I’m hanging out in SFO on T-Mobile’s HotSpot waiting for my 12:50AM red-eye to Cancun. I’m leaving today to Cancun until December 23rd. From Cancun I’m heading to Boulder, CO until the 28th when I return to the Bay Area. I’m looking forward to this vacation as it’ll be nice to get away from the cold Bay Area weather in Mexico to go to the snowy beauty of Colorado. Work has been quite a bit more relaxed this past week as our release has stablized and we’re now looking foward towards what’s next for Hotmail.
Reeves had asked me randomly one day to post different things that I read as a CogSci major which is a great idea since I personally think it’s very interesting. Further, I don’t have much of record myself what interesting and compelling things I’ve read and looked at. So, in the continual vein of making my blog more compelling, here are a couple of really facinating sites/projects that I found to be quite interesting:
- Don Norman’s Jnd Site (www.jnd.org) — one of the grandfathers of usability and cognitive science, his site provides valuable insight in to how to think about design and usability
- Design of Everyday Things (Don Norman) — a great book by Don Norman that explores how everyday objects can make people more efficient and intelligent in our everyday lives. One of the most useful and quoted books in design.
- Cognition in the Wild (Edwin Hutchins) — book that most changed my way of thinking in the world on the absoultly facinating topic of distributed cognition and how we process data in our world. It attepts to explain why, we as humans, are more intelligent and capable now verus 500 years ago when we as a species have not evolved (hint: our society and culture have grown/evolved and the greater cognition has been augumented). Perhaps one of the most quoted books in the field.
That’s it for now, I’ll post more about visulation, information display, cognitive engineering, situated cognition, etc.