Craziness

It's like some unholy demon emerging from hell

Ethical Design: IA summit Barcelona

I presented a panel at Euro IA / Barcelona a couple of weeks ago, with Joe Lamantia and Thomas Frölich.

The subject was 'Perspectives on Ethics' in information architecture. My part of the panel presentation is above, you can also download a pdf here. Joe presented some intriguing ideas on designing for conflict, and Thomas provided a set of very-well researched insights into whether or not the field of IA needs a code of ethics.

Synesthesia documentary

I just watched a stunning documentary from the BBC about a savant named Daniel Tammet. He has a particularly rare mix of conditions: socially-functional autism, and what appears to be both intense number and language synesthesia. The fact that he can clearly describe what he 'sees' whilst he performs incredible mental feats is unique. Feats such as dividing numbers to 100 decimal places and learning a language in a week. It's the true story of the movie "∏"...

For the story of another truly gifted synesthete, read Nikolai Tesla's page on wikipedia.

I have sometimes wondered if I have a mild synesthesia towards information structures - doing IA I get what I can only describe as a sort of 3-dimensional colour / texture shape: I rotate in my head and when I see particularly clear lines through it (a more crystal-like structure) they can sometimes represent very clean ways to structure the data. But I get this only infrequently, it takes a lot of concentration, and the images are vague and weak.

Watch it here, for free (I love google video)...