I found Dan Saffer’s presentation on “How to lie with design research” on Nicolas Nova’s blog today. A User Experience researcher, Nova posts a lot of blog posts of varying insights on interaction design and user experience and such buzzwords. The talk is a tongue-in cheek discussion of ethnographic design research, which appears to annoy [...]
Wednesday, I went to see former Chess World Champion and current Russian Human Rights Champion Garri Kasparov receive the grandly named Herbert Pundik Freedom Prize. Kasparov proved to be a fairly eloquent speaker, and he managed to summarize the enlightenment ideal of Human Rights very precisely, and underline its importance once more. What surprised me [...]
One of the entries for the Index design award was the Dropping Knowledge website. It’s a fun, if somewhat difficult concept which lets anybody ask a question, and gives anybody else the opportunity to offer their answers. It is an attempt to use the new sort of participatory culture to find or reach contemplative answers [...]
Following the INDEX conference, I got to thinking a bit more about how the designers posited design as an unquestionable good to be used to solve the many problems of the 21st century. But what is good design? How do you know when you’ve found it? Well, this summer I read Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and [...]
I’ve spent some time this morning upgrading this blog to the latest version of WordPress, and changing and editing the theme to something even more simple. I also spent some time updating the About, Writings, and Best of… pages to make it as easy as possible to find your way around the site. So take [...]
2 weeks ago, I went to the INDEX design conference, which is a prelude to the Aspen Design Summit – a design meeting which takes place in June, and is considered something akin to a design world summit ever since its first instance in 1951. The conference was part of the INDEX design awards, the [...]
Writing a thesis is a difficult undertaking. Before I started writing mine, I hadn’t written any assignment longer than 30 pages (my Bachelor’s essay), and it was quite a step up from that to having to structure a huge complex of data that I’d gathered on my own, analyze it and bring it together in [...]
It’s been a long way underway, first through fieldwork, writing, submitting, defending, editing, and polishing. But now, finally. My anthropological thesis on the social dynamics of the Ubuntu community is available for everybody to read. You can download the abstract, or the full 2.9 MB PDF file. I’ve released it under a Creative Commons license [...]