I laughed a little at his reaction to people’s reactions to color scheme and logo (it doesn’t matter) and other design related things that designers perhaps get too upset about. His particular case study was exceptionally useful, as it provides a template to build off of for interaction with the user.

This is an explanation of how our really fancy interface works in asshole bike punk.

Going without a computer generally implies a vacation, after all, going on vacation, for a long time, had a lot to do with getting away from the office, the phone, and responsibilities, and when I am on vacation, I am usually without my little silver laptop. It takes my attention away from the people around me in a negative way.

I don’t see how this was a useful experiment, especially to make a movie that is 80% whining. Like the students themselves, I don’t understand why they did it, what they were proving, etc. etc. Being able to organize one’s time appropriately has very little to do with a Macintosh, and I think that essentially, this was a film about time. How much time one has to do things depends on how much time one makes for them. E-mail takes less then 20 minutes per day and acts as a convenient mode of interaction; it outlives it’s usefulness if I over use it, like face book and most other internet tools.

Don’t Make Me Think (Read as: Most People Who Are Interneting are Stupid)

are as horrifying as I expected. As a fan of literature, and art, and… Thought, the whole domain of advertising (and thus, the internet) is generally against most of my core values. This dude effectively goes on about how nobody will take the time to read your stuff, they don’t care, they want what they came there for and, as long as they see something that might come close to “satisficing” their needs, they will move quickly throughout your site without taking the time to notice all the hard work you’ve put into it.

Steve Krug is a smart man because he teaches us (designers and such) not to count on the smarts of the user, something computer programmers and old school admen picked up on a long time ago. He’s got a lot of fantastic advice that I already pour into my everyday activities (Such as “Write what you want, then cut it in half, then cut that in half”) and so far has me thinking a lot less about “pretty” and a lot more about “accessible.”

At the same time, it’s men like Steve Krug, and the legions of designers that follow him shouting his name (along with his annoying little proverbs) from the rooftops as though he were their newfound god that let truly innovative designers jump ahead of the masses. Not everything needs to be legible. Not everything needs to be easy. Just most things.

At this time, navies relied on optical equipment that helped them measure the speed and distance of a boat. To combat the optical equipment, Dazzle Camouflage was invented.

Nazis and such would get confused because they couldn’t tell which direction a boat was moving in, and therefore not know the speed or any other useful information. It seems likely they didn’t know it was a boat either.

awesome.

RISD also did a cool thing with a bunch of gorgeous designs for american boats. Check it out here: Bedazzled

His foray into the future, an odd bit of insight considering what was to come, is fascinating for its recognition that machines were/are not only capable of simple labor tasks but organizing information.

His statement on selection by association especially caught my attention because of the search methods employed in computer programming, are, to my knowledge, still limited by his prediction and generally unable to associate. But, in the context of the internet, where content is linked together, especially with a website like wikipedia, where reading one article often leads to one more, his predictions, or rather, proposal for an invention, have been realized completely.

Too bad he made stuff primarily for killing people and never actually built a computer.