benzipkin.com

I’ve discovered that one of the best ways to generate a creative spark is to find a creative a cool environment to work.

I’ve been working intermittently out of the lobby of the W Hotel in San Francisco for the last couple of days. As fans of the W chain will know, they use interior design, materials, audio/visual (and even scent) to craft a provocative experience for their guests. The W known for being hip and attracting the same with their clientele (myself excluded!)

The lobby at the San Francisco W is a little loud and there is constant action and people milling about—basically there’s a lot of distractions. Nonetheless, I’ve been able to get a large amount of work done, both in quantity and quality. I’m finding that the environment is inspiring and clearly conducive to getting work done.

When you get busy and under pressure there’s a normal inclination to hole up in your office, seek quiet, and hole up with the familiar. The last couple of days have shown me that contrary just may be just as true. Working somewhere new and cool may be just what you need to get you out of your creative funk.

Unfortunately I’ll have to wait until August of 2009 for the W Hotel Boston to open…

I watched Once on a cross-country flight and was totally blow away. It’s a simple and unfettered love story set to music—an almost perfect Indie film.

This is a movie you need to see if you haven’t already. Granted, the acting is a bit wooden, and it’s shot in that grating docu-style that is so popular among independent movies. Nonetheless, the story is gorgeous, the music is memorable, and you will be thinking about the ending long after the closing the credits.

In what some are calling the best moment from the Oscars, here are the lead players from the movie (Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova) performing “Falling Slowly” that would eventually win “Best Song”.

The New York Times Online recently launched a neat online tool – The TimesMachine – that lets you browse their issue archive stretching back to the 1850s. You can see the newspaper layouts in their original format (something Google news doesn’t offer).

I did a look-up of October 25, 1872 – one hundred years before I was born. It doesn’t seem like too much was going on outside of the Horace Greeley campaign, although it’s hard to tell because there are no real headlines! I suppose the headline is an invention of the modern newspaper…

More big sites should do what LinkedIn.com is doing: testing a working design concept in real-time—with actual users. The site is testing a new homepage design (which is very good, BTW). There’s a very clear call to action soliciting input from their user community. Clicking on the ’send your feedback’ link opens a pop-over window with a text box for comments.

I’m surprised that more websites don’t put feedback loops like this into practice. Granted, the site owners probably receive a ton of junk to sift through, but I’m sure they are lots of great insights and commentary that will go a long way towards informing their design decisions. It’s also think that the simplicity of the text boxes results in more candid feedback and is much more user-friendly than a poll or survey.

It would be interesting to learn how the LinkedIn design team plans to assess and act on the data…

I was recently asked to give a brief presentation on the elements of interaction design and web strategy. Distilling all the aspects into a thirty minute presentation was a daunting task! After some deliberation, I decided that the most sensible way was to break interactive design strategy into three elements:

• Concepts: Basic components of interaction design strategy—key “sound bites” and practices
• Process: The five stages of strategy development with their individual artifacts
• Deliverables: Examples of primary deliverables (wireframes, task flows, prototypes…)

Here’s presentation via Slideshare.net.