HYPERGURU

The generalist that thought about every aspect and impacts of a problem will be replaced by a group of specialists, communicating and cooperating, asking themselves the same questions has the old generalist. The only difference is the quantity of information to analyze and the complexity of the problems. We do not have the choice; we are becoming scientific ants, helping each other to try to reach a specific goal: understanding our new world.

Link: Fred On Something - Replace a generalist by a group of specialists.

Human-Centered Design has become such a dominant theme in design that it is now accepted by interface and application designers automatically, without thought, let alone criticism. That’s a dangerous state — when things are treated as accepted wisdom. The purpose of this essay is to provoke thought, discussion, and reconsideration of some of the fundamental principles of Human-Centered Design. These principles, I suggest, can be helpful, misleading, or wrong. At times, they might even be harmful. Activity-Centered Design is superior.

Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful

The following is a graphical presentation of a multi-year field study of the market for musical acts in Bigtown (a large city in the Northeastern United States). Building on the cultural industry and art worlds theories of Paul Hirsch (1972) and Howard Becker (1982), I have explored how gatekeepers in a local cultural industry use their social ties to make sense of and operate within a market characterized by risk and uncertainty. Like these scholars, I see cultural industries as networks of collaboration and competition among actors and organizations engaged in the production, selection and consumption of cultural products (e.g., movies, books, music and art).

Booking the Bazaar: Mapping multi-level networks in a local cultural market

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FeedShake - Merge , sort and filter RSS feeds

Maple is a powerful yet easy to use bookmarks manager extension that adds advanced bookmarking capabilities to Firefox.

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Link: Maple