Daily Yoga

‘My Daily Yoga’ is bookmarked as a favourite on top of my browser. I’ve set an hourly alert on my calendar and I’ll try to stick to it. (first seen on LaVolta recruitment)

Nice!

Christopher Alexander – a most beautiful mind.

The IAI mailing list has been discussing the usefulness and approach of collating an IA pattern library. Christopher Alexander is one of the team of architects who wrote ‘A Pattern Language’ Victor Lombardi pointed to a keynote Christopher Alexander gave at The 1996 ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programs, Systems, Languages and Applications. (Thanks Victor)

While the subject of a pattern library for Information Architecture is very interesting and relevant – what resonated with me most reading Christopher’s keynote was his conclusion about our moral imperatives and powers.

‘Please forgive me, I’m going to be very direct and blunt for a horrible second. It could be thought that the technical way in which you currently look at programming is almost as if you were willing to be “guns for hire.” In other words, you are the technicians. You know how to make the programs work. “Tell us what to do daddy, and we’ll do it.” <…>

What I am proposing here is something a little bit different from that. It is a view of programming as the natural genetic infrastructure of a living world which you/we are capable of creating, managing, making available, and which could then have the result that a living structure in our towns, houses, work places, cities, becomes an attainable thing. That would be remarkable. It would turn the world around, and make livingstructure the norm once again, throughout society, and make the world worth living in again.

This is an extraordinary vision of the future, in which computers play a fundamental role in making the world — and above all the built structure of the world — alive, humane, ecologically profound, and with a deep living structure.’ <…>

For me Christophers conclusion is as valid today as it was when he addressed the ACM conference 1996.

I have been grappling with the compromise between ethics and to whom I hire my services for as long as I can think. I am striving to make good choices and find myself often limited by reality – like supporting our children, mortgage payments…

Sam, Christopher Alexander and me, Resurgence 2005

I am still so chuffed to have met him.

I heart flash…

…when it is used well.

This is fantastic information design – check it out

via UIE – where you can find plenty more lush examples of information design. Like the  ‘Is it better to buy or rent?’ graph.