This guy was a designer at IBM for ten years, and after being laid off he reflects on what he was able to “learn, teach, discover, accomplish, survive” in that time. There’s good stuff here, and not just for big companies.
March 21, 2012
Items of Interest
Collecting amazing and interesting things on the web.
Page 49
“For the great task of Ecclesiastes is to expose the dynamic at work behind service to the powers, the pursuit of meaning and self-esteem through the cultural hero system. Who is Oz, the force behind the curtain pulling the levers of achievement, reputation, significance, and self-esteem? What Ecclesiastes shows us, in pulling back the curtain, is exactly what Ernest Becker has shown us: death is the force in the background driving the show.” “Because of this Ecclesiastes talks a lot about death. And for a culture dominated by a denial of death that topic can seem morbid and depressing. But think about how death is being used in Ecclesiastes. Death is being deployed to show the futility of the self-esteem project, that idolatry is, at root, a service to the angel of death. Ecclesiastes isn’t about existentialism and angst. Ecclesiastes is interested in smashing idols. Ecclesiastes is interested in exorcism, purging our soul of death-oriented spiritual strivings. Ecclesiastes is trying to get us to stand with St. Paul and declare that the self-esteem project is one big pile of ‘rubbish’:”
March 21, 2012
bible / ecclesiastes / hebrew-bible / richard-beck / theology
Experimental Theology: The Slavery of Death: Part 26, Ecclesiastes as Exorcism
Content Portability: Building an API is Not Enough
March 19, 2012
api / content management / content strategy / npr / programming
These days I hear a lot about NPR’s publishing strategy, and how it empowers them to quickly publish content to various types of devices and contexts. The thing is, I hadn’t really seen any specific examples of what, exactly, they do and how it’s so amazing. But here it is, in a series of posts from their Director of Application Development. And it truly is brilliant.
Content Modularity: More Than Just Data Normalization
March 19, 2012
api / content management / content strategy / npr / programming
These days I hear a lot about NPR’s publishing strategy, and how it empowers them to quickly publish content to various types of devices and contexts. The thing is, I hadn’t really seen any specific examples of what, exactly, they do and how it’s so amazing. But here it is, in a series of posts from their Director of Application Development. And it truly is brilliant.
COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere
March 19, 2012
api / content management / content strategy / npr / programming
These days I hear a lot about NPR’s publishing strategy, and how it empowers them to quickly publish content to various types of devices and contexts. The thing is, I hadn’t really seen any specific examples of what, exactly, they do and how it’s so amazing.But here it is, in a series of posts from their Director of Application Development. And it truly is brilliant.
We need to… ask “Where is it working?” when we consider content and functionality. Does this really enhance the user experience? How does this make good business sense?
March 18, 2012
a list apart / content strategy / design / mobile / user experience
“The question we should always be asking ourselves is: what information have we gathered that we can use to create a better experience and make our content more useful?”
March 13, 2012
From Jonny Ive: “A: We struggle with the right words to describe the design process at Apple, but it is very much about designing and prototyping and making. When you separate those, I think the final result suffers. If something is going to be better, it is new, and if it’s new you are confronting problems and challenges you don’t have references for. To solve and address those requires a remarkable focus. There’s a sense of being inquisitive and optimistic, and you don’t see those in combination very often.”
March 13, 2012
Sir Jonathan Ive: The iMan cometh – London Life – Life & Style – Evening Standard
“We need to relinquish control of our content as well, setting it free from the boundaries of a traditional web page to flow as needed through varied displays and contexts. Most conversations about structured content dive headfirst into the technical bits: XML, DITA, microdata, RDF. But structure isn’t just about metadata and markup; it’s what that metadata and markup mean.”
March 2, 2012
52weeksofux: Ghosts: invisible specters often thought to be trapped between worlds, left to torment the living or act as a messenger from the beyond. They invoke fear because we can’t touch them, can’t see them, and we don’t fully understand their existence—much like the mysterious design decisions that…
February 24, 2012