I’m a big fan of the work of Jef Raskin (creator of Apple’s Macintosh) and the Humanized guys have made a really kewl tool called Enso that makes computing simpler, using some of the ideas pioneered by Jef.
I wonder how long until this is part of Windows Vista?
I’m told that Macintosh OSX has a similar feature, and so does Linux (Catapult).
A Practical Guide to Extreme Programming, by David Astels, Granville Miller and Miroslav Novak.
Very thorough on all aspects of an XP project from the begining to the end. Lots of good examples.
The Pyramid Principle, logic in writing and thinking, by Barbara Minto.
After reading this book I felt I had a much better understanding of how to target my writing; that the subject, the questions and their answers would be clear in the mind of the reader.
The Wisdom of Crowds, Why the Many Are Smarter Than the few, by James Surowiecki
This is a fantastic book that I think should be on your must read list. Here are some quotes from the book.
“the simple fact of making a group diverse makes it better at problem solving.”
“grouping only smart people together doesn’t work that well because the smart people (whatever that means) tend to resemble each other in what they can do. If you think about intelligence as a kind of toolbox of skills, the list of skills that are “best” is relatively small, so that people who have them tend to be alike. This is normally a good thing, but it means that as a whole the group knows less than it otherwise might. Adding a few people who know less, but have different skills, actually improves the groups performance.”
“Ultimately, diversity contributes not just by adding different perspectives to the group but also by making it easier for individuals to say what they really think. As we’ll see in the next chapter, idepedance of opinion is both a crucial ingredient in collectively wise decisions and one of the hardest things to keep intact. Because diversity helps preserve independence, it’s hard to have a collectively wise group without it.”
I came across this personal mantra on the web site of Bill Buxton and it resonates with me.
A Personal Mantra: Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the “things” that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.
I think this mantra applies to all design and not just product design.