–Engage

I have so much; I waste so much. Instead of being decadent tomorrow night, maybe we should take pause, and put the resources of decadence towards a higher priority this New Year’s.

http://www.moveon.org/tsunamirelief/

There are many, many, many more places to give to.

My suggestion for the night is to tea-total. Have fun w/o alcohol. Yes, the bars will take an unexpected hit, but considering what is going on for so many, I think its a small sacrifice.

Take the money you should spend on a drink and donate it. If you can’t do that, then commit to a matching grant. Whatever I spend tonight on “partying” I will also donate at least 50% of towards the Tidal Wave releif agencies. Pick one. Anyone. Don’t stand on ceremony.

This is not complicated. This is about us as primarily well-off westerners (no matter how poor you think you are and you live in the west you are probably well-off enough) to think about our priorities and our behavior.

Our President has shamed us by first suggesting $15million in relief aid and now he back-peddles to find the right balance. This is shameful.

Almost every news site on the web has a list of relief agencies to donate towards.

Other ideas to find the funds for donating in larger amounts:
Give up coffee for a week/month
Give up beer for a week/month
match your cable bill
donate frequent flyer miles
bring your lunch to work

Find those little pieces of decadence in your life (unnecessary expenses) and either commit to match that expense in some way as a tax on it, or avoid the expense and re-allocate it to a relief agency donation.

How much simpler can it be? Can’t think of anything.

Also, the link above is to a letter to the President to do more to not let these human beings feel like they are an annoyance. The current vibe is one of afterthought, and backpeddling. It is time to be proactive and an example among nations.

I was reading Wired.com like I always do and found this article about a home grown, garageband created ad for the iPod mini by George Masters.

It is pretty kickass and I wanted to share.

Dirk Knemeyer of Involution Studios gave an amazing presentation (I wasn’t there, but just reading the presentation gave me chills) on the future of Digital Product Design this past week @ Yahoo in Sunnyvale, CA. This is my appreciations and critique of some aspects of that presentation. I believe this presentation expresses a lot of what I was trying to say in my own presentation, which I gave here in NY at the Parsons School of Design in October.

Dirk’s new ven diagram overlays most of the core aspects of Digital Product Design very well from role, to discipline to difining makeup of a product, and finally the organizational model that makes up the economics surrounding product design.

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So there are just somethings we know how to do. We know … well we learned in such a way that we can’t even remember that we learned. Walking, talking, knowing that cold is supposed to be on the right, and hot on the left (this might be a USism, but that will just prove my point). We know how to bruch our teeth, and we know how to dial a phone. The first two seem to be innate. But to be honest, the greatest instinct of humanity is really the one that is more at work here, and that is our instinct to want to mimic. That’s basically all we are. A big pattern absorption mimicking device and it is in this process that we actually learn those most intimate tasks that we think are instinctual. This of course means that there has to be cultural differentiation at some level in all these actions. Such as in some countries you use the left hand for the phone more often than the right. Why? might be a sanitary thing, or it might just be about luck, or reading left to right instead of right to left. But the action is learned and passed on w/o anyone saying a word.

What does this have to do with software? usability? interface design and anything else this blog may or may not be about? (had to put a break some place) …

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Luke in response to an article in wired, offers his POV that way too often when UI designs fail designers fall onto adding text. Now, I have to say that I agree here mostly. I do think that UI design often fails at the graphic design art of communicating without words. I actually very much appreciated the traffic design article. I thought that it made a very clear statement that where you put signs you are admitting a flaw in your design.

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I was wondering if/when I was going to have something new to add to this blog, then inspiration finds its self in a Bar called “Hell” … It’s closing so there is little point in advertising it.

Victor Lombardi and I were talking about conferences, UX community, factionalization of UX, and how to communicate to clients and the business side internally about the value of design. I went back on my little soapbox about separating UX into its 3 major formative pieces: structure & definition, behavior, and presentation. Then in the discussion it occurred to me, “User Experience” is just as jargonny and hard to understand as “Information Architecture”, “Interaction Design” and “Usability”. With this in mind I thought. What could we say that is different? What is it are we really doing? And it hit me (at least for me and hopefully you will help me judge) … “Digital Solutions”.

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