Wednesday, March 19, 2003 ~ Comments Off
Odd steps
I had to laugh when I saw this over at vodkabird – the bit about the steps.
We have something similar in Hamilton leading from the town centre to the Hamilton Palace area (on the way to Asda etc). Whether descending or ascending these steps you always had to take 1 and a bit steps between them. The height of the steps is quite shallow which is just as well as I have, on several occasions, stumbled up them expecting the edge of a step and finding thin air. The design of the steps prompts thoughts that the designer was either eight feet tall, a midget, incompetent or just down-right malicious.
Or maybe it was the same ‘architect’ who designed the three adjoining roundabouts in Aylesbury. A wonder to behold, they are truely mind boggling when you try to drive round them with the entrance to one being the exit of another and traffic from the third crossing your path. I always got the impression that whoever had been charged with the design had accidentally left three coffee cup rings on the plans by accident.
Wednesday, March 19, 2003 ~ Comments Off
Free iPAQ?
OK, admittedly against the backdrop of the “war that no-one wants” this is kinda trivial… but…
Amazon accepted my order of £23 for a top of the range HP iPAQ H5450 Pocket PC (valued at around £500), but now it looks like they won’t pay and, legally they probably don’t have to. So I’m off in the huff… pah!
Ohh and to all the ‘City’ workers who were ordering 50 or 60 at a time, the only thing I have to say is: You greedy bastards.
And to Amazon: Come on, what’s a £1m or so in lost profits between friends… (figured based on 2000 sales at £450 loss each…)
Wednesday, March 19, 2003 ~ Comments Off
Oh shit…
RIAA turns up heat on file-trading at work.
* heads off to delete some ‘files’….
Wednesday, March 19, 2003 ~ Comments Off
Love him? Hate him?
A letter to George W. Bush on the eve of war
I think it is overwhelmingly grating attitude and confrontational ‘style’ that makes me dislike this man (plus the fact that his research could be a tad, ehhh… tighter) but either way this letter from Michael Moore to George W Bush should provoke something in you, be it loathing and contempt or a hearty hear-hear!!
Mind you, I do like the opening address…
Wednesday, March 19, 2003 ~ Comments Off
Roll up, roll up!
Well actually more like, go there, go there… Meg is having a Book Sale.
Wednesday, March 19, 2003 ~ Comments Off
Day in, day out
I work in the field of Technical Communications (which is full of poppies and grazing sheep… sorry…). Essentially, whilst I am a ‘team lead/manager’, I am mainly a technical author by trade.
So what is a technical author? Basically it is someone who writes manuals. But, as with every other job, there is a lot more to it than that. Our job loosely includes information design, graphic design, indexing and editing skills, the ability to write accurate, unambiguous and technically valid information (usually from a description of how something will function rather than from a completed component), the ability to understand our audience, what information they want, how they want it presented, and how we can best tailor our output to their needs. We need to be technically competent to the same level as our users, need to be able to talk to developers, consultants, SMEs, product managers, technical support and testing/QA staff. We need to be able to take information from a variety of information sources and levels and distill it into one consistent, readable, usable document (or two). Ohh and we have to deal with translation issues, print shop demands and are typically asked for input to sales and marketing documents, corporate intranet and websites etc etc.
Most technical authors tend to favour one area of work to another, my personal preference is in the early planning and design phases, and I don’t enjoy the writing phase. Other authors prefer the writing phase but may be less technically minded than others who, in turn, prefer the interaction and collation of information and the filtering and learning process that must be passed through. We are a strange bunch, by all accounts, akin (possibly) to the goalkeeper of a football (soccer) team. Our mistakes are obvious, our part of the product typically goes untested, and frequently is only validated internally rather than externally by the people the document is aimed at…
Hmmmm, this wasn’t supposed to turn into an essay.
As I said, I prefer the information design stage of a project and have been delightedly working my way through this list for a while now, picking up books when I can. I spotted a link to it on another site yesterday which reminded me that I’ve not bought a work related book for an age. The reading list takes the view that information design (experience design) is not a sole art, but knowledge can be gathered from a wide variety of sources and used across all the mediums covered.
Experience Design Reading “The following books cover many disciplines, from Interaction and Visual Design to Filmmaking to Architecture, but all relate loosely to the various processes, ideologies, visions and practicalities of Experience Design.”