Anjali Arora on Web applications, personal information management, FoundIt

The age of mega-participation in micro-doses

2008-06-05T23:03:00.006-04:00

I was induced to write this post (after so very long, I know) by the expected yet amazing victory of Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee. Look back to 18 odd months ago, & he was the underdog who would have to face the challenge of the formidable Clinton machinery & clout. Fast-forward to today, & it has been one remarkable journey. One could speculate about what it is that spurred such fervor & devotion for this relatively unknown young candidate (a key factor does seem to have been the contrast Obama's message provided to the seemingly unending bad news on all fronts coupled with a brazen & unheeding Bush Administration, & more-of-the-same-old-guard Clinton aura).

What I'd rather do, though, is focus on the effectiveness of Obama's fund-raising, & try & understand why that happened. By all accounts, his campaign has raised a staggering $40-50 million each month for the first few months of 2008. It speaks, of course, to how effectively they tapped into the pocketbooks of the masses ( it's said that the highest individual contribution is $130); but as a keen observer of the transformations that the internet is making to the world & its institutions, I see this as at yet another example of how people will express themselves through whatever means available; here, ordinary people have made contributions of $5 or 10 or 20, & have so transformed & empowered a campaign, & in the process have empowered themselves: that they are able to make a difference, that they have will have a say in bringing about change & making things happen. I am not sure such an overwhelming wave of support would have been possible in the early stages of any elections in the absence of the internet.

And while it is true that the technology has made it easier to participate in this manner very easily, I suspect the forces that drive such participation have more to do with the psyche of people in this era of participation; we have just come to expect as very natural that anyone can write ( or upload pictures or videos) about the World Economic Forum or the events in Myanmar or the China earthquake. We have simply gotten quickly accustomed to seeing ourselves as producers/ creators/ builders as well as consumers.
So, just as we are seeing the micro-contributions of millions & millions of amateurs to the huge proliferation of news & content on the web ( a photo here, a video there, a comment there, a minor edit of wikipedia), I believe we are seeing the same phenomenon at play here in US politics: that the average Joe need not stand by idly feeling helpless while the forces determine how things will play out. The average Joe can quickly make a contribution of some money, any amount works; as they say, 'Mighty oaks from acorns grow', & the Obama success so far is one impressive oak! One look at the Obama website reveals that the visitor is greeted with the 'Make a contribution' page ( not much subtlety there, but it's possible their research has shown that that is the page supporters want to reach first). However, once past this splash screen, the website offers umpteen ways for people to participate: make calls, find Obama supporters near you, organize, plan events, volunteer your time, etc. They also appear to have a strong social network component: get together with groups in your city, for example. But then again, one would need to compare this website with websites of other campaigns: my feeling is content-wise, they will not be all that different. So definitely, campaigns have to be multi-pronged, multi-channel affairs, with the bulk of the connection happening through personal visits by candidates, & with the internet being one very powerful arm to ease some of the organizational challenges.

What's also very interesting to me is how much is read into the messaging & tone of a website (of course, colored by one's leanings & prejudices). After the recent turn of events with Hillary Clinton bowing out of the race, her website today displays a simple form for visitors to fill up to show their support for Hillary. When I first saw it this morning, it did strike me as a bit curious since this seemed to go contrary to the news that she had conceded to Obama. Later in the evening, I was watching CNN & heard that they have received a thousand comments on their blog about the Obama victory today, & the anchor then started to read a few of these comments; one struck me as very telling: a reader had written in about his/ her disgust at the Clinton site still seeking support & in this very in-your-face manner; it reinforced, to this person, the lack of grace & class that Hillary has displayed all through her campaign, & that even when she knew she was down & out, she was still resorting to meaningless tactics such as drumming up support.
This conveys to me how sophisticated we are becoming with the medium of the web: we are not tone-deaf at all when it comes to the web, but are reading so much more into the web fronts of the candidates. It was as if Hillary committed the faux pas of not making eye contact at the right time in a one-on-one conversation.

More is less

2007-03-02T22:08:00.000-05:00

I just watched this video The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less from a talk the speaker Barry Schwartz gave at Google. I have to admit this was a much better experience than the talk here at Google NY that I went to last month.

Anyways, so this video has really set my mind racing, it's actually one of those rare occasions when you can see a theory relating so directly with life. The speaker talks about why more & more choices are weighing people down with a heavy cognitive load in terms of deciding between all the options, why affluent societies are experiencing more unhappiness than ever before, why striving for the best next gadget or the best address in town is so self-defeating....

But aside from the philosophical overtones of less consumption & simple living which will never lose their appeal for me, there's a lot of food for thought here:

as digital designers, there is a whole lot we can do for users here: not just by creating simpler, meaningful products rather than falling into the trap of feature-bloat, but also by practising a concept this speaker cites, namely libertarian paternalism. In simpler terms, it means that we as application designers can make choices for users that are in their best interest, at the same time giving them the choice to reverse it. The theory ( & practice too) goes that people are likely to stay with the decision you have made anyway, but would have been confounded had they been given a choice. Is this true for you, or would you rather have every choice offered to you so that you can actively choose one?
Professor Schwartz also talks about the concept of the agent playing a very important role in shielding the customer/ client from the burden of choice; the agent picks a single or small number of choices from the vast array available. This brings to mind the great job the small pop-and-mom grocery stores in India do for their customers: unlike walking through aisles full of similar products as one does in a typical American supermarket, I can just call up my kirana store asking for the best deals in say cooking oils or in laundry detergent; he quickly offers 2 or 3 of the best choices I have, & the job is done. When you couple that with totally personalised service (delivering the stuff to my doorstep, no matter what the value of the total order; always greeting me as bhabhiji, a very sweet Hindi word that means sister-in-law), it is not hard to see why these kirana stores will survive & thrive in India, despite all the fears of big business houses joining hands with American retail giants to take over the Indian retail market.
The recent explosive growth of India & China is seeing unprecedented waves of consumerism engulfing these places. In fact, to paraphrase Kaushik Basu's recent article on the BBC website, on a trip to China & then India, he is astounded by the huge consumption trip these two countries ( at least the urban areas) are on. He jokes that it would appear in comparison that to get away from the vast-scale consumerism, one would need to go west, to Europe & America!
I myself have sensed this on my recent trips to India: a craving for the best brands, the latest gadgets, the flashiest car & home. Weddings & even birthdays warrant conspicuous displays of wealth. The sprouting of the umpteenth shopping mall still has people all agog with excitement. Restaurants are always full, even the expensive ones ( By the way, most of them are, expensive that is. The boom is digging deep into the average Indian's pocket, just as medical tourism has resulted in locals paying three to four times what they earlier paid for basic services such as blood tests & xrays.

