Thought I’d take a break from not getting anything useful done to exclaim about this morning’s breakfast. Maree took us to Fratelli Paridiso, which I find difficult: sitting in the dark waiting for the good-looking Italian staff, to interrupt their own conversations for rapid fire explanations of the illegible blackboard menu in unintelligibly thick accents – however everyone else loves the place. So I have to grudgingly admit this was the best breakfast dish I can remember having. A poached egg, basil, bacon, (roast?) cherry tomatoes and salty biscuit on polenta with balsamic and an incredible olive oil.

This tea looked so much better than it tasted.

So that’s a ludicrous amount of stickies marking all the bits that seemed worth noting as i read Subject to Change. I was disappointed when I got to the end and hadn’t learned any specific new techniques. And yet it was exciting to read a clearly articulated explanation of experience design aimed at business people. It helped me recognise and reorganise my own understanding of experience strategy, research and design. Below are my notes, some paraphrasing jumbled up with quotes, any typos are my own.

P8-9

Design has been saddled with many connotations: Design as aesthetic (styling), design as a role, design as objects, design as rock star. But the authors say design is an activity: Empathy (understanding of how people will behave/interact), Problem solving, ideation and prototyping, finding alternatives.

p10

Great quote on design from Steve Jobs: “When you start looking at a problem it seems really simple, you don’t really understand the complexity of the problem. Then you get into the problem, and you see that it’s really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s sort of the middle, and that’s where most people stop… But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, the underlying principle of the problem – and come up with an elegant, really beautiful solution that works.”

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My unshaven facial hair snags in the keys during calls.

It’s also spontaneously stopped being able to roam. It drop outs. It randomly restarts. It drains batteries three times as fast as it used to. I assume these are symptoms of it trying to connect to the roaming partners network. It won’t manually connect either, although it does seem to see the roaming partner’s network.

This problem has exposed Three’s / 3’s / Hutchison’s Sydney coverage as being appalling. Their Indian call center’s have been very friendly but of little help to date. I’ve sent it off to be repaired – which was a huge inconvenience – but the problem was not fixed (at the time i just knew the batteries were being drained but didn’t know why)

I’m expecting them to fix this or replace the phone, when I finally get around to takeing it into one of their stores

Update: I’ve replaced this phone after sending it to be repaired twice for failing to roam, draining batteries & random rebooting. Replacement e65 works fine.

Stoneware
Nakazato Taroemon XIII, 1981
Art Gallery of NSW

Entree from Oy Restaurant (a “Sailors Thai canteen”, 71 Macleay St, Potts Point). Fancy, very tasty and expensive thai food. See their website

I almost destroyed Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody by dog-earing the bits I wanted to try and remember. As many of those as I could two finger type are recorded below:

p39

There is obviously some value to both photographers and viewers in having photos available, but in many cases that value never exceeded the threshold of cost created by the institutional dilemma. Flickr escaped those problems, not by increasing its managerial oversight over photographers but by abandoning any hope of such oversight in the first place, instead putting in place tools for the self-synchronization of otherwise latent groups

p45

Our basic human desires and talents for group effort are stymied by the complexities of group action at every turn. Coordination, organisation, even communication in groups is hard and gets harder as the group grows. That difficulty means that whatever methods help coordinate group action will spread, no matter how inefficient they are, so long as they are better than nothing.

p47

The cost of all kinds of group activity – sharing, cooperation, and collective action – have fallen so far so fast that activities previously hidden beneath that (Coasean) floor are now coming to light. We didn’t notice how many things were under the floor because , prior to the current era, the alternative to institutional action was usually no action. Social tools provide a third alternative: action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive.

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Scott Bryant organised for most of NDM’s USiT to go to an event called Dr Sketchy a couple of weeks ago. It’s an “anti-art school”, a kind of life drawing come burlesque evening held at the Art House Hotel in the Sydney CDB on a week night. It’s been a long while since i did any drawing from life and i really enjoyed it: good music, a glass of champagne and time dedicated to making marks. Below are some of my better results.