Archive for the ‘Design’ Category
Thursday, January 28th, 2010
Often when working on projects there are two opposites types of personalities at work: Idealists versus Pragmatists. Often both sides show great animosity for each other. What’s so problematic about battles between idealists and pragmatists is that great solutions to problems are most often combinations of these two approaches. Results come from elegant combinations of pragmatism and idealism. Dogma is the enemy…
Elegance is our best friend. Now before the Dogmatists (Idealists + Pragmatists) claim the elegance of their respective approaches, lets look at the actual definition of elegance: pleasingly ingenious and simple, related to Latin’s eligere, ‘to choose, or select’. Elegance is choosing or selecting a simple and ingenious solution. Nothing more, nothing less. Idealists over-design, in love with excess flexibility. Pragmatists under-achieve by rushing to action, in love with excess quantity.
Elegance is in finding a fine middle point between these extremes. How to achieve elegance in software design and implementation is not always intuitive or straight forward. One the the best talks on this topic is Jim Weirich’s from Mountain West Ruby Conference 2008. He skillfully combines the approaches of the noble blue collar pragmatists with the space-age white collar idealists. He advocates a path that does not over-design, or over-implement. He points out that a solution must be appropriate to be elegant.
James Joyce said that great writing comes from Wholeness, Harmony and Radiance. I think he meant understanding the problem, creating the right goals, and selecting or choosing the elegant path to meet those goals. It sounds easy, but simple is much harder than complicated. If one persists, a certain timeless beauty becomes possible. This feeling transcends elegance, and feels like Grace from the constant struggle of the programmers trade.
Often when working on projects there are two opposites types of personalities at work: Idealists versus Pragmatists. Often both sides show great animosity for each other. What’s so problematic about battles between idealists and pragmatists is that great solutions to problems are most often combinations of these two approaches. Results come from elegant combinations of pragmatism and idealism. Dogma is the enemy…
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Monday, December 28th, 2009
I have not been writing, nor reading for that matter, over the last several months. So I was excited to have Santa bring me a copy of Phil Bolgers’s Boats with an Open Mind. Spending the last few days leafing through the work of Phil Bolger reminds me that design is not a job for wimps, or for folks afraid to have strong opinions.
While pleased with a new position at Micron Technology, I have been working an uncharted area of my trade furiously for several months. When I took this position my wife wisely advised me to drop other pursuits in the interest of focus. Like so many things, she helped me remember the value of doing one thing at a time. Phil Bolger clearly understood the value of focus.
Phil’s work combines the simplicity of the Model T, with the craftsmanship of the masterful New England boat builders of the last two-hundred years. The ability to relentlessly pursue design, and understand the sometimes subtile difference between success and failure, stood Phil well.
It is with sadness I report that Phil died this year. His story ends with the clean lines and simplicity that marked his work and his life. Not one to shirk a challenge Phil left this world violently. I wish him godspeed on his next expedition.
Tags: Phil+Bolger
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Friday, September 11th, 2009
Recently I bought a nifty little USB charger for my iPod touch and mobile phone. You can build these things, but I was in a rush, and Radio Shanty had them on sale. I was so pleased at how tiny my vacation bag was without my enormous collection of wall warts.
We get to our mountain cabin, tuck the baby into bed, and plug in the charger. Ack! The Blue LED of death! Why must almost every electronics manufacturer put these obnoxious super-bright blue LEDs into everything. Is it really a feature?
Sure you can say “night light”. But what night light makes one wince? I once worked on a pair of computer servers from a reputable maker. The blue LED on the front of the box was so bright it hurt (not kidding) whenever I failed to turn my head before approaching the machines.
When I looked inside these servers, I found a light pipe over one foot long to make the bright blue light come directly out of the center of the machine (straight into my face). So the design team on the computer actually worked long and hard to make this death ray come out of the center of the control panel. This is really quite far away from the “pilot light” concept, the little stupid light that tells one a machine has power.
Of course the solution is black electrical tape. However I would urge design teams to send the marketing girl/guy packing when they pop in to ask for a bright blue LED on something. Apple has the right idea with pilot lights, dainty soft, unfocused lights, discretely hid on the front of devices. Design is about removing that which does not belong as well as adding what does. Unless there is a compelling reason to put a blue death ray on something, it’s better left off.
Tags: apple, Belkin, Blue+LED, high+brightness+LED, Light+Emitting+Diode
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Thursday, August 13th, 2009
So having been careful about requirements, prototyping iteratively, testing with real users early on and getting it out the door quickly, what now? No doubt users are calling, or emailing questions, feature suggestions, raves, rants and some, hopefully occasional, hate mail. There are some naysayers at this point hollering that it went out the door too soon. Be calm…
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Wednesday, August 5th, 2009
I just off the phone with an old High School chum. We got to talking about Bottom-Up Thinking as a way to set direction when a situation is unclear or changing too quickly. It was in the context of career, so I gave a lot of unsolicited advice … ‘natch.
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Tags: agile, agile+software, agile+software+development, google, software+design
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Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
From the Google Chrome OS announcement:
Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web.