Let me what you think about all this!

Defining who/what you are, & more importantly, what you are not

2006-12-17T14:03:00.003-05:00

FoundIt has evolved, a little at a time, but based on my own fascination with helping to get to information when we need it. The problems now are problems of plenty: there is too much information even on our own computers, & a lot of what we do everyday may be easily avoided, if only we remembered that we had done this before, & have the stuff somewhere.

So the current FoundIt you see now is one that has grown organically out of our understanding & experiences with managing information,as well as what some early user surveys revealed. But this version is still an underpainting. Those of you not familiar with this term, an underpainting comprises the initial broad strokes that a painter puts on the canvas, to essentially map out masses & tones on the canvas, oftentimes using a single color such as sepia or a yellow ochre. This is a great means to break down all the decisions that go into a painting into manageable, distinguishable ones. Once the artist is happy with what he sees in the underpainting, she can start to put in more detail & volume & color.

So with FoundIt, the underpainting is in place. The way we hope to develop FoundIt is organically, based on your experiences & what you'd like to see the application do. I see the latest issue of Time magazine has 'You' as Person of the Year, because well, you control the information age. This isn't really as ridiculous as it sounds at first. There has been a huge shakedown of a lot of institutions in the last year or two: big media, publishing, social software that makes ordinary people capable of contributing to & being heard in a way never seen before. And as a designer, I do believe that the best applications need to be made from the inside out, growing & developing based on actual needs & experiences. So FoundIt will continue its goal of an application that brings your key information to the forefront, just in time, every time.

And equally we have to be clear about what we will not be. In the recent weeks that we have been promoting FoundIt with various groups/ people, blogs, we have heard back from a Venture Capitalist or two that they are interested only in funding social software. That's interesting but oddly, we had gotten in touch with them because they are avid bloggers & not because we were looking for VC money. But it certainly got me thinking that if one did need a lot of money to get up & running, one would spend not only a lot of time & energy in other activities such as writing business plans & making ridiculous 5 year forecasts, but that one would also be under immense pressure to alter the complexion & nature of the product. We are more than willing to shape this & other products based on user feedback; but to have a financier twist you out of shape simply because everyone in their tribe is looking to birth the next YouTube or MySpace is absurd. At least to me. And thankfully for us, we do not need millions of dollars to bring our ideas to fruition.

And so we will continue down the path of organic, evolutionary growth.

Download FoundIt now!

2006-11-26T13:55:00.000-05:00

We are now offering FoundIt beta free to download. Some links of interest:

What is FoundIt [Download available from the right column of this same page]

Product Tour

This is just the beginning. We aim to explore exciting ideas in interface design for information retrieval, as also bringing meaningful information to you the user. So try FoundIt, & send us your feedback.

FoundIt beta is ready for release!!!

2006-10-31T08:45:00.000-05:00

We are very excited to be releasing FoundIt(beta) for you to try out. FoundIt is a web-based application that gives you a bird's eye-view of all the files & documents on your computer. In addition it allows you to tag & chunk content for easier retrieval & re-use.

So check out the FoundIt page & sign up to try FoundIt.

Breath of fresh air

2006-09-27T22:38:00.000-04:00

In the humdrum of everyday work, there come those moments when one breathes deep & full, those moments when one sees exciting, adventurous work. Such a moment came for me today watching a documentary on Frank Gehry's work on PBS ( BTW, this wonderful channel amidst the crap that goes in the name of entertainment TV channels has given me & my family so many wonderful moments, I owe it big!). His process, his inspiration, and his amazing work: this documentary covered it beautifully. Gehry says his desire to build what he builds now-- in my view, some of his structures look like a child has randomly arranged blocks, sometimes a little awkwardly, so that the viewer gasps at the possibility of one of the blocks tipping over---emanated from a childhood spent building fantastic creations out of left-over wood-blocks that his grandmother would bring in. His Bilbao museum is stunning in the way the burnished metallic shapes melt & flow one moment, stand uptight & rigid the next. The way the earthy browns combined with the blue reflections in the glass walls took my breath away.

I also loved the kind of loose process he has - he sits back, while his assistants add another twisted piece of paper to the model at Gehry's bidding, only to have him make them rearrange it; or when asked why he says he likes a shape, or what materials he will finally use, his answer is very often "I don't know yet".

For me personally, the challenge is to see how I can combine my passions for painting with my work in interface & interaction design. I don't know how I am going to tackle this one, not yet anyway, but I do know that the idea has been brewing in my head for a while.

And some more....

2006-08-28T09:34:00.000-04:00

Returning to Ahmedabad, my home city, after almost three years of being away takes some getting used to. The traffic in the streets is overwhelming, there is the constant screech of honking from the interminable stream of two-wheelers & cars & buses flowing merrily down the narrow street. It's a brave soul that walks down these roads, I am thinking, as I try to take the furthest edge of the road, so as not to become just another statistic on my first evening home. My husband though is very unwilling to be pushed to the unpaved edges, & insists on staking claim to the meager strip of paved road; and so we continue down....

I notice right away that at least we are not sharing the road with cows & buffaloes that too prefer to plant themselves bang in the middle of the dry paved roads, especially in these monsoon months. These animals are largely missing now from around my house, & I have to admit, I miss their sight! The next few days I am actually watching out for cows, donkeys, camels, & elephants, & I do manage to sight all of these. I remember a few years ago when we were visiting London, we paid about $10 apiece to visit the London zoo, only to see that the bulk of the animals there were what I used to see on the streets everyday back in Ahmedabad! In fact, add monkeys & peacocks to the list too; driving down the University road in Ahmedabad on this visit, we were forced to stop as a magnificent peacock strutted gracefully across the street.

The other major major change I notice is that the air is so much cleaner. Ahmedabad was infested with old, rickety auto-rickshaws, three-wheeled vehicles that raced across pot-holed streets, giving passengers a cheap but unforgettably bumpy ride. These rickshaws were noisy, & let off such angry black, malodorous fumes that one's eyes would sting from a short walk outdoors. Thankfully that has changed, we now have what are called 'green rickshaws', that run on CNG & are quiet enough so that one can actually have a conversation while riding in one of these!

The city buses too have switched to CNG; the streets are full of Toyotas, Hondas, Marutis, Fords, as also assorted scooters & motor cycles. The clean air has made it possible for chronic walkers like me & my husband to reclaim the outdoors. Our son, though, continues to wrinkle his nose at the mention of any physical activity!!

The monsoons have begun in earnest, & everyday brings heavy rains, slushy streets, cool breezes, & awful moisture-laden fruit & vegetables that spoil in very little time. Still Ahmedabad is lucky unlike Surat, that had Katrina-like flooding this past month; entire areas of the city were marooned & cut off for days on end.

