topic: thoughtless acts

in the Jane Fulton-Suri sense of the word: everyday workarounds to ambiguous situations and behavioural problems. in short, design solutions by everyman
22 Oct 09
in

only in an experimental psychology paper can you find...

"The media were demonstrated by having the participants solve three simple communication tasks by means of video telephone, hands-free telephone, and text chat. Face-to-face (F-t-f) was assumed familiar."

Schliemann, T., Asting, T., Følstad, A., & Heim, J. (2002). Medium preference and medium effects in person-person communication. In CHI '02 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 710-711). Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA: ACM. doi: 10.1145/506443.506559

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brown sugar flash

27 Sep 09
in

brown sugar flashbrown sugar flash originally uploaded by steelmonkey

left: on-camera flash
right: on-camera flash with a packet of "sugar in the raw" slipped on (it's made of brown paper)

this is part of an ongoing obsession of mine to understand how to do photography under varying light conditions with a minimum of additional equipment, and possibly reusing available materials

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welcome, again! and again! and again!

27 Jul 09
in

welcome, again! and again! and again!welcome, again! and again! and again! originally uploaded by steelmonkey

every time the hotel staff clean my room during the day, they reliably place this welcome package on my bed even after i repeatedly move it to a remote corner of the room, as if to insist that i read this stuff. presumably this happens because they have been given instructions as to what a clean room should look like, and go about replicating it regardless of the circumstance?

what happens when the instruction designers are not also the instruction performers? how do service patterns migrate through an organization? how can situational/contextual thinking be formalised or reified? how can formal systems can be made fluid?

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unfortunate uses: key to the lock

21 Jun 09
in
Unfortunate Uses | Key to the Lock, originally uploaded by steelmonkey.

the bike store neglected to use washers with the screws, causing the bolt to cut through the plastic on tightening. the keys were the only thing available with a sufficiently wide hole to let the screw pass and sufficient stiffness and surface area to provide distributed pressure

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why paper is still around

29 Dec 08
in

why paper is still around

Taken at a colleague's desk: a flatscreen display repurposed as a, well, display. This is why the folks over at Oblong are so cool

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