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This is an old one, but this cartoon of the various views of a design/software project is pretty good.
The graphic design of the futuristic world depicted in Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. I love the signage that doesn’t fit on the hospital. (via do)
Every few months, the blogosphere addresses the matter of gender diversity of speakers at conferences about design, technology, and the web. The latest such incidents revolved around the lack of women speakers at the the Future of Web Apps conference in San Francisco last September1 and the Creativity Now conference put on by Tokion in NYC last October. Each time this issue is raised, you see conference organizers publicly declare that they tried, that diversity is a very important issue, and that they are going to address it the next time around.
With that in mind, I collected some information2 about some of the most visible past and upcoming conferences in the tech/design/web space. I’m reasonably sure that the organizers of these conferences were aware of at least one of the above recent complaints about gender diversity at conferences (they were both linked widely in the blogosphere), so it will be interesting to see if those complaints were taken seriously by them.
Future of Web Apps - San Francisco
September 13-14, 2006
0 women, 13 men. 0% women speakers.
Tokion Magazine’s 4th Annual Creativity Now Conference
October 14-15, 2006
6 women, 30 men. 17% women speakers.
PopTech 2006
October 18-21, 2006
8 women, 30 men. 21% women speakers.
Web Directions North
February 7-10, 2007
5 women, 16 men. 24% women speakers.
LIFT
February 7-9, 2007
10 women, 33 men. 23% women speakers.
Future of Web Apps - London
February 20-22, 2007
1 woman, 26 men. 4% women speakers.
TED 2007
March 7-10, 2007
12 women, 41 men. 23% women speakers.
SXSW Interactive 2007
March 9-13, 2007
147 women, 378 men. 28% women speakers.
164 women, 373 men. 31% women speakers. (updated 2/22/2007)
165 women, 379 men. 30% women speakers. (updated 3/31/2007)
BlogHer Business ‘07
March 22-23, 2007
43 women, 0 men. 100% women speakers.
An Event Apart Boston 2007
March 26-27, 2007
1 woman, 8 men. 11% women speakers.
O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
March 26-29, 2007
9 women, 44 men. 17% women speakers.
12 women, 79 men. 13% women speakers. (updated 3/31/2007)
Web 2.0 Expo 2007
April 15-18, 2007
17 women, 91 men. 16% women speakers.
Future of Web Design
April 18, 2007
2 women, 12 men. 14% women speakers.
4 women, 16 men. 20% women speakers. (updated 3/31/2007)
GEL 2007
April 19-20, 2007
2 women, 11 men. 15% women speakers.
1 woman, 16 men. 6% women speakers. (updated 3/31/2007)
MIX07
April 30 - May 2, 2007
0 women, 4 men. 0% women speakers.
8 women, 89 men. 8% women speakers. (updated 3/31/2007)
The New Yorker Conference 2007
May 6-7, 2007
3 women, 21 men. 13% women speakers. (updated 2/28/2007)
6 women, 29 men. 17% women speakers. (updated 3/31/2007)
Dx3 Conference 2007
May 15-18, 2007
5 women, 48 men. 9% women speakers. (updated 3/2/2007)
5 women, 70 men. 7% women speakers. (updated 3/31/2007)
An Event Apart Seattle 2007
June 21-22, 2007
0 women, 9 men. 0% women speakers.
1 women, 9 men. 10% women speakers. (updated 3/31/2007)
From this list, it seems to me that either the above concerns are not getting through to conference organizers or that gender diversity doesn’t matter as much to conference organizers as they publicly say it does. The Future of Web Apps folks seem to have a particularly tin ear when it comes to this issue. For their second conference, they doubled the size of the speaker roster and added only one woman to the bill despite the complaints from last time. This List of Women Speakers for Your Conference compiled by Jen Bekman is a little non-web/tech-heavy, but it looks like it didn’t get much use in the months since its publication. Perhaps it’s time for another look. (If you think this issue is important, Digg this post.)
Update: To the above list, I added An Event Apart Boston 2007 and corrected a mistake in the count for GEL 2007 (they had one more woman and one less man than I initially counted.) Ryan Carson from Carson Systems, the producers of The Future of Web Apps conferences, emailed me this morning and said that my “facts just aren’t correct” for the count for their London conference. He stated that the number of speakers they had control over was only 13. Some of the speakers were workshop leaders (the workshops “are very different” in some way) and others were chosen by sponsors of the conference, not by Carson Systems. I’m keeping the current count of 27 total speakers as listed on their speakers page this morning…they’re the people they used to promote the conference and they’re the people at the conference in the front of the room, giving their views and leading discussions for the assembled audience. (thx, erik, mark, and ryan)
Update: I added the Future of Web Design conference to the above list. (thx, jeff)
Update: Hugh Forrest wrote to update me on the latest speaker numbers for SXSW Interactive 2007 (he keeps close watch on them because the issue is an important and sensitive one to the SXSW folks)…the ones on their site were less than current. In cases where counts are updated (and not inaccurate due to my counting errors), I will append them to the conference in question so that we can see trends. I plan to update the above list periodically, adding new conferences and keeping track of the speaker numbers on upcoming ones.
