Selling your soul, the CSS way!
July 24th, 2008Designing the Bumblebee Labs Theme
When it comes to this sort of thing, I usually take the lazy way out. There are so many designers vastly better (both technically and visually) than I am out there, spending all day making kick-ass-fabulous wordpress themes, it would just be a shame to not take advantage of them. I’d almost consider it doing them a favor.
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Ira Glass on taste
July 23rd, 2008Ira Glass, that distinctive voice on This American Life, has a video manages to distil into words a process that I’ve been observing for a long time about taste and the creative process:
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Creating the Bumblebee Labs logo
July 23rd, 2008It began, as it usually does, with sketches. Cocktail napkins, receipts, small animals, whatever happens to be on hand at the time. This is a glimpse into my design process – a rare and unadulterated look at how I do what I do.
In this case, it was a napkin on Hang’s kitchen table.
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The right size for the job
July 23rd, 2008Being a computer scientist by background, one of the things which I’ve always been keenly aware of is issues of scale, not only of computer systems but also of human systems. As organisations grow larger, layers of beaurocracy and organisation are needed just to keep things on track and get the job done. When done well, each of these things has a clear task and purpose but they also involve an inevitable tradeoff of time taken away from actual production.
One of the challenges I’ve been facing establishing policy at this early stage is what formal procedures and mechanisms should we put in place to safely navigate between the twin pillars of informal cowboy style development and rigid, stifling control freak management. At the moment, my inclination is to lean towards slightly too much procedure over slightly too little because I’m also treating this phase as a learning experience.Part of the reason to implement these systems is so that we can learn to use them and be familiar with them and understand the individual nuances (aka: frustrations) of each one.
On Passing…
July 18th, 2008
The most recent xkcd comic reminds me of a interesting phenomena I’ve observed…
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The responsibility of a designer
July 17th, 2008My cellphone dictionary doesn’t contain any profanity. Whenever I want to send a text message which contains swearing, I need to laboriously enter in the word letter by letter and it’s a pain in the ass. Once I get over the brief annoyance though, I can’t help my smile a little every time I do it because it’s just all so… quaint.
Getting the small things right…
July 15th, 2008I despair that, even over a decade into developing for the web, so many companies still get the obvious, basic small things completely and utterly wrong. Here’s a tip for any aspiring web developers: Make it as easy as possible for me to give you money. When I want to pay you for your product, don’t make me fill in another damn registration form and send me an email confirmation before I can continue. I want to give you money but I have a short attention span. Make it too frustrating for me and I get annoyed.
I’m not even pretending to say anything original here. This has been said by people far more eloquently by far more experienced people than me. Still, the fact that so many companies manage to thrive despite so many of these obvious flaws shows the obvious potential still left untapped by the internet. If people are willing to put up with such a hostile experience, imagine what it will be like when we do it right…?
New Logo
July 12th, 2008Michael completed the first version of the Bumblebee Labs logo tonight and I gotta say, I’m very impressed with it:
We printed out the inaugural version of the logo on some very nice hand made fabriano paper I had lying around and the effect was striking. Whenever I’ve embarked on some grand new adventure like moving away from home or writing my first non-trivial piece of software, there’s always a point where I can’t manage to convince myself on a gut level that this was all there was to it and it’s all so simple. Surely starting a company must involve more than just two guys, sitting around and figuring out problems that need solving? I know intellectually this is how many a company starts but my gut is run by narrativium, not common sense.
Holding that piece of paper in my hand and feeling the weight of it suddenly made all of this seem more real, more substantial. It may be a minor thing in the scheme of things but it was a sign, to me, of forward motion…
Me, briefly
July 6th, 2008I was an infant at the infancy of personal computing. At first, we’d clumsily bang on each other, crawling around our small living spaces, and not doing anything that could be strictly defined as “working” or “playing.” We fought a great deal, growing up. I would corrupt kernels, break hard drives… in retaliation, my documents would be corrupted, and my deadlines broken. It was a barely functional relationship, but we’d manage when we really needed to.
It wasn’t until my father asked me to build him a website that we started working well together. I was reluctant at first, but for $50, his website became my summer lemonade stand. The resulting product was crude, bitter in places and overly sweetened in others, but for an adolescent foray, it was just as cool.
Now adults, we’ve learned to work together in ways that were previously inconceivable, and excited as hell to be carving a path into this brave new world of computing as a social medium. This is the wild west of the information age, and I’m itching to lay down some tracks.
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Introducing myself…
July 3rd, 2008I’m Hang and I’m the founder of Bumblebee Labs. I grew up in a family of computer science academics and somehow, I absorbed the idea that that was what I was going to become. I entered into college with a burning love for computers and a macho desire to solve hard problems, the more technical the better. Over the years, that desire to solve hard problems has stayed with me, but without even noticing it, I started to drift towards the softer side of the spectrum: studying people rather than machines. Psychology, Economics, Politics, History & Linguistics were all fascinating to me, and I became interested in how technology could be used to impact people’s lives.
My path through graduate school was marked by puzzlement, more than anything else. I wanted to understand how to build “social” software and what theories and guidelines could be used to design the social interactions and nuances of this ever increasingly important communications channel. What does it mean to “friend” someone on facebook, and how did the design decisions that went into that impact that meaning? Should we support the everyday white lies that people use to smooth over their social interaction? If so, how? What new forms of social awkwardness are these tools creating and is there a smarter way to design them to avoid it? All of these seemed like obvious questions to me, and I was content to contribute to the surely mountainous stacks of existing literature on these very fundamental questions… until I went searching for that mountainous stack.
In one corner was a big group of communication scholars who were doing a masterful job documenting the impact that technology is having on society, and in the other was a big group of Human Computer Interaction scholars talking about how to design computer interfaces to be efficient and usable - but there was virtually no one at all talking about the design of the social aspects of our tools! Quite frankly, nobody really knows at this point what the hell we’re really doing when we unleash these massively transformative tools into the world. We’re making a series of blind stabs in the dark and hoping that whatever current bits of ad-hoc theory we have is enough to ensure success.
This has been the motivation for starting Bumblebee Labs. It got to the point where the only way for me to really understand how to build social software is to roll up my sleeves and build social software: to use everything I’ve been thinking about and figuring out in the pursuit of better tools and better interaction through deliberate design. Lets see how this will work out…
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