I loved that most of the little shops around my house are still around. Everything looks familiar & comfortable in that respect. But there has been a burgeoning growth of shopping malls, restaurants, & some totally new fads for this once very conservative city: hookah joints. After an evening out with friends, one of our hosts offers to take us to an exciting coffee shop. Once there, we are told that the only available table they have is outdoors, & we take it. I couldn't for the life of me fathom what was exciting about this place to the college-going crowd, the primary consumers of these services. Our table was in a dark, damp corner, with some rain sneaking in through the covers overhead; there were mosquitoes for company. Through the glass doors, we could see young boys & girls sitting on relatively more-comfy chairs & sofas inside the cafe. Today they are having only coffee & snacks & conversation, but as we do a reconnaissance (a favorite term of my son's) of the innards of the 'cafe', we come to a floor that is given over to mattresses strewn across the floor. We are told this is where customers can lie around, puffing away on their hookahs. I later learn that hookahs are harmless contraptions, dispensing flavored water/ steam into willing mouths & noses. ( On our way back to the US via London, we see women as well as men puffing away on their hookahs along Little Beirut).

As I mentioned earlier, Ahmedabadis seem to be reveling in all the glitzy shopping malls all over the city, this once tight-fisted city simply can't seem to get enough of these. In fact, a cursory visitor to the city can be forgiven for thinking that all that the locals do is eat, drink ( not openly, though, for this is a dry state), & shop.

Everything is so expensive, or so it seems to me. I seem to be stuck in a time-warp as it were, and I am having to ask for the price to be repeated ever so often. The economic upswing has pushed up incomes, but has also resulted in sky-rocketing prices, as also insatiable demands for wage hikes by employees. This last fact is so missed by foreign clients getting work done in India, who believe it is their right to demand that work be done at rock-bottom prices.

We had an exciting, eye-opening visit to the RTO for a local driver's license. The process for getting this very basic piece of document is as obtuse & non-transparent as can be. The offices are dark, overcrowded, filthy, & it is impossible to figure out what is to be done next. Our guide/ tout leads us from one desk to another, confident that our job will be done. He informs us dismissively about the new computerised process that will be in place in the next few weeks: it won't work, he declares loftily; the computers have been bought, the company & a few politicians will have made their millions, & now the computers will gather dust, & things will continue as always at the RTO!

India is a foodie's delight, & we dig in every day into our favorite foods. After months, I am starting to enjoy drinking milk. Milk in the US is a horror, I am told it is because the cows are fed some concoction that is certainly not grass! ( This time around, now that I am back in the US & am determined not to buy regular milk here, I chance upon 'Organic milk'; this IS milk, trust me). The other thing that has added enormously to my temporal pleasures while in India is the multiplexes: they are ever so plush & enjoyable, have had a great time watching even indifferent movies here.

Down memory lane

2006-07-21T10:01:00.000-04:00

It is glorious to be back home in India. It has been two years since I was last here, & there's so much that has changed, & yet so much that is as it was.

The long flight from the US to Mumbai is torturous; thankfully there weren't too many loud adults or bawling babies in my vicinity. We finally land in Mumbai around midnight; I totter out to the baggage area, all stiff from sitting in a cramped space too long, & also from sleep & fatigue. Unlike in the US where nothing comes free, including the baggage trolleys, airports in India offer free use of these: I grab one , find a spot near the conveyor belt, & await my baggage. The belt moves into action, & everyone now has their eyes trained on it; after all, baggage comes in only so many shapes & colors, & would be very easy to miss. A couple of bags roll down the belt, & then nothing. For the next 15 minutes, tired & impatient passengers grumble at this holdup, but as with a lot of things in India, waiting it out is the best solution, in this case, was the only solution, as there really were no airline officials to answer our questions. My suitcase arrives, & I dash down the green customs line. I never cease to be amazed at the volumes of baggage people carry with them, even lone passengers. After all what could they be carrying, especially now that India has every global brand available!

It had been agreed that I'd meet my cousin's driver as I stepped out of the airport. I have ostensibly seen this driver on a previous visit, but I was certain I wouldn't recognize him; the sign he'd be carrying with my name would help, so I wasn't too concerned on this point. But the sight that greets me has me bewildered: there are at least four dozen tightly packed signs out there, planted in the hands of equally strange looking faces. I try to take in each sign as I am forced to keep moving by the flow of people behind me. I do not see my man. I check with a helpful policeman if there is a public phone booth near-abouts, & to my great relief, there was one right behind the arrivals area. This booth was manned by a blind man ( a government-aided scheme to provide self-employment to the blind & handicapped) who informs me that the call will cost two rupees ( less than five US cents!!). I am a little hesitant to wake my cousin at 1 in the morning, but heck, she is expecting me, & I desperately needed to find her driver. I get through to her, & she informs me that a car has indeed been sent for me, & I should look carefully at the signs. I joyfully return to the line of bobbing signs, secure in the knowledge that I have not after all been forsaken in the middle of the night. Mumbai is the city of my birth & early childhood, but finding my way around at this unearthly hour was not something I relished. Anyhow, my cousin's Man Friday is indeed there, & we make our way to the packed parking lot. I am amused that three people have come to take me home, & while one of these goes looking for the car & driver amidst the chaos, the other wheels my luggage through. Cell-phones are ubiquitous here, & help locate the missing driver. Finally the car swoops in by our side, everyone gets in swiftly, & we speed off into the night ( this experience reminds me so much of Hindi movie scenes where a screeching getaway car whooshes in to take in the hoodlums after a crime).

We pass by quiet, relatively empty streets, magnificent & brilliantly lit hotels, hovels & makeshift homes by the roadside, & several people sleeping under the flyovers of the city. We finally arrive at our destination, my uncle & cousin's home. It was a very pleasant reunion, making allowances for the unearthly hour; we were meeting after a gap of several years, & seeing them was a throwback to my college days in Mumbai; I was living at this very same uncle's home in those days. Finally we make our way to bed, after all tomorrow was going to be a busy day!

Ethics of eating

2006-06-20T18:51:00.000-04:00

Came across this moving piece (thanks to my husband Ravi for pointing me to it) in the Times of India, Ahmedabad about how we get our food these days. The innocuous-looking piece of meat on your table has had a long, sad history; and we humans believe we are a civilized lot! It is shameful that in our quest for more efficiency & profit, we are denying these creatures grass & sunlight. Read on to feel justly angry....