[1] Sadly, when I Googled “future of web apps women” while doing some research for this post, Google asked “Did you mean: ‘future of web apps when’”? โฉ
[2] All statistics as of 2/22/2007. Consider the gender counts rough approximations…in some cases, I couldn’t tell if a certain person was a man or a woman from their name or bio. โฉ
[3] This conference has released only a very incomplete speaker list. โฉ
A friend of mine who works at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln emailed to let me know that they’ve posted both audio and video of a talk that Chris Ware gave at the school last week. If you’re short on time, the real meat of the video starts around 18:30 when Ware starts a slideshow that delves into his process. In addition to his series of Thanksgiving-themed New Yorker covers from last year, he also talks about some of his other work, including Rusty Brown and the strip he did for the NY Times Magazine.
An interview with Ootje Oxenaar, who designed a whole range of Dutch banknotes in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. “On the 1000 guilder note, it became a ‘sport’ for me to put things in the notes that nobody wanted there! I was very proud to have my fingerprint in this note - and it’s my middle finger!”
Some recent covers by Chip Kidd of three books by James Ellroy. The photographs on the covers are of dioramas of pulp fiction covers made by Thomas Allen. (via yda)
Tax tips for graphic designers and visual artists. “If seeing the visual art of others is vital to your own creativity, keeps you abreast of current design trends, or clues you in to the latest fashion, then consider the costs [of going to the movies or renting DVDs] a tax deduction.” (thx, shane)
Finalists for the 2007 version of the annual competition held by Design Within Reach to design the best chair out of a champagne cork. Check out the finalists from 2004 and the winner from 2006. (DWR’s site has a bit of a permalink problem, so I can’t find contest results from previous years.)
Each day, Brass Tacks Design chooses an exemplary newspaper front page and explains why it’s so good. (via newsdesigner)
80 wonderful handdrawn typographic posters by Job Wouters. (via type for you)
Designers often have the design disease, where you “can’t stop looking at things through your designer eyes”. “But it’s not just books, it’s everything. You’ll choose wine by the design of the label and you’d stay [at a hotel] because of the sign.” (via emdashes)
Update: Bruce writes: “A parallel affliction to the Design Disease is Climber’s Complaint, wherein someone who takes up rock climbing begins to see every object and architecture as potentially climbable. Similarly, Skater’s Disorder afflicts those for whom every surface is seen to exhibit some measure of skate-worthiness.”
Photos of patterns taken from public transport vehicles. Gotta make it ugly enough to hide the stains, I guess.
Video: web designers Jeffreys Veen and Zeldman fight in Wii Boxing. More web designer Miis here and an explanation here.
Pentagram has redesigned the Doomsday Clock, which depicts the world’s proximity to nuclear annihilation. The funny thing is that they designed the 12 o’clock face, which will never actually be needed because we’ll all be dead before the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a change to move it forward.
By now you’ve all heard about the iPhone and read 60 billion things about it, so I’ll get straight to it. I’ve been tracking some of the best points from around the web and jotted down some thoughts of my own.
Caveat: Evaluating an interface, software or hardware, is difficult to do unless you have used it. An interface for something like a mobile phone is something you use on the time-scale of weeks and months, not minutes or hours. There are certain issues you can flag as potential problems, challenges, or triumphs after viewing demos, descriptions of functions, and the like, but until you’re holding the thing in your hand and living with it day-to-day, you really can’t say “this is going to work this way” or “I don’t like the way that functions” with anything approaching absolute confidence. With that said:
The touchscreen text entry is the biggest issue with the iPhone. If it works well, the iPhone has a good shot at success, and if not, it’s going to be very frustrating for those that rely on their mobile for text…and every potential customer of the iPhone is going to hear about that shortcoming and shy away.
What *is* fantastic about the iPhone is the way that they’ve put it all together; features are great, but it’s all about the implementation. Apple stripped out all the stuff you don’t need and made everything you do need really simple and easy. (That’s the way it appears anyway…see above caveat.)
