Steve Barth | Reflexions

Wolfram|Alpha Confuses Answers and Facts

Everybody's googley-eyed about the long-anticipated first-coming of Wolfram|Alpha, launched yesterday. Already, the system claims 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains. But can it cook?

Stephen Wolfram gives a very impressive demo. He should: he's both an acknowledged genius and simultaneously a guy who acts like he's pretending to be a genius. W|A stands as a milestone in The Quest for Computable Knowledge and is based on Wolfram's single-handed invention of A New Kind of Science (irrespective of previous work in chaos and complexity research).

A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over …. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic…

From Technologies to Tools

Think about the relationships we have to our communication and information tools, not just through our tools.

Have we gone too far distinguishing knowledge work from manual labor, so that we disconnect knowledge workers from the tools of their trade—and in doing so disrupt their sense of identity?

There is an affective connection between individuals and their tools that is vital to maintain both the productivity and the passion of knowledge work. But there is also a distinction between "tools" and "technologies" that is often missed in the modern workplace.

"Technologies" are systems imposed by the organization that often constrain, disempower and depersonalize knowledge work. "Tools" are extensions of our hands, as much as the hammers or knives of traditional work. They reinforce ownership, craftsmanship, stewardship and professional identity.

Read the article: The Difference between Tools and Technologies

NOTE: Preparing to relaunch my website, I'm designing a reprint template for my old articles. I believe if you want people to learn from any document longer than a few paragraphs, there should be a version that can be printed, read and annotated away from the computer (and recycled later). So I'm creating a template based on my article "Maintaining the integrity of design in a digital world: What is the role of real typographic design in knowledge work?" (still online only).

Please download the attached PDF and let me know what you think about both form and content. Thx.

Making Documents “Smarter”

I'll be speaking about "Smarter Documents" in Kansas City during the 4th Army Operational Knowledge Management Conference hosted by Ft. Leavenworth's Battle Command Knowledge System.

As artifacts of individual and organizational expertise, even smart documents cannot really contain knowledge, but they can evoke learning. On one hand, effective communication today leverages cutting-edge technological advances in collaborative authorship, individualized delivery, rich media, and online environments accessible through disparate devices.

On the other hand, it still relies on timeless anthropological traditions of writing, design and publishing that honor the hand as much as the eye. The right process can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of organizational publishing, while the right presentation in form and function enhances both message and meaning.

Adobe’s latest creative suite

I've been thinking a lot lately about how documents need to be richer, more compelling and more evocative artifacts of knowledge work from page design to writing style. This week Adobe took the wraps off Creative Suite 4, which includes all of the company's flagship products for design and production. In July, I was invited to a special NDA workshop at Adobe's San Jose headquarters, previewing CS4's tools with demos and briefings directly from each application team.

I'm really excited about new things people will be able to do in terms of both performance and productivity in CS4: swift workflows for interactive documents and rich knowledge assets rolling seamlessly from page to screen to portable devices. In particular, I was much less intimidated about how non-fulltime designers—amateurs and accidental art directors such as myself—can still leverage the professional power even if they only spend a few days per month on organizational newsletters, websites or multimedia productions.

Typography as a KM Tool

The art, science and craft of typography are thousands of years old. Today, more than 550 years after Gutenberg, anybody with a PC can self-publish and anyone with a Web connection can be read by millions. But somewhere in the democratization of the displayed word, many of the traditional lessons of message and meaning have been forgotten. Documents have become digital and/or disposable things, and their authors neglect the ways that typography, layout and editing mediate what we learn from and what we do with the information and ideas that we read on a page or screen.

Based on the "Design for Learning" research and reflection that I started last spring, I just submitted an essay about the role of typographic design in knowledge work and content management for an upcoming issue of eContent magazine. Stay tuned for a link.

New Spin on Social Computing?

This clever design concept popped up on the blogosphere this week, but it really made me think about a new kind of social computing. Seokwon Hong's Brix smartphone features an edge-to-edge touchscreen and the units link up to expand screen size. I wonder if they would network processing power and bandwidth, too? (More pictures after the break)

Whatever Happened to the Page?

My article on Adobe Creative Suite 3, “Whatever happened to the page?” is up on KMWorld as part of its June issue.

