All posts from
October 2004

Stupid Voters

Added on 29 October 2004 Peter Bogaards
“At the end of the article, he quotes a Florida elections supervisor, who makes a mean-spirited remark about ‘stupid people’ who vote — arguing that no matter how good the redesign, they (those stupid people) won’t mark it right. Cynical comments like these make me believe that every time one of us has the chance to articulate the needs of citizens, we should. There are too many of these public officials who pollute the air with their snide remarks and who blame the general public for not knowing what to do when confronted with their atrocious writing and design.” (Karen Schriver – InfoDesign-Cafe Oct. 2003)

All watched over by machines of loving grace

Added on 29 October 2004 Peter Bogaards
“Ubiquitous computing is coming. It is coming because there are too many too powerful institutions vested in its coming; it is coming because it is a ‘technically sweet’ challenge; it is coming because it represents the eventual convergence of devices, tools and services that became inevitable the moment they each began to be expressed in ones and zeroes.” (Adam Greenfield – Boxes and Arrows)

[BEEP]

Added on 28 October 2004 Peter Bogaards
“I am Peter Boersma, male, 34, living in an apartment from 1670 in the centre of Amsterdam. I studied computer science and ergonomics, and have been working in the field since 1995.” – Welcome to the blogosphere! (Peter Boersma)

Stick Figure Warning Signs

Added on 28 October 2004 Peter Bogaards
“For the longest time, whenever I saw one of those ‘don’t stick your head into the rotating blade’ warning signs with an illustration of a stick-figure person doing exactly that, I’ve wanted to make a web gallery of them. (…) they’re a visual form of anticryptography, the science of conveying information without assuming any prior knowledge.” – (Toren K. Smith) – courtesy of antenna

Why categorize?

Added on 28 October 2004 Peter Bogaards
“The human brain is a wonderful information processor. We take in innumerable details with every glance, sound or touch. Yet we are seldom overwhelmed with the magnitude of the information we are processing. One reason that we are able to cope with so much input is that we categorize it all. We look for what is new, what is different, what has changed. Then we try to match the new information to the categories that already exist in our minds.” – (Susan Feldman – KMWorld Magazine) – courtesy of elearningpost

A Comparison of Hyperstructures: Zzstructures, mSpaces, and Polyarchies

Added on 27 October 2004 Peter Bogaards
“Hypermedia applications tend to use simple representations for navigation: most commonly, nodes are organized within an unconstrained graph, and users are presented with embedded links or lists of links. Recently, new data structures have emerged which may serve as alternative models for both the organization, and presentation, of hypertextual nodes and links. In this paper, we consider zzstructures, mSpaces, and polyarchies from the perspective of graph theory, and compare these models formally.” – (Michael J. McGuffin and M.C. Schraefel) – courtesy of ui designer

Microsoft Typography

Added on 21 October 2004 Peter Bogaards
From Lewis Blackwell’s 20th-Century Type: “Microsoft has arguably the largest, most expert typographic unit in the world. With repsonsibility for the functionality and output of the great majority of type-generating devices, it is no surprise that they should have that, but it is not a fact that is celebrated or much investigated. That the Apple Macintosh platform is more celebrated and widely supported by creative designers obscures the prevelance of Microsoft technology in generating the typography that the world sees — even if many of its smartest ideas came from elsewhere.” (…) “Microsoft’s Typography group researches and develops fonts and font technologies, and supports the development of TrueType and OpenType fonts by independent type vendors.” (Microsoft) – courtesy of jamie divine