It has been a joy to watch WordPress evolve over the past couple years. I’m by no means an early adopter, but my use of the open-source blogging software did begin long enough ago to see how quickly the tools have improved and how much deeper the community programming has gone. Now, the upgrades to the WordPress main site have reached a point where search and information about those extensions needed to improve, too.
Thrive.
Guess what I won? Last month, Dandelife—a great young community about personal narrative—had a contest to produce a testimonial about the site. The hard drive crash I had in February delayed my participation until the 11th hour, but I posted one in time and won my first iPod.
Relational Experiences by Design
Mikhail Bakhtin says our interaction with technology is dialogical, making a distinction from the abstracted, static notions that are the subjects of traditional design. The Stone Center has developed a relational-cultural theory that puts the relationship—not the individual—in focus. We are strongest when we are in relation. Finally, Katja Battarbee describes interaction in terms of the type of interaction and the type of experience, suggesting a higher plane exists for co-created expression. This is an attempt to bring these ideas together into a map of the externality of experience.
Twitter is a daily journal widget that has great potential for both community building and design. It has tools for updating and displaying the short journal entries of yourself and friends to keep apprised of what everyone is doing. Amy and I are relying on Twitter to keep each other in the loop while spending our spring break in different states.
Making autotelic people
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argued that there are autotelic personalities capable of finding pleasure in any context. For these people, it is easier to achieve a flow state. Csikszentmihalyi points to the family environment as crucial to the development of autotelic people, an idea of which attachment parenting advocates aware.
Tourney Time!
Live-blogging the selection show for the NCAA men’s hoops tourney. Indiana is a #7 seed with a rematch with Gonzaga, the team who ousted us last year. Bob Knight might be former Hoosier Pat Ewing, Jr.’s second-round opponent in Winston-Salem, assuming Texas Tech upsets #7 Boston College. I pwn the bracket this year.
Critical Flow
In his seminal book, Csikszentmihalyi described flow as the pleasurable balance between the skill a person has and the challenges that person perceives. Flow has since been applied to product and interface design, including web sites, as the ideal experience that makes people form attachments to the things they use. Kevin attempts to connect flow to a concept in complex systems called criticality.