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Interview with Jake Barton

Over on the IDEA blog, I've begun a conversation with Jake Barton, the principal of Local Projects, a leading-edge environment and museum design firm, known for incorporating user-generated content into public spaces. Some comments from our discussion so far:

"...Because they occur in public spaces, our projects differ from similar web-based projects, creating a very rich and complicated interaction sequence that leverages the density of urban experience on top of storytelling..."

"...“More is different” is the phrase used by Steven Johnson in Emergence for how scale changes everything, and it fits here too: What happens to an interface when ten people can work on it simultaneously? How can you create a film experience that immerses you from every interior surface of a building?..."

"...Museums don’t tend to lend themselves to persistence, like a community-based site or bulletin board relies on, because people generally visit a site once a year. There is a constant flow of strangers, much more a group of passersby, then a community of people beholden to each other and their reputations. I haven’t seen good examples of digital interfaces for commuters, but they would be an interesting hybrid of these two models..."

Inalienable right

I've been looking up California employment codes, and came across this today.

The Fair Employment and Housing Act, includes a provision on the Right to Wear Pants.

Libraries and Museums in the vanguard

IDEA conference is how many of the best examples of institutions that are truly embracing cross-channel and cross-media information architecture come from museums and libraries. In fact, I couldn't find a corporate world entity that engages as well with the kinds of information complexity that these institutions do.

Though non-profit community institutions famously have less money than their corporate brethren, they (perhaps paradoxically) seem less risk-averse. Corporations have to do everything to protect the bottom line, and, as such, don't mess with stuff that works. Libraries and museums have higher aspirations, which allow the more visionary ones the opportunity to take new approaches to engage with their audiences. The Museums and the Web conference is approaching its 11th year; Seattle and Minneapolis have new central libraries that do more to relate information with their communities; the Getty Center in L.A. hired Cooper to design kiosks and audio players that support the visitor experience; I'm sure you can think of others.