The digital age has deeply undercut appreciation for how graphic design not only makes information more appealing, but more learnable. When documents are digital and/or disposable, we tend to forget that they have tangible power in their form as well as their function. Meanwhile, design is a field in which much of the skill is tacit—both the art and the technique. Crafts like art direction, graphic arts, photography and page layout blend training, experience, invention and automation to create new value on demand and on deadline, inevitably under constraints of inadequate time or money.

See also: “Maintaining the integrity of design in a virtual world”

Adobe,InDesign,graphic design

The Cognitive Design of Airport Terminals

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”

Saint-Exupéry was not a designer, but an aviator and author (The Little Prince). Too bad he wasn’t an airport designer (although he did once manage a desert airfield). Because late last night, I rode out to Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport to pick up my wife.

Thailand’s brand-new international airport is an award-winning architectural masterpiece. The AIA raved, “Leafy roof forms protect you from the sun and it provides a beautiful way to get from one end of the space to the other.” It is has been a godsend for contractors, vendors, and VIPs. But no one seems to have ever considered how the facility might actually serve the average passenger, especially after a 25-hour flight.

Can a magazine guru redesign the Web?

Those who design for the Internet need to embrace a more timeless visual language than is common today. Don’t just take my word for it. Roger Black has been a magazine design legend since long before I wrote my first articles (ie., Rolling Stone, Newsweek, The New Republic, Fast Company, Foreign Affairs, National Enquirer). In a new essay in MIT’s Technology Review, Black argues…

Like singing a song or writing a story, designing a printed page is a craft that is fundamentally uni­directional, or one-to-many. The flexibility of Web structures confounded and then humbled many traditional designers as they started trying to make Web pages. The whole thing had been developed to let the readers—the users, software developers confusingly called them, as if they were addicts—have control. How could that be good?

Typography boosts comprehension 500%

"Good typography can improve comprehension by up to 500 per cent. Bad typography can kill a reader's interest almost immediately. In our word-and-advertising-heavy culture, we are bombarded with thousands of printed messages on a daily basis. Written language is presented to the viewer using typography, and, unfortunately, much of what currently surrounds us is compromised and amateurish due to the designer's lack of knowledge surrounding the old, established discipline of the manipulation of type and typographic elements. The results are serious; bad typography can render even the most beautifully written message incomprehensible. "

Source: Course description from Humber College Institute of Technology & Advanced Learning. CABA 131 - TYPOGRAPHY 1 (Humber Full-Time Calendar 2007.2008)

Typography

Typography, Perception and Cognition

Think fonts don't matter? BBC: An air traffic controller sent a Glasgow plane to Cardiff after misreading small computer text at the new control centre… “Screens blamed for air blunders.” May 23, 2002

How do the fonts chosen for documents and information affect sense-making? At Wichita State University, the Software Usability Research Laboratory (SURL) team specializes in user interface design research for software and websites. They have done some interesting studies about the effect on reader perceptions and cognition of different fonts, line lengths, multiple columns, etc.

For example, they studied how the chosen fonts change reader perceptions of the author and/or of the material, finding: "Typefaces can influence the mood of a document in three possible ways: the typeface may reinforce the text and mood; the typefaces may conflict with the message/mood; or there may be no influence resulting in a neutral effect." They used Calibri, Comic Sans and Gigi and found—not surprisingly that people got low scores for knowledge, believability, maturity, professionalism, and trustworthiness when they used Gigi in their emails.

PowerPoint when Thinking is Critical

The year I worked for Dave Snowden’s IBM Cynefin Centre, I was required to use the official Big Blue PowerPoint template. Based on 12pt Arial, the template was impossible to read, even close to the screen. The year after, when Cynefin went independent (eventually as Cognitive Edge Pte.), Dave used my presentation font, Marker Felt Wide, at a minimum of 18pt (but usually 28-36pt). You decide:

Dave has since moved on, but Marker remains my signature font for presentations.

Maintaining the integrity of design in a virtual world

Last week, I finished my article reviewing Adobe Creative Suite 3 as a toolkit to maximize productivity and creativity for knowledge workers that rely more on the right side of their brains. It will be in print and online soon at www.kmworld.com. Meanwhile, I had some leftover miscellaneous and incomplete thoughts.

The article is about two issues you don’t hear much about in KM:

1. The KM needs of design and creative professionals as knowledge workers
2. The role of real design in knowledge and content management

New Coffee Buzz

Coffee doesn't just make you smarter, it can also make you more open minded, according to research.