Hello, and welcome to Push Button For. This is a collaborative blog by Damien Newman and myself that relates to Interaction Design, and the ways that Interaction Design fits into the business world.
When I look back, this site should have started around 1998, back when I was one of very few bloggers in the world, but due to various factors it never happened. Damien and I have, for many years now, had dialogues (some might call them “arguments” or “debates”) both in person and via email and IM about design, interaction design, and what they have to do with business - and we have long talked about publishing our collective thoughts. Well here we are in 2006 almost ten years after we met, and we sort of have this idea in motion.
Things are still a little rough around the edges, but I can’t think of a better time to start putting thoughts. Call it a beta…
Damien did most of the coding stuff for this site, which runs on WordPress, and we had special help from our good friend, Dagan Packman in the areas of code where we simply suck too badly to do correctly. If you have problems with it, I recommend you contact Damien. Or you can contact me, and I will harass Damien myself.
People have already begun asking about the name. I got the idea when I saw one of the many crosswalk boxes one comes across in any city. It had approximately 8 words, an arrow, and a button - all for a 1-button user interface that can only perform one action. I started thinking to myself, “I wonder how many ways people have come up with to implement this one simple civic UI?” Well, it turns out that people have thought of a lot of ways to do it. See the photo on the bottom of this page.
I’ve started tagging photos of these implementations on Flickr with ‘pushbuttonfor‘ - and if you find a new version I encourage you to upload and tag it as well.
So without further noise, I welcome you to Push Button For.
Wehey - Finally Gino gives it the push it needs to launch PBF. We hope that you forgive us the odd functionality of the site, due to our (well, my) limited understanding of WordPress (which fantastically powers this site) and see past the quirks and get something out of the writing.
If you don’t - then comment. If you do, or want to build on what we say - then comment. If you … I don’t have any other scenarios.
Thanks to Gino for finally giving way to my pleas for him to write about this stuff, and to Dagan who earned a bottle of Kettle One tweaking the code on this site.
Enjoy and contribute.
April 4th, 2006 at 8:49 pmCongratulations to you both on the new site launch - I’ll look forward to your posts.
April 6th, 2006 at 7:12 am