Fun exhibit at Imprint magazine about display type from the 1920s. Stillson in particular really evokes the era for me.

In Microsoft Unleashes the Kinect and Promptly Misses the Point, Tim Maly makes the point that "A key part of human manipulation of the world is the manual aspect." The more we abstract controls away from physical, tactile experiences the less precise they become. They are less "controls" than "suggestions", so to speak. This is a characteristic of virtual keyboards, gestural interfaces, touch screens where every touch is identical to every other touch, and systems like Kinect where there's no touching at all. They are in many ways the opposite of ergonomic. 

One of the threads in the history of computing is increasing abstraction. It's not just in the area of human interface, of course, and in many ways abstraction is incredibly powerful. In interaction, though, it's not an unalloyed good, and it can introduce imprecision — vagueness — into use cases.

This is just conjecture, but Maly mentions playing a musical instrument as an example where the physicality of the experience is central to the whole thing. It's not easy; it needs learning and takes a long time to master. It's the physical nature of it, though, that helps make it learnable. Introduce the vagueness of waving your hands in the air and it's less learnable. 

When something is learnable it's more likely to be satisfying, long term.

Washington needs to hear your best ideas about how to clamp down on rogue Web sites and other criminals who make money off the creative efforts of American artists...

This is a quote from the Obama administration. It's emblematic of an approach — a mindset, although I dislike that word — that's counterproductive. It assumes that "piracy" is a big problem and goes from there. I'm not convinced that premise is valid.

The main issue is providing creative people with ways to distribute their work and hopefully make some money from it. Business models from the previous century were based on providing access to distribution when it took a lot of money and networking to get a book into bookstores or a new single into record stores or a video production on air (on one of only three or fewer TV channels in most US markets). The access providers competed not so much with content as with controlling limited access to distribution. Now that distribution is available to everyone, their businesses are obsolete. They could compete on the quality of content, but that's a different business and means jettisoning a great deal of the structure of their existing businesses. 

Not to mention that based on a lot of what I've read, "criminals who make money off the creative efforts of American artists" is a pretty good description of a significant part of the recording and film industries.

A study published in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology by Radvansky, Krawietz, and Tamplin, suggests that a "memory episode" is some kind of contextual placeholder grouping recollections, such that a new episode — something as simple as walking through a doorway — makes it harder to remember all the details associated with the previous episode. 

This might be a useful thing for design; it might help a user remember something if you can figure out what's associated with its memory episode. 

I am probably around to update this site because when when I was about 12 and thought about mounting rockets on my bike... I didn't. Some people apparently did!

...folks know that they want design in their products (because, you know, Steve Jobs and shit), they don’t really know what that means or how to effectively incorporate design into their MVP / Lean Startup culture.

Cameron Koczon writes about the opportunities and dangers in the current climate for design. 

"Designers" are in demand at the moment, but without much specificity about what a "designer" is or does. I find it more helpful to talk about "graphic design", "interaction design", "interface design" and so forth. There's a certain core approach that (can be) common to all of these, just like there is a general engineering approach to solving problems. A software engineer, though, doesn't have the same skills as a mechanical engineer. It's the same for designers. 

Anthony at UX Movement examines scrolling versus clicking in web page design. As he notes:

As user behavior changes over time, designers need to take that into account in their designs.

What's amazing is how fast this change has been. Ten years ago — maybe as recently as five — if you designed a page the user had to scroll, many users would fail to complete a task depending on scrolling. Today scrolling has become much more of a default behavior.

Audiences are changing fast, and the rate of change seems to be accelerating. That's one of the best challenges of interaction design: you need to stay current with evolution in hardware, software, platforms, form factors, competitors, and even user behavior!

...conservative writers like David Frum and Andrew Sullivan have worried of late about the intellectual flabbiness of the contemporary right: A movement that once seemed the emblem of heterodoxy has succumbed to stale thinking and rote incantations.

Corey Robin astutely examines modern political conservatism. He observes:

So accustomed are we to the sunny Reagan and the populist Tea Party that we've forgotten a basic truth about conservatism: It is a reaction to democratic movements from below...

So you’re doing something that’s endless, and you will never find out what it means, but you do it anyway.

Amanda Stern interviews Laurie Anderson. 

Android apps, in general, are not as well designed as iOS apps. They're not as well designed as Windows Phone 7 apps either. I would even say they're not as well designed as Symbian apps. I think a big part of this is because of the "google effect"; Google generally doesn't seem to care much about design, details, or even actually finishing anything it releases. 

Maybe the new Android Design site will help; it's a nice start. It seems like a work in progress — for example they list design principles but without any elaboration or examples. You have to start somewhere though, and having design principles at all is a good step.