Pebbles on the beach Newton picked up the pebbles on his metaphoric beach with an intellectual objective in mind, but his ancestor in paleolithic times picked up real minerals because he enjoyed looking at them: quite inadvertently he started the chain of practice and craftsmanship and thought that led to the diversity of specialized materials and generalized theory today. More like the early Homo sapiens than the sixteenth-century intellectual giant I have enjoyed a life of rather undisciplined wandering and search. Apologia searchcuriosity
Marginalia Search A Website search.marginalia.nu I want to show you that that Internet you used to go exploring is still very much there. There are still tons of small personal websites, and a wealth of long form text from both the past and the present. So it's a search engine. It's perhaps not the greatest at finding what you already knew was there, instead it is designed to help you find some things you didn't even know you were looking for. The art of finding what you didn’t know you were looking forIn Defense of BrowsingMillion Short micrositessearchdiscoveryserendipity
Million Short A Website millionshort.com Million Short makes it easy to discover sites that just don't make it to the top of the search engine results for whatever reason – whether it be poor SEO, new site, small marketing budget, or competitive keywords. The Million Short technology gives users access to the wealth of untapped information on the web. Marginalia Search searchwww
A brief foray into vectorial semantics An Article by James Somers jsomers.net One of the best (and easiest) ways to start making sense of a document is to highlight its “important” words, or the words that appear within that document more often than chance would predict. That’s the idea behind Amazon.com’s “Statistically Improbable Phrases”: Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book. mathmeaningwordsnotetakingsearchchance
Pair Design: Better Together A Book by Gretchen Anderson & Christopher Noessel mmbolg.files.wordpress.com Pair design is the counterintuitive practice of getting more and better UX design done by putting two designers together as thought partners to solve design problems. It’s counterintuitive because you might expect that you could split them up to work in parallel to get double the design done, but for many situations, you’d be wrong. This document will help explain what pair design is, how it works, and tour through the practicalities of implementing it in your practice. It involves two brainsA distinct and complementary stanceGens and synthsWe come as a teamStarting off with pair design+1 More designcollaboration
It involves two brains It involves two brains on a project at the same time. This doesn’t mean part time, checking in with each other on work that’s been accomplished separately. Pair design really means being in the same room, working on the same problem, with both brains focused on the problem simultaneously for the duration of the project.
A distinct and complementary stance Each person in the pair takes a distinct and complementary stance toward the design problem as they work together. One generates solutions. That is, one individual materializes solutions to the problem at hand for discussion and iteration. The other synthesizes the proposed solutions. ideascritique
Gens and synths Gens are generally comfortable drawing and drawing in front of their partner. Additionally, the generator needs to have “fearless generativity,” to be able to come up with a dozen pretty good solutions to a problem even with incomplete information. Designers in the synthesizer role need to be skilled at describing designs and explaining rationale in writing. The role requires the designer to be detail oriented and have a strong memory, to keep the big picture of the system, stakeholders, and users in mind as a reference for designs on the table.
We come as a team There is a legend at Cooper of one team who found pairing with each other so powerful and fruitful that when they left that company, they sought out opportunities and even interviewed at other organizations as a pair. teamwork
Starting off with pair design It’s better to start small. Find the “genniest” designer you can and pair her with the “synthiest,” have them work through a few projects as a pair to see how it goes, evolve a process that works for your organization, smooth out the wrinkles, and become resident experts. Then, split them up, assign them with new pairs, and begin to spread.
What are the benefits of pair design? It Makes for Better Design Pairing forces constant iteration: idea testing and course-correction. It brings to bear two brains and two stances. It Makes for Better Designers and Better Design Organizations They are happier. Pair design makes it easier to focus on core aptitudes. They cross-pollinate: a mechanism for a learning organization. Pair Design Makes for a More Effective Process Pairing avoids the problem of dueling whiteboards. It encourages designers to materialize ideas early. It encourages designers to vocalize their rationale. It encourages constant course-correction.