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Publication How to Avoid Scope Creep by Christopher Butler on December 11, 2012 Scope is a powerful word. Mention it to any designer, developer, project manager or client, and you’re likely to provoke a mixture of emotional responses. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. OK, maybe it won’t be that dramatic. But you probably won’t get a smile... Read Now About
Publication Don’t Be So Linear by Christopher Butler on December 11, 2012 In Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling's manifesto for design in a post-gizmo society, the author points out that technologies "do not abolish one another in clean or comprehensive ways." If they did, the designer's job would be far easier. Instead, we must design for the spaces between the old and the new—a challenge that Sterling calls wrangling... Read Now About
Publication Making Sense of the Data by Christopher Butler on December 11, 2012 We designers need to be proactively involved in measurement. Knowing how to gather and interpret interactive data will better position us strategically, not to mention prevent inheriting unhelpfully data-glutted reports and being held accountable to someone else's vague interpretation of them. But, it's more important that the data ground our vision in reality than be used to build credibility with clients. We want our clients to trust our judgement, but our measurement process should lead them to the same conclusions we've made if they were to do it themselves... Read Now About
Publication Stuck in Idle by Christopher Butler on December 11, 2012 One of my greatest fears is that my last living thoughts might be of Friends. Not my friends; that would be lovely. I mean the television show, Friends. Of all the things I could remember in my final moments—loved ones, nature, great art or music—I instead recall fake people I never really knew... Read Now About
Publication Playing with Data by Christopher Butler on December 11, 2012 Most professional information designers I know see themselves as stewards of tradition. Traced from early practitioners like Snow and Minard and on through contemporaries like Pentagram and Tufte, it is one purely focused upon the effective display of information and resistance to the allure of aesthetics. But in design culture, aesthetics play an important role, one that is particularly relevant today as new tools enable millions of amateurs to visualize just about anything. Rather than seeing this as a good thing — a potential innovation explosion of Cambrian proportions — many professionals instead perceive their tradition as under attack... Read Now About
Publication On Digital Davids and Goliaths by Christopher Butler on December 11, 2012 Here's a familiar story: Back in 1996, when the web was about the size of a postage stamp, five different search engines struck a very expensive deal with Netscape, the most popular browser at the time. For $5 million per year, Yahoo!, Magellan, Lycos, Infoseek, and Excite would each have a turn as the browser’s featured search tool. Meanwhile, two unknown students were putting the finishing touches on a completely novel approach to search, one that would render the others obsolete. Just one year later, they registered their whimsical domain name and invited web users to start searching with their tech. The following year, their company was incorporated. I think you know the rest... Read Now About
Publication Future Daydream by Christopher Butler on December 11, 2012 So where are the designers who dream as Bradbury does? We seem to be content to let corporations do the dreaming for us. On the internet, we can be routinely entertained by their visions—videos depicting possible futures that are far more controlled, sterile, and expensive than is likely... Read Now About
Publication Smarter, Better Cyborgs by Christopher Butler on December 11, 2012 In the future, you will design the unseen.You will design with sounds, textures, vibrations, smells, and temperature, along with the media you already know so well—text, color, and light. You will design environments and interactions that are immersive. You will once again create things that do more than match eyeballs with ads. I promise... Read Now About
Publication How Should We Contain the Cloud? by Christopher Butler on December 11, 2012 What is a book, really? For that matter, what is an article, a record, or a movie? For each of these, I have a very clear picture in my mind that says more about when I came of age than about the content itself. When I think of books, my mind retrieves an image of my grandparents' bookshelves, which I used to browse after school as a child. Records? I see the CD stacks of my teenage years, collected from local music shops and trading with friends. And somehow, thinking about movies still produces images of VHS tapes and memories of frustratedly fixing the tracking on my VCR. No doubt, future generations will have very different associations... Read Now About
Publication The Folly of the Flock by Christopher Butler on December 7, 2012 Sometimes I'll just stare at a website for minutes on end, trying to figure out why it's so confusing. You know websites like this; you probably look at them every day and identify plenty of ways that they could have been better designed than they are. So, why weren't they? Read Now About