Now I do my banking with RBC, and have signed up to use their online banking. I don’t want to make this a Canada vs. America thing (though it is all too easy given that the country names are right there as part of the bank), but I can only conclude that this is yet another reason why America is better than Canada (USA! USA! USA!). The other two are Amazon and pizza.

It’s about the time of the month when I have a batch of bills that come due, and I always dread logging in and trying to navigate the wonky interface to accomplish this really simple task.

I think that the opening page is a pretty good indication of the experience you’re in for when you try to use this service:

So far so good, right? Awesome. A reasonable person would expect that the kind of things that belong in this menu are actions, things you’d want to do, things that the helpful RBC internet elves could assist you with, maybe signing in to banking, getting in touch with a representative, finding a branch.

Or, apparently, this is Canadian – English for “What Country is Your Account In?”

While you can do quite a lot within the service, it seems less like a designed system and more like a mish-mosh of different functionalities and modules held together with spit and duct tape. There’s a lot of jumping around and between different interfaces and areas of online banking and never any clear sign of where you are (or how you’ve got there and how you can get back). This is an especially scary thing for an online banking site. With no clear path back, I use the browser back button (which is somewhat of a no-no in web apps) and inevitably end up getting asked if I want to send the form again. Until I check my balance, I’m never quite sure if I’ve ended up sending Fido (my mobile carrier) twice what I owe them. And even sending them once what I owe them pains me because that’s already more than it’s worth.

A game that I like to play is called “Nest the Tabs” I click around for a while and see how many nested tab navigation menus I can rack up. My record in this game is four:

Pretty good, huh?

Perhaps the biggest flaw with the service is its flakiness. Most sessions end not with my logging out but with an error message like this:

… which is so frustrating! It’s not temporary if it happens over and over again, and there’s no information on this page that tells me why the error happened or what I can do to resolve it or better yet, avoid running into it again.

It’s bad enough to receive this kind of error and lose your work flow if you’re checking email or uploading photos … but when your finances are at stake, it can be truly terrifying! What if this happened in the middle of a funds transfer? Not only are the effects of this acute, but it also contributes to a general mistrust of the system, and thus the company as a whole.

Speaking of triathlon training, I bought a Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS watch + heart rate monitor last summer, and it’s proved to be a really valuable tool in supporting me in my training. Interestingly enough, this product came out at the end 2005, and an updated (the 405) was released in 2007. But the reviews for the newer version were quite middling, with many people quoting the flakiness of the software and the fact that the touch-sensitive bezel misfires when you sweat and is difficult to use while active. Duh. Who would have thought that one would sweat while exercising. The 305’s honkin’ huge, but other than that, I can’t say I have any real complaints about its performance. It gets the job done quite effectively, whether I’m running along the river or on a hike in Kannanaskis.  The only issue I find with it is the extensive nested configuration menus. Stuff isn’t always where I expect it to be. And trying to find a setting when I’m doing something else (running, for example), proved to be impossible.

A couple weeks ago, I was running 200m repeats around a track. I had previously set my watch to automatically trigger a new lap every mile, but now I wanted to time each lap separately, without it automatically resetting every mile (which would inevitably somewhere in the middle of a lap). So as I’m running, I’m digging into the menus, and for the life of me, I cannot find this freakin’ autolap setting to shut it off! Is it in “Settings->General->Display” … or perhaps “Settings->Fields->Units” … wait, this menu looks familiar, was I just here?!? To make a long story short, it took me about four laps after I’d realized what was going on before I was able to find this setting and turn it off.

So I was thinking about contextual awareness, and how this experience could have benefitted from the device leveraging this information. The Motorola Droid knows when you’re in your car, and it knows when you’re sleeping (it does not, however know when you’ve been bad or good. That comes as part of Android 4.0 a.k.a. Raspberry Bear Claw).  Seriously, what more information could this watch know about me?!?: It already knew my heart rate, where I was , how fast I was going, and what training regimen I was on! Talk about the ultimate contextually aware device!

