I stumbled into the design patterns piece of it on del.icio.us Monday, but during my periodic look at mezzoblue, the details became more clear. Not only has Yahoo made available to the public a set of design patterns, but a
UI library and other tools.
Rather than duplicating details here, I’ll pass you to Chad Dickerson’s more detailed summary. (Thanks to flashpoint for the ref to Chad’s words on the user interface library.)
I came late to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer party. I watched a little of season 4 when my girlfriend at the time was rooming with a Buffy fan, then got back into it again in reruns just in time for the end of the series, ((The real fun of those later seasons of Buffy watching was that my mother got me started on it again while I was consulting back in Chicago. My memories of Mom when I was growing up are practically devoid of tv, but apparently as more of us grew up and moved out, she started having time to watch the tube (and no kids monopolizing it).)) then attended one of those “end of an era” parties held by the Buffy faithful back in the summer of 2003.
Thanks to the magic of TV on DVD (the way god intended television to be viewed), and Fox’s limited edition *The Chosen Collection*, I’m reliving the joys of yesteryear with a little more context.
I could talk about the character development over the course of the series (my standard reason for loving a tv show), but my enjoyment centers on two of the show’s repeating themes: laying down what you want for what’s necessary, and making your mistakes right. Though everybody gets a few turns at it, the themes come out most plainly through Buffy herself.
At the macro level, you have the slayer’s burden. Evenings of vampire slaying, days of people thinking you’re flaky because your night job isn’t especially compatible with daytime responsibilities. Work hard all night to save people that think you’re a freak.
More specifically, there’s pushing the lower end of the grade rankings because there’s no time to study, taking a dead end job to support yourself and your sister now that Mom’s gone, and no love with your vampire boyfriend because it will turn him evil.
Examples abound in the “making things right” category, but the most common pattern boils down to Buffy pushing her friends away (typically to keep them safe), realizing that she’s making them miserable because all they want to do is help, reconciling with them, and Buffy and the scoobie gang beating the baddies together.
Specific plotlines vary of course, these are just recurring themes over the 7 seasons. But after the fun of the banter and the commentary on high school, I’m glad to see Joss Whedon and his team consciously providing a positive message about growing up and getting through life without getting too preachy about it. Letting your characters be flawed helps, as does letting them take some time to recognize their mistakes.
Anyway, a nice jaunt through memory lane. One I’m looking forward to repeating when my kids are old enough to appreciate it. ((And you can bet that one of the first things Dad will say about the show is how Grandma got him started watching it back when he worked in Chicago. Grandma will thereafter forever be known as the Buffy grandma.)) …Provided we can find one of those primitive pre-high definition DVD players and a TV that will connect to it in the glorious world of the future.
As my brother continues the visual redesign of our family site (primarily a web forum and gallery), he’s now facing down typographic issues. What typeface will best fit our family and how we use our site? What’s the prevailing family aesthetic, and does it work toward or against legibility or clear typographic hierarchy?
It’s been interesting to see the feedback thus far. Naturally we’ve discussed the virtues of faces designed for the screen like Verdana, Georgia and Lucida Grande. Conversation has run through the oft seen web practice of serifs for headlines, sans for copy. (Complete with explanations of why that works best for screen while the inverse is normally best for print. I love having a family full of type geeks.) We’ve even made our way to talking through font replacement methods like sIFR and whether it’s worth using that to open up the option of family favorites like Garamond and Goudy Old Style.
All things being equal, sIFR’s not really my cup of tea once I’m done admiring the code. (I’m generally one of those “keep the text texty” sorts.) I love quality type, but I get uneasy about replacing regular text, even if we’re still preserving accessibility. That said, I’m about ready to put down money that someone in the family will volunteer to implement it for that extra bit of typographic punch. (Dad had no idea what trouble he was causing, keeping all those typography books where young boys could get at them.)
We’ll see if I get roped in to help someone make out the scripting. If I do, something tells me I’ll enjoy sIFR altogether too much in spite of myself.
As a means of facilitating interdisciplinary thinking and to help enfranchize informal learners, Burke presented a knowledge map project he’s been working on called the Knowledge Web. Through this tool and others like it, Burke hopes we will foster a more relational approach to learning and learn to think more innovatively.
His KWeb knowledge map focused on a web of significant individuals in art and science history, connected by relationships including friendships, working relationships, enmity, etc. The idea is to take journeys through the network, see what interactions led to innovations and how those innovations rippled through the network of people and ideas.
