c-md

Written at 20:25, on Friday 21 March 2008. Tags: c-md .

An average human being is capable of keeping approximately 6 items in his short-term memory. Then why do we still think it’s natural that websites present us dozens, or even hundreds, of links to navigate through them?

According to Jakob Nielsen, navigation on the web is often overdone: there are too many links on a page. His research shows that users ignore navigation area’s and dive straight into the content area. Despite the growing importance of disciplines such as information architecture and usability research, or the use of design patterns and content management systems in the website development process, navigation is still fundamentally based on clicking links in lists. Let’s not forget that the Web as medium is still very young: “I think the Internet is still on Day One… You can’t predict some of the really big changes. Who would have said that the development of the automobile would have led to suburbia?” (Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO). So there is still plenty of opportunity for experiments with new interfaces to make information accessible. That is also the purpose of this thesis. Through a design research, this thesis will focus on exploring different concepts of website navigation.

Written at 11:23, on Tuesday 8 January 2008. Tags: c-md .

Did you know that people are happiest in Hawaii and saddest in Singapore? And that people feel most sexy in Las Vegas? We Feel Fine is an art experiment that has collected allmost 10 million feelings from 2 million people around the world and has built a unique interface to dive into this data. The project of internet artist Jonathon Harris and Googler Sepandar Kamvar has been harvesting the expressions of human feelings from a large number of weblogs. The system searches occurences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”, and stores these in a database. It also extracts additional metadata, such as age, gender, geographical location and even weather conditions.

Written at 18:35, on Wednesday 7 November 2007. Tags: c-md webdesign .

37signals state that they don’t use personas because:

“We use ourselves. I believe personas lead to a false sense of understanding at the deepest, most critical levels.”

Personas are poor substitutes for real people, they argue, and you should always base your decisions on the problems and behaviour of real people instead of passive abstractions of people. This reasoning fits perfectly with their “getting real” process, which argues for a very agile development process.

Written at 10:32, on Wednesday 4 July 2007. Tags: c-md .

My pre-master year at C-MD was succesfully concluded on the 25th of june with a presentation of my thesis proposal. My ideas have shifted quite a bit and my proposal evolved with it.

Initially, I wanted to explore the possibilities of Web 2.0 for police research, by building on the police’s initial steps on the web with politieonderzoeken.nl. However, this was too narrow, although I worked out some ideas in a study course on creative design. Brainstorming more about using the web for crime solving gave me the idea of a murder game, and with this idea in mind I found World Without Oil a great inspiration. This concept had all the ingredients: a mix of reality and fiction, community building, collective intelligence, user-generated content and cross-media story telling.

Written at 11:05, on Friday 11 May 2007. Tags: c-md .

As you might be aware, I’m currently doing a master Communication & Multimedia Design (C-MD). Coming up with a good research subject is, for most of us, one of the hardest tasks. To make it easier, we were asked to setup a blog to reflect on our interests, hobbies, experience, philosophy etc. Rather than spin off another web site, I’m going to post my thoughts here under the tag c-md.

Written at 13:43, on Wednesday 9 May 2007. Tags: c-md .

I’m assembling a list of books for my research. This list is already too long, which probably means my subject is too broad. However, I like to read and these books will come in handy no matter what!

Written at 00:05, on Wednesday 9 May 2007. Tags: c-md javascript webdesign .

A large part of the discourse on web development today is focused on design patterns and interface components. But what are they exactly, how are they useful and how can they change the way we work? More importantly, what are their limitations, the scope of their application?

Design patterns are sort of an evolution of the style guide, which we are familiar with from graphic design. But while the style guide documents and prescribes the use of graphic design for communicating a certain brand, design patterns abract common problems in interaction design. A common examply is undo functionality.

Written at 11:37, on Wednesday 21 February 2007. Tags: c-md webdesign .

We have now entered the age of the audience. Audience is the new currency for determining social status. The more audience you have, the higher your rank. And social websites like MySpace, Digg and YouTube are perfect examples of this. In feudal society, you are what you’re born; in consumer society, you are what you buy; in the Information Age, you are who you’re watched. I wonder, is everyone turning into a simulacrum, constantly re-representing themselves, pushing their identity until there is no original left? Or worse (applying the participation inequality rule): are we all turning into a silent audience of lurkers?

Google Idols winners Pomme and Kelly gained world-wide fame with this playback video.

Related reading: article on how privacy is redefined by a new generation in NYMag. And the classical essay by Walter Benjamin on originality and audience: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Written at 16:03, on Wednesday 31 January 2007. Tags: c-md .

I recently finished writing a paper on the Digital Divide with a small group of students at C-MD. It reminded me that there is still a lot of work to do both on and off the Web, and that we’re nowhere near Tim-Berners Lee’s vision of a universally accessible information source.