What would an interface adapted to my current context look like? Well, to be fair, the device already does a bit of this: it changes the display depending on if you’re biking, running or other-ing, though it’s something that the user has to manually specify. But if it knew I was in motion, maybe it could shave out some of the excess settings and only give me access to the kinds of things I may want to do/edit during an actual workout. Turning on/off autolapping may not be at the top of that list of use cases, but there’s a whole lot that could be safely hidden with the justification that these are probably things you’d never want to do while actually exercising (e.g. change the time and date).

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”

Sometimes, I am just floored by the elegance and truthfulness of this quote, when, using some piece of technology, I stop and wonder “how the heck is this working?”  And I think that, at least on some conceptual level, I often know how the technology is working … and this makes it all the more amazing that I still don’t believe that it’s doing what I can clearly see it is doing. Sometimes I resort to just thinking that we are indeed all stuck in the Matrix and that it’s all just some kind of simulation (at which point, I think, that there must be some computer somewhere that is actually running the simulation, at which point I just curl up in my cubicle underneath my desk and start whimpering, which my boss hates!)

Using Google Maps on my cell phone the other day to get some directions, I had one of these moments (the awe kind, not the whimpering kind). But it wasn’t merely that I was able to figure out how to get from Point A to Point B via public transport — I’ve been using Google Maps now for quite a while and I’m kind of used to it (but I never take it for granted!) — it was how I was able to get these instructions … very, very easily. I had this fleeting, preternatural sense of connection to my device, like it was anticipating what I intended to do and all but did it for me. What I started typing it finished on my behalf; just as I recognized the need to provide the application with additional information, it presented me with an interface to do this. For such a mundane interaction, it was an oddly spiritual experience.

And with this, as someone who is interested in the design of user interfaces and user-centered technology, I’d like to provide a front-end-centric corollary to Mr. Clarke’s excellent quote:

“Any thoughtfully designed technology is indistinguishable from magic”

There’s a subtle — but important — difference to the kind of magic referred to in these two quotes.

The magic arising from sufficiently advanced technology might be the kind practiced by an illusionist: you observe something happening — right there in front of your eyes —  yet you don’t believe that what you’re seeing is true, and can’t comprehend how the illusion is effected . The magic arising from thoughtfully designed technology, however … it’s a bit more subtle. It trades in the exhibitionism of an illusionist for the serene omniscience of an oracle. He’s been waiting for you, and he knows why you’re here. He knows your past and he can predict your future.

Take the #24 up Crowchild, get off at 32nd Ave. And quickly, this next bus will be early.

Surprisingly, my anger wasn’t directed at the network for being slow or at Parallels for taking entirely too long to boot up or shut down. It wasn’t because I lost work, because my computer inexplicably froze up on me or forced me to restart because it had some updates to install.It was at a piece of software I explicitly elected to use, though there were other options available. And, perhaps most surprising of all, this piece of software is from Apple, who’s products I generally find enjoyable to use.

I am fucking pissed at iMovie ‘09.

I needed to do some editing of a video I shot for a tutorial. A colleague of mine suggested using a product called Ultra Video Splitter from company called Aone; my e-mail esponse to him was this:

Thanks, Xxxx – I’m probably going to take a shot at it using iMovie – as it’s software I’ve been meaning to learn how to use for quite a while and this would be the perfect opportunity! I’ll let you know what I come up with ……

Dan

It’s true; I’d never used iMovie before, mostly because I never had a reason to have to use it. And here was the perfect opportunity. I’ve had good experience with Apple products in the past, and I didn’t mind investing time in learning a tool that could potentially come in handy in the future. Besides, Apple sh*t is cool, right? Way cooler than some Windows shareware app.

The good part, is that within about half an hour of clicking around, after hovering over buttons to bring up tooltips and countless Apple-Zs, I knew my way around the interface and had a good mental model of how all the parts fit together. Apple tends to be very good at designing simple, learnable interfaces with plenty of scaffolding to enable first-time users like myself to find their way around.

My goal was very simple. To comb through about 45 minutes of video, splice out ~20 interesting clips, and make a separate video file out of each. I went through the video, Favorite-ing about twenty sections and made ‘clips’ out of them to add to my movie. All without looking at a single sentence of an instruction manual. Bravo to me for being so smart, and kudos to Apple for building an application which requires zero instruction for a newbie to get up and running.

