COM 585 - Media Message Design

Week Eight Readings

2006-02-20T14:19:00.000-08:00

Nothing is ever as straightforward, easy or clearcut as one thinks. Everything I have read this quarter has reinforced that thought for me. The chapter from Web Redesign certainly continues the path. The complexity of webpage development or redevelopment is mind boggling. The need for strong leadership, thoughtful design, capable working partners, good business practices and skills, it's all there and more. From what was stressed in the chapter, web development like many businesses is plagued by recurring problems. The need for redoing code, scope creep, content nondelivery, lack of QA and usability testing and the time to do it, are things mentioned often in the chapter and in class. There appears to be a large gap between the business of web development and what best practices of web development should be.

Reading E-Commerce only confirmed what I have noticed about myself when I have shopped online. If you use a search engine, you are more likely to shop only for what you are specifically looking for but if you use a specific site such as E-Bay or Amazon, you can easily lose your "self-regulation" and end up buying those Paul Greene shoes that you didn't know you needed. The implication for marketers that the recreational shopper was not necessarily the desired shopper really caught my attention. I would have thought they were the perfect impulse shopper but the time browsing, using server space, leaving without buying and returning unwanted goods makes them sound almost normal!

As in the bricks and mortar world, where it took a long time for accessibility to buildings to be standardized, the author in Standards and accessibility Compliance explains the difficulty in developing a website that not only addressed what the standards for accessibility should be but also was in and of itself accessible. Makes one realize how much we all take for granted. I enjoyed reading this article and found it thought provoking and a breath of fresh air after those deficient self-regulating shoppers.

Legacy Businesses in Web 2.0

2006-02-13T08:04:00.000-08:00

I year ago, I heard a presentation by Joe Esposito, a former editor, publisher and someone who knows a lot about the scholarly publishing business. His talk was about scholarly publishing and what things like Open Access and User based Web pages had to do with scholarly publishing as the audience knew it. What he said to us was even more applicable today, not just to scholarly publishers but to many other businesses.

He told us that we were what he considered legacy businesses. Even though we had moved to online publishing, we were no longer innovating. We dug in our heels when it came to anything that threatened copyright and we refused to negotiate with what we considered the oppostion, the Open Access movement. We were only innovative when we were forced to be and our business models had not changed in probably fifty years. Our businesses had matured and now we were/are static, we're dinasaurs. When I think back to the end of the presentation, there was polite applause and no questions. I don't think anyone believed him or they were like me, stunned.

I am remembering this following the readings, particularly Dave Rogers, Mistaking the Forest for the Trees and The Forester Report on Give Customers Short Paths to What they Want. Like many other businesses, the publishers who moved scholarly publishing to online were business men and women not prepared for what was to come. Unfortunately, many of these same people are still in charge today and they are not paying attention to Web 2.0 or their users.

Three of Roger's points Share What We Know; Break New Ground; and Move Beyond Site-Centeredness speak directly to publishers. The major stumbling block for all publishers now is mapping a business plan that can encompass these three points and still make money. To do that, they will need to rethink copyright, rethink who the user is and will be in five years, rethink peer-review and rethink what scholarly publishing is supposed to mean.

This could be one of the most exciting times for publishers or one of the worst. It only depends on a few getting on the Cluetrain.

Norman Doors and the function of design

2006-02-06T21:04:00.000-08:00

You will never open a door again without thinking about Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things, at least not if you read his book. The same goes for light switches, teapots and just about any other everyday thing you come across in your daily life. Norman takes apart modern conveniences, showing how they are not always the convenience we think they are and he also is delightfully reassuring in explaining that it's not all your fault that you cannot seem to get all these items to work correctly.

But it isn't just that he explains why they don't work, he goes far beyond that, delving into how we interpret the world and how our thought patterns influence how we work out how to use things. He's fascinating and an absolute kick to read. All the irritations I have with design, he does too. So I admit, I have become a Normanite and I want to tell everyone about him. Everyone should read this book and then walk through their house or apartment and notice all the stuff that doesn't really work but we accept anyway.

There is a store downtown Seattle called Design Concern and it carries very cool gift items from across the world but more often from Japan and Europe. It just reinforces the idea about the different ways design developed here in the US as opposed to across the pond. Always makes me want to move to Europe.

