Remember this name: Aaron Koblin

This afternoon I attended the Yahoo Design Expo, a collection of projects from students engaged in new media/media arts/interaction design at various universities. Most of the exhibits were interesting, but only one presenter really shone through as One to Watch: Aaron Koblin. A student at UCLA, he showed two works that demonstrated amazing promise: The [...]

Completed my conversation with Michael Bierut

You can read the third (and final) part of my conversation with Michael Bierut on the Adaptive Path site. It’s a nice little capper of our discussion. You’ll also see a teaser from Michael on what he plans on discussing at User Experience Week. And, if you didn’t know already, you can buy single-day passes [...]

Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence, Chapter 3: Links and Causal Arrows: Ambiguity in Action

Welcome to my thoughts on chapter 3 of Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence. If you haven’t yet, you can read what I thought of Chapters 1 and 2. As an information architect and interaction designer, I’ve had my share of trafficking in boxes and arrows — diagrams of schemes, systems, processes, and flows, commonly depicted as elements [...]

Why Joel Kotkin is Full of It

Joel Kotkin is an urban theorist who loves to flout urban conventional wisdom by supporting suburbs and the rise of new cities like Phoenix. His primary argument seems to be, “If people want to move there, Why not let them?” And a good reason to at least call into question this flight of people to [...]

Fujita-san

Stacy, because this is the kind of thing she does, has been digging into the history of the house in which we live. Among the things we’ve found out is that it was built in 1905, and has the identical floor plan, albeit in mirror image, to the house right next door. A couple days [...]

JJG and SBJ – Interface Culture 9 Years Later

Wow. The discussion between my colleague Jesse and Steven Johnson is stunning. I was a little jealous that I didn’t get to converse with Steven, but after reading this, I’m now thankful — Jesse addressed things I wouldn’t have considered, and uncovered interesting ideas that I wouldn’t have found. Steven, of course, is the day [...]

Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence, Chapter 2

Earlier this month, I wrote an at-times-savage review of the introduction and first chapter of Edward Tufte’s new book, Beautiful Evidence. I write that critically because I hold Tufte to very high expectations — if only because he considers himself a critic of the highest order. Chapter 2 is markedly different from Chapter 1 in [...]

Animation from the Great White North

A long long time ago, when a student at UC Berkeley, I volunteered for the organization that brought movies to campus. A perk of that role was the ability to get paid Real Cash Money to work the annual Spike and Mike Festival of Animation, which, in the early 90s, was still pretty obscure, and [...]

What I’ve been up to – conferences edition

The blog has been quiet… Some stuff is brewing. There’s an official website for the IDEA 2006 conference I’m organizing. Speaking of conferences, I’ve been invited to speak at SHIFT (Social and Human Ideas for Technology), taking place at the end of September in Lisbon, Portugal. I’ve never been to Portugal! And, of course, I’m [...]

TED Talks; People Listen

I finally got around to listening to the posted talks from the 2006 TED Conference. They made their way to the internet in no small thanks to June Cohen, an old friend who is now involved with organizing the TED conference (is that a dream job or what?) and is trying to get the TED [...]

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Links, thoughts, and essays from Peter Merholz