But from here, things went downhill. Fast.

First off, I realized that I couldn’t only export one clip at a time.  You’re only able to export the whole movie (i.e. the sum of all the clips plus whatever transitions are in between them). This was kind of confounding, and I spent a bit of time Googling around before resigning myself to a wonky workaround: duplicating my twenty-clip project twenty times, and then deleting all but one clip in each of the projects, so that when I export, I got just one clip in the movie. *Sigh*.

My test case then was to just create one duplicate project with one clip, and to see how the resultant video came out. To my dismay, I found that the video I was exporting was of significantly lower quality than the source. Back to the Google. Without knowing too much about video editing and codecs, from what I read, In concluded that this is is just apparently the way iMovie works, nothing I can do about it.  But I would be taking these video clips and using them in a Camtasia presentation, which would compress them even more, so starting with degraded-quality clips was not an option. Time to check out the other application recommended by my colleague. *Sigh*.

One issue though – I’d spent about three hours going through the video and hand-selecting the bits that I needed, and I didn’t want to have to go through the video again in another program and repeat this laborious process. Surely there must be some way to export the chapters I’ve created or information about the Favorites I’d earmarked? File -> Export? Hello? Share? Where are you, menu item?!? I tried ‘Export to Final Cut XML’ or something and the xml  file which was produced didn’t seem to have units or tags that I could make any sense of. Fair enough – that one was kind of a stretch. But still …. *sigh*.

Looks like I was going to have to do this the old-fashioned way. Here was my plan: I was going to take out a piece of paper (there must be some around here somewhere) and some kind of writing instrument, and record onto the paper with the writing instrument, the time, in seconds, that each one of these clips starts and ends. Then, with this presumably inferior recommended software open, I would then take aforementioned piece of paper, read back the numbers, and create a parallel set of clips within the new software, then export these to seperate videos. Simple, right? A pain in the ass, sure, and a waste of time, sure, but what could go wrong?

As it turns out, it’s not that easy to figure out where in the movie each of my twenty clips started and stopped. iMovie does not tell you the location in minutes and seconds of the playhead. Let me repeat that, this time in bold , red letters:

Nowhere in iMovie ‘09 is there any indicator of time. Everything is relative to everything else, but it’s not possible to determine where anything is in absolute terms.

What is the implication of this? The implication of this is that any work done in iMovie ‘09 is essentially locked in iMovie and, other than exporting a video, there is no way to get this information (even in an ‘analog’ fashion), to any other application.  How so … very … Apple!

(if anyone who reads this knows a way to either export marker information or to see an absolute timeline in iMovie ‘09, please tell me and I’ll gladly whimper away with my tail between my legs).

why? Why? WHY? Who thought this was a good idea? Who would object or be inconvenienced by having this information appear in the “Playhead Information” that follows the scrubber? I just don’t get it. It really frustrates me.

But the deeper question is, why do I still really really want to use iMovie as opposed to the other software (which, after a really contrived process, I was able to utilize)? Why do I want so badly to want to like this software, and to want to use it?

So my revelation out of this long, tedious retelling of this event is that Apple is kind of like a selfish, flaky friend. You know the kind I’m talking about – the kind of friend that’s great to be with when you’re actually hanging out with them, but the second you ask for a favor, or suggest an activity that they’re not too keen on, you get shot down, because … c’mon … who’s really in charge here? We all know that Apple is wearing the pants in this relationship.

And I’ll put up with it (I suspect other people will too), with all the abuse, with the selfishness, just for the chance to use the software — even on its own terms. Doesn’t matter if Apple shows up late, or forgets about my birthday, I’ll take what I can get, because, when things are good, they’re really good! And when things don’t go so well, I’m willing to cut him some slack, because man, he is cool … I’m surprised he even wants to hang out with me at all. And when other people try to tell me how he’s kind of a douche, and that I’ve got lots of other good, reliable (albeit less cool) people I could be spending my time with, I’ll defend him, but I won’t be able to explain why. You could call it “Cupertino Syndrome.”