To show this network of knowledge, KWeb uses a navigation metaphor of nested spheres, inner spheres representing periods farther back in time, outer spheres representing more recent events. Once you pick a node in a sphere, it shows that node’s direct connections to other nodes in the web, and secondarily highlights directly connected nodes’ directly connected nodes.
Burke’s intent with this approach to representing knowledge is to hook people with interesting connections and get them to trace through the network with the kind of thrill people experience when reading through a mystery story. He means to take advantage of curiosity about how ideas are connected to drive users’ learning activity.
Using KWeb to trace through a path, Burke illustrated the kinds of connections across discipline, business, market or culture that have led to important innovations in history.
Burke provides an example beginning with Richard Arkwright, a man who made weaving equipment. He had all the usual connections you’d expect to people in the textile industry. But look, he’s talking to this guy who has nothing to do with textiles, he fixes machines for Glasgow University. “This guy” turns out to be James Watt, who as Wikipedia tells us was “a Scottish inventor and engineer whose improvements to the steam engine were fundamental to the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution.”
During the demonstration Burke suggests that as we pay attention to similar information in the present, we can predict where, when, and what kind of innovations will happen. (Though the thought of tracking people’s associations part has a certain invasion of privacy feel to it.)
Burke puts forth an idea he calls social ecology describing society applying the predictive capabilities society develops for understanding the secondary or ripple effects of a given technology in sufficient detail and far enough ahead of that technology’s development to understand what we think about that technology as a society before it develops, and develop a consensus as to whether we want to encourage the development of that technology or not.
After describing this he quickly notes that he’s not proposing centralized government controls upon innovations or the entirely free reign of market forces. (Citing past repressions of communism and excesses of captialism.) He hopes for a solution that will educate and enfranchize people so they are capable of contributing meaningfully to decisions about innovation. The ultimate hope he puts forth is “that in balancing entrepreneurial dynamism with the public good, we can have our cake and eat it.”
In relation to Social ecology, Burke notes there will be resistance to change. As innovations continue, technologies will develop that people won’t like, and in many cases, it will be the “old fogies” that don’t like the changes, because they will require a change of mindset.
Mozart got kicked down the stairs. The Catholic church censured [and] burned people who said the earth wasn’t the center of the universe. Some people still don’t like the theory of evolution. We have a built in resistance above all to the extension of inclusion. It rocks the boat.
He finishes the presentation returning to the need to expand education to properly enfranchise people, pointing toward a future in which such enfranchised global citizens will be able to focus resources on the most helpful innovations for both commercial interest and the public good.
Burke also made reference to institutions frustrating innovation because they are based on the problems, solutions, and knowledge of the past, and are continually looking backward, hoping to continue to innovate based on what straight lines of discovery they can extend from that past knowledge. The problem with this otherwise reasonable approach being that “The future you might want to plan for is almost never a simple straight-line extension of the present,” and that such a focus on the historical and present achievements of an institution artificially discourages the collision of previously unassociated ideas that leads to innovation.
A further symptom he cites of this institutional problem lies in the western approach to higher education focusing at the graduate and postgraduate level on “learning more and more about less and less,” a case in point being a colleague whose work apexed in studying John Milton’s use of the comma. Burke traces this to “the man I blame for everything… Rene Descartes” and his reductionism as put forth in Rules for the Direction of the Mind_. (See especially rules V – VII.) To properly study complex things we must reduce them to simple propositions to which we devote our full attention.
As a result, we compartmentalize knowledge into an array of disciplines where everybody focuses on the details of their own discipline, leaving other areas of knowledge to the other disciplines to make sure that we’re attending properly to our own. Conventional wisdom says that until recently we rarely broke the invisible walls between disciplines to cross pollinate among them within higher education.
I see this as conventional wisdom in that I hear many people say this was true, but have never been presented documented proof of how long it’s gone on or that it has necessarily changed despite our best intentions. It has the reasonable sound of conventional wisdom, which is part of such wisdom’s treachery. I also find this concept hard to reconcile with the historical examples of technologies or ideas in one discipline rippling into innovations in another that Burke is so fond of highlighting.
Burke notes that the most likely places we will find ideas that will lead to innovation lie in today’s gaps between disciplines, markets, and social needs. He cites Norbert Wiener saying “Change comes most of all from that unvisited no-man’s-land that lies between the disciplines.” Or in his own words earlier in the presentation…
When differing types of data come together in new ways, 1 + 1 = 3. The rules of math change. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
When ideas collide that people haven’t brought together before, innovations develop that can (and often do) bring historical change through their primary or ripple effects. That being the basic thrust of Burke’s work on the Connections series, his lecture series, and his KnowledgeWeb project.
