November 2011

Balzac and The Little Chinese Seamstress

Enchanted by the movie, I searched for a used copy of the book for about half a year. In my impatience, I finally bought the paperback edition new from Amazon. When it arrived, I read it in a night. After all my anticipation, I felt a little let down. The book is slight. In fact, without the movie to provide detail and context, it would not have had much of

Appliances vs Tools: Are You A User of a Maker?

“Don’t tell me what it’s for; tell me what it does.” This conflict between developer intention and user desires drove my interest in user experience design. My internal disconnect comes from the fact that demographically I’m an “ordinary user” but psychologically I’m not.

Maps of the Sounds of Tokyo

This 2009 Spanish film starts out very promising and so is all the more disappointing when it doesn’t fulfill its promise. Watching the first third of it I became deeply aware that the way a film is shot and edited, the language of film-making, has a distinctive national accent. I’m used to the flavor of Japanese films and American films set in Japan. I think Map of the Sounds of