Ethics Of Eating
Mass production of meat is senseless, dangerous
By PETER SINGER

Global meat consumption is predicted to double by 2020. Yet in Europe and North America, there is growing concern about the ethics of the way meat and eggs are produced. Consumption of veal has fallen sharply since it became widely known that to produce so-called white, actually pale pink veal, newborn calves are separated from their mothers, deliberately made anaemic, denied roughage, and kept in stalls so narrow that they cannot walk or turn around.
In Europe, mad cow disease shocked many people, not only because it shattered beef ’s image as a safe and healthy food, but also because they learned that the disease was caused by feeding cattle the brains and nerve tissue of sheep. People naively believed that cows ate grass. I discovered that beef cattle in feed lots may be fed anything from corn to fish meal, chicken litter (complete with chicken droppings), and slaughterhouse waste.
Concern about how we treat farm animals is far from being limited to the small percentage of people who are vegetarians or even vegans eating no animal products at all. Despite strong ethical arguments for vegetarianism, it is not yet a mainstream position. More common is the view that we are justified in eating meat, as long as the animals have a decent life before they are killed.
The problem, as Jim Mason and I describe in our recent book, The Way We Eat, is that industrial agriculture denies animals even a minimally decent life. Tens of billions of chickens produced today never go outdoors. They are bred to have voracious appetites and gain weight as fast as possible, then reared in sheds that can hold more than 20,000 birds. The level of ammonia in the air from their accumulated droppings stings the eye and hurts the lungs. Slaughtered at only 45 days old, their immature bones can hardly bear the weight of their bodies. Some collapse and, unable to reach food or water, soon die, their fate irrelevant to the economics of the enterprise as a whole.
Conditions are, if anything, even worse for laying hens crammed into wire cages so small that even if there were just one per
cage, she would be unable to stretch her wings. But there are usually at least four hens per cage, and often more. Under such crowded conditions, the more dominant,aggressive birds are likely to peck to death the weaker hens in the cage. To prevent this, producers sear off all birds’ beaks with a hot blade. A hen’s beak is full of nerve tissue — it is, after all, her principal means of relating to her environment — but no anaesthetic or analgesic is used to relieve the pain.
Pigs may be the most intelligent and sensitive of the animals that we commonly eat. When foraging in a rural village, they can exercise that intelligence and explore their varied environment. Before they give birth, sows use straw or leaves and twigs to build a comfortable and safe nest in which to nurse their litter. But in today’s factory farms, pregnant sows are kept in crates so narrow that they cannot turn around, or even walk more than a step forward or backward. They lie on bare concrete without straw or any other form of bedding. The piglets are taken from the sow as soon as possible, so that she can be made pregnant again, but they never leave the shed until they are taken to slaughter.
Defenders of these production methods argue that they are a regrettable but necessary response to a growing population’s demand for food. On the contrary, when we confine animals in factory farms, we have to grow food for them. The animals burn up most of that food’s energy just to breathe and keep their bodies warm, so we end up with a small fraction — usually no more than one-third and sometimes as little as one-tenth — of the food value that we feed them. By contrast, cows grazing on pasture eat food that we cannot digest, which means that they add to the amount of food available to us.
It is tragic that countries like China and India, as they become more prosperous, are copying western methods and putting animals in huge industrial farms to supply more meat and eggs for their growing middle classes. If this continues, the result will be animal suffering on an even greater scale than now exists in the West, as well as more environmental damage and a rise in heart disease and cancers of the digestive system. It will also be grossly inefficient.
As consumers, we have the power and the moral obligation to refuse to support farming methods that are cruel to animals and bad for us.

The writer is professor of bioethics atPrinceton University. Copyright: Project Syndicate

Take our survey: How do you manage your files

2006-05-16T20:12:00.000-04:00

We'd love you to take our survey about your practices relating to file management. How do you organize your files on your computer; how easy is it to find a certain file after a couple of weeks; what are your pet peeves about finding your personal documents when you need them.

This is a short survey, and shouldn't take more than 10 minutes. We are trying to get a broad variety of feedback, so please go to our survey now!!
Take the survey here.

web 2.0 meets personal information management

2006-04-25T10:09:00.000-04:00

For the past few weeks we have been busy crafting this new app tentatively titled FoundIt!!

Bite-sized, healthy doses of your information, crafted yes, carefully crafted, for delightful & easy consumption, as & when you desire or need. We hope we have stirred up your appetite. Great, because we are counting on you to design this application with us. Just drop us an email at anjali[at]artbrush.net, letting us know you would like to participate in occasional user-testing of this exciting application. If you are in New York city, that's great coz we do hope to meet with some of you in person; but if you are not, that's fine too, & we could do this remotely. So if you are a moderate-heavy user of technology, and are frustrated with finding & keeping information findable, don't wait: send that email now.

Here's some more details about FoundIt:

Imagine having easy access to all of your key personal files, as well as web-based information: easy at hand, ready to go. No more rummaging through endless digital folders & the deep & dark digital recesses of your bottomless hard disk;
Being able to tag pertinent information.
Being able to repurpose your files endlessly: a chunk from here from document A, another from document B, and yet another from a web source, and voila, your new document is ready.
Share files with colleagues & teams online.

So help us design this experience, let's do it!

Tags: Web 2.0, PIM, Findability, User Research , User testing

Making information meaningful

2006-04-11T09:05:00.000-04:00

Last year around the time of my thesis preparation at NYU's ITP program, I remember going off on tangents to seek out research papers on information seeking, document management, making information meaningful: subjects that I am still passionate about.

Thus my deep interest in the Semantic web, and the technologies that will enable more context to be brought into web documents. To be able to harvest deeply from the huge data out there on the internet, to be able to retrieve just the information that a user will find useful, & even further, bringing just-in-time information to her through intelligent systems: how delicious! Like I was half-joking with my students in the Information Architecture class at NYU, we'll need to coin a new word for such information-seeking: search implies an effort on the part of the user, the next five years will have information coming to her, when she needs it, how she needs it. And guess what, we may not need a term for it, for ideally it should be so transparently woven into the design!

RSS feeds are a great development in recent times with information coming to me; and yet it is very easy to be inundated with that too! I had painstakingly put together my feeds in Awasu, but I dare not open the application now: it's overwhelmingly overloaded! A more manageable way seems to be the personal pages such as MS Start page, or one that I particularly like: www.netvibes.com. You can set it as your Home page, so you don't need to remember to fire it up! Also, the clean interface, ajax interactions, & one-page access make information much more usable.

Another area that I am recently finding very interesting, & am digging deeper into is that of data analytics & modeling. My company DecisionCraft is doing excellent work in these areas. To dig into gigabytes of raw data, & to use math & statistics to reveal valuable patterns & insights for future action, is truly catching on with the savvy companies: Amazon being a prime example of a very quantitatively-driven organization, and one where one sees, as a user, the tremendous impact their analytics approach is yielding.