One reason there’s limited innovation in cell phones generally is that the cell carriers have stiff guidelines that the manufacturers have to follow. They demand that all their handsets work the same way. “A lot of times, to be honest, there’s some hubris, where they think they know better,” Jobs says. “They dictate what’s on the phone. That just wouldn’t work for us, because we want to innovate. Unless we could do that, it wasn’t worth doing.” Jobs demanded special treatment from his phone service partner, Cingular, and he got it. He even forced Cingular to re-engineer its infrastructure to handle the iPhone’s unique voicemail scheme. “They broke all their typical process rules to make it happen,” says Tony Fadell, who heads Apple’s iPod division. “They were infected by this product, and they were like, we’ve gotta do this!”
Several people have speculated that the iPhone’s version of OS X is actually a preview of what we’ll be getting with Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X.That is to say the core operating system at the core of Mac OS X, the computer OS used in Macs, and “OS X”, the embedded OS on the iPhone. More on this soon in a separate fireball, but do not be confused: Mac OS X and OS X are not the same thing, although they are most certainly siblings. The days of lazily referring to “Mac OS X” as “OS X” are now over.
Apple has figured out a way to retain a hold on hearts and minds in a business previously based on bytes. I applaud its designs, I worry about its tactics and what they mean for the future of marketing and group think. A group that wants our devotion but doesn’t need the press, doesn’t want the press, can’t keep the press off its backs, is a group that’s more interested in mind control than in improving lives with its products.
And that’s enough, I think.
Nicholas Felton’s personal annual report for 2006. “Disclaimer: Alcoholic beverages were consumed during the collection of this data and the author acknowledges that the occasional drink may have gone unrecorded.” Here’s the one for 2005. LOVE this.
Peter Merholz has some interesting thoughts on why Google Calendar is about to overtake Yahoo Calendar as the top web calendar app. “Here’s a product whose very definition was predicated on empathy for true customer needs. And it’s succeeding brilliantly.”
Food manufacturers are greenwashing their packaging, using homey organic colors and themes to sell food that isn’t even necessarily organic or healthy. “Start with a gentle image of a field or a farm to suggest an ample harvest gathered by an honest, hard-working family. To that end, strangely oversize vegetables or fruits are good. If they are dew-kissed and nestled in a basket, all the better. A little red tractor is O.K. Pesticide tanks and rows of immigrant farm laborers bent over in the hot sun are not.”
10 kick ass opening credit sequences from movies (+ accompanying YouTube videos). The credits for Se7en will forever be my favorite, if only because they inspired me (in part) to become a designer.
Scans of the New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual from 1970. (thx, jake)
A look at Saks Fifth Avenue’s new logo and identity. The identity system consists of cutting up the logo into patterns….98,137,610,226,945,526,221,323,127,451,938,506, 431,029,735,326,490,840,972,261,848,186,538, 906,070,058,088,365,083,852,800,000,000,000 possible patterns.
Quirky West Village eatery Shopsin’s finally closes for good. Once more, with feeling: the Shopsin’s menu and Calvin Trillin’s classic piece about the restaurant in the NYer.
Update: James Felder wrote a nice remembrance of eating at Shopsin’s on its final day for Serious Eats. (thx, adam)
The proprietor of the Book Design Review blog picks his favorite book covers of 2006.
Slate has gone to the dark side by splitting up their articles into multiple pages. I hate this reader-hostile bullshit. At least they have a single page option. But why not have that as the default and have the pagination be the option? (That was rhetorical, btw…the reason online pubs split stories up is to increase ad views.) (thx, john)
Roger Black interviews Luke Hayman, the outgoing design director of New York magazine.
Lisa Strausfeld’s team at Pentagram has designed the interface for the One Laptop Per Child computer. “Users can move outward from the Home view, where they can set preferences like color, to the Friends view, where they can chat with their friends, to the larger Neighborhood view, where they can locate other users and gather around an activity.”
Update: The OLPC human interface guidelines document has a lot more on the interface. (thx, bob)
At The Art of the Book event last week, the panel was asked why there were so few female superstar designers. Milton Glaser took a shot at answering the question (many women choose family over work during the crucial superstar career development years) but judging by the reaction afterwards online, his comments were not appreciated by some. To be fair, Glaser’s comments were taken out of context, I think, and what he said is a part of the overall answer to the question. On Design Observer, Michael Beirut, who was the moderator for that evening’s event, takes a closer look at the issue. “The real question was the unspoken one: ‘Why is it that you guys up there are always…guys?’” Oh, and here’s a list of women speakers for your conference.
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