Imagine my amusement this week when the characters of Howard Tayler’s excellent Schlock Mercenary comic discovered a new word.
In which vocabularies are expanded
Nice one, Howard!
Tags: vocabulary, plethaurus, neologisms, Schlock MercenaryThis amusing 5-minute video stars Brian Rosenberg, President of Macalester College, a private liberal arts college in Minnesota, USA:
I sent that video’s URL to the head of the university where I work. He has a sense of humor, so might appreciate it, but he’s not the type of performer Rosenberg is.
Our vice-chancellor is known for his great intelligence and his willing to listen to a variety of ideas and opinions. He’s also good at conveying in writing the sincerity that’s obvious when you see him in person.
Here’s an example of an email sent by the vice-chancellor to all staff this week. It could have been simply a yawn-inducing list of names with a brief “thanks everyone” to close. Instead, here are the final few sentences:
“We can all recall the lecturers we found inspiring, and a new generation is about to discover the exaltation created by teachers who bring a story to life, make clear a difficult concept, get to know their students and share their passion for ideas.
“Such students will remember the start of semester in 2010 as that hidden gate in a low wall that leads to a life barely glimpsed until now. Thank you to the staff who have worked so hard to make the campus ready for the influx, to the professional staff and student volunteers who have done so much already to make students welcome through activities and student centres, and to the academics about to begin again the great adventure of learning.”
Enthusiasm, generosity and a reminder of why we’re here. That’s a good way to start the year.
Tags: chancellor, learning, macalester.edu, universityThe Onion reports on a forgotten Assyrian god revived to name a sports drink. Go Nisroch!
The Winged Victory of Samothrace - statue of Nike, now held in the Louvre
Perhaps the Nisroch article caught my eye because I work at an organisation whose:
Can you see a theme there?
Computer system administrators have a long history of naming their machines, networks and gadgets after gods, pop-culture figures, music composers… anything that comes in groups and provides a mental model, a metaphorical framework that helps people to organise their understanding of the analogue reality it describes.
For example, I know of one organisation that named its mailserver TARDIS and its webserver Metabelis — the webmaster was a Dr Who fan. (TARDIS is the name of the Doctor’s spaceship and Metabelis was an important planet in the Jon Pertwee storylines of the mid-1970s.)
Another enterprise named its webservers for birds — galah, budgie, parrot — and another used the names of Russian composers. If you could remember one name in a series, the theme of the series gave you a mnemonic for recalling the other names.
Another organisation named its array of proxy servers after Snow White’s seven dwarfs. This is a particularly effective example of ‘framing’: hearing the names of two or three machines, you immediately know that there should be seven in total, and with a bit of concentration you would be able to name them all. The reference to a well-known fairytale provides additional information that helps you understand the system’s size and shape.
We often don’t know or recognise the frameworks that affect our behavior and thinking. Frameworks can be a powerful tool for designers, information architects and writers. Understanding an end-user’s mental model of a task or situation can give the designer or IA clues about how to organise and present information. And the organising principle will, as often as not, be based on some kind of underlying cognitive framework.
.
Suggested further reading:
.
Tags: indi young, categories, Lakoff, mental models, frameworks, language
Feeling a bit Cinderella-ish today, because my ’short session’ proposal for the OzIA 2009 conference has been accepted and I’m off to Sydney in early October.
Yippee!
The 30-minute session is called “Look what they’ve done to my song, Ma” and it’s about the different perspectives of project and operational teams.
Here’s the pitch:
It was a good project, well planned and managed, and you did your best to idiot-proof the redeveloped site and the technology that supports it. The wrap party was a blast and the project team has split up, moved on.
A year later you visit the redeveloped web site – only to find that the CMS rollout has stalled and your elegant IA and sleek interface design are being whittled away by dozens of tiny, clunky changes made by the client’s permanent staff.
Would the client be willing to engage you again, to set the staff back on the path of Usability Gorgeousness™? After all, you can’t be blamed for what went wrong after the last project – or can you?
Part confessional, part observational, this session looks at web redevelopment projects from both sides: the independent consultant brought in to “just fix it, OK?” and the in-house wage-slave who seems to want nothing to change, ever, at all. Is it possible for them to move from “loathe at first sight” to “happily ever after”?
And the take-aways (that is, what you can expect to learn from the session):
I’m not saying I know everything about this topic, but I’ve worked on both sides of the project/operational divide — so you can at least expect to hear an anecdote or two that you’ll identify with.
Tags: project management, oz-ia, mentoring, organisational politics, #ozia09, conferenceThe Oz-IA conference has become an annual must-do weekend. Lots of interesting people to meet, lessons to learn, coffee to drink.
The 2009 call for participation went out this week.
I gave a short presentation last year, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Highly recommended, even if it’s your first time as a presenter — the Oz-IA crowd is friendly, supportive and interested in just about anything you have to say.
Tags: oz-ia, ia, conference