Last week, I participated in a webcast titled 'Competing on Analytics'by Ben Schneiderman of the University of Maryland . He presented some of the work they have done in working with large data sets in assorted industries: hospital & patient records being one. What was very fascinating to me was the visualization of that data (I'll admit it takes a bit of a trained eye to see some of the patterns that he saw, while I was thinking "where, what") , & the ability to drill down into as much detail as the doctor cared to. To be able to see a visualization of say the blood pressure history of a patient over the last 5 years, and further, to be able to see if there is any relationship between this & his worsening arthritis, & to be able to predict potential health problems down the road is very powerful indeed.

I also got an opportunity to ask Schneiderman a question that had been bothering me for quite a while: Most information visualization tools depend on color to convey key patterns. So what about accessibility concerns, the color-blind for example. His answer: most of the tools we have designed allow users to determine the colors they'd like to use, or they could opt for gray-scale too. He adds that you can make the question even harder & ask "what about the blind, can they ever use these tools?". Well, he said, he have worked on a design, it's still in prototype, that translates these patterns into audio. Hmm, sounds interesting, one would need to see, rather hear how effective that is.

Check out Ben Schneiderman's work at www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/

Tags: Data Analytics, Data Modeling, data Mining,Information Architecture

Social space for connecting hearts, rekindling memories

2006-02-23T09:36:00.000-05:00

We have finally got this pet project off the ground: an online social space for people to share their memories from the 1947 partition between India & Pakistan. We have all heard horrific tales from those times: uprootment, terror, homelessness, sudden change in fortunes, & more. But as the decades have marched on, there also surface fond memories: the house you lived in ( or your parents or grand-parents lived in), the neighborhood cake shop where you spent an inordinate amount of time & pocket-money, the evenings spent strolling the streets girl-watching, those hot sizzling summers spent lazing with friends in the dark cool room & nights motorcycling to the street-side gol-gappe wala for several mouthfuls of that indescribable taste!!

The 1947 wiki is the place to go to, to share these & other stories. Think of this as your digital nukkad, a space to hang out, share your memories, write on behalf of family, & hopefully watch new connections take place as people from the other side of the border respond & reciprocate.

Tags: India, Pakistan, Social Software, 1947, digital commons, community

Laptops <$100 or cellphones: which is it to be

2006-02-03T17:36:00.001-05:00

I came across an interesting twist to the long-brewing <$100-laptop-for-developing- countries scheme. It appears that Microsoft has better ideas, or so they think: internet-enabled cellphones for kids in these countries to get access to all the resources on the net. (See Technology Review).

Granted that cellphones are a known commodity in most parts of the world, & are largely outnumbering landlines in developing countries, but I think it needs to be remembered that cellphones are loved because they let you TALK, not because of cool videos you can see, or music you can listen to, or even text messaging. Repeated research is showing that a very large percentage of cellphone usage is about speech.

Secondly, how in the world is a kid to manage to surf efficiently given the size of that screen. I loath having to read the occasional text message I receive, and would absolutely balk at reading large chunks of text on that teeny screen. The MS folks need to understand that it takes more than slots for keyboards to make use of cellphones for extended surfing.

The third issue is of power to recharge the gadget; it appears the under-$100 will be designed with a hand-crank to recharge, which is a good idea in developing & under-developed countries. I can speak for India, where frequent power outages are the norm ( Delhi is a prime example) in large cities groaning under the weight of rapid growth; the rural areas are worse, with power available for just a few hours every day.

And of course, all of this rests on having access to internet connectivity in the first place; the very logic of the exercise gets defeated if children in these countries are unable to get onto the web. So given the unreliable power scene, & relatively thin telephone connections per capita in the rural areas, it must be wireless connectivity: how feasible is that?

Very important too is the argument from Seymour Papert against the cellphone idea: a lot of the power of computers derives not from passive consumption of all that is on offer on the web, but on enabling the younger generation to be active producers through writing their own softwares/ applications. This is virtually impossible with a cellphone.

There are a myriad other issues that go against both of these options: physical conditions such as dust, heat, improper storage ( remember, poor households do not have special tables to neatly house these machines), & how these will affect longevity. And of course paramount are the social, economic & psychological factors: how good will be the translation for all the excellent resources out there; also poverty takes on a completely different color in such countries: it is well-known that all hands, young & old, must be put to work to seek refuge from hunger for that day; putting a kid into school, even a free, municipal-run facility, is a luxury that such subsistence kind of living simply does not allow. There is an opportunity cost to schooling; in addition, an inescapable script that runs among the poor is 'What good will education do anyway?'. I know that in my country, the poor would pooh-pooh the idea of studying & getting an education. That sort of dreaming is better suited to the middle classes ( who may not benefit as much from this scheme, as most likely they already have access to computers & the internet). So as happens with mid-day meal schemes in poor societies, where kids are sent to school only to get a decent meal, I suspect this computers-for-all scheme may meet with the same fate. Let the kid get one, the family will sell it off to buy more meaningful & useful things for the family, or even to buy liquor for the father! Sadly, this is the reality in poor countries, & one hopes that the folks sitting in the pristine campuses at MIT & Microsoft, & debating do-good ideas at Davos have toured the places that they hope to bring such change to. As always, here too it appears that the overwhelming logic is that if we can crack it technically / technologically, we have a winner. And how often, such a logic has met with failure!

On a related note, we met with clients of ours who are in the business of asset recovery for major companies in the US: they take charge of discarded computers from these users, shred the equipment of all that is recoverable, then reuse & reassemble these to ship off to developing countries. In fact, several NGOs & charities are into making these recycled systems available to countries in Africa & Asia. I wonder how this will play against the much-touted under-$100 laptop venture. Of course, with these recycled machines, the other issues remain as confounding: power availability, internet connections, & the socio-economic variables. But hardware to hardware, it seems the world's resources might be better spent resurrecting old hardware rather than creating it anew.

NYC and the strike

2005-12-22T08:39:00.002-05:00

When one first heard about the possibility of a strike by the MTA workers, one was incredulous: do these things really happen in America? One heard of strikes in Russia or China or India, but here in America, that too in New York!! On second thoughts, it's not hard to see why not: despite the glitz & glamor of the American life, it is a harsh one. To my mind, America is a hugely 'masculine' country, borrowing Geert Hofstede's term, and New York might top the rankings!! I often wonder while walking down the streets of New York whether it is the size of the city that makes its people, its systems a little harder every day. Hotel staff do not feel it necessary to greet their clients courteously, or to settle them comfortably in their rooms; people plant themselves in the middle of sidewalks, chatting blissfully about this and that, their dogs staking a claim to even more of the space, stretching their leashes to check out the smells around the tree at the edge; and so what do other passers-by do? Well, they squeeze their way around this merry group, & move on as best they can. It is New York-ish to be unmindful of others in a public place, it is New York-ish to do exactly what you want to do & how you want to do it, the rest of the swirl of humanity will take care of themselves. ( A little side note: how do you distinguish a New Yorker from anyone else: well, if they make way for you on crowded subway stairs, or on a narrow street, 9 out of 10 times they are a not New Yorkers! A couple of bewildering hard knocks, and they'll gradually start to develop the mannerisms & behavior of a local!