It's all about Structure

2006-01-29T20:57:00.000-08:00

The Readings for this week Blueprints for the Web: organization for the Masses and Hierarchy and Contrast: The Basis of Good Design zero in on the need for well developed structure in building good design. Creating the road signs for the user to easily pick out, sending them on the path to where they want to go, no easy task. What is so elementary becomes near impossible or so it seems but both authors have solid ideas for ways to begin. Halverson and Wodtke come at the equation from different angles but essentially they are both arguing for developing an clear outline that not you the developer but all the users can easily understand.

They both argue for letting the user see the most important information first and then creating a hierarchy that makes sense to the users. If it only makes sense to the developer, it's probably a bad design. Continue by ensuring that the organization remains simple and the more complicated the site, the more important this becomes. I think of this as keeping the site clean.

Use color and contrast but sparingly. Color and contrast divert the brain to look here or there but if used to much they cause overload. Think Audrey Hephurn not Paris Hilton. What they are describing is the basis of all good design. But good design does not happen easily, it never has and we can just go back to Winston for a reminder that the best design does not always survive.

What is intriguing is that the most clever, ingenious, gorgeous, workable, usable, smartest designs always appear the most deceiving simple. I find this universal in good design which lends credence to the idea that there must be best practices for designers. At the top of this list would be creating a clear road map or what Halverson calls hierarchy and what Wodtke uses a card sort to achieve that same idea. Side by side with the hierarchy is that it is designed by the user, in the sense that the designer works at creation from the user's standpoint not from a designer standpoint.

Two things here, Drew's remark about a sense of naivete, finding that again, I believe this is a trait all designers must have and naivete is probably one of the first things lost in one's career (unfortunately true for most of us. Second, Norman's thoughts on how hard it is to change design after they have become part of the culture - a most important thought when trying to create software of web pages that are better designs than what has come before. We get used to the crummy design and find it hard to break out of the old habit.

Cluetrain Manifesto

2006-01-22T18:06:00.000-08:00

As a student of communications and someone exceeding interested in marketing, do I think the Cluetrain Manifesto is still relevant today? Yes, the idea that markets are conversations is still fundamental, it was before Cluetrain and it will be long after Cluetrain.

Do I think companies have changed and are paying attention to the conversation online? Companies that always listened to their customers are probably still listening and companies that try to manipulate the market are still manipulating.

Has the philosophy of Cluetrain changed how we communicate with others in business? Speaking as a vendor, it has eliminated down time. Response to problems needs to be immediate, we are available to our customers 24/7. Speaking as a customer I don't see large corporations be any more responsive than they have been in the past. That said, I love buying airline tickets online just like that.

Has the philosophy changed the message? I don't know that it is the philosophy as much as it is the medium. I cannot easily speak to my clients in Amsterdam, Singapore, New Delhi or Rio because of language and time differences. I can email them in English and develop good working trusting relationships in a few short days. So yes the medium changed the message but I don't think that is was a direct response to Cluetrain. I see it as the natural progression of change brought about by technology.

Maybe if I had read this when it came out I would have been more impressed but I found it underwhelming in its philosophy and overwhelming in its verbosity. I felt bludgeoned by it and by the end I was so sick of it, I had a difficult time trying to write about it objectively.

Affordances and Gestalt

2006-01-21T17:29:00.000-08:00

We humans are too clever for our own good. As I understand the Gestalt Theory of Design, humans preceive the visual world by manipulating what we see so that it fits our sense of how we think it should be. I don't mean we are actively manipulating what we see but that on an unconscious level, our mind is working to bring order to what we are looking at. Apparently we like order and we like things to be whole, so we want design to be orderly and fit patterns that go, God only knows how far back. It must go back to our primitive brainstem and have something to do with survival and sensing danger by noting that something was out of place in nature. Moving on, as we became more sophisticated and large brained beings that sense of orderliness found its way into the objects and tools we created. It is inherent in human nature and it's manifestations are to be found in all cultures.