On the one hand, this experience was incredibly infuriating, and on the other, it’s completely unsurprising. This is what Apple does, over and over again. Mac. iPod. iPhone. iMovie. You name it. When you buy into something Apple, you’re not only buying into that thing – you’re buying into a whole ecosystem of (sometimes really expensive) stuff to support it and to work well with it. And for most of the people, most of the time, it does work well, very well, in fact. And for many people — myself included — on the average, it’s worth it. By excluding so many features from their software, those features that are included are all the more easier to use. As an interaction designer (and a human), I appreciate this simplicity.

Now that I know the limitations of iMovie ‘09, I probably won’t use it again for doing any kind of substantial video editing. But I will always look back fondly on the good times we shared together, and appreciate him for all of the good qualities, such as learnability, a snazzy user interface and some cool visual effects.

And I thought I read somewhere  that they had a ‘Timeline’ feature back in iMovie ‘06 ….

I recently moved from Chicago, IL, USA to Calgary, AB, Canada. Jury’s still out on whether or not trading the El for the C-Train, pizza and hot dogs for Vietnamese subs, or the lake for the mountains (which have their own lakes!) is worth it …. but one thing’s for sure: I’m really happy with my new job as  Usability Specialist with a company called SMART Technologies,  responsible for  many excellent educational technology hardware and software products, most popularly the SMART Board.

But this post is not about SMART (maybe I’ll write one in the future), it’s about parking in Calgary (something I try to not have to do too much of, but there’s just no way around using a car here). Nothing too insightful here, just a funny parking experience I had and also a  kudos to the city-wide parking system, ParkPlus.

The Bad

It took about a million weeks for my car to ship from Chicago -> Calgary (which is funny as my stuff got here in about one). Once it arrived here, I had to visit around eight different places (government offices, registries, dealerships) in order for my car to be blessed as kosher in Alberta. In any event, there was a period where I had a rental car and my imported Volkswagen and had to strategically shuttle them around so I could take the latter to get inspected and then use the former to get home. A funny thing happened when I tried to park them both in the same lot, using my credit card in the automated parking machine. I swiped my card, paid for a couple hours worth of parking for one car, then went to dip my card again, and got the following error message.

It took my quite a while to figure out what the heck was going on here. I eventually just assumed that my credit card info was stored in some central parking database which doesn’t allow one to have multiple simultaneous sessions on the same card. Understandable … it’s an edge use case …. but I still couldn’t figure out what was the rationale for disallowing this. But … what about that error message, huh? Gotta be one of the best I’ve seen. How about ‘Session in Progress’ or ‘Try Different Card’ ? To me, “Impossible Payment” implies that I tried to pay for -i or 1/0 hours of parking time, or attempted to pay with my blockbuster card. I scrounged up enough loonies to pay with cold hard, cash. It didn’t seem to have any problem with that.

The Good

Not that I enjoy paying for parking — especially at work — but if I have to pay, I want it to be as painless as possible. The ParkPlus system makes parking so easy, you don’t even car that you’re getting ripped off!

Here’s how it works. These payment boxes have sprung up all over the city, and many of the streets have signs with zone numbers posted along them. You park your car somewhere, find the nearest box enter the zone number where you’ve parked your car, dip your credit card and you’re done.  Pretty easy, and ingenious for ParkPlus because adding a new zone is as easy as putting up a pole with a number — no need to install a quarter-based parking meter for every parking spot.

Well, the streets around my work building are Park-Plus-ified, and I’d seen signs advertising a way to pay with your mobile. So one day, instead of walking the extra 250 feet past the front door to the machine, I decided I’d pay with my mobile. I navigated to parkplus.ca with my mobile phone and found it to be not a mobile-optimized site, and I was a bit confused by this. When I got to my desk, I spent some more time navigating around the site from my browser on my PC, and as it turns out, you actually need to call a phone number from your phone to pay for parking — how adorably quaint!! The website is only used to create an account and for you to add money to that account.

Paying exorbitant fees every month to Fido for use of their mobile internet, I was a bit upset that there wasn’t a web site — or better yet a mobile app — I could use to do this, but I thought I’d put some money in my ParkPlus account and give it a go using the ‘ol Dialer app on my Android Phone.  It’s a pretty fluid interaction:

• Place the call
• Press 1 to create a new parking session or cancel current one
• Enter zone number
• System reads it back, press 1 to confirm
• It thanks me, tells me when my session expires and hangs up.

