As an Information Architect who has always embraced the “information” appelation but long been queasy about the “architecture” bit, imagine my surprise to come across* this wonderful article by Marvin J Taylor and Andrea Geyer about the long history of tension between librarians and architects around the design of libraries. The article documents the evolution…
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A Taxonomy Glitch
We’ve all been there–wracking our brains to come up with a descriptive label for a category and finding that the easiest way to describe the set is by what it ISN’T. Ideally in a carefully designed information architecture this will be relegated to iterative draft work and not make it into the live version of…
Read moreJill Lepore: What the Gospel of Innovation Gets Wrong
I’ve waxed poetic about my love affair with The New Yorker before, and this week’s issue is another one with several riveting long form pieces that I can’t wait to dig into. Jill Lepore offers a scathing critique of Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation theory. I have to confess that I haven’t actually read The Innovator’s…
Read moreWeekly Roundup
I’m going to begin by saying that I continue to believe a subscription to the New Yorker is about the cheapest thing you can buy in terms of the ratio of what you get out of it vs. what you spend. Seriously. I feel so strongly about this that I almost want to personally offer…
Read moreAkron UX Meetup Calendar 2014
Somehow fall snowballed into the holiday season and it’s now the polar vortex season. The Akron UX meetup is kicking into gear–we met at Panini’s on Kent on January 14 and discussed the idea of starting an informal book club. We’re currently running a survey to select our first book, which we will discuss in…
Read moreIt makes me want to weep!
This headline from the WSJ is utterly depressing: Groups Leading Insurance Sign-Ups Haven’t Tested Program’s Web Tool Even better is the sub-head: Some Say They Expect Computer Glitches (ya think?!) (see the story here) On the plus side, this article at least acknowledges the importance of testing, which perhaps would not have even registered as…
Read moreHow reading an article on Bustle made me a bit bipolar
I started reading this New Yorker piece about Bryan Goldberg with mild interest–he’s the 30 year old multi-millionaire founder of The Bleacher Report, a sports site it probably isn’t surprising I’d had never heard of as the demographic is described as “overwhelmingly male.” His latest venture-funded “business” plan is to create a parallel media site intended…
Read moreUpcoming Events
Midwest UX is now accepting registrations. It looks like it’s shaping up to be a great event. There will be 3 keynote speakers: Christina Wodtke, Abby Covert & Karl Fast. Looking forward to this event in Grand Rapids! The next Akron UX Meetup event will be on Weds, Sept 11 at the Tannery in downtown…
Read moreA Kickstarter that could have been inspired by Bret Victor’s talk!
Check out this kick-starter–it feels like it could have been inspired by the Bret Victor talk on the future of programming. NoFlo Development Environment
Read moreFantastic talk on the dangers of dogma
Bret Viktor on the Future of Programming This talk is amazing–his approach reminds me a lot of reading an article by Atul Gawande (one of my personal heroes). The best kind of constructive criticism.
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