Posts Tagged ‘patterns’
Wednesday, December 5th, 2007

Last summer I found myself exploring an early Iron Age home at The Crannog Centre on Loch Tay. The Crannog was cosy, as its focal point was the Iron Age hearth - a large open fire. During the day the inhabitants would peel back wicker shutters to let in fresh air whilst they tended to their animals, making food and clothing and ground spelt for bread.
Today, wearing a woolly jumper and eating spelt pasta, with my back to the radiator, it seems to me that our needs and motivations have changed little since the Iron Age. (more…)
Tags: architecture, cognitive science, crannog, david adajaye, form follows function, hierarchy of needs, idea store, joseph campbell, loch tay, mario salvadori, maslow, motivation, patterns, pyramids, satisfaction, spelt, terracotta army
Posted in Design, Musings | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007

Like many usability consultants I have spent hours locked in rooms with strangers saying: “What do you think about this web page?” It is boring way to earn a living especially as you often know the answers and could tell clients without asking the questions.
Alas, most clients only believe opinions about their websites when it comes from random users - not you, the expert. Luckily the industry takes Jakob Nielson’s advice on testing: five users only to establish a pattern of responses (and because it’s cheap). Although, if we were really serious, we would need 30 users to talk about the statistical significance of our results.
Some of this boredom could be avoided (and client money saved) if everyone employed the patterns which already exist in users’ heads to create more intuitive webpages and GUIs. Cognitive science, the study of mind and intelligence, enables us to understand what makes our users tick. (more…)
Tags: artificial intelligence, charles pierce, cognitive bias, cognitive science, colour, constancy, depth cues, edward tufte, expectations, george miller, human-computer interaction, jakob nielson, joseph campbell, limitations, memory, patterns, perception, reasoning, superstitious learning, usability
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Sunday, June 10th, 2007

(The Great Fire of London map at the British Library website)
In the 1530s when Henry VIII realised that dissolving the monastries would get him much needed assets, he commissioned a map of London, paying particular attention to ‘lawless’ Southwark. He wanted to see if the borough had any money he could take off them. Henry VIII was a smart man, he knew that the right sorts of information bring wealth and power.
I saw the resulting map last year at the British Library exhibition London: A Life in Maps along with many others - maps of wills and estates, Victorian cab fare maps, cycling maps and tourist maps. Each map was primarily motivated by the need to learn more about an area of London in order to make or save money, especially when making your way around the ever growing London.
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Tags: artificial intelligence, Design, edward tufte, football, google maps, human-computer interaction, information visualisation, journalism, online, patterns, piero, support, technology, visualisation, website
Posted in Design | 3 Comments »
Thursday, May 24th, 2007

A structural engineer once told me that he would always win pictionary if he was teamed with another engineer. Structural engineers have a symbolic language of their own and use it, normally in the workplace, to communicate more accurately. To the onlooker it is all triangles, little circles and arrows. But to the trained eye they represent bridge spans with fixed supports under uniform loads. Similarly, electrical engineers use seemingly incomprehensible symbols to describe apparatus layout. (more…)
Tags: charles pierce, computers, Design, hieroglyphs, metaphor, patterns, semiotics, support, tattoos
Posted in Design | 3 Comments »
Friday, March 9th, 2007

In the 1990s, Erich Gamma changed the way I thought about software engineering forever! Gamma visited the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne where I was a PhD student, in order to give a seminar on design patterns.
The idea of extracting a solution template from a piece of software to turn it into a pattern which can be reused, was to me, an exciting step forward in software engineering. Instead of reusing software from a library that needs to be maintained and ported as necessary, abstracting the solution and creating a pattern repository gives software engineers a toolbox of meta-level solutions.
(more…)
Tags: behaviour, bill hillier, campbell, christopher alexander, collective unconsciousness, Design, edward tufte, form follows function, function, future, information visualisation, jung, patterns, semiotics, space syntax, structure, usability
Posted in Design | 5 Comments »