Total time expended ….. 33 seconds. That’s pretty great (as great as paying for parking gets), and quite the relief after having used Fido’s ridiculously inefficient voicemail system. I hope to post more on this later.

Sad fun fact of the day: ParkPlus is at the top of my mobile’s automatically generated ‘Favorites’ list (based on frequency of calls).

Thankfully, it’s not just me doing this; there’s a whole team devoted to this task (several, depending on who you ask ). And one of the best ways to stay on top of this tidal wave of new developments is to be able to leverage the collective knowledge of the team, each member contributing their own $.02 on whatever topic of interest, from which, when taken together, one can get a rough sense of where’ the industry is at, and where it’s going. To do this, though, requires a robust, flexible system to manage and categorize this constantly-updated stream of information, and I’ve found that the legacy corporate, Web 0.2 system we currently have in place was just not cutting the mustard. In fact, it was hurting our team, and thus, by extension (IMHO), our business.

So I spent some time poking around the interwebs to see what a viable (hopefully, free) alternative would be. I took a look at several open-source content managements systems – Plone, Drupal, Joomla – and found them to be very powerful, but with a somewhat steep learning curve, and probably overkill for what I needed. I didn’t want to spend weeks just getting up to speed with a system, when I knew, in the back of my mind that there was one tool out there – one dead easy to use, robust, flexible, jack-of-all-trades,  all-around awesome tool that could fulfill about 80% of functionality I was looking for. I’m talking, of course, about of Wordpress.

To make a long story short, after a couple weeks of back and forth with our internal tools and IT teams, a bit of convincing on the part of my manager and others in our organization, I finally have a working Wordpress blog running behind our corporate firewall; it is – albeit slowly – being adopted by my colleagues (a team of about ten), and has, after a trial period, fully replaced our previous blog (which was powered by our massive company-wide dinosaur of a content management system).

I’d like to spend a bit of time talking about some of the challenges I faced and the workarounds I found, for anyone who hopes to do the same:

Convicing People of Worth

Time == money, and with ROI being the acronym on everyone’s lips (well, WTF is on mine sometimes), it’s important to have some good reasons why a blog is worth the investment in time and effort it takes to set one up. Though, seriously, with Wordpress’ famous five-minute installation, unless you’re making serious bank, this can’t take more than a couple dollars of your time! What enabled me to sell others on it was the fact that it could be used not only as a blog but also as a powerful content management system, in which posts can be tagged and categorized, and then later retrieved at the outset of a project. So figuring out what anyone ever said about, say, social media is as easy as clicking on the Social Media category. 

This is, of course, assuming that everyone does a good job of categorizing their posts. But a little work up front can pay off a lot down the road when it comes time to draw on this accumulated corpus of knowledge. On this note, it’s really important to come up a priori with a suitable taxonomy of categories which suit the breadth of topics relevant in your industry.  You can always change them later, but a good starter set is important so that no post gets lost in the mix.

Cost

Wordpress is free, you say (it’s GPL-ed, which doesn’t restrict its commercial use). There is no cost. Well, there are costs, but they’re not immediately obvious. It costs money to run servers, to pay for service contracts, to back up your data. I thought that running a blog would be as easy as plugging a Mac Mini into a port in the wall, but it’s really important to make sure that the server you’re running it on is maintained properly. So while Wordpress itself is technically free, it’s worth plunking down whatever is required to avoid having a server crash and losing months of valuable links and insights.

Barriers to entry

People, much like large corporations, are slow to change behavior, and it is an awful lot to ask of people to change everyday behaviors to accommodate a new technology, especially if the value of that technology is not immediately apparent. One way to mitigate the negative side-effects of technology upgrades  is to make the new system feature-for-feature backwards compatible with the old one, so that no additional work is required to get an equal level of value. Kind of like snapping out the table cloth from off a table without disturbing any of the place settings.

