Links of interest - November 2009
I've fallen into the now-familiar trap of posting interesting links on twitter and neglecting my blog, but twitter is currently so transitory I figure it's worth collecting the links for perusal at your leisure. Sometimes I'll take advantage of the luxury of having more than 140 characters and add comments [in brackets]. 'vision video' for Project Natal - lots of UX challenges but the hardware and software sound amazing already http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2009/06/project-natal.html [physical and gestural interfaces, spatial, facial recognition - all kinds of "we're living in the future" stuff

Nine days to go! And entering Cosmic Collections just got easier
Quoting myself over on the museum developers blog, Cosmic Collections – do one thing and do it well:I’ve realised that there may be some mismatch between the way mashups tend to work, and the scope we’ve suggested for entries to our competition. The types of interfaces someone might produce with the API may lend themselves more to exploring one particular idea in depth than produce something suitable for the broadest range of our audiences.So I’m

Organisational pain
If you work in a large organisation (or a cultural heritage organisation of almost any size), you may find cathartic release in reading this response to criticism of a large website from a member of its internal webteam:...simply doing a home page redesign is a piece of cake. You want a redesign? I’ve got six of them in my archives. It only takes a few hours to put together a really good-looking one, as you demonstrated in your post. But doing the design isn’t the hard part, and I think that’s what a lot of outsiders don’t really get, probably because many of them actually do belong to small, just-get-it

'Cosmic Collections' launches at the Science Museum this weekend
I think I've already said pretty much everything I can about the museum website mashup competition we're launching around the 'Cosmos and Culture' exhibition, but it'd be a bit silly of me not to mention it here since the existence and design of the project reflects a lot of the issues I've

On 'cultural heritage technologists'
A Requirements Engingeering lecture at uni yesterday discussed 'satisfaction arguments' (a way of relating domain knowledge to the introduction of a new system in an environment), emphasising the importance of domain knowledge in understanding user and system requirements - an excellent argument for the importance of cultural heritage technologists in good project design.  The lecture was a good reminder that I've been meaning to post about 'cultural heritage technologists' for a while. In a report on April's Museums and the Web 2009, I