Me, Michael Bierut, and User Experience Week 2006

Part 2 of my conversation with Michael Bierut has been posted. In this installment, we touch on ethics, politics, and designing tangible futures. Lots of good stuff. Some favorite passages: “I also sometimes hear that, for instance, design adn politics don’t mix. Sure they mix. Everything mixes. The goal is to seek an integrated life, [...]

IDEA 2006 – Three new speakers announced!

Over the past week I’ve had some great discussions with people whom I wanted to present at IDEA 2006. And in that last week, I’ve lined up three new speakers: Fernanda Viegas, IBM Research, History Flow Fernanda will address the upsurge of visualizations online, and how more and more people are able to visualize their [...]

peterme wikipedia contrail

Finally a blog meme I like. Darin Morgan – writer of three brilliant and one good X-Files episodes Lesson 3 – hip-hop song (no entry) Lily Tomlin – American actress, in the current movie A Prairie Home Companion Robert Osborne – host on Turner Classic Movies (I was trying to see if they at all [...]

Don’t you all know what each other is going to say?

So, one of the things that is explicit for me in planning IDEA is that I *don’t* want the usual suspects speaking. I’m feeling particularly good about this as I look over at the latest cause of conference buzz, Aula. The main public event features Clay Shirky, Joichi Ito, and the follow on private event [...]

The World of The Sinister

I live with one, and work with at least two others. I’m talking left-handed people. The most recent episode of Quirks and Quarks, CBC Radio’s weekly science program, has a lengthy and interesting segment on what causes left-handedness (MP3, 20 min) (hint: still not quite known), and typical traits of left-handers. If you’ve got a [...]

Stories of the George Foreman grill

From the It’s old but it’s new to me department comes this story of the George Foreman grill as a means for the impoverished to prepare a meal. I recently subscribed to a bunch of new podcasts, including NPR’s Hidden Kitchens, and this was the first download. It’s remarkably touching, particularly hearing George explain his [...]

Thoughts while reading the premiere of IN: Inside Innovation

Its process of creation stirred controversy in the blogosphere. Last week, the first issue of BusinessWeek’s Inside Innovation appeared to the world. Here are my thoughts as I read it. – Marissa Mayer on the cover? Really? Did BusinessWeek feel a need to “catch up” to Fast Company? Do magazines talk of a Mayer gap? [...]

Don has a point but…

In a recent essay, Don Norman bitches about the tendency among designers and researchers to call the people who are the subject of their efforts anything but, well, “people.” And I think he has a point — words do matter. Though I think he overstates the point — those other labels (well, except for “consumer,” [...]

20 Minute Book Review: jPod

(Written on the commute to work, which lasts 20 minutes.) My colleague Janice attended the super swanky D conference; among the schwag bag items was Douglas Coupland‘s latest novel jPod. I’ve been reading Coupland’s work since Generation X, and have found it to be wildly uneven. I distinctly remember enjoying that debut book (though I’ve [...]

The Small Things

Living with an archaeologist, and having spent a very little time at her dig site, I came to appreciate how it’s about the small things. Hell, when I was digging, I was excited to be digging up rocks, because at least it wasn’t just sand or dirt. Anyway, Stacy reports a major find on her [...]

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Links, thoughts, and essays from Peter Merholz