pure and applied

Love's End

Your phrase, its convincing finality,
fires my weltering heart
across the room. Till then I wanted you
by the bucketload. Shoring-up I reel
through rounds of Claire's cumquat liqueur
while snide messages sidle down the redundant
path - for I am muggins, deaf to sound, daft
to sense - for I am hard at work shovelling
coals, abaft the audience. There's private
health plans for my chiropractor, for my nervous
tic, but nothing for this, as the whole
proscenium crashes about these listing schemes.
Jeez the gin-soaked cumquats knock
me out. For you are beautiful, really. I hope you
have a stroke. Your sculptured fandango
sliding from its cheekbones. Not right now
though - I press on, making regrets:
new stanchions, new duct, new stuffed
toys, new soft porn - the whole unwanted
container-load nuzzling at your dock.
Baffling, this unravelling - your manners,
your patois!

First published in Jacket #6, 1999. Republished here with minor changes to the 6th and 11th lines.

Affordance nostalgia: MP3 player in a C60 cassette

As for so many of my generation the C60 cassette was a mainstay of childhood and teen music experience. Somehow, in a fit of ruthless flint-eyed efficiency, I threw out my many mixtapes a few years ago (and how I rue that moment now).

The nostalgia I feel is for the music, which of course I can buy on the intershops, but almost equally for the physicality of the technology. Let's call it "affordance nostalgia". Now I can have both, sort of, with an MP3 player in a C60 cassette housing. I can even forward through tracks by turning the tape sprocket with a pencil. It's almost real.

No matter how much we progress as far as technology is concerned, we always look back towards retro stalwarts for inspiration in the designing field.

At Yanko Design.

Analysis

Excellent post by experience architect Steve Baty writing in Johnny Holland magazine on analysis. Steve says:

Analysis is that oft-glossed over, but extremely important step in the research process that sits between observation (data gathering) and our design insights or recommendations.

I'm learning a lot about analysis at the moment by doing plenty of it, but what I have so far lacked is a language to talk about the separate activities involved. I've been focusing on the form and content of the outputs, but without a strong understanding of the inner-life of the process itself. So I've found this to be a useful post.

Steve covers the analysis activities in overview and I'm hoping this is also an introduction to future in-depth posts about the areas he outlines:

• Deconstruction
• Manipulation
• Transformation
• Summarisation
• Aggregation
• Generalisation
• Abstraction
• Synthesis

Read more at Johnny Holland (via @docbaty).

(Tractors and agquip came immediately to mind when I first saw the name Johnny Holland - as though some unholy GFC smackdown merger had taken place between John Deere and New Holland to create, of all things, a blog about interaction design.)

Australian Poets in Flickr

David Prater, originally uploaded by pureandapplied.

Having turned 38 I'm at an age where I can safely start life-long personal projects knowing the end is in sight how to pick projects I can enjoy devoting a lifetime to. This particular small-scale effort is at the sustainable intersection of two of my interests - poetry and photography, and it's one I'm dead-keen to share with others.

A few months ago I started a group in Flickr with the intention of collecting together photos of contemporary Australian poets. Check out the collection at Flickr.

This is an invitation to anyone with images of that most elusive species of writer, the living Australian poet, to join the group and add their shots to the collection.    

There's a small pool at the moment, with images only of those I personally know such as Jane Gibian, Mark Mahemoff and David Prater (above), but I'm keen to see it grow, and am hopeful of seeing writers I've only heard of being contributed to the group.

Find out more in the group page at Flickr.

UPDATE

Wanna include a slideshow of the pool in yer site? You can grab the code here.

ABC Shop a finalist in the 15th AIMIAs

In mid-2008 ABC Commercial asked Bienalto to work with them on a new customer experience design for their ABC Shop retail site. The site launched in October, in time for Christmas, and has performed well since then, in spite of the famous financial crisis... Somehow I missed the opportunity to post about it at the time so you'll have to read more about the project in Bienalto's blog.

What I am pleased about at the moment is that the site is a finalist in the 15th AIMIAs in the Best Retail category.

The AIMIAs, for those that don't know (ie readers outside the online industry), are the pre-eminent online industry awards in Australia. Being a finalist is something to crow about and being a winner is something to shout about. While working at Massive I was part of the team that won Best of the Best at the 11th AIMIAs - and I'm still I should probably stop talking about it.

It's also great to see Rob Muller (a former colleague from my Massive days) a multi-category finalist this year for his work in the Euro RSCG team that produced the Quantum Code campaign.  

The 15th AIMIAs looks like a very competitive year so, like Rob, I've got my fingers crossed.

Site launch: Austrade

Two of the things I love about my job as an experience architect at Bienalto are helping businesses do better online, and site launches.

How much more gratifying it is to simultaneously help Australian companies do better business online en masse (especially at a time of economic crisis); to help Australian exporters sell their products, to connect investors with businesses in Australia, and to help overseas buyers hook up with Australian producers.

This is the mission of Austrade and I'm really stoked to have worked with them on the architecture for their new site.

Check it out at  www.austrade.gov.au.

