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Argentine tango blog
/ with Interaction Design interludes / by Oleh Kovalchuke |
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August 2006
August 28, 2006 - Tango in the news
Gazette, local newspaper, has covered tango scene in Colorado Springs.
August 26, 2006 - Desperate embrace
I have tried before to describe "desperate" embrace popular among cool girls in Buenos Aires. You can see good example of the embrace in this performance video by Javier Rodriguez and Andrea Misse (too many kicks (too much spice) even for performance), courtesy of Ney Melo, who is good dancer in his own right (Jennifer Bratt in this video does different kind of embrace, not my favorite - her arm doesn't reach accross and above the shoulder).
August 26, 2006 - Required personal skills for interaction designers
Successful interaction designers are organization hubs, they have to interact with variety of people across organization. Therefore an important and unavoidable part of interaction design is politics. I don't think political skills are taught in design schools. To make matters worse, not every personality type is adept in social interactions.
"First, Break All the Rules" (good book) describes environment in well-run companies. It touches on, but doesn't cover in detail internal politics, especially those in the not-so-well run companies, where managers do not read insightful managerial books. The topics touched upon in the book are importance of personal status and relationships.
-------------------------------Let's see... The useful personality traits for interaction designers: analytical, creative, socially adept (communicative, assertive, amicable, perceptive of group dynamics) + technically knowledgeable. Taken singly these personal traits can be found with relative ease. All together, in one body - not very common combination. Moreover this is the same infrequent combination of personal traits often found among entrepreneurs - a drain on the pool of available employable designers.
Hm. Add good sense of humour and you have someone almost good enough to take out for dinner and long walks on a beach...
August 24, 2006 - Blogs, modal checkboxes and action buttons
Jana wrote:
I have been trying to figure out why the radio buttons for published/draft status in some blog applications seem wrong to me.
....
>In my case I am particularly concerned about a checkbox on a properties form that essentially says "make available". (This is applied to a blog entry)
I was trying to figure out if "being available" is a state or a property. I believe that this should effect whether it is applied through an action or through the existing checkbox in a form.I think you describe another case of mode button related to the recent discussion of Play/Pause toggle.
In the case you have described, blog entry status ("state", "mode", "property") and action to change the status are combined in one checkbox, hence are confusing (the alternative to "make available" is not obvious).Raskin describes similar example in The Humane Interface and recommends using a pair of radiobuttons instead of one check box. That would work, but, personally, I would prefer to separate status indicator ("Draft" label, for instance) and action button ("Publish").
Related thought: "Publish" is probably the single most important and frequently used action in a blog ("Unpublish" could be more important, occasionally). It should be accessible via visible button, not hidden in an obscure checkbox in properties form.
Tete (Pedro Rusconi), one of the very best milongueros in Buenos Aires, is dancing with Silvia at "Porteno y Bailarin" milonga in these videos.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tAUGkBpUtY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJDowJI0-7s - vals
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alcBFsaRoPQSeveral notable things: musicality, Silvia's left hand embrace, Silvia's feet are on the ground at all times (kicks are unnecessary even for performance). Silvia also collects her feet between steps and because of that she has good balance and responsiveness. IMO, she could have played a bit more with her ankles as she did for ocho cortado at the very end of the vals.
August 10, 2006 - Information Dashboard Design by Stephen Few (2006)
Have read in three hours at B&N. 200 pages. Good summary of Tufte’s and Ware’s work plus additional thoughts on dashboard design.
Many example of dashboards from current vendors filled with chart junk. Also examples of ~10 dashboards displaying the same info with analysis of mistakes. Dashboard classification: Sales, Marketing, HR, Financial, IT, Tech Support, Operational, Analytical + categories of info for those categories.
“Sparkle” charts (from the upcoming Tufte’s book) – line chart without axis to see trends displayed in conjunction with numeric current value or bar chart of current value (focus – current value, within context – sparkle trend). “Bullet” chart (which Few invented) is bar chart with target value and target range indicated by dash and background respectively. The bullet chart can be simplified as dot + dashed line + dash + two brackets, like so for three unrelated charts:
|......o [ | ]
|........[...|o ]
|.........[.o | ]Display current data and compare to average on the same day last week, month, last year. Show range. Show top and bottom 5-10 performances.
Concise overview of perception from Colin Wares book (Information Visualization). Classification of possible charts with recommendations on use (~Tufte).
This book was needed for a while now. See also Dashboard Spy website.
From The Mating Mind by Geoffrey Miller.
Art is sexual display of fitness by the artist. Art is not sublimation, or display of sexual fitness by the artist as Sigmund would put it.
Darwin has discovered two kinds of selection processes: survival of the fittest (force behind convergent evolution), and reproduction of the fittest (force behind divergent evolution, "males court, females choose"). Unsurprisingly his discovery of sexual selection via female choice has been largely ignored by prudish, patriarchal scientists until 1980s.
An example of sexual selection for art creation:
The male bowerbirds of Australia construct enormous and purely aesthetic displays. Each of 18 species constructs different style of nest, only by males and only for courtship. Once inseminated, females go off to build their own tiny nests to raise offspring by themselves, rather like Picasso's mistresses. Males defend their work and try to destroy that of rival's. Regent and Satin bowerbirds use brushes made out of leaves and regurgitated paint. Males are also brightly colored and dance in front of their bowers when female arrives.Said Satin Bowerbird, when interviewed for Artforum magazine:
I find this implacable urge for self-expression, for playing with color and form for their own sake, quite inexplicable... It is happy coincidence that females sometimes come to my gallery openings and appreciate my work, but it would be an insult to insinuate that I create in order to procreate.
We, humans, have evolved instincts to create ornaments and works of art that are distinct from the sexual instincts behind copulation [no Freudian sexual sublimation in other words]. Yet both types of instinct may have evolved through sexual selection.
Art does not have to be about sex to serve the purposes of attracting a mate, it can be about anything at all, or about nothing, as in the geometric art of Islam, or Donald Judd's stainless-steel minimalist sculpture.
To be reliable, fitness indicators must be difficult for low fitness individuals to produce. Applied to human art, this suggests that beauty equals difficulty, [novelty], and high cost. Hence "art" is honorific term: the art of math proof, of making fire without matches, of cooking, of sex.
The aesthetic of elite art reflects verbal displays of superiority in its own right - the art of contrived preferences.
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