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Sunday, January 08, 2006
Things I loved in 2005
The rise and rise of documentary cinema, and in particular My Architect, a very moving - and informative - account of Louis Khan's son's search for exactly what his father was about. (A model for the Khan's Capital of Bangladesh - along with many other architectural models, including that for Fallingwater - can currently be seen at the Guggenheim Bilbao).
Citizens on the internet: the take off of Open Rights Group in the UK, and similar groups in Ireland, Canada and elsewhere. Open Tech, very ably organised by Dave Green, where ORG took off. And the excuse all this has given me for catching up with Lawrence Lessig's writings (Free Code).
Musical discoveries: Sufjan Stevens, The Arcade Fire, Polar Bear, Nouvelle Vague doing Guns of Brixton...Pandora.
Mash-ups: Practically everything Mark Vidler has done, particularly Shannon Stone, Strung Out, and Abba and the Bunnymen; and DJ Food's Raiding the 20th Century (I know, I'm a bit late to this particular party).
New perspectives: peering into the upper-floor windows of 30 St Mary Axe (the Gherkin), and hearing about those windows from the neighbours...
Shows: Faces in the Crowd at the Whitechapel
Meltdown: seeing Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine, and Yoko Ono. A different kind of trance music. It was also Patti's Meltdown that introduced me to Antony & the johnsons.
Work: doing ethnographic fiedwork here, there and everywhere. The first EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry) conference in the US. The People Inspired Innovation conference (though in my view nothing in recent years has beaten Dust or Magic at Oxford in 2004). A superlative usability awards do in London, for the first World Usability Day, due in no small measure to Sarah Ronald at the Pru, Louise Croft-Baker and all the UPA volunteers, and Bill Thompson.
Couch potato: Smooching around parks (Hyde, Regent's, Dulwich) in the summer sunshine with picnics and without. Getting my hair done by the lovely Alex and Joanne in Westbourne Grove, before visiting the glorious kitchen shop next door. Lunches and dinners with friends at favourite restaurants in London, Bristol, Manchester, Edinburgh, Brighton, Bilbao and Brussels. Sitting in a marvellous Suffolk pub with great folks from the Beeb, NASA...
6:42 PM|
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Saturday, January 07, 2006
Trance butchers
Over at music blog Soul Sides - one of my faves - Oliver takes aim at some of his fellows over the question of site design:
"I will very briefly say that the one thing I noticed in many of these newer sites is my age-old pet peeeve: step up your design game. You don't need super-duper professional templates, but a clean, simple, uncluttered page isn't much to ask for.
"And no more black backgrounds with big fonts and multi-colors. It looks like someone slaughtered a zebra at a rave or something."
Lovely image...
5:13 PM|
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Friday, January 06, 2006
Pandora
Following a chat with Matt Jones about online music, I've been exploring Pandora over recent weeks.
I still haven't made up my mind about its worth, but it is good fun...
1:33 PM|
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World Usability Day
We had the UK WUD 2005 inquest last night at Wagamama.
Lots of positive things and losts of lessons learned from this first World Usability Day.
I think we'd welcome comments from anyone who took part, and from those who didn't, about what could be done better for 14 November 2006.
1:30 PM|
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UK UPA talk on ethnography
I can confirm this will be on Thursday 19 January. Details are still to go up on the UK UPA website, but should be there shortly.
1:28 PM|
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