Monday, November 24th, 2003
A post to the Interaction Designers list about Brian Eno’s Long Now project turned up this gem:
Eno was asked by an audience member if he could think of any examples of this kind of long-term thinking in an existing project. He told us about New College, [in Oxford], which is over 500 years old. A few decades ago, the thick oak beams that supported the ceiling were rotting and needed replacing. The headmaster asked the head gardener if they had access to good wood on the campus. The gardener replied that the college’s builders had indeed planted a grove of trees specifically for this purpose, 500 years earlier.
Are modern organisations capable of thinking even a fraction of this far ahead say 20 years? Or is it just that world today is so different and fast-changing that it’s impossible to plan that effectively?
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Friday, November 14th, 2003
I was at a Jisc sponsered Managed Learning Event yesterday. During lunch I overheard someone talking about how they were wary of using streaming video because it’s not accessible and can cause problems for screen readers. Now streaming video is wide open to pedagogic abuse, but to not consider using it purely on accessibility grounds seems strange. When you consider the poor accessibility of many university campuses and the lack of access technology in lecture theatres it’s as if the person were saying ‘Well, we don’t give lectures because we don’t have an induction loop installed’.
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Monday, November 10th, 2003
Re-design the infamous useit.com with the blessing of the man himself. Who could resist? Here’s 53 designers that couldn’t:
<http://builtforthefuture.com/reuseit/contestants.php>
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Monday, November 10th, 2003
… the W3 remix <http://w3mix.web-graphics.com/entries.php>.
In Jacob mode, note how the entries on the re-useit.com page are more usable because they include a little bio and most importantly a screen shot.
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