And therefore it comes as no surprise to see the acrid & cacophonous exchanges between the union leader & the mayor on public television. Between strident accusations thrown at each other, with the already-suffering public caught in the middle: the union leader reminds us, the viewers, of how they are a hard-working simple folk working relentlessly in the service of the city; & the mayor wants to make sure you, the viewer knows that he walks across the Brooklyn Bridge to work every day, and the news network provides you a glimpse of his sleeping place at his emergency office: a pillow thrown on a carpeted floor.
And so the media war plays on, in true New York-style: grim looks, harsher speeches!

I personally am not affected too much by the strike, but on the first day of the strike, I walked through the East Village on my way to NYU. The downed shutters of store after store on that normally very-alive street were a total surprise. The immediate parallel my mind drew was to the times when Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in my city of Ahmedabad; the eerie calm in the normally throbbing, pulsating markets was jolting, more so because the fear of more violence was very real. The NY experience was more like watching a city, or a part of it, napping, taking a much needed breather. It seemed to me like the city that never sleeps was finally putting its feet up, snatching some rest, however fitful.

It was also interesting to see people waving down already occupied cabs, to see if their paths & destinations crossed enough to share the car with a couple of perfect strangers. The traffic on most streets was thinner, but it was a glorious day: chilly but sunny, and I enjoyed my stroll along Fifth Avenue, as did dozens of others who were leisurely moving about. I love that about New York, there is always, but always, people-movement on the streets.

The medium is the code

2005-11-07T07:16:00.000-05:00

So these last few days, I have been diving deeper into code of all kinds: javascript, actionscript, css; and as I work, really work with the finer aspects of it all, as I understand the idiosyncracies & beauties of each, (yeah, clean, clear code is as beautiful as a well-crafted essay; reminds me of my son who is forever talking about the 'elegance' in math equations) I am transported back to the time when I created in paint. The oil paints, the oil,& turpentine, & one's ideas & sketches had to be molded & coaxed into a unified piece. It's the same with code: the essence of it still remains the same: become one with the medium in order to work well with it. And of course it's gratifying that one's efforts in the code medium can be easily made accessible to millions of users. And the way the web & RIAs are going, it is exhilarating to conjure up new possibilities for new experiences, new behaviours, & not least, rich graphics. I was pleasantly surprised to see the very attractive Konfabulator website. In terms of visual look, it is luscious; so are some of the widgets. The weather widget especially comes to mind, with the super icons for rain & clouds & sunshine..

Living here in the US the past couple of years has impressed upon me the wisdom of looking up the weather report for the day: I can't tell you how many times I have gotten drenched, or stepped out in a light shirt to realize that it's freezing. ( Never, ever did I check the weather back home in India, & I'm sure weather news & widgets are not as big a deal in Asia as they are in the West, probably because the weather there is not quite as temperamental as here). So I check out the weather widget, a very very attractive visual overview of the next few days ( though the default it turns up is for Palo Alto!!), showing thick gray clouds one day, fat droplets of rain for the next, & the sun peeking out shyly from behind the clouds the next. In school ( 4th grade or standard as we used to call it), we were given a homework assignment to fill in a paper calendar with a visual for the weather then; I used to get immense pleasure coloring these in with my boxful of pencil crayons. These widgets remind me of then.

Email health woes, mobile phones & other stories..

2005-10-17T10:00:00.000-04:00

So while I labor on with my pet project about email visualization, I am fascinated by these stories I read up on the side when I am re-charging my batteries :)

Couch potatoes are bad enough, now people are carrying forward that behaviour to their office chairs too: experts warn of health risks from sedentary behaviours spawned by email; more & more people resort to emailing a colleague, ( even one sitting in the next cubicle!!) rather than walking over. Experts call it the 'Screen Slave' culture... Read it here
A teenager in the UK is being treated for 'text message addiction' as he runs up a 4500 (UK pounds!!) bill for text messaging in one year. He was sending 700 text messages a month, sent 8000 emails during one month... Read it here

Tags: Email, mobile phones, Health

We Media Conference: Some notes from my observations

2005-10-17T08:42:00.000-04:00

I've finally found some time to put together my notes from this conference. It was an interesting event, populated by 'old'( read TV & newspaper editors & journalists') and
'new media' folk from Yahoo, Google, Craigslist, and a bunch of entrepreneurs mainly from California who are doing pretty exciting stuff such as relevant search.

The keynote address by Al Gore was interesting, but drew its share of snorts especially at his claim that TV is the primary medium of information for the bulk of Americans, & will continue to be so for the next decade, despite the burgeoning of the web. His rationale for this predominance of TV was the fact that full-motion video is possible only through TV, and that in turn ensures glued eyeballs. I would tend to believe that TV is truly the top source of news & information for the masses, and video may be just one part of it; I'd like to think it has more to do with ease-of-use: all you need to do is press a button to power it up, & then press 1, 2, 3, 4 (don't worry, there's only 10 buttons here:) The passivity & the simplicity may be a big part of the allure too. On the other hand, take web surfing: firstly, one has to be moderately computer-literate to even begin, then one has a variety of browsers & document types to deal with; reading is always harder than listening; the much-touted interactivity demands periodic responses from the user, and we all know we'd rather be left alone at times :)...

So anyways, next there was a little discussion about bloggers: their phenomenal growth, but that only a few blogs are surfacing enough to be read, & so on. There was an interesting panel discussion among folks from a combination of new & old media: old media companies (CBS in this case) were questioned about their feeble response to new media challenges, that the only response they & similar old media giants could garner up to challenge digital news providers was to set up a digital media division. This thread came up again in the Citizen Journalism discussion, & here's the bottom line that emerged:

that despite the events of the past few months where blogging & citizen participation in news production have exploded, the noise-to-signal ration is still too high.
what old media companies have over fledgling citizen journalist content is credibility & authenticity. After all, one may read a blog or two for amusement or the individual style of the writer, but to get credible news, one will very likely go to the established professional players.
Now what happens when you combine the two: that is what Yahoo is attempting with their Hot Zones experiment (http://hotzone.yahoo.com/b/hotzone/blogs1186). They have teamed up with Kevin Sites, a blogger who independently covers regions such as Iraq & now Rwanda; he is given full editorial rights, Yahoo claims, to cover & report on events as he sees fit. To my mind, this is great, & brings to mind how, in these uncertain, unchartered spaces, experimentation & agility might yield interesting results.
The theme of trust & authenticity in the online space, like I mentioned earlier, rightly bubbled to the surface every now & then during the course of the day. It was brought up that so far, internet news providers have not displayed the quality of reporting & journalistic standards that traditional media has.