How the Gestalt Theory of Design fits in with Don Norman and Affordances is that when we go to use a tool or a software program or anything humanly designed, there are perceived or real "actionable properties" between us and the object. These are affordances. If we accept the Gestalt theory of design than affordances are those properties of a things that help us to see the whole and order of the design, whether this in fact is the case or not. I read on another website a good example of this, the real properties of a rubber ball are its shape, its rubberness, its color etc. It's perceived properties are what that ball should be used for and the actionable properties or affordance are the relationship between the properties and the person acting on the ball. So an affordance helps us figure out the "thing" we are trying to use, it helps us see the whole beyond the parts and make sense of the "thing" in our world. The faster and faster our world changes, the more technology takes over, the more difficult it becomes for us to make sens of the whole to create the order that primitive part of us still craves. Affordances give us the clues to the order.

It seems to me a very complicated way of saying that good design takes into account humankind's needs for order and wholeness and fulfills those needs in the simplest, most straightforward and pleasing manner. Taking into account the unconscious, good design solves complex questions and invites discovery at the same time it does not thwart human curiosity. It encourages rather than discourages.

I needed to let all of this percolate for a while, the first time I read Norman I didn't get what was so special. It was only after putting Gestalt and Affordance together that I realized what a pretty piece of insight his idea is. My apprecation of good design has jumped tenfold.

Websites

2006-01-10T21:11:00.000-08:00

http://www.worldcitizenguide.com is what gave me the idea of combining Drew, Brian's and Jyotsna's ideas together and do a seattlecitizenguide for students. The opening page reminds me of a James Bond movie preview but I liked the simplicity of the site. The setup could be easily expanded to add more pages. I particularly like the design of and colors, it gives one the sense of one person all alone among many and at the same time its giving you a place to find out how not to be alone. I'm thinking the seattlestudentguide could be quite useful and it certainly could be continually expanded overtime.

http://www.mercycorps.org is a good site for a nonprofit idea. I like this site because even though they present a ton of information, navigation s straightforward and well presented. The photos of the children draw you in and you want to know more. Like the use of stories and its not just asking for money but giving information on progress made. Colors are warm and inviting.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/communities/onionstreet is another good example of a student oriented site even if its for young students. It is pleasant mix of actual typeface and more graphical typeface. It has the kind of creativity I remember enjoying as a kid and its obvious that it knows lots of kids are by themselves afterschool and need some company while doing schoolwork. Very interactive, the artwork page is really fun and would definitely be a draw to kids.

Class Project

2006-01-10T19:51:00.000-08:00

I'm torn between Brian's and Drew's Crew. Drew's crew is more community oriented but Brian's idea is appealing and makes me smile. I had one other idea, kind of a combo, use the idea of story telling and immigration but restrict it to students and start with our class. The site could be used to help orient students new to Seattle. It would detail not only the unofficial aspects of student life but it could also detail Seattle's many highlights and lowlights.

We have lots of resources in our classmates for giving advice about Seattle quirks, for telling stories about what was difficult in moving to Seattle, and even how Seattle and the Univ is different from even five years ago. It could incorporate podcasts of interviews and stories of students life back home. It could be expanded to neighborhoods, restaurants. It goes on and on.

Just tell me what to do

2006-01-10T18:23:00.000-08:00

In my work, I do some design, some marketing, some copy editing and some managing editor type tasks. I know lots of software programs a little and only a few really well. By default, (probably because I'm the oldest one in the office), I am the liaison with our vendors, our printer and our online publisher etc. Because of that I often have to do what I call the icky work, telling a vendor they have lost the job, dealing with employee breakdowns, the usual stuff.

Because of that, I do not want to have any kind of managing role in our project. I also do not want to moderate anything or anyone. I don't usually collaborate with anyone in my work and that is what I really want to learn more about, the process of creating something together. I'm particularly interested in getting enough diverse ideas going that something really new and creative evolves. It is all about the process!

In our office, Suzanne, our IT enfant terrible does all the really hard computer stuff and once in a while I understand what she's telling me. I would like to understand what she is telling me more often and maybe even have a real conversation with her. So number two on my list of goals is learning the technical side of digital design. I want to learn the back end of the web page and I would like to be able to discuss the technical stuff intelligently with others. I want to see if I even have any geek matter in my left brain and if I don't then how can I get around that working with technical people.

