Archive | design

03 December 2012 ~ Comments Off

Design Experience Report – December 5 Design Thinking Meetup

design events

This Wednesday, December 5, I’ll be sharing a short experience report at the Lansing Design Thinking meetup.

My current project is about to go into a major phase of building a feature we’re calling My Plan. Although the team originally had some good ideas for what My Plan could be, we knew there were more ideas out there. Over the last two months we’ve applied some design principles, which were heavily inspired by Designing for Growth, and we now have more and better ideas to build from. This meetup will be a review of the processes we employed and the results of our design thinking.

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26 November 2012 ~ Comments Off

Content Without Context Is Dead

Context Scenarios User Experience context design

As designers of web applications, it’s vital that we understand and incorporate the user’s context when considering how to provide the best experience for them. Specifically, paying attention to the needs of your users and the context in which they live is the beginning of figuring out what content to serve up.

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25 November 2012 ~ Comments Off

RubyConf 2012 Reflections: Bad Code Is a Symptom & Keeping Your Business Logic Functional

/testing Community Design & Development Languages Pairing design functional ruby

Denver Conference Center

I recently attended RubyConf 2012 in Denver, CO. I had a great time, and I learned a lot. While getting a clearer picture of the Ruby development community was interesting — particularly the tension among MRI, JRuby, Rubinius, etc. — the talks I keep thinking about were essentially language-independent.

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19 November 2012 ~ Comments Off

Visualization Is for Everyone – Nov. 20 at GRJUG

/testing android design events

On November 20, I’ll be presenting my talk Visualization Is for Everyone at the Grand Rapids Java Users Group. It’s definitely not a topic specific to Java, but it definitely applies to Java (and all) developers. It’s a fun talk, and I look forward to presenting it.

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08 November 2012 ~ Comments Off

What Are the Categories of Design?

Design & Development design product development

We often hear that “design is an overloaded word.” This must be one of the biggest understatements of all time! Often when I’m communicating with others and the word design is dropped, we need to ask ourselves: are we talking about visual design? User experience? Markup? Tangible design? Tactical design? Strategic design? Or simply aesthetics?

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15 May 2012 ~ Comments Off

Inspiration: The Water Clocks of Bernard Gitton

Time art beauty bernard-gitton childhood clock culture design education fluids gitton inspiration learning physics sculpture timekeeping water water-clock

Not long ago, I had an interesting lunchtime discussion with Job Vranish. I don’t recall exactly how we got on the topic, but we were discussing how mesmerizing siphons are. As the discussion progressed to imagining a fluid-based computer (that’s another story…), I remembered something I had seen as a child at the Indianapolis Children’s museum: an immense clock that kept time with the flow of water through glass tubes.

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