James Burke recently presented at BYU, where I earned my undergrad degree, and thanks to my brother catching it, I was able to see a rebroadcast this past week. The presentation impressed me to where I feel compelled to share at least some of the ideas covered over a set of upcoming posts, followed by reactions to how Burke’s presentation hit my various info architecture, constructivist education, and computer supported learning switches.
For those unfamiliar with his work, Burke was the mind and the voice behind the PBS series Connections, which focused on the connecting threads that led to some of the innovations that changed the world, however unlikely those connections may seem on the surface.
The BYU presentation appeared to cover topics from both his Staying Ahead and The Knowledge Web presentations. Seeking methods for predicting innovation and its secondary effects provided the primary focus of the presentation, and the Knowledge web provided a tool for making those predictions and fostering innovative, interdisciplinary thinking.
Burke presented the problem of predicting secondary effects by noting technologies whose secondary effects proved detrimental despite the high value we placed on their primary effects. Items like asbestos, thalidomide, chlorofluorocarbons, nuclear power, and carbon emitting machines were all invented and/or used with the intent of making our lives better. It was after adopting them that we discovered that asbestos fibers caused respitory illness and cancer, thalidomide caused birth defects and deformities, CFCs depleted stratospheric ozone, etc.
These secondary effects move beyond disciplinary barriers as well, as seen in one of the secondary effects of the invention of the stirrup in Afghanistan: the modern English language.
By adapting the medieval Afghani stirrup, the French enabled their horsemen to fight more effectively and defeat the Anglo-Saxon British in the battle of Hastings in 1066. French Norman rule over the British Isles brought changes to the language spoken in Britain, as the Anglo-Saxons sought to prove their refinement by learning the Anglo-Norman language of their French rulers. This contributed to the shift from Anglo-Saxon “Old English” to Middle English, which later developed further into the English we use today on either side of the pond.
We would clearly have liked to avoid the unexpected problems associated with these and other technologies, or found the way to predict the problems before we encountered them. The problem is, these secondary effects aren’t often visible to us until we adopt a technology. We see things from within the “box” of our current understanding, and it requires effort to see outside of it.
Burke points out that this can even be true in our hindsight, citing a story told about Ludwig Wittgenstein in a conversation on Copernicus.
Somebody apparently went up to [Wittgenstein] and remarked what a bunch of morons we in Europe must have been (800 years ago before Copernicus told us how the solar system works) to have looked up there and thought that what we were seeing was the sun going around the earth, when as any idiot knows the earth goes round the sun, and you don’t have to be Einstein to understand that.
To which Wittgenstein is said to have replied… “But I wonder what it would have looked like if the sun had been going around the earth.” The point being of course that it would have looked exactly the same.
What he was saying is that in any decision about what to do next, you’re stuck with your view of things. If, as an astronomer, the contemporary paradigm says the universe is made of omlette, you make instruments looking for traces of intergalactic egg…
We’re all in a box.
And incidentally, you’re right. The box you’re inside and the box I’m inside may be very different. So I may have trouble buying into how you see things from your box, and you may have trouble buying how I see things from mine.
In the end, we have to get over ourselves and our boxes or we’ll paralyze our natural ability to connect ideas and innovate.
ecto update: Kudos to the ecto crew for getting me a solution to my configuration problem within 4 hours of simply mentioning it here.
WordPress’ built-in rich text editor… not so good in Safari. Doesn’t run. (To be fair, I haven’t used a JavaScript based rich text editor that works well in Safari.) But hey… all the more reason to install a Textile plugin or the like, once they’re updated for WordPress 2.
So far so good on the categories. I’d like to be able to lock down posts to certain user groups (a la LiveJournal), but I haven’t seen a function for that. They’ve revamped the user accounts recently, so I haven’t got a good look at how they function yet.
This web host doesn’t seem to like .htaccess files, so unless I move to a different server, the permalinks will end up being query string style (the fun, hard to reverse engineer ?p=4629 approach). That’s disappointing and a bit of a usability, but there’s not much I can do on it at the moment.
I took a little time to play with desktop clients like MarsEdit or ecto. I’m running into difficulties with them both. Right now, MarsEdit won’t upload images. (I’ve got an interface issue there… there’s no clues as to where the path you enter is referenced from, so you have to guess.) ecto won’t recognize the site at all. So looks like it’s the traditional method for me.
I still have to check out the thumbnail functions for images uploaded through the regular WP interface, see how the WP generated thumbs come out as far as size.
But all things in their time.