For example, our old blog was really convenient in that you could register for email updates whenever a new entry was posted, and it was also possible to post new entries via email. Wordpress does not come out of the box with a subscribe-via-email feature (I like using one called Subscribe2 ) but, assuming you have a mail server at your disposal, you can set it up — with a little bit of effort — to handle posting via email. I never was able to get this feature up and running, but I found that the Press This posting bookmarklet, which comes out of the box in Wordpress 2.6, makes posting a pretty painless operation, as it integrates right into your browser toolbar.

Even with these backwards-compatible features in place, there was still some attrition when we moved from our old blog to the new one. So the moral of the story is, make it as easy as possible for people to post.

Also, as a corollary, go out of  your way to help your co-workers become familiar with Wordpress! It’s definitely user-friendly software (and fun!) but some features are not immediately obvious on first use.  Helping show people the ropes is an effort that will definitely pay off in the long run; if people are frustrated or confused from the outset, they’ll be even less inclined to get on board.

Security

Security is always an issue in big corporations, and there were definitely a lot of questions as to the security of Wordpress. We’re running the blog behind our corporate firewall, so that definitely helps lock it down some. There are also Wordpress plugins available to help with LDAP authentication if that’s a requirement. We never were quite able to get this plugin to work with our LDAP server, and eventually gave up, but with a bit more work, I think it would be possible.

While by default, anyone can read a blog you’ve set up with Wordpress, in order to be an author, Wordpress requires a user to have a login. There is a setting to allow people to register themselves (and the admin sets the default privileges of self-registered users – i.e. can they publish posts or only contribute content?). What I found well, though, was to manually create a login for everyone I knew I wanted to be able to post to the blog. I felt that by taking this initial step (as opposed to asking people to register themselves), it would make things that much easier for everyone to try out Wordpress.  

One other advantage of  a single person creating a username for everyone at once, is that it affords a consistency that could make certain things easier down the road. For example – Wordpress is flexible in that you can change almost anything about your account except your username. Once you create that username, the only way to change it is to delete your account and create a new one. So, by explicitly choosing a certain username for each of my teammates (specifically the id which is used on the company wide intranet), I have left open the possibility to leverage LDAP authentication when we get that plugin working. If everyone were to create their own username, with no enforced format, there is no guarantee that this username would be compatible with another form of authentication if it became a requirement.

Multiple Blogs

As discussed above, because Wordpress is only nominally ‘free’, there was some question as to whether it was worth the investment if this tool was just meeting the needs of a single (i.e. my) team. In general, I would imagine that corporate IT is looking for solutions that can scale, and is not interested in investing time, effort and money in one-off solutions that just serve a small subset of their serviced population.

Case in point: as I was discussing setting up a Wordpress blog with our tools team, there was another team within my organization who was talking about tweaking and contorting our corporate CMS to fit its needs of a dynamic,  update-able site where they could publish their perspective on design trends. After sitting down and determining what their needs were, I suggested that Wordpress is just the tool for them. As it turns out, it was.

Fortunately, once you have a Wordpress installation and database set up, it is dead-easy to set up additional blogs. We have three running off of the same database. And each one is its own unique identity, fully autonomous and administered by a different person on a different team.

***

This article by Cory Doctorow about the inherent tension between corporate IT and tech-savvy users really struck a chord with me, as it echoed a lot of the feelings I had and challenges I faced while working on this project. I agree with it completely, and think that it is a sad state of things when the users of corporate IT (specifically those who are advocating change) are seen as “heretics”;  they  should be seen as scouts, out there in the trenches scoping out new vantage points and competitive edges.

I think that tools like Wordpress can provide that edge. And this is just one example of an ecosystem of incredibly powerful, free (or cheap) tools out there. Especially when compared with the unusable legacy systems that cost orders of magnitude more money to operate, train and maintain, the benefit of these tools is self-evident, and the potential they have to positively impact practices in the workplace is limitless. Policy may come from the top down, but change has to come from the bottom up.

Well, using the industrial stapler in my office today, I noticed a little nub sticking out of the front of it that I could swear wasn’t there the last time I used it.