Recently, I failed to notice a Google malware notice on some search results. In a scene straight from the late 90’s, I clicked on my browser, it crashed, followed by Windows crashing too. Been a while since I’ve seen that blue screen of death. Kinda missed it…not!
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Tags: Acme, Chrome+OS, google, netbook, Plan9, Rob+Pike
Posted in Design, Software | 1 Comment »
Thursday, June 25th, 2009
Recently my family descended on me for a visit. It was nice. Good weather. Good times. However, I knew that my father (a talented engineer) and my nephew (a budding nerd genius) would need something more than pin-the-tail-on-the-WALL-E to keep them occupied. Luckily I had a plan.
I went to the Maker Shed and bought a Drawdio. Then I deposited the two nerds in my office with a soldering iron and some spare tools. An hour later, our new Drawdio appeared (much to my wife’s consternation). We now have one of the most irritating nerdy little musical instruments ever conceived of.
However, a grandfather got to teach a teenager how to solder and test an electronic circuit for the first time. The feedback from the easy to build Drawdio is immediate and a riot to play with. Yup, you guessed it, priceless…
Tags: drawdio, electronic+art, electronic+kit, electronic+toys, lady+ada, make+magazine, maker+shed
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Friday, June 12th, 2009
There is talk about stimulus packages, and economic recovery. There is also talk about cheap offshore labor and sometimes slave labor. There is talk of more wars. It seems to me that these are issues our country has had to deal with again and again in its short life. We also have some new issues like global warming, finding sustainable energy and global (possibly nuclear) terrorism.
Being builders, we Americans tend to create new stuff to work through our problems. While we need a new spurt of innovation to meet new needs, I think that we also need to think, as a society, or as communities, on how to sustain innovation. I think in the process we need to teach the world to fish. The way to accomplish this is to funnel stimulus funds to inventors. Some ideas: (more…)
Tags: Bruce+Sterling, fabrication, innovation, invent, invention, Neil+Gershenfeld, save+the+world, stimulus, stimulus+money
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Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
Designing data into art may be a key web skill in the future. As we get more and more data, companies will need ever more attractive ways to lure information saturated users. While certainly this kind of design has been around for a while, the newest work made for the Internet, visualized using Internet data is cutting edge great.
Tags: Albert+Einstein, art, data+visualization, information+saturation
Posted in Analytics, Design, Software | No Comments »
Thursday, June 4th, 2009
Not long ago the idea of usability was new to web designers. Now almost anyone in business today will need to start thinking about usability. Whether crafting an HTML message to customers, or evaluating a new product’s concept, usability is not just a topic for designers anymore. Luckily Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think is the classic book on web usability and can be read in no time.
Don’t Make Me Think doesn’t just address usability technicalities, though it does that. It also covers a few simple usability principles that will keep most doing routine work out of trouble all the time. Ironically, one of the most helpful things about the book is the advice it has on dealing with conflict between a web site’s creative, editorial and executive staff.
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Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
So I have watched the Google Wave introduction video and demo. You should too. If Google is successful at building, attracting developers to, and deploying this system, it very well might be the next HTTP. Web servers, domain names and all the other cargo of the Internet might just up and float away.
Now Google is capable of accomplishing this. They might also manage to screw it up. Google Wave is such a large venture, I doubt seriously if anyone will be able to predict success or failure. However, Google Wave is so important that to ignore it might just be fatal to an Internet business. That’s something to think about.
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Tags: google, google+maps, google+wave, HTTP, Jens+Rasmussen, Lars+Rasmussen, open+source, Tim+Berners-Lee, web+20
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Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
For years high technology vendors have been selling been selling us, well, technology. It’s like being given fire, when you want a stove. What we need is technology thoughtfully applied. You know, designed. The Teach Me Talking Alarm Clock is a nice example.
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Tags: gadgets, innovation, micro-controllers, microcontrollers
Posted in Design, Software | 1 Comment »
Sunday, May 31st, 2009
Garnet Hertz’s ConceptLab has a project with a dissected frog, its legs animated and controlled by a tiny webserver. Yikes…
Tags: art, Concept+Lab, frog, Garnet+Hertz, micro-controllers, microcontrollers, web-server, web+server
Posted in Design, Software | 1 Comment »
Friday, May 29th, 2009
Yesterday I heard the bad news about a young man, with a young family, committing suicide. Describing such a tragedy is best left to poets. I cannot write words to do justice to such a situation. However, the story changed my opinion about a mostly weak book I just read. The book Wired For Survival gave me some hopeful thoughts, and reminded me of all the hopeless situations people are faced with.
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Tags: affecting+change, hearts+minds, Margaret+Polski, suicide, winning+hearts+minds, Wired+For+Survival
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Thursday, May 28th, 2009
It is said that if you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump out; however if you put the frog into a pot of cold water and slowly bring the water to a boil, the frog will contently get warmer until it dies. I don’t care to know if this is true of frogs, but it is surely true of all companies and a large number of humans. It is our nature. But it doesn’t have to be our nurture.
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Tags: 1950s, 1980s, 1990s, apple, bankruptcy, boiled+frog, detroit, General+Motors, GM, IBM+PC, Macintosh, personal+computer, San+Jose, Silicon+Valley, Sillycon+Valley
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