I finished Sam Shepard's latest book this weekend and started Consequential Strangers this morning before getting out of bed. I came downstairs into the kitchen, where I've had these comments about snow and beer posted for a couple of months on my freshly-painted blackboard wall. And what do I notice but a new comment [...]

Let me tell you a little story about a Blackberry, bad design, a deaf man, and an airplane. I was flying back from Savannah, Georgia (from, ironically, an interaction design conference) on a rescheduled flight after my original flight had been canceled due to the monster storms that hit the mid-Atlantic last month. I was [...]

In my ongoing thinking about the city as an interface – as an operating system, if you will, of this thing we call Earth – I picked up a book I bought while in grad school: Universal Principles of Design. It lists a multitude of various design elements and principles to consider when designing. I'm [...]

The semester is humming nicely along. I have an incredible group of about nine grad students in my Visualizing Information design class at MICA. In my research for the class, I came across Trulia Hindsight. It couldn't be more timely given my current bedside reading, Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities.  [...]

The Poynter Institute’s review of the new NPR.org was one of the few to specifically note our use of turquoise to designate audio elements across the site. This color and usage choice was my doing and as I’ve thought about it since launch, I wonder why I chose turquoise. My semiotics professor, Natalia Ilyin, would [...]