Archive for January, 2008

The ‘ilities’ : Quality Attributes for busy people

I remember having quality assurance explained to me in very simple terms: “think of all the words that end in ‘ility’!”
It seemed overly-simplistic even at the time , but it’s always stuck in my mind that way. Here’s a quick round up of quality attributes that’ll keep you hip with the SQA crowd …

Usability and signup pages

Was trawling the net for interesting sites/blogs and came across this post on how registration forms tend to be designed, and how they might be improved.
If you’re a Usability Specialist or budding Information Architect you might find it interesting. I personally hate signup forms, and see no reason for having more than 2 fields for [...]

System Design & Requisite Variety

During the initial phases of a project, and in particular during the design phase, it becomes necessary to decide upon what is actually being built, along with its constituent parts. In short, this is when the team decides how much complexity they’re going to bite off and chew. As it turns out, people aren’t very [...]

Economic alchemy & digital media (part 2)

I touched on increased availability of media content in part 1,  and there’s another reason for this increase in supply: it is easy for consumers to become content-producers themselves.  So what happens when  the  entire demographic is treated as a  group of producer-consumers, each able to produce and/or consume media content to some degree?

Visualisation of large datasets

Go to http://www.visualcomplexity.com and check out a rather interesting collection of images based on large / hierarchical data sets. Pretty neat, huh?
None of us can hold thousands of variables in our heads and not get confused. So, with some creative imagery, we can tackle monstrous datasets by offloading some of the information processing to visual [...]

Cybernetics and software processes

How might control systems theory, at the heart of cybernetics, inform the way we develop software? Well, cybernetics can be brought into play at 3 different levels:

execution-level control: the software application’s own control systems
test-level control: the software’s test harness that is used to exercise its functionality
process-level control: the methodology that is used develop the software

Economic alchemy & digital media (part 1)

I was challenged, in a classroom setting, to respond to this book called ‘unlimited wealth: the theory and practice of economic alchemy‘ by Paul Zane Pilzer. In very broad terms, his idea of alchemy is that societies thrive when their economies become more knowledge-based, and when technical innovation is maximised. He argues (I think), [...]

The culture of fragmented media : part 2

while in the culture of personal sound, there seems to be some shared habits in how people consume audio content, people have very different viewing habits. Is it because we’re always being shown imagery of people listening to music on their phones/ipods but we have no shared iconography for people watching tv or consuming [...]

The culture of fragmented media : part 1

[updated 2010-06-03]
Tivo, blogs, podcasts, vodcast, iptv, online dvd rentals… the list goes on. Our very fragmented media has some interesting effects on society. For one thing, you can say goodbye to the phenomenon of shared culture. It’s getting harder and harder to encounter people who read, watch, listen to or even do the same things [...]

Evolution, Stability and the sweet spot inbetween

When I met the idea of NK* Boolean networks, I immediately started to wonder if they could ever be a simplistic model for people and processes. In short, what would you get if you swapped the gates with people, the inputs with instructions, and the outputs with tasks that people carry out?

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