Call it an art installation if you want...

Call it an art installation if you want—I call it Experience Design.

I didn’t create it, Chris Cobb Did. He convinced Adobe Books (no, not the Adobe you’re thinking, this is a used bookstore) in San Francisco to let him and a team of friends rearrange all the books by color. And then he named it “There Is Nothing Wrong in This Whole Wide World.”

The pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/heather/sets/39617/ give you some idea what it must have been like. At first glance it looks like a photography trick or filter. But then you realize, no, it really looked like that.

And it must have been delightful. It must have been magical. It makes me want to roll around on the floor in there. And, yes, it even makes me want to buy books.

I’m not a trained designer. My Photoshop skills are pretty pathetic. My coworkers still correct me every time I call a typeface a font. I studied English Literature for far longer than was practical, and then somehow became a project manager at a web development company. After realizing what project managing was really like, I convinced the higher ups to let me try out the new-fangled role of Information Architecture. And then I got to learn on my feet when I found myself leading up the IA team on a low-profile little project called Orbitz.

Information Architecture tends to emphasize ease-of-use as a design goal above all others. Things should be easy to find, easy to use, easy to buy, easy, easy, easy. A good Information Architect would never recommend rearranging all the books by color. Because they wouldn’t be easy to find!

But a good Experience Designer would. Which is why I’m trying to be a good Experience Designer these days. Because I don’t want to just make things easy. I want to make people feel joy, or laugh, or even roll around on the floor. I don’t have all the answers yet, and I probably never will, but I’m having a lot of fun learning.

Jane Jacobs

The ever sensible, down to earth and totally on target Jane Jacobs passed away April 25. I love this excerpt, when instead of taking the opportunity to engage in a little America-bashing, she just says very simply & sensibly "So we are lucky."

http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=1934

JHK: The Europeans seem to have a higher regard for city life than we do, and to do better with it. How do you account for that?

Jane Jacobs: Well, you have to go back to something I don't understand and can't explain, which are these planning hysterias that went over America. I guess different kinds of hysterias swept over Europe.

JHK: They get Adolf Hitler, and we get Ed Logue.

JJ: So we are lucky. But something else amazes me about the United States versus Europe. When we are faced with the task of fixing up a riverbank--and many American cities are on rivers--we have to put in theme parks, ballparks, aquariums, all this stuff. In Europe they make granite embankments with a ramp or stairs down to the water, and it's beautiful.

One Easy Solution to Traffic Congestion

We were driving home from the mountains on Sunday and it occured to me, again, that a lot of driving stress & probably congestion, could be saved if brake lights had a visual indicator (intensity?) corresponding to the force with which the driver is mashing the brake.

Maybe it's just me, since I'm a bit of a nervous nelly driver, but when someone brakes ahead of me I think they're probably just slowing down, but *maybe* they have actually slammed on the brakes. From directly behind you can't tell. So I tend to slow down a bit more than I generally need to, on the off chance they've actually slammed on the brakes. Of course, any traffic planner knows that my slow down causes a ripple effect which can take hours to clear, in congested traffic. Even if most people are not like me--they just assume the car hasn't slammed on its brakes until they practically touch its bumper--just a few people like me can cause major slow downs in traffic.

It would be such a simple solution--really red means you'd better brake hard, a little red means you don't need to. Think of that next time you're behind someone who is ever so gently riding the brakes all the down a long mountain.

Polar Bears Rool!

So, Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld picked me to be the Editorial Assitant on the next edition of the polar bear book (Information Architecture for the World Wide Web). I'm very excited! I've never worked on a book before, this should be a lot of fun.

Most entertaining moment so far: Survey results came in and one person's comment was just "Polar Bears Rool!" (yes, spelled like that). Hey survey-answering person, I like your enthusiasm!