kuniform

World Usability Day is coming, and Chicago’s theme is “It Makes $ense.” That’s Chicago in three words, really. If it doesn’t pass the common sense and financial test, it’s not going to get done. Sometimes I wonder if that limits how often we attempt to look off to the horizon, though. At least, it feels that way to me sometimes, so I am excited to hear from Jeremy Alexis of IIT’s Institute of Design talking about the future of user experience design. I thought Patrick Whitney was speaking at some point, too.

Anyhow—I’m going to be a panelist at the WUD, talking with Dayna Bateman of Hammacher Schlemmer and John Yesko of Fry. We’re presenting on usability as its practiced at each of our companies, retailer, consultancy, and travel site. I’m representing for Orbitz, yo. I’m really excited and honored to be asked. I hope to have a good presentation, good enough to inspire some questions.

An interesting link passed to my by my buddy Dirk Gaiser. It’s a new organization dedicated to taking on Walmart and asking them to behave more responsibly with regards to the rest of humanity.

Hmm, the nice thing about starting up a blog at Kunesh Interaction Design to deal strictly w/design issues is going to make this blog much easier to parse and actually, well, care about and read.

A really good Christopher Hitchens article sent by my friend James Wynne about the “policy” of terrorists. One of the side points Hitchens makes is that the terrorists aren’t thinking about the enemy and reflecting, they are simply acting on their ideology. To me, this is an issue I have with the intellectuals who look at our enemy and seek to understand something of ourselves or our complicity in their crime. It is an issue, but it was an issue a generation ago.

Now, we have all participated to have created a world in which men like these exist to exercise solely to fulfill a violent destiny of fundamental hatred. We should be addressing those concerns now and work for justice everyday, but it is not how to prevent more suicide bombings tomorrow or five years from now.

Anyway, I said I would stop posting political things, so there is little mention of it here vis a vis current events. Without James’ kindly im, I wouldn’t have had this to send along at all.

I have been reading up on Web 2.0 applications and consuming them at a voracious rate. It is a very different beast than the traditional User Centered Design-methodology driven-world I’ve been a part of most recently at Orbitz. A few years ago I worked at a small shop where our staff had some common roots with the two Jakes ofthreadless. They did lots of fun social networking stuff and were tuned into things like Bonnaroo as well as people like 37signals.com’s basecamp, etc.

I will be extending and substantially updating this site in the weeks ahead as I take advantage of sites like del.icio.us and build out some of my content, like the links on the side nav over there, through them. Finally, I am switching this blog to feature only design-related items on the homepage. I feel like I’ve been ignoring my own trade while I was doing all this research on accessibility, interaction design and the user interfaces of physical products. While interesting and somewhat relevant, the internet is morphing this year.

Reading about it while not participating in it is not a comfortable or customary position for me. I intend to amend this situation post-haste. Thank you to Tim O’Reilly for this excellent article entitled What is Web 2.0?, which has reformulated the web for me. He shed the proverbial scales from my eyes on what this generation of the web has to teach us.

Now, on to figuring out how information architecture interacts with folksonomy; how to document these interactive AJAX applications. More soon…