My third goal is learning podcasting and the basics of Dreamweaver. I'd say I want to learn Flash but I don't even know enough about it to think that I should. So I'll do anything that has to do with the technical side of the site and I'd like to stay away from the writing, editing and design. And as I said earlier no managing or moderating.

Messy Communication

2006-01-08T20:35:00.000-08:00

I'm really excited about working in a group on a design project and Notes on Design Practice only added fuel to my fire. Before last quarter, I never would have said that but my fellow cohorts really blew me away with the amount of knowledge and expertise they had and I can only think that I will learn so much from them in a collaborative setting. My first Ah Ha moment is sort of along these lines. I was thinking about the emphasis Erickson places on the communication involved in design and sort of wondered how anything ever got designed and built. There are so many personalities, working styles, knowledge bases that it just seems like chaos. Then I thought about last quarter and how different we all were, how I didn't always "get" what everyone was talking about, sometimes what people said was disturbing to me but that somehow it still worked and we all jelled as a group. By the end of the quarter, we probably all could name at least one of each other's strengths and weaknesses. We knew who to go to with questions about certain subjects. I thought that's how design and ideation comes about. It takes a certain amount of being uncomfortable and push pulling for the sparks to fly, for the creative juices to get going.

That's my goal this quarter - learning the group design process.

Coming from online publishing, my Ah Ha about the publishing team chapter was how all the key positions areas of focus become extremely fluid when the team is small. There is much more collaboration and less delineation of responsibilities when fewer people are responsible for all the work to be done. It's the never a dull moment type of job. It can be stimulating but it can easily become overwhelming. The most overwhelming job is that of the managing editor. They have the responsibility to keep the jobs moving, to know where every job is on the schedule, who is doing what and when it has to be done. Most key positions are just that key but I think the Managing editor is "the" key to the publication. They have to be a little bit of everything and they have to be great communicators.

The Tragedy of the Commons

2005-11-13T19:06:00.000-08:00

"Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work-whereas, economics represents how it actually does work."
Freakonomics by
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

In 1973, the US Supreme Court ruled in Roe v Wade that a woman had a right to make decisions about her body without the state intervening. A legal abortion was now available for less than $100. In the 1990s the United States had a dramatic drop in the crime rate, particularly violent crime. The five states which had legalized abortion two years prior to the Supreme Court decision saw their crime rates decline two years earlier than the rest of the country.

I think people can act in their own best interests and those of the state, we just need to get out of their way.

In 1966, Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictator of Romania outlawed abortion. In the year following, the birthrate of Romania doubled. The cohort born after the outlawing of abortion were the poorest of a nation of poor people and would do worse in every measurable way; lower test scores, no jobs and many criminals. In 1989, thousands of poor people took to the streets of Romania to protest the corrupt regime. The thousands were led by the young, most between the ages of thirteen and twenty. Ceausescu was the only communist dictator disposed during the breakdown of the Soviet Bloc that met a violent death, a bullet to the head.

That's what happens if you don't get out of the way.

The World is Flat

2005-10-30T18:56:00.000-08:00

Somewhere amongst the flattened world hyperbole and wringing of hands in Thomas Friedman’s, The World is Flat, there is a great book. I think he is dead on in describing the changing world of technology, the flattening of the world economy as a result of the dot.com bubble and bust, and the uneasiness we as Americans should feel about the state of our national leadership and future economy. He is a great story teller and his anecdotes are as fascinating as they are illuminating. Where he flounders is when he strays to far from technology, remaking the history of the world to fit his theories.

Chapter One

In Chapter One Friedman lays out his theory of globalization and its three historical phases: from the time of Columbus up to 1800, 1800 up to 2000, and 2000 forward. The first phase as the time of nation building works but collapsing 1800 up to 2000 as the period of multinational companies only works so far. Friedman discusses the early diffusion of transportation and telecommunications on up to the early version of the web, listing this period as the realization of a true world economy. He credits the agent of this to be multinationals which may be partially true but even so without continued nation building and colonization, the multinationals would never have thrived as they did.

