Today was a good day, book-wise. I finished writing it, for one thing, with an epilogue on designing ethically. I started seeing page proofs, for another. It’s a thrill to see the words and images in their near-final form.
Lastly, some good conversation about the excerpt on UXmatters. It’s frightening and thrilling that people are talking and thinking about the book before it even comes out. It will be interesting to see what the broad reaction is to it.
UXmatters has published a short excerpt from my book, a section called The Elements of Interaction Design. It’s one of the more high-level/theoretical parts of the book, but interesting to think about.
I’m not sure why you would want this, but if you simply can’t wait until August to start reading my book, you can now order and download the Rough Cuts (pdf) version. It’s not the whole book right now–I’m still writing it!–but the first two chapters, with the next two chapters (3 and 4) coming in about two weeks. When the book is finished, you get the whole book in PDF format. You can also order both the PDF version and the final print book together if you’d like. (Again: I’m not sure why you’d want to do that unless you are desperate to read all of Marc Rettig‘s interview (as you should be!) right now and save it for posterity).
There’s also some limited text snippets available free. Like this one on the overlapping disciplines of interaction design.
One of the other purposes of Rough Cuts editions is for readers to give feedback before the book is published, to correct errors and problems, and to make suggestions for improvement. If you are one of these brave souls ordering this edition, I would love to hear what you think of the book!
My alma mater is starting a yearly design conference, this year focusing on service design. Ignore the muddled and garish design of the teaser website: it should be a good conference.
I worked in New York’s SoHo several times over the years. To get to my office from my apartment in Hoboken, I usually got off the Christopher Street PATH station and walked my favorite New York walk through my favorite part of Manhattan: the West Village. Hudson Street to Barrow Street, then the tiny, twee stretch of Cherry Lane to Bedford Street, and down Barrow Street, near old speakeasys and Edna St. Vincent Mallay’s house.
Thank you, Jane Jacobs, for fighting so that I could see it.
Posted an excerpt from my interview with Yahoo designer Luke Wroblewski over on the book site. Enjoy!
Through Jeff, I found an old post of Chad’s that had an amazing comment from one of our classmates, Maggie Breslin. Since she inexplicably doesn’t have a blog and her comment is pretty buried, I’m quoting it at length here. This is her advice to Chad about how to teach interaction design:
Chad! Did you learn nothing in your time here in Pittsburgh? He wants to be an interaction designer and you gave him some articles from Cooper and uiweb?
Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.
You tell him I said to take a long unstructured walk around his city. Talk to strangers. Take pictures. Visit at least one museum. Pretend like he’s from somewhere else for an hour. Stop in a park to read Raymond Carver’s “What we talk about when we talk about love.” (outloud would be rad, but I leave that up to him.) Go into a music store, find two people who seem completely different from him and buy whatever they are buying. And then end his travels at your house where he’ll tell you the story of his day over a bottle of Bombay Sapphire Gin. The story should last as long as the bottle.
You listen to his story and then like Mr. Miyagi in “The Karate Kid” tell him all the things he already knows interaction design without even realizing it.
And to answer the question before you ask – why Bombay Sapphire Gin? Gin because it’s yummy. Bombay Sapphire because it’s beautiful. We’re still designers after all. 😉
Amen.
It will be hard for any interaction designer to read Adam Greenfield‘s Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing without feeling like the work we’re doing now is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
A combination call-to-arms, overview, and prophecy, Everyware is a frightening, but engaging, read. Several times throughout the book, I simply wanted to shut its covers, as though that alone would stop its predictions and reportage from coming or being true (smart toilets!). But, as Greenfield lays out with a pretty convincing case, ubicomp is coming whether we want it to or not, and designers, engineers, and politicians simply can’t ignore it. It will be too powerful and too potentially invasive. Its consequences are too great.
A number of books lately, including this one and Shaping Things, have presented a remarkable view of the near future, a near future that we are going to have to help shape. I hope we’re ready, although I know we’re not.
Highly recommended.
An observed phenomenon: when a product or service does a major redesign, long-time users will freak out. But if the design is better than the previous one, they will eventually get over it. I’ve watched it happen recently with the New York Times redesign.
I’m calling this phenomenon redesign reorientation.
I’ve posted more interview excerpts from Designing for Interaction recently, namely
.
These interviews really are one of the book’s highlights.
A book update: I’m more than 2/3 of the way through now, racing towards the end of writing in May. It’s coming along really well, I think. Later this month an excerpt will appear in UXmatters and the Rough Cuts edition should also be out shortly. You can also Pre-order it from Amazon