CSS layout is awesome, except when your layout calls for a header, a footer, and columns in between. Use float, and content changes can cause columns to wrap. Use absolute positioning, and your footer can crash into your columns. Add the complexity of drag-and-drop layouts, and a new technique is needed. Enter "faux absolute positioning." Align every item to a predefined position on the grid (as with absolute positioning), but objects will still affect the normal flow (as with float).

 

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

CSS layout is awesome, except when your layout calls for a header, a footer, and columns in between. Use float, and content changes can cause columns to wrap. Use absolute positioning, and your footer can crash into your columns. Add the complexity of drag-and-drop layouts, and a new technique is needed. Enter "faux absolute positioning." Align every item to a predefined position on the grid (as with absolute positioning), but objects will still affect the normal flow (as with float).

 

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

A recent post by John Kullman on Mobile Crunch highlights a study that speculates by 2011, 25 million Americans will use their mobile phones as mobile wallets. The report states that the ease and convenience of mobile phone commerce is hard to resist.

While I can appreciate the value of mobile wallets, there is something about this prediction that makes me slightly sad.

In a fast-paced and stressful world, who doesn’t need ease and convenience? It’s seems perfectly natural to want to make life a little easier and more efficient. It’s that desire for efficiency that’s inspired countless products and services like automatic bankteller machines, self-serve gas pumps and the revered Octopus and Oyster cards. I’ve used all these systems and services and yes, they have saved me time and made my life easier.

But lately I have been thinking how the systems and services we design in the name of ease and convenience are actually coming at a steep price.

It’s said that people are defined by their relationships to others. Given that, it’s probably easy for most of us to make a laundry list of all the important people in our lives. If one unpacks all the moments of interaction with human beings on any given day, it’s clear a good share of our time is spent reinforcing those important, explicit relationships – a phone call to the parents, conversations with work colleagues, dinner and drinks with friends and family.

The thing is, there are tons of tiny interactions we have throughout the day with people we hardly know – a conversation about organic produce with a clerk at the grocery store, commiserating with folks standing in line at the DMV, a wink from the bus driver while fumbling for bus fare. Somehow those interactions while seemingly less important, have significance in our lives.

They’re important because they give a richness and texture to our daily experience. They add an element of unpredictability and surprise to our lives. They provide us with opportunity to practice skills like striking up a conversation, thinking on our feet, joking, and flirting. Most importantly, I believe the cumulative effect of these interactions feed into the holy grail of human needs – the need to feel connected to the world around us and be part of something bigger than ourselves.

As we clamor to create systems and services like mobile wallets that streamline our lives and make things easier, unbeknownst to us, we’re actually slowly eliminating the opportunity for these types of tacit interactions to occur.

I’m not suggesting that we abolish convenience and efficiency as design principles because that seems crazy. The momentum of the modern world won’t allow it. However, if we simply approach design problems from a task/goal/efficiency perspective, we lose the opportunity to create systems that honor our need for these tacit human interactions and leave in our wake a society of people who enjoy convenience yet feel lonely and disconnected.

How do we change that trajectory? I’m not exactly sure. However, it seems like an interesting place to start would be to think about how mobile technology can “grease the skids” of social interactions. Instead of placing a premium on the accomplishment of a task or a goal, privilege mobile systems that enable the subtlety, elegance and grace of tacit human interaction.

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“Director Saam Farahmand filmed Soulwax on their recent international dates, capturing all the excitement, chaos and humour of the world tour. Where the Beastie Boys filmed one gig with 50 cameras, Soulwax filmed 120 shows with one camera, in Europe, Japan, US, Latin America and Australia. The result is a snapshot of life on the road with one of the most exciting live bands in the world, and features their friends including 2manydj’s, James Murphy & Nancy Whang (LCD Soundsystem), Erol Alkan, Tiga, Justice, Busy P, So-Me, Peaches, Klaxons and many more in interview, as well as behind-the-scenes footage, and LOTS of music.”

http://www.partoftheweekendneverdies.com

Once, I only had ONE thing to do…not the onslaught I face in a typical day, but a single, solitary thing to wrap my brain around for an entire week.

I was attending a one-week video art residency at Arts Electronic. I had a cozy place to sleep, a private workspace with equipment, and someone nearby for help when needed. Because all of my basic needs were taken care of, I was able to surmount an unfathomable number of technical tasks in a short period of time. The result was draft one of a documentary. Prior to that week, I had never opened an editing program.

This experience of intense creative productivity is the basis for my project management style today. As an artist myself, I understand firsthand the importance of developing a nurturing environment in which to create. Keeping this in mind, when I start a new project with a team, I do a few simple things to enable the same singular focus and heightened productivity that I experienced at the residency:

Keep it simple
Part of my job is to take care of the team’s basic needs, so they can focus on creating. Practitioners don’t need to be thinking about meetings, finances, client relations, or buying supplies and tools. If they are, the creative process isn’t getting that attention and the work suffers. At Adaptive Path, we also limit practitioners to one project at a time so that their focus is not split in multiple directions.