Hard to read from this photo, but it says “User Guide” with a little arrow that invites you to pull the nub towards you. I took the nub challenge and pulled…

Now, while you could argue that a stapler shouldn’t need instructions, I’d argue back that there are some operations – de-jamming, re-filling, or calling for tech support (really?!?) which require kinds of specific information that users shouldn’t have to remember – such as the phone number or the model of staple needed.

So this is pretty nifty, I think, and useful for some bits of information which wouldn’t be immediately obvious. I like how it’s there when you need it, and not when you don’t, is very discoverable, but not knowing about its existence does not negatively impact your experience with the stapler (assuming you don’t need to call tech support  

Also, I’m sure unintentional on the part of the designer, it has a GUI widget feel to it; I was half-expecting the arrow to rotate 180 degrees once the drawer was pulled out to indicate that it could be pushed back in!

Despite my current gig as a designer, I’ve had an opportunity with DIYcity to reach way back to my computer science B.S. and get my hands dirty with some Java programming, which has been a nice change.

DIYcity’s first project, released a couple of weeks back, was called DIYtraffic. It is a traffic monitoring system  that takes input from Yahoo!’s traffic API, and pumps it out over a Twitter feed (see traffic_chicago’s feed for an example). The cool thing about the system, is that it’s set up to be super-extensible, so the same framework can be appropriated for any city, any traffic feed and any output source (twitter, sms, facebook,etc.) assuming you’re up for writing a bit of code Working on this project, I got a chance to play with the Twitter API (an experience which was at times frustrating, at times awe-inspiring), and also put into practice whichever best practices of object-oriented software programming I remembered (or could learn about with a quick Google search).

Just today, DIYcity has released our second app called SickCity – real time disease tracking. You can check out the live, running version of it up at sickcity.org. Basically, we’re tracking Twitter for the mention of illness terms (such as “feeling ill”, “flu”, “head cold”, “food poisoning”) located within a particular city. Kind of like Google Flu Trends, but more local (city instead of state scale), more extensible (tracking multiple conditions), and more organic (someone may tweet about having a cold but not do a Google Search on it – but of course the opposite holds true as well . Hey, it’s a start. This app was built primarily by Paul Watson, with design input / support from John, Clint McMahon and myself.

Twitter’s incredible. Kind of like a Google News for people.

One particular sculpture, which I was unfortunately unable to take a photo of (or find online) caught my attention. It was a beautifully intact, almost perfect condition. Roman in origin, the sculpture portrayed Dionysus, the god of wine (and certified party animal) posing with Pan, his little half-goat half-human freaky friend. According to the caption below, Pan was gazing adoringly at Dionysus, but I think it was more lust than love.

But what really struck me about the sculpture is described in the last paragraph:

The sculpture is remarkably intact. Complex pairs rarely survive two thousand years in such complete condition. The artist made careful choices to ensure the figures stability. A tree trunk supports the pair; Pan’s elongated arm is joined to Dionysus’ back; the god’s neck is reinforced by his bound hair, and this hand rests on Pan’s shoulders. Aesthetics, psychology, and engineering combined to create this remarkable work of art.

This is an awesome example of what I see as the intersection of art and design. Granted, I don’t have a formal education in either, but my very vague understanding of the difference between the two is that, while art creates beautiful things, design creates beautiful (possibly functional) things that can be reproduced on some appreciable scale. Art is created in a world of boundless possibility, while good design is forged under the pressure of constraints.

So this sculpture (ack I wish I had a picture of it ) is a great example of what can happen when an artist – a sculptor, in this case – takes into consideration particular constraints, let’s say longevity or robustness.

Would the sculpture have been more beautiful if the figures were prancing through a forest of small saplings as opposed to leaning against a single large trunk chosen by the artist? Perhaps. Would it be more moving if Pan’s “elongated arm” were outstretched,  frozen in some grand gesticulation in homage to Dionysus? Perhaps. But these decisions were made (in retrospect, for the better) and this work of art is no less stunning because of any sacrifices which may have been made.

Whether the particular constraints of longevity and robustness was imposed by the commissioner of this sculpture, or is due solely to the foresight of the artist, we can not know. But whatever the case, this sculpture, clearly built with a set of constraints in mind, has survived in almost perfect condition after two millennia! Have you ever owned a product that lasted that long ?