Chapter One yields a plethora of examples of all that has flattened. The Reuters and Wall Street outsourcing were new to me as was the importance of news blogging. I erroneously thought of bloggers as people who had too much time on their hands and wondered who really read them? Friedman and the Wired article "Blogs of War" by John Hockenberry were my dope slaps to wake up. I am impressed by the innovation of those passionate enough to go out and become their own news organization like Bill Ardolino of InDCJournal but what happens to the rest of us if standard news organizations go away. Or will there be a new suppression put into place on such innovation, as the US soldiers mention in Wired? I have no anwers but my gut feeling is we won't be better off without standard news organizations.

I was familiar with or had read about much of the other outsourcing discussed. I understand it and I know it is inevitable yet like Friedman I wonder what happens to the level B accountant? I thought Jaithirth “Jerry “ Rao’s of the Indian company MphasiS comments about the level B accountants who does not want to be creative and inventive, “we must be honest about it” “it is difficult to look into the eyes of the accountant and say this is what is going to be. We should not trivialize that. We must deal with it and talk about honestly…” extremely sad, genuinely thoughtful and touching to hear come from an Indian entrepenour.

Flattener #1

As in Chapter One, Friedman theory is troublesome when he makes generalizations about politics, globalization and what exactly brings about certain global situations. In detailing what brought down the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Soviet Union, he attributes “one factor as first among equals, it was the information revolution that began in the early- to mid 1980s.” No mention of Afghanistan which along with the Cold War nearly bankrupted the USSR or the fact that the government corruption was so bad, its citizens would no lonter put up with it. Friedman becomes caught in this loop and every deregulation and democratizing of governments is tangentially linked to the fall of the Berlin Wall. India’s deregulation of the private sector happened because they were running out of hard currency, it was economics which the wars with Pakistan had far more to do with that than the fall of the Berlin Wall. I understand the metaphor, I agree with the metaphor but it doesn’t always fit and using it carelessly undermines the power of his argument.

Flatterner #2

On the other hand, whenever Friedman sticks to technology and the globalization of, his writing glows. The Mosaic browser and the story of Netscape changing and flattening the world by changing how we interacted with others on the Internet is perfect. It is clear concise and gathers all the disparate pieces of the story together. It is the best example of an innovation (Mosaic) and the diffusion of an innovation (Netscape release of the browser) with the resulting law of suppression (Microsoft Internet Explorer.) I ate up his explanation of how the dot.com bubble and bust, the telecom deregulation and the wiring of the world with fiber-optic cable all converged to produce the flattening process. Friedman clearly understands technology and is never better than when he is explaining it.

Two last comments: I wish he had kept to technology and tried not to be so encompassing and I wish he addressed the issues of what happens to those who lose. He worries about them but don't we all. I think it would have been a stronger and more fascinating book if he had just stuck with the flat techological world and all that it encompasses for those working.

When I wrote the above I had not finished the book so I need to amend it a bit. My final thought is that there still is a great book in here but the one he wrote is better than I gave him credit for but still way too encompassing. It needed to be pared down and kept to the focus of the flat analogy. The environment, WTO, geopolotics and everything else are interesting but he doesn't have enough time to address them and so major areas of concern get short shift. I'm glad I read it, I argued this book with myself for two weeks. Schizophrenic but lots of fun.

Ecologizing Mobile Media

Perhaps because of Rheingold's background, he is far more skeptical of new technology and thus willing to see the plus and minuses of it. His appropriation of Postman is inspired.

Moving Faster - Sorta

2005-10-24T06:32:00.000-07:00

In technologies of the third mediamorphosis, Roger Fidler examines the speed at which electrical technology went from innovation to critical mass and the underlying forces driving or suppressing the technologies. Winston covers the same material in more detail and by reading both, one understands more fully the Diffusion Theory.

According to Fidler telegraphy, telephony, phonograph, radio, television and computers all charted a similar course beginning in the early 1800's. Starting with experiments in electricity and moving forward with ideation using electrical charges. As further experimentation happened, each field continued to grow depending on its needs and each field fed off of the others, using innovation to creep or leapfrog forward as the case may be.

What is striking about the diffusion is that the pace from innovation to supervening social necessity is not necessarily different in any of these fields, but the rate from there to critical mass and forward increases the farther one moves into the twentieth century. In fact the speed as which the radio and television gain majority in the U.S. is somewhat astounding.

It is interesting than to consider the chart from class of what technology has attained success as shown by the S curve. I'm not sure what it says that DVD players are the only technology to have reached self sustaining adoption in quite such a short period of time similar to that of radio and television but it is somthing to ponder.

