Adaptive Path Blog

I missed Stephen Anderson’s talk at this year’s IA Summit. Every time I think about it, I kick myself. Where the heck was I? Wandering lost in the serpentine halls of the Flamingo Hotel, no doubt. Regardless, I hear I missed something special so we booked Stephen for UX Week.

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We are in for a treat tonight—Scott Berkun, author of The Art of Project Management, will be stopping by to share insights and ideas from his new book The Myths of Innovation. Scott gave a great talk at MX this year and we are really looking forward to having him here.

When: Tonight, Wednesday, May 16; 6pm social hour, 7pm talk

Where: 363 Brannan St, upstairs (look for the signs)

Adaptive Path will be providing soft drinks and snacks. Feel free to bring your own beverages.

Full details are available at upcoming.org.

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This posting is not about Star Wars analogies.
This posting is about a project sketch I showed during my portfolio presentation for Adaptive Path two weeks ago. This interactive sketch parses subtitles and maps them as dots linear on a stage. When you roll-over a dot you’ll see the timecode, the number of the subtitle and the text of the subtitle itself.

I experimented with subtitles, because some dialogues in movies are almost like poetry, or as significant as the image itself. Furthermore, I found it interesting that I could associate many of the Star Wars subtitles with the corresponding sequences.

To try the sketch out click here: Star Wars
(pop-up blockers might prevent this from launching)

Who am I again? Let me explain, my name is Sebastian Heycke and I luckily started an internship at Adaptive Path a couple of weeks ago.
I‘m in the final stage of my studies towards my Diploma in Communication Design with emphasis on Interface Design at the University of applied sciences in Potsdam, Germany. So far my internship has been very insightful and interesting and I’m very glad to be on board.

Thank you.

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Last year we had the pleasure of hosting John Bjerke, now a senior at the Marin School of Arts and Technology (MSAT) for a spring internship. He was in the middle of redesigning his school’s web site and asked to come work with us at Adaptive Path two days a week as he moved through the project.

We’re glad the experience didn’t frighten him off.

John has joined us again this spring, as part of MSAT’s Workplace Learning Experience internship program, and we’re thrilled to have him back. This time around John is helping us build a mini website for UX Intensive, which we will be hosting in Chicago April 23-26. He’s helping us out with everything from concept development, information architecture and development and has been doing a great job. Even more exciting, he’s blogging the whole thing. Welcome back, Bjerke!

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John Backus was the guy who looked at machine code and punch cards and said, “There has to be a better way.” His solution was FORTRAN, which in the words of his New York Times obituary, “changed the terms of communication between humans and computers, moving up a level to a language that was more comprehensible by humans.” He also developed the notation for any programming language that helped in the development of compilers. Anyone who has ever written a line of code owes him their thanks and his family their condolences. He passed away on Saturday at age 82.

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An internal AP mailing list has been buzzing since Amanda Willoughby asked, “What are the top 10 books, papers, websites, or objects had the most influence on your work, inspired you, or made you a better person?” I knew that as soon as I answered, I’d end up kicking myself for forgetting to include someone or something that I’d be mortified not to have mentioned.

Wouldn’t you know, I forgot to list Jane McGonigal’s This Is Not A Game: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play, her seminal paper on the alternate reality game (or ARG) known as The Beast, it’s “players” and their methods of collaboration. It’s a delightful read, and it was at the front of my mind this weekend when I learned about something that can only be the emergence of another full-fledged ARG.

It seems that as both a political statement and a promotion for the upcoming Nine Inch Nails album “Year Zero”, Trent Reznor has orchestrated a full-fledged immersive game that spans from encoded messages on T-shirts to dozens of microsites to thumb drives with leaked tracks. It’s complex, potentially controversial and gaining a significant amount of press attention only two weeks after it first came to light.

I’ve already spent a couple hours perusing the 360+ pages of threaded posts on the message boards at Echoing the Sound, where (much like the original Cloudmakers group board) the game is being discussed and dissected as it unfolds. It’s all rather impressive, both in scope and in its message, which is strongly anti-establishment (these links come with a strong content warning: the game kicks off with audio from an alleged “sniper shooting”). As the Year Zero approaches its puzzles will be tackled, and I’m excited to see how this group of players works together to solve and experience the whole thing.

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Mohawk Fine Papers has published a book of 40 posters designed for the Yale School of Architecture by Michael Bierut. A small sampling of these stunning pieces are posted over at Design Observer. Points of interest: each poster features different typefaces, an adherence to the simplicity (and low printing cost) of black and white, the use of simple geometric forms to create complex layouts. One poster, for “Non Standard Structures: An Organic Order of Irregular Geometries, Hybrid Members, and Chaotic Assemblies Symposium” was featured in Michael’s talk at UX Week 2006.

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Among both liberals and conservatives, he was one of the great giants of 20th century economics.

“What was really so important about him,” said W. Allen Wallis, a former classmate and later faculty colleague at the University of Chicago, “was his tremendous basic intelligence, his ingenuity, perseverance, his way of getting to the bottom of things — of looking at them in a new way that turned out to be right.”

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Intersections are exciting, infuriating, wondrous, and dangerous places. Roads, vehicles, people, and destinies all come together and are forced to deal with one another. 60% of all traffic accidents occur at intersections and many cities were founded at crossroads. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that Grant McCracken’s blog sitting at the intersection of anthropology and economics is quite a fascinating place. He always has something insightful to say about design, marketing, research, business, and culture. I especially love his “case study” style posts like these recent ones on “the new advertising” and the Zaltman research method. Note, though he may seem a bit academic/esoteric at times, it’s worth it. I recently met the man at the EPIC conference, an intersection between ethnography and industry, where he was directing traffic and stirring up trouble in the best way possible.

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Steven Johnson, who will be keynoting AP’s UX Week in August, will be sparring with Stephen Colbert tonight.

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