ride by Honda CB77 Restoration) on Flickr)
Atoms Are Not Bits
Joel Johnson:
Atoms are real, finite things. Until 3D printers can do more than squirt out mono-material resin sculptures—inevitable, perhaps, but not within the next decade—even the at-home revolution that Anderson puts up as an example of a new way of manufacturing consumer goods isn’t actually new at all. Until that glorious day, Anderson suggests American enthusiast makers outsource the dirty work to China.
the-stig: youmightfindyourself:
The Orquestra Voadora playing a Michael Jackson cover in the streets of Rio.
You know who doesn’t like Latin-flavoured Michael Jackson covers? Terrorists.
reblogged from the-stig
Let this be a lesson to you.
I changed my template to have proper markup and my tumblelog moved from 7th hit for my name in google to first. The System Works!
(That is, I switched to one of Bill Israel’s great templates because I am too lazy to edit a template myself but not so lazy that I won’t check the source to see if the theme uses h1 properly. Or at all. Yes, I’m looking at you, vast majority of tumblr themes.)
I’m inclined to agree in so far as I believe that the people Kottke encounters also have this view of design, and indeed of technology.
I also believe that when people talk about solving problems with technology, what they’re often talking about is solving problems with computation… which is to say the application of algorithms in a social and societal context. And that this is a Bad Thing™ and I would prefer they were talking about things in the way Kottke is.
reblogged from mjhoy
Patrick Tucker (via chrbutler)
AI watchers have been predicting something of the sort for more than 30 years now. Hubert Dreyfuss has been critiquing the sort of AI that proposes conversational machines since 1965.
Lucy Suchman showed in 1987 that machines lack the ability to “converse” with people because of the mis-match in the context that humans and machines perceive.
In any case, search already is a “conversation”, but you have to choose to see it that way. If you search for something, and then use the results that come back to inform your next search, that’s a conversation.
The other half of what Parker’s article describes, which is basically perfect natural-language spoken speech recognition, is, in my opinion, basically impossible to build using current sub-symbolic and statistical techniques which work well for closed simple domains (for occaisionally large values of simple) but fail, and fail in an opaque way, outside of those domains.
reblogged from chrbutler
