Gneumatic

This documentation of an installation by Nate Harrison traces the history of the “Amen break.” A drum track originating from an obscure, late-sixties funk album, the Amen break was sampled ubiquitously in late-80s hip hop, and later served as the foundation for the entire genre of drum and bass. Asks Harrision, “Hundreds of tracks, dozens of DJs, clubs and events, in effect an entire sub-culture based on this one drum loop, I mean, based on six seconds from 1969… What’s the fascination?”

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Alex Wright summarizes his IA Summit presentation on Stone Age Information Architecture, or, “how pre-literate cultures manage their collective intellectual capital.” He adds a valuable insight to the ongoing debate between old-guard hierarchical systems of classification and tagging/social classification, namely, that hierarchical classification may be more deeply ingrained in our cultural past than we realize.

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The Washington Post reports that San Francisco interactive agency Method has been engaged by the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum to lead a major redesign of their existing site. Only about 500 items from the 250,000-piece collection are currently viewable to the public. The new site will encourage visitors to play a curatorial role through the use of social classification a la flickr and delicious.

[T]echnology can let Web users — and museum visitors — create their own exhibitions, add content and engage in communication among themselves, reducing the institution to the role of go-between… The museum also wants to enable Web visitors to curate shows and build virtual collections, to circulate favorite digital photos. Web visitors also might be able to fill in the blanks on works that have yet to be researched fully. Shifting the curatorial responsibility might seem risky, but in 2002, a visiting researcher helped the museum by discovering an unsigned Michelangelo in a box of drawings.

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This is my official first post. I have a variety of goals for this site. First and foremost, it is intended to be a forum for writing and thinking about user experience (UX) design, and the wide variety of disciplines and practices it encompasses, overlaps and references. In addition to writing about topics of interest to me professionally as a UX designer and strategist, I also hope to explore other aspects of technology, culture, art and media. I look forward to establishing a dialogue with other folks who are thinking, writing and debating about similar subjects, and hope that I can perhaps entice some of my more opinionated friends (oh wait, that would be all of them…) to stop by and weigh in.

I anticipate it will be a while before I get the site completely up and running, styled the way I want it, etc. Since it will definitely be a work in progress, please stop back by again soon.