The two other interesting thoughts from Fidler were how the technology was used to bring people closer together into the "global village" at the same time as the technology was used to create a homogenous white male middle class culture. Disgusting but fascinating in how thinks work.

I would venture that that is what is so scarey about the Web to many people. It has the capacity to bring us together in ways untold at the same time that it can create chasms of diverging opinions and so far it cannot be very well regulated.

Yahoo Adds Blogs to News Search Page

2005-10-11T12:28:00.000-07:00

Is this good news or bad? There, I said it "news." But it is news and I wonder if news organizations are cringing as they envision their market shares slip even more. I have no answers to any of this but it certainly provokes questions left and right. Who will validate the blogs for accuracy? Is this the beginning (or middle or end) for newspapers, etc.? Will bloggers be any less partisan in their news reporting? Do average folks care that you can get blogs from our troops in Iraq giving you almost up to the minute information on fire fights and anything else you want to know about the war? What are the consquences for a country if news organizations go away? Is there already too much news (see Informing Ourselves to Death)? Will this further partition the US with blog readers left and right on one side and newspaper readers on the other and then break that down even further among political parties? Can non propressional reporters of the news take the place of professionals? If bloggers become the de facto news reporters for everyone, what happens after that? See it's neverending. This could be a thesis, hmm...

Introduction: Media Technology and Society

2005-10-10T18:50:00.000-07:00

In the Introduction to his book Media Technology and Society, Brian Winston sets forth that the history of technology has been evolutionary and contrary to contemporary thought there is not a revolution going on in technology. He further posits that even as change happens faster and faster, the law of suppression of radical potential, applies brakes and accelerators to insure that change will be controlled enough for the social sphere to survive and perhaps prosper.

By the social sphere, he means the culture and community where the technology is changing. So for example, he explains how single track train system in England brought about the need for the telegraph. Life in England was changed by both technologies but survived and adapted.

Winston explains how "supervening social necessities," convene to push various prototypes from the experiment stage out into the social sphere where they are either accepted, rejected and eventually classified as an invention and then moved on into production. To accept Winston's viewpoint, is to accept that no matter how chaotic this evolution of technology is, there is an order and logic to its innovation.

This is a really interesting book to read in parallel with Thomas L. Friedman's The World is Flat. I don't think Friedman would agree with Winston and I am not sure that I do either. But then I don't always agree with Friedman either. I do find it hard to reconcile the shifting, spinning, whirling dervish world of Friedman with Winston's somewhat orderly and logical world. What it really may be is that it is impossible to reconcile their divergent views of the time it takes for change to happen. Change in Winston's paradigm only happens as fast as society allows it but in Friedman's world change seems to be like Moore's law, it just keeps accelerating.

Internet killed the telephone

2005-10-09T20:23:00.000-07:00

Okay I admit I am a little confused. In The World is Flat, Thomas L.Friedman describes the Japanese cellular giant NIT DoCoMo and how it offers total interoperability with its cell phones. The Japanese, particularly young Japanese women, have integrated cell phones into their lives in place of PCs. Young Japanese run their lives by their cell phones. Supposedly, Asia is on the leading edge of cellular technology, far ahead of the US and Europe, so how does Japan cellular technology fit in with the Economist article? That's what I don't get. If cell phones are as entrenched in Japanese culture as it appears than doesn't it make sense that NIT DoCoMo would already be working on VOIP.

According to the Economist, VOIP is a huge threat to mobile phone companies but it seems that would depend on where that cell phone company does business. If it's in Japan, it's probably already figured out how to incorporate VOIP into its business model. I'm guessing here, but I think the Economist article is slanted far in the direction of western countries and not Asia. that's too bad, it would have been a much more intriguing article if they had a more global perspective.

If it isn't slanted towards the West, and indeed, all global cellular companies are sitting rather precariously, than it missed a great opportunity to talk about the cellular market in Asia.

Cheers

2005-10-05T21:27:00.000-07:00

I'd like to welcome you to my blog on scholarly publishing, where it's been and maybe where it's going, as in on the Web. For now, this is my main focus in the University of Washington's Master's program in Digital Media. But anything can happen...