A podcast of Australian poets

Mike Ladd's ABC Radio National show 'Poetica' has been must-listen radio for Australian poets for many years. A podcast is long overdue...

A Pod of Poets is a series of eleven, 40-minute podcasts of Australian poetry, read by the authors. The poets come from all over Australia; some are emerging talents and some are established; several of them are on the school syllabus.

Listen in at A pod of poets.

(Via Ruby Street)

Twitter spikes, others dip, during inauguration

Interesting post over at O'Reilly on web traffic during Obama's inauguration. Compares traffic on flickr, last.fm, google and Twitter.

Here's the twitter traffic from that post:

Reading the post it's fascinating to see that Twitter is the inverse of the other services. This data amply illustrates Twitter's role as a social forum, a clearinghouse of meta and emotion that people turn to (ie away from other sites) reacting real-time to both the great and the trivial events of the day.

It would a web analyst's dream to be on the inside of Twitter's analytics, to better understand what was happening during one of these spikes, but responsive, multi-party, ad-hoc threads arising in hashtags (like #obama, or today in Australia #bushfires) would undoubtedly be the key mechanism.

And I wonder if it was only Twitter that had traffic spike in this way. How did mainstream media (MSM) sites behave? Om Malik, commenting on the role of twitter during the Mumbai attacks, observed that twitter provides a torrential raw feed of observation on the ground and reaction in the stream, and that mainstream media (he called it "old media") needs to focus on "providing analysis, context, and crucially, intelligence." Mainstream media site traffic data, viewed alongisde that of twitter, would tell us more - though I'd be surprised if we ever get to make that comparison.

Back to the O'Reilly post - also of interest is the way in which the data came out - through a flickr pool of shared analytics data.

Web traffic is something that companies typically keep very secret, and often the only time engineers can talk about it is late at night, at a bar, and very much off the record.

Better get some mainstream media analytics people down to that bar and ply them with tequilas.

Understanding Web Operations Culture - the Graph & Data Obsession - O'Reilly Radar.

via @damianm

After the party

About the face she’s photovoltaic.
“There’s marriage to make men
lecherous,” she says, “I see it all the time

in characters like you.” Still, a casual mention
of the yacht by Lion Island sends her
into a lather. She’s dramatic; American,

emphatic – tattoos and piercings in vertiginous
array, an anodyne piece of tinsel nonetheless,
and her structured hair is the bomb. A cigarette,

a shared song, a languorous interlude. She works
in a call centre – “it’s not transcendent,”
she says, “not a bit.” You make to leave.

Well, she’s blocking the exit. “In Russian,”
she sidles up, “the word for secret
is the same as for mystery.” Hmm

portentous – and it’s too late to know
if it’s really so – she doesn’t want you though,
you figure that much, not beyond

this booze-raddled night. Somehow you get her
to the run-about, with a bottle of bourbon;
a twist of the throttle and you tear out

across Brisbane Waters, pinching luck, past
the oyster leases, past an old gaffer in a tinny
fishing the neap tide, threading a seam of silvery

water. Later, by some narrative device not herein
recorded, you proceed to the forecastle, from cuddling
to many acts of intercourse – lovely, burlesque.

Sentiment flows from you then:

Cherry blossoms floating
on a spring thaw stream.

First published in Cordite #28.1, Mulloway, April 2007. The Mulloway issue was put together in tribute to Robert Adamson.

Monet's 'Waterlilies'

Monet's 'Waterlilies', originally uploaded by pureandapplied.

Over a period of 30 years Claude Monet painted more than 250 extraordinarily beautiful images of the waterlilies in his garden pond at Giverny, where he lived until his death in 1927.

This series is known as the Nympheas, and eight of the most impressive are hung in the Musée de l'Orangerie, near the Louvre.

The l'Orangerie, renovated from 1999 to 2006, was originally a barracks, and first became home to the paintings immediately after Monet's death. The eight Nympheas are hung in two long oval rooms designed specifically to show them in the most dramatic way. Sunlight from opaque skylights above illuminates the rooms with their walls painted white and curved so the viewer sees the paintings in their entirety almost equidistantly, to feel immersed in the images.

In each room two wide images and two narrower images face each other. The myriad, varied colours of season, sunset, flowers and pond meld together and many people, like those in this photo, myself included, simply sit and look at the canvases for long, silent periods. The combined effect of the architecture, the diffused natural light, and the vast canvases is quieting, even spiritual (for want of a better word).

Downstairs in the l'Orangerie is another gallery of modernist painters. The likes of Picasso, Modigliani, Cezanne and Matisse are demoted to the basement beneath Monet's more impressive paintings.

Later in our travels, in New York, we saw another of the Nympheas series hung in the MOMA. With all its resources, the MOMA could not match the experience of the paintings to be had in Paris in the l'Orangerie.

I'm writing this post for my friend Katie who, although having lived in Paris for many years, was unable to visit the gallery probably because it was closed for renovation. Katie, I encourage you to go to the l'Orangerie, and I encourage anyone reading this post to do so as well.