Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips The user interface and the user experience seem to be based on two, quite simple things. I love to look at the photos on the Analog Dreams posts in tumblr. Those big, beautiful round knobs. I owned a lot of the things shown in the photos, and there was something magical about […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I review an old, and seemingly forgotten, technique for building systems in which we fully describe what a system will be and do. Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away… Maybe not that long ago, but still…there was a technique for building systems wherein we wrote the user manual […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Here we are in the present. We can decide how we create the future. Things are the way they are because they got that way. Let’s try that again…The present is a natural result of all past circumstances. There are people, capabilities, technology, budget, outside forces, and a host of other things […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes I work in groups of persons; sometimes I work alone. Why don’t I have a workspace for each of these types of work? This is a silly request; I realize that. This request, however, reflects reality and it would certainly improve productivity. I want two work spaces for myself. One is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips One indication of a bad design are lots of instructions on how to do a simple task. I live in Reston, Virginia. We have an (somewhat or other) urban core or something called the Reston Town Center. It has parking garages. The management company, to the consternation or many locals, has decided […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Designers design solutions. The most despised solution a designer can design is often the one that is free. Designers design solutions to problems. In today’s employment vocabulary, designers are called Solutions Architects. (I find that title an insult to architects and the English language, but that is just me. Anyways…) For this […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Knowing, ahead of time, when to change the design of a technology system. Consider: We have software running on different computers. We don’t have much electrical power available for computers “out in the field,” i.e., they probably run on batteries. Hence, we move heavy computations to lab computers where electrical power is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I am again disappointed in job titles, but at least I learn some new lingo. Architecture = Design (noun) Architect (noun, person) = Designer (noun, person) Solutions Architect = Solutions Designer (well, that else would you design but a solution?) Then we have the verb form… to architect =  to design (verb) […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We give new titles to an old profession. Back in the last decade of the prior century, I met several people at work who had one skill: They could read a product catalog. They would read the catalogs from DEC, Sun, IBM, and even Dell. They would proclaim, “Look what is out […]

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by Dwayne Phillips If a system designed to last a few months last 12 years, is that a success or a failure? A recent story hailed the success of the NASA Mars rover. The rover was “designed” to last a few months, but is still going after 12 years. Wow! What a great design and […]

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