McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art is one of the most influential books I’ve read—it’s a must-read for any designer.

One of the doctors behind Hello Health has a really illuminating blog post announcing the service and explaining why something like this hasn’t happened before now.

Who they’re targeting:

Our market is the 47 million people in America without health insurance; the other millions of Americans who are underinsured; and the 40 million Americans over the next four years who will have high deductible health insurance plans.

…If you cannot afford the ridiculously expensive insurance premiums in your local area, we provide the next best thing — your own personal accessible doctor who you can communicate with however you’d like who treats your medical conditions at a reasonable price, and who helps you spend your money wisely. We are not a replacement for insurance. We, at hello health, are simply your best healthcare resource for the vast majority of people who do not get hit by a bus in a given year. We save you money.

It costs $35 per month. Office visits are $100 to $200, short emails with doctors are free. Available only in north Brooklyn right now.

“The past” is filled with far more examples of products, innovative thinking, and success stories based on activity-centered research, magic, genius design, and just plain luck than UCD can claim even on its best day.

What’s cheap and easy is the idea that we can dissect a chef’s work and call it a recipe. That we can simply analyze genius and come out with a one-size-fits-all plan for success.

—Robert Hoekman, Jr.

Ouch. Definitely a hit to the old UCD ego, but I couldn’t agree more.

On imagining Steve Ballmer embracing Firefox 3:

But it’s also a nice little “thought exercise.” It is impossible to imagine Ballmer acting with this kind of initiative, imaginative or vision. (I’m not suggesting that what Briggs proposes is a good idea. Only that it is hard to imagine Ballmer ever acting with this scale and dynamism.) It is impossible to imagine Ballmer advocating a position that would make consumers “the big winners.”

That Microsoft bull in the china shop (This Blog Sits at the)

I remember reading about Apple engaging in a similar process before they opened their first brick and mortar Apple store. I like competitive analyses that go outside the domain for inspiration:

The airline studied theme parks, hospitals, and retailers to see how they handled similar situations. Then, the team built mock-ups in a warehouse using cardboard boxes for podiums, kiosks, and belts in order to find ways to increase efficiency.

Alaska Airlines saves millions by rethinking check-in flow (37signals, makers of Packcamp)

Our minds are quick to convert new optical experiences into familiar stories, favored viewpoints, comforting metaphors. No wonder, for how else can we manage optical data flows of 10 MB per second without familiar categories for filing, without the rage for wanting to conclude?

An excerpt called "See Now… Words Later," from the Edward Tufte’s upcoming Seeing Around. Here’s a related link to Tufte’s sculptural work.

The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, “Here’s a specific problem – solve it.” The thing from the agency said, “We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said “and it must be 3¼ seconds long.” I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Eno#The_Microsoft_Sound

When I use Twitter or Facebook to say that I am entertaining my cat, no one, I’m pretty, sure gives a good God damn that I am entertaining my cat. But they are reminded that they have someone called Grant McCracken exists in their network.

This is not nothing. Facebook sustains social knowledge and networks that begin in conferences and then fade almost immediately until a couple of months later we have a hard time attaching a face to that business card still banging around in our briefcase. A “newsflash” about my cat helps keep the network node called Grant McCracken from blinking out.

…So I’m ok and you’re ok. This means the channel must be ok, and this means that the network must exist, and this means that the network is ok, and this means that the network is active, and this means the network is flowing.

Are you on Twitter? Communicate phatically with me and hear about my own cat entertainments.

PowerPoint may be a step backward, but the backlash is under way (Google “PowerPoint is evil” if you disagree) and there is abundant evidence that Tufte’s work is rising out of the Flatland of academia. His first book called out the Times‘s lousy graphics; today, he says, the paper has some of the best. The current vogue for less-is-more minimalism, for ample white space, is traceable in part to Tufte, especially when it comes to a certain maker of MP3 players. In fact, when I ask him whom he’s never worked for but would like to, he leans in and says, “A-P-P-L-E! [But] they don’t need any help.”

A Tufte-Apple collaboration… the mind would boggle, except that everything would be so clear even to the most confused person.

There is very little on SXSW’s schedule that I wouldn’t want to attend:

• The Real Story Behind Snakes on a Plane
• Turning Projects Into Revenue Generating Businesses
• Under 18: Blogs, Wikis and Online Social Networks for Youth
• Stop Designing Products
• Web 2.0 / 3.0 Arts Entrepreneurship: Make Your Passion Your Profession
• Why We Should Ignore Users

The list goes on and on. I won’t be there, but you can bet I’ll be following online.

I love this passage about "hacker Gods," or, well… information professionals:

…[T]here is the activity of our hacker Gods, who are free to cast their eyes and minds over huge manifolds of possible Life worlds, trying to figure out what will tend to work, what will be robust and what will be fragile. For the time being, we are supposing that they are truly God-like in their "miraculous" interactions with the Life world… they can intervene, reaching in and tweaking the design of a creation whenever they like, stopping the Life world in mid-collision, undoing the harm and going back to the drawing board to create a new design. Wherever they can foresee a source of difficulty they can set themselves the task of designing a way of countering it. Their creations will be the unwitting, foresightless beneficiaries of the foresight of the hacker Gods, who have designed them to thrive in just such circumstances.

I’ll insert a pause where Dennett doesn’t. Take a breath, and think of CmdrTaco‘s foresightless beneficiaries, thriving in his robust world.

Hacker Gods have their limitations, however, and will economize wherever they can. For instance, they might interest themselves in such questions as: What is the smallest Life-form that can protect itself from harm x or harm y, under conditions z (but not under conditions w)? After all, gathering information and putting it to use is a costly, time-consuming process, even for a hacker God.

Hear hear! It’s hard out here for a hacker God.