That about sums up the day. I also enjoyed the ferment of ideas from new entrepreneurs playing in the collaboration & search space.

Tags: we media, collaboration, social software

We Media: Conversations & collaborations

2005-09-26T11:22:00.000-04:00

This exciting conference "Conversations & collaborations" takes place in New York on Oct 5. Organized by Associated Press, the conference hopes to stimulate new thought & directions for participatory media, and shared networks. I am deeply interested in the idea of ordinary people producing as well as consuming media, and now that I have won a fellowship to this event, I hope to take in a wide swathe of all the buzz & activity in these areas.

The event has Al Gore as keynote speaker, as well as speakers from Yahoo, Craigslist, & from various blogs & media companies. I will be blogging the days events right here, & reporting on interesting happenings & my observations.

Check out more about the event at We Media.

In this context, would like to point out some examples of meaningful shared experiences through technology:

1. Work in modern times often means that families continue to stay connected across distances, and that's what we do too periodically. While I broadly work out of New York, my husband is a globe-trotter, and we stay in touch these days through Skype or Google Talk. Now not only do we speak whenever we please, without the costs of long-distance telephone, but there is so much ambient information I get about his day & his surroundings: when he got back home from office, has he gone for his usual jog in the morning ( when he logs in at 5=30 AM I know he has skipped his jog!!).
The other day, we were chatting on Skype, & the doorbell rings at our home back in India; that very ordinary sound meant so much to me, as it brought back memories of my own days back at home. So anyway, it was this neighbor of ours who had come to visit, & my husband drags him to the computer, & there followed this very rich, threesome conversation. It was almost as if I was back in my living room in India, & the neighbors had dropped by. Powerful!!

2. This story was narrated by my student, as she was finding her way to the NYU building for the first class. She did not know how to reach the building, she checks with a few passers-by, but nobody can help her. Next she calls up a friend who has been living in the city for years, but this too didn't help. At her wits end, she calls up, via her cell phone, her mother living in another state; the mother looks up the address on some mapping site on the web, passes on the exact location to my student, & she finally does make it to class!!

3. I usually don't much care for high-tech wizardry such as Google Earth: I mean, I hear people going ga-ga over how cool the zooming features are, or how you can fly in & out of views. As far as I could see, there were these variously sized blocks standing for buildings, & you could get a peek into this street or that street. Great, but I still didn't find it personally meaningful!! Till the other night my son whooshes down into his school campus, points to a curved wall in a building, & says, "Do you see this, this is where I have my lunch every day." Now that's something, isn't it?

Tags: we media, collaboration, social software

Teaching at NYU, that's exciting!!

2005-08-05T11:05:00.000-04:00

I am slated to teach two courses this coming fall at NYU: Information Architecture, and Weblogs & Wikis. I am really really excited about this. I am sure this experience will invigorate my own thinking in these areas. Check out these courses here:

Information Architecture
Weblogs & Wikis

Technological change & cultural attitudes

2005-07-17T11:45:00.000-04:00

I was walking down the aisles of my supermarket here in Jersey City, and picking up frozen vegetables: shelled peas, corn, okra conveniently chopped into pieces, cauliflower & broccolli florets in a bag!! How wonderfully convenient all this is. I don't remember having shelled peas for a number of years now.

And it just brought home to me how much has changed. Even back in India, I bought my yoghurt off the grocery store shelves, rather than making my own. Here in the US, I haven't succeeded in making my own yoghurt, it just never sets right. Also, I remember as a child, part of the routine during hot, long, lazy summers was sacks of wheat lying in a corner of the house, a grim threat everyday that I may be called upon to help in this terribly boring chore: sit with other women, & help clean out the grain of stones & bugs. I did serve my time here, & it was always a relief to see the sacks sagging & getting smaller as the contents moved from there through our watchful eyes & fingers, & into large metal containers to be stocked away for the coming year. ( There was sometimes an in-between stage where the job done by us kids was scrutinized again by an elder before making it to the final storage!!)

Then as the years passed, my generation was disinclined to go through the tedium of this routine. Things had changed too, there wasn't a need for this: the erstwhile days of shortages of every necessity had given rise to the practice described above; now there were none, one could buy as & when one needed, without any significant difference in price from season to season. In addition, family sizes were getting smaller; it just did not make sense to buy the volumes my parents did.

But the older generation frowned upon the methods we adopted. In their eyes, not buying & stocking up for the entire year meant that one wasn't doing well enough financially; it almost was like a literal living-from-hand-to-mouth as far as they were concerned. Just-in-time inventories meant nothing to my mother & grandmother, and their generation, believe me.

In a similar vein, I love the idea of chopped & frozen veggies in my frig: I for one have the least patience with chopping beans or getting the cauliflower cut & sized for the next meal. Like I said earlier, I haven't shelled peas in years, & I don't think I am upto the task anymore. I would cry from the sheer tedium of it! But it amuses me to go back to my teen-years when I was the veggie-chopper of the family. Holidays & vacations would have my mother setting aside baskets of veggies for me to work my magic with: potatoes, onions, peas, okra, beans, the lot. And back then I enjoyed this task, and I'll divulge my reasons now. It was like this: I either chopped the veggies, sitting next to my favorite gadget, the radio, listening to my favorite Hindi movie songs, humming along with, and in short, getting transported to a lovely romantic world, while the hands mechanically did their job with the veggies. Or I would have to help with dusting & cleaning the house every morning, or standing by the hot stove in the kitchen. My little sister could work herself into a lather over a sparkling house every morning, not me. Don't get me wrong here, I love a clean, fresh home: but will someone else please take care of that!! I am grateful my sister did just that, every morning!! ( It also occurs to me now, but pray what did my brothers do during their summer breaks? hmmm............)

And I'm sure the current spate of technological change will throw up equally fascinating stories of how different people are taking to such changes in their lives. If you have a family story like this, do feel free to send it to me. I might just make a project out of it!!

