Pipsqueak Articles

Posts written by Olga Werby or Christopher Werby

Background Knowledge Errors, Pipsqueak Articles

Decision Scaffolding and Crisis Mapping

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I’m working on a series of illustrations to highlight the need for decision scaffolding during an aide mission. The ideas are based on the Ushahidi deployment experience in Haiti after the 2009 earthquake. But the idea is to make this more general. I would love ideas and recommendations on how to make this visualization better and more communicative. (read more about crisis mapping here) Crisis: Smoke Signals from Eye-Witnesses Let’s start with a crisis—a natural disaster or a political upheaval leaves thousands of people in desperate need of help. The people on the ground witness the suffering and use ICT (Information Communication Technology) to send up the spoke signals. Please not that Internet services might be compromised (due to deliberate actions taken by the authorities; infrastructure failures; chaotic conditions on the ground), but people tend to be very creative and use phone lines, radios, satellite links, and just person to person communication to get the information out there. During the current Libyan crisis, people were very creative: “To avoid detection by Libyan secret police, who monitor Facebook and Twitter, Mahmoudi, the leader of the Ekhtalef (“Difference”) Movement, used what’s considered the Match.com of the Middle East to send coded love…

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Interface Design, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy

Information Architecture: Building Mental Castles

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Prosopagnosia and Topographical Agnosia Not all memory structures are created equal. Humans have an amazing variability in our capacities to commit information to memory and to use this information flexibly to achieve our certain goals. Consider facial memory: our ability to remember a face even when out of context of original interaction. Like all cognitive abilities, facial recognition spans the continuum: there are people who basically lack this capacity (Oliver Sacks, a famous neurologist who wrote “A Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and “Awakenings” is one such example.) and then there are those who “never forget a face.” Most us are somewhere in between. I’m, personally, worse than most but perhaps not as bad as Dr. Sacks. (I taught science at a local elementary school, and to this day people stop me on a street and greet me in a very familiar way while I haven’t a slightest idea of who they are, never mind their names—very disconcerting.) The condition of being a lousy face recognizer is called Prosopagnosia and it tends to come with a complimentary Topographical Agnosia (or inability to identify places and thus having bad navigational skills). If you don’t remember faces and places,…

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Conceptual Design, Pipsqueak Articles

Augmented Reality in Design

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For those of you who have been designing iphone apps that use the geo-location features, social media connections, and tie-ins with local businesses, here are a few ideas and platforms that might help push your projects along to completion. In particular, if you’re considering developing a shopping iphone app (shopping lists, price comparisons, coupons, bulk purchases with friends, and sale alerts), this is worth watching. Argon, the Augmented Reality Web Browser Blair MacIntyre, director of Argon Project, and associate professor in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, describes the new platform for smart phone (iphone) that uses the same tools as those used to develop web sites. Ad-dispatch Augmented Reality Video This video shows how iphone can be used to interact with packaging, ad, and billboards. What is daqri? This video shows off a piece of software which allows “rich spatial media experience”: Daqri.

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Background Knowledge, Conceptual Design, Flow, Interaction Design, Interface Design, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy, Scaffolding, Users, ZPD

Remarkable Design

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How does one design a remarkable product? “Well, it depends on a product,” some would say. But couldn’t we say something general? Why do we feel passionate about some products but not others? Consider conversations: some are fun, some are boring; some engage lots of people, some not so much; some result is heated exchanges, some are more neutral. Note that you can be very passionate about a topic, but don’t consider it fun: rape, genocide. Politics engages lots of people, but the details leave most bored. Some conversations generate sustained interest, and some fizzle out without a remark. What’s required for a conversation to be remarkable? That depends on the audience. To be engaged in a discussion, you have to find the topic interesting to you. And what’s interesting to you, might not be to me. Thus the topic of conversation is a variable of the targeted audience. Even if you find the topic amusing, you might not have the time to participate in the conversation. “I would love to talk to you about quantum space time, but the plane leaves in 5 minutes.” And it is so noisy on the plane that you can only hear every other…

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Pipsqueak Articles, Users

Bullying in a Workplace

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On Valentine’s Day, February 14 2011, New York Times ran an article “Web of Popularity, Achieved by Bullying” by Tara Parker-Pope—recent research shows interesting patterns in bullying and victimhood distribution in the school student body. As I was reading the article, I realized that much of what is being described there had a direct parallel in a workplace. I don’t have the data to back this up, but I had personal experiences giving me some anecdotal evidence. Perhaps you have had similar experiences as well (academia is ripe with them). To make my point I’ll quote part of the article below and use bold on text that I’ve replaced in the article: students to co-workers; student body to employees, and so on. Enjoy! Web of Popularity, Achieved by Bullying By TARA PARKER-POPE For many employees navigating the social challenges of a workplace, the ultimate goal is to become part of the “popular” crowd. But new research suggests that the road to workplace popularity can be treacherous, and that employees near the top of the social hierarchy are often both perpetrators and victims of aggressive behavior involving their peers. The latest findings, being published this month in The American Sociological Review,…

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Cognitive Blindness, Featured, Mental Model Traps, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy

The Value of Trust in Search

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There was an interesting article published on the New York Times the other day: “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search.” The article documented the use of Black Hat SEO strategies on behalf of J. C. Penny, leading J. C. Penny to be at the top of multiple Google search results for months. While J. C. Penny didn’t disclose the boost in revenues that the number one placement on Google search produced during the 2010 Christmas shopping season, we can assume it was substantial. The article raises several alarms: How prevalent is the use of “Black Hat” CEO techniques among large commercial companies selling their services online? Since J. C. Penny is a customer worth several million of ad dollars to Google, did Google (for a time) look the other way? [30-11-2010, BBC News: “EU launches antitrust probe into alleged Google abuses,” last visited on 02-14-2011.] Google administers “Google Hell” punishment to the companies that use “Black Hat” strategies to beat its search ranking algorithms. There’s no court, no arbitration, no negotiation. The company simply vanishes from Google search results. These are all about trust. We—the average online citizens—rely on search results for so many needs now. We research our medical…

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