Make the physical workspace inspirational
The team needs to feel good enough in their physical workspace to spend hours there brainstorming and making. Grey cubicles and blank walls kill creativity. At our company, each team has a dedicated room for their project. I make sure those rooms are filled with the tools needed to create. The walls are then quickly covered with drawings, doodles and illustrations.

Take care of the team
The director of the Arts Electronic residency, Annie Langan, was like my guardian angel. She cared immensely about my experience and took care of my needs before I was even aware of them. My goal as a project manager is to be that guardian angel. I pay close attention to the health, mental wellbeing, and dynamic within my team. Sometimes practitioners get so deeply entrenched in their work, they need to be reminded to take care of themselves. To produce dynamic projects, their brains, bodies and spirits need to be nourished, not exhausted. When team members feel cared about, they also become more deeply invested in the success of the project.

There are, of course, many other aspects like budgeting, scheduling, and client relations that make project managers successful. But when project managers also develop an environment that encourages focused creativity within their team, they set the foundation for exceptional ideas. At the core of projects is the work itself and, most importantly, the people that create it; foster those two things and you have the recipe for a dynamic project worth talking about.

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This piece from the exhibition recently shown at the MoMA, Design and the Elastic Mind is designer Moritz Waldemeyer’s refresh of the classic Pong game by Atari released first in 1972. Essentially a table, it combines 2,400 LED’s and two trackpads as the interface for Pong. When switched off, it’s simply a classic white table.

Check out some more works from Waldemeyer.

Loving the homage to Otl Aicher stamps from Gavin Potenza.
Check out some graphic goodness at Exploratory Design.

Now that I’m done travelling for pleasure, it’s time for me to travel for business again. I’m heading out to San Francisco for the Supernova conference. Tantek has roped me into moderating a panel called Bottom-Up Distributed Openness.

I’ll be showing up in SF next Friday. Until then, I’ll be in Nashville for the somewhat embarrassingly-titled Voices That Matter conference where I’ll be delivering a half-day workshop on Ajax and a presentation on microformats.

While I’m in the heartland, I’m planning to treat myself to a new mandolin. Then I can bring that mandolin with me when I go to Copenhagen at the end of the month for Reboot 10 where, if my proposal is accepted, I’ll be talking on The Transmission of Tradtion. The video of my talk from last year, the pretentiously-titled Soul is available for your viewing pleasure. I’ll see about getting it transcribed and added to the articles section here.

All that’s ahead of me. Right now I need to prepare myself for the long and tedious trip across the Atlantic. See you in Nashville, San Francisco or Copenhagen.

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Tagged with travel supernova08 reboot10 nashville sanfrancisco copenhagen

I’ve published a transcript of the panel I moderated at South by Southwest this year. The subject was Building Portable Social Networks and I had a blast moderating, mostly due to my great co-panelists, Chris Messina, Leslie Chicoine, David Recordon and Joseph Smarr.

During the panel, I made reference to an ongoing joke by Brian and myself to do a negative version of XFN — an XHTML Enemies Network. I always thought of it as a frivolous idea but sometimes I wonder if there might be the occasional real-world use case.

Suppose, for instance, that I wanted to link to Mike “The Dick” Arrington’s latest bit of bollocks over on TechC*nt? Well, now I can add some extra semantic richness to that link by throwing in the appropriate rel value.

I give you the XEN 1.0 profile.

Please note the fine print:

XEN is not a microformat. It is a joke.

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Tagged with xfn xen sxsw08 sxswi08 sxsw2008 sxswi2008

Andy and his cohorts have been busy recovering an important televisual document of computer history: The Machine That Changed the World (originally titled The Dream Machine). The series comprises of five parts:

1. Great Brains
2. Inventing the Future
3. The Paperback Computer
4. The Thinking Machine
5. The World at Your Fingertips

The first episode is particularly fascinating, tracing the history of the idea of a universal machine, starting with Charles Babbage and his Analytical Engine. The documentary includes footage of Doron Swade, author of the excellent book The Cogwheel Brain (released in the States as The Difference Engine). The story then moves on to the turbulent time period of the 1930s and ’40s that saw the creation of the world’s first programmable computers — a period so evocatively described in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon.

The documentary shies away from declaring any one computer as “First!”, though plenty of time is devoted to ENIAC. The Colossus is covered but the secrecy surrounding the project ensured that its place in computer history would be denied for decades. Churchill himself once quipped that he would personally shoot anyone who blabbed about the code-breaking at Bletchley Park.

Today we understand the historical importance of Bletchley Park and yet the charity responsible for the upkeep of the centre has to go cap in hand to the Heritage Lottery Fund to ask for the money required for its upkeep. If you are a British citizen (or resident) and you consider the preservation of the site of the Colossus to be an important task, consider signing the petition to save Bletchley Park.

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Tagged with book:isbn=0349112398 book:isbn=0142001449 book:isbn=0060512806 computing history