Archive for April, 2005
Is undesign the new design trend? Folks such as Garret Dimon and Tom Coates have redesigned their blogs to be über-minimal, leaving me feeling somewhat overdressed, so to speak. It’s not entirely accurate to say that they are ‘undesigned’ since clearly a lot of thought has gone into reducing the unnecessary and achieving maximum simplicity. Subtraction is monochrome (until you hover over links) and looks great. I like this trend - design striving toward transparency. A paring away of merely decorative elements. But at the same time, a certain boldness from the use of BIG headlines and pictures. And BIG buttons.
Beats In Space is the home of Matt Sweeney’s radio show on WNYU Radio, and it rocks (apart from the frames). You can download or stream his playlists and shows. Matt will be DJing at ‘And Did We Mention Our Disco?‘ in London’s passé Shoreditch on May 20. So if you like ‘punk, funk, no wave, rock and roll, fucked up house, sleazy electro or mutant disco’ I might see you there. It’s slightly Nathan Barleyesque, but not as much as you might think.
Janice Fraser at Adaptive Path neatly sums up the feeling of excitement in the web development community of late in her essay It’s a Whole New Internet. After the dot-com boom and bomb we are starting to see green shoots emerge, in the form of innovative and actually *useful* web site and web applications, many of them from the independent developer community - del.icio.us, flickr, wikipedia, basecamp, ta-da lists - but also from the unstoppable innovation machine that is google - gmail, google maps, google local, google suggest etc. And then we have the wonderful innovations which occur when independent developers are let loose on google’s API - combine google maps with craigslist property listings and you have this beautiful piece of genius from Paul Rademacher.
Those who stuck with this whole web lark after the bomb, because they truly loved the web and could see it’s real potential are starting to build the internet 2.0. They are doing this largely through building innovative applications to fulfil their own needs, rather than with a view to some mythical IPO. Which is nice. The recent emergence blinking into the spotlight of technologies such as xmlhttprequest (a.k.a. AJAX, which has actually been around for a couple of years) are allowing richer interactions on the client-side and will change the rulebook for us ‘interaction designers’ working the web. In many ways, design for web applications will come to more closely resemble traditional design for desktop application, with support for previously impossible tasks such as drag-and-drop, instant form validation, etc.
In fact, many übergeek web-folks (such as Evan Williams, CEO of ODEO) are more or less running their company on web apps. This, of course, rocks. You can pretty much work where you like (which if you have a wireless laptop is lots of places and more all the time), you have a web-based remote backup of all your project files (if you upload regularly, at least) and in a pinch you may not even need to use your own machine to get some work done. (Of course, some apps such as Photoshop and Flash will not be migrating to the web any time soon…)
Anyway, exciting times indeed to be a web designer - I’d better read a few books on XML. And maybe some Alan Cooper.
Aren’t gasometers cool? These are by the canal in Hackney. They go up and down, you know…
It is with extreme pleasure, excitement and general happiness that I can announce that as of Monday I will start my new job as web designer/builder (or maybe even ‘interaction designer’) for www.headshift.com.
To quote the headshift site:
"In an increasingly interconnected world, smarter, simpler online tools are needed to support meaningful social interaction.
Our job is to help organisations construct online communication projects, technologies and tools around the people they aim to serve."
In a nutshell, instead of using large, centralised, command-and-control style enterprise level applications such as, ooh, SharePoint, headshift take advantage of the readily available ’small pieces, loosely joined’ social software tools such as blogs, wikis, etc, essentially tackling the problem from a more emergent, bottom-up, but importantly *human-centered* perspective than that of the enterprise applications - i.e. moulding the tools to the ways people work and interact, rather than vice versa. It seems clear to me that the folks at headshift *get it*, which is really exciting. I’m looking forward to contributing towards projects which has a definite, measurable, positive social benefit, and if we can help bring forth the emergence of the noosphere in the meantime, that would be lovely.
I’m looking forward to getting more deeply into all this social networks/network theory/emergence/mutual synergy type stuff as part of my job; hopefully I will soon sound somewhat more plausible when I talk about it. Heh.
(Oh, and I’d like to extend thanks to Tom ‘Plasticbag‘ Coates, since I first spotted the job listing via his RSS feed. Isn’t that just terribly modern of me?)
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