(Technorati tags: culture, family, life)

Podcasts

2005-07-17T11:02:00.000-04:00

I have been reading up on discussions about podcasting: opinions range from 'it's the next big revolution' to 'this is just fluff, and a lot of hype by some'. As with most such issues, it's best to see for yourself. And I accidentally hit upon BBC's podcast for their 'Go Digital' section. Here's what I experienced:

First, it was a pleasure that the download was so quick. I tried this on a dial-up (as a designer I am intensely interested in how accessible a technology really is to people world-wide, not just the ones with broad-band & cable connections; that's a great reason for using PCs too in one's toolbox). So this one started streaming in a few seconds, no stuttering, no pauses that one typically gets with audio & video downloads as the slow connection gasps to keep pace with the material coming in). Great experience there.

As I listen to the interviews & discussions, I started getting really excited about it. I could move about in the house, carry on my other activities, & yet continue to listen to news I wanted to stay abreast of. Now what routinely happens with me is that everyday I plan to get into my favorite news sites (BBC is one) to quickly scan through important happenings. It never works, really. I put these news sites into a favorites folder, but that was it. There were always other things to take care of, so ............ Next I added all of these to my news aggregator, hoping that would solve the problem. But again no, there are times that I do not open my RSS reader for days on end!

I now realise part of the problem may have to do with the nature/constraints of the above experiences: I have to be at my computer for one; and more importantly, a good deal of focus & eye-power ( for want of a better term) is required to carry out these activities. Reading off computer screens is enormously straining on the eyes, thus inducing one to scan text rather than to actually read.

Podcasting solves that problem beautifully: download the file to your computer or mp3 player, listen to it at leisure. No eye-strain, plus one now has mobility, and there are other bonuses too!! Listening to the BBC podcast brought home to me the wealth of communication in the human voice. The intonations, the laughter, the warmth, the horror: all so effectively conveyed through this channel. And the best bonus for me was I didn't have to look at grisly pictures even when the topic might steer to Iraq or the London bombings. This enables one to focus on other bits of the story, rather than the overbearing pictures!!

Search & hierarchies

2005-07-02T09:04:00.000-04:00

With the new-found enthusiasm for tagging and folksonomy all around, combined with my passion for all-things-findability, I have been following up on these areas. My interest in information organization & hierarchies also stems from mailViz, a personal project that I am pursuing (among a dozen other things, I'm afraid). This involves the design of an email-visualization add-on to Outlook Express that will 1) enable a more visual view of emails in the system 2) produce better/richer alternatives for information-seeking. (Write to me if you'd like to be involved in this project, the concept & design are still in the very early stages).

So as part of this project, I am looking into the whole issue of folders & how they can be improved upon/done away with/what are the alternatives. I found the following posts useful to start off with:

Desktop Search: The End of Folders?Posted Jun 9, 2005, 9:07 PM ET by Brad Hill.
Much buzz is circulating about the Mac OS X Tiger’s Spotlight feature replacing the traditional file-management system of nested folders. Spotlight is X’s built-in desktop searcher. If the search is so transparent, effortless, and accurate as to render the folder view irrelevant, Spotlight has great implications for Windows-based systems (Longhorn), and, by extension, for search companies.Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I have trouble conceiving the death of nested folders. I use Google Desktop Search and Yahoo! Desktop, and appreciate the tremendous improvement over the panting Windows search puppy, but the folder structure remains active in my mind. I don’t always want a spotlight to laser into a single file. Often, my preference is to view an entire folder’s contents. Admittedly, I am freakishly organized about placing files in correct folders, and I create elaborate folder hierachies to match my mental organization. When using desktop music programs, I sometimes use their search functions to find individual tracks in my collection, but just as often I go into the folders via My Computer and drag desired tracks into the media player. Searching and browsing enjoy equal emphasis in my computing lifestyle. So while I’m all in favor of improved desktop search, I cannot (yet) get my mind around a computer with no folders.Tagging blog:You're It!
The Death of Hierarchy?John Hiler has an interesting post on Microcontentnews called Google’s War on Hierarchy, and the Death of Hierarchical Folders. He talks about how that computing standby the folder is being replaced by search and tags:Hierarchical Folders have helped us manage information for decades. They’ve proven themselves as some of the most flexible tools ever created: organizing wildly different industries, from Web Directories, to Email and Desktop File Systems.But Folders rarely solve the core problem that they address - and often create new ones, like forcing you to create new folders just to manage new information. Solutions like Search, Archives, Stars and Labels get more directly at the core problem… and promise that the future of information management will look very different from its past.Dan Brown posted a thoughtful follow-up that digs into the distinctions between hierarchy and structure:Hiler is right to point out that folder-based navigation is going away, but I think it’s dangerous to extend the demise of the folder (a bad metaphor) to the demise of hierarchy and formal structure. There is still a place for formal structure in interface design, even if it doesn’t look or behave like our old friend the folder.It’s also dangerous to compare “hierarchy” with “search.” Hierarchy is, most typically, a part-whole organization of things. Search, on the other hand, is a behavior where users specify some criteria and the computer does the work of locating objects that share something in common with them. These two notions are hardly mutually exclusive. Perhaps Hiler meant to compare search with browse, a behavior where users select from menus of options to arrive at the desired thing.In Hiler’s three “search” case studies, there is evidence of formal structure, though it’s under the surface. With Gmail, for example, there’s still the notion of a thread which contains messages. There is an inbox and an archive, which contain threads. There are relationships between original messages and replies. These are abstract hierarchies that are inherent to the information architecture, not layered on top like a folder structure. They may seem self-evident, but constructing these hierarchies requires a careful, user-aware design process.Indeed, structure is useful. And instead of one structural option–the folder–we now have derived structure (like search engine indexes and the derived polyhierarchies in iTunes) and user-applied structure (tags, labels, links, playlists). This is not the death of hierarchy; it’s the augmentation of hierarchy.

Street life

2005-07-02T08:50:00.000-04:00

I enjoy reading about street life in cities, and enjoy more the act of simply experiencing & exploring cities. And there's nothing like walking down the streets of a city to get to know it intimately: the character of the stores lining it, the way people loiter around their corners, the way it connects to adjacent places: all have rich stories to tell about the place. My family & i make it a point to tramp around new places, that is our way of making it our own.

In this context, I've just come across this book called Small Change by Nabeel Hamdi. Here's a description:

'Build a bus stop in an urban slum and a vibrant community sprouts and grows around it - that is the power of small changes that have huge positive effects.This book is an argument for the wisdom of the street, the ingenuity of the improvisers and the long-term, large-scale effectiveness of immediate, small-scale actions. Written by Nabeel Hamdi, the guru of urban participatory development and the master of the art, Small Change brings over three decades of experience and knowledge to bear on the question 'what is practice?'.

Seems like an interesting buy!

A mobile tale of three cities

2005-06-15T20:51:00.000-04:00

Interesting study of sociological & behavioral differences in cell phone usage in London, Paris & Madrid.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/10/business/ptcell11.php