Thu, Jul 20, 2006

The world keeps spinning

by Austin Govella

Apparently, depsite my absence, the world has not stopped.

Comments

Apparently, depsite my absence, the world has not stopped. I’m pretty dissappointed since I left strict orders with each of you.

If you haven’t seen Hans Rosling’s talk at TED, then you absolutely must drop everything you’re doing right now and go watch it. Ostensibly, he animates the dry topic of historical statistics. It’s not the history he makes so fascinating. It’s the story: the changes over time.

He’s intelligent, passionate, and dedicated — qualities that make him a great storyteller, and it’s his story that communicates; not the data. (Via the Wodtke)

It’s worth noting how the story becomes real when he adds time. Add time to anything, and you go from data or documentation, to a story. Time brings the flatland to life.

Lately, it seems I’ve made sure to add time to everything. I think it’s a common, implicit tactic for more holistic, design thinkers, but I’ve achieved some great insights by explicitly mapping time against models for every part of a system’s ecosystem: the data model, user models, interaction models…

I’d be curious to hear how others explicitly integrate time into both the requirements/discovery and design/architetcure phases.

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