While the ethnographer is interested in understanding human behavior as it is reflected in the lifeways of diverse communities of people, the designer is interested in designing artifacts that will support the activites of these communities.
Reference: Blomberg J., Schukler D. ed., Namioka A. ed. (1993) Ethnographic Field Methods and Their Relation to Design. Participatory Design: Principles and Practices. London, Hove. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers. p. 123.
Wired post an interesting article by Leander Kahney titled, Futurist Fears End of Innovation, which comments on the talk by Howard Rheingold at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and his views that the freedom of technologists to innovate is under attack as never before.
Commenting on legislative and political opposition to Innovation and also the influence by music and movie industries, Rheingold mentions that the explosive growth of Internet-connected PCs, handhelds and cell phones has dramatically altered the cultural landscape.
Lucy Sushman, who received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science last year, is doing a talk in Sydney titled ‘Embodied Agencies at the Interface’. The talk will be held at 3.30 pm, Wednesday 30 April at UTS City campus, Broadway (Building 2, Room 4.13)
Further Reading: Human/Machine Reconsidered – Lucy Suchman
Clay Shirky has posted an interesting blog entry called, Social Software and the Politics of Groups, which looks at the political approaches, group experiences, and barriers to public development of tools such as weblogs, wikis, chat and instant messaging by comparing these to old systems and old assumptions.
Social Software are different when compared to other traditional groupware and knowledge management tools, which are based on pre-defined roles, workflows, and categories.
A company that provides such a service is SocialText.
So what is happening for Earth Day in Australia you ask? Well, there is an event on Saturday 26 April, 2003 at the Manly Mermaid Pool.
There are some great interviews on the topic of Brand, Design and Business at the GAIN 2.0 (AIGA) website. Some of the interviews include, Elsie Maio on business ethics and financial stability, Andrew Zollie on the future of brands and research, Ivy Ross on building new brands and Creative Director of the NBA Tom O’Grady on sports branding.
Simon Rutgers from PeopleSoft forwarded me this link of the KartOO metasearch engine which renders results as a visual interface. The algorithm of KartOO launches the query to a set of search engines, gathers the results, compiles them and represents them in a series of interactive maps. It is an interesting visual way of displaying search results.
Here is a related visual search by Anacubis which uses the Google Search API to render search results visually.
There is a media festival on this long weekend in Paddington, Sydney called, Interface. It is a student run festival with over 70 speakers from all around Australia. Interface is a festival of ideas on the future of the media, democracy, and education.
There is a great article in Boxes and Arrows this week, which explains the idea behind ontologies in the Semantic Web, which is being pushed by Tim Berners-Lee.
The article titled, Building a Metadata-Based Website has been written by Brett Lider and Anca Mosoiu and discusses the differences between Meta-data websites and traditional CMS by looking at the advantages between the two and looking at business models that could result. The article also contains a great reference list of further readings on the Semantic Web.
Here is an interesting discussion I came across while reading George H. Williams blog site post on whether it is accurate to call print an information technology?
Dave Phillips from Cafedave.net has posted a great link to an article which comments on the end of the “click here” hyperlink. The article makes reference to Donald Norman and also his views on this.
Voodoo has officially been declared a religion in Haiti today. Here is a report from Channel4 in the UK and CBN News. Here are also some interesting articles on Haitian Voodoo, outlining misconceptions, beliefs, history and influence.
Here is an interesting article on Lev Manovich’s views on the mechanisms which move the information society. His book, The Language of New Media is the first systematic essay on the New Technologies of Communication. He sees the language of New Media as the vision of the world in contemporary society.
Lev Manovich recently Guest Lectured at the University of Sydney on Art and Culture in the Digital Age on April 4th and on his Research in Humanities and Social Sciences on April 15th.
There is an insightful and engaging blog post by Adrian Miles on why Television and not Cinema might be the opt approach which could formulate New Media in the future. Adrian comments that Television might have a more adoptable approach rather than Film, by commenting that bandwidth and the length-time issue will have influence.
The entry makes interesting references to attention, aesthetics, time, multi-tasking and online environments.
Prof. Alex Filippenko of the University of California at Berkeley and Dr. Luis Ho of the Carnegie Observatories have announced that a Massive Black Hole has been found which could change the scientific idea of spiral gallaxies.
The Gallaxy known as NGC 4395 is a flat pure-disk galaxy about 11 million light-years away in the Northern Hemisphere constellation of Canes Venatici. The discovery suggests that other pure-disk galaxies, thought to be devoid of supermassive black holes, may indeed have one.
