KonzeptioNerd

The Four Copywriters of the Apocalypse

Did Rewe really mean to call their vitalizing shower gel (green bottle to the right) The Day After???
 

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Ha-ha surveillance state

Whenever I travel with Deutsche Bahn, I rest assured that the surveillance state is a logistic feat that humankind will not achieve in my lifetime.

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If the great philosophers had been user interface designers (pt. 3, Oscar Wilde)

Although an information architect at heart, Oscar Wilde spent much of his life working as a graphic designer, trying to disprove common fallacies of interface design by blatantly extolling them.
However, the finer points of his humor were by and large lost on colleagues and clients alike who held him as one of the greatest proponents [...]

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If the great philosophers had been user interface designers (pt. 2, Plato)

Plato was a vocal advocate of logfile analysis. In his famous Simile of the Cave, he explains that the web designer is like a man, sitting in a cave, and logfiles are like shadows cast against the walls by users carrying lanters before an opening in that cave.
Of course, he conceeded, one might learn so [...]

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If the great philosophers had been user interface designers (pt. 1, Descartes)

Rene Descartes made the feeds briefly when he coined “Cogito, ergo sum” in his review of Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. Alienated clients left and right by insisting on grounding his design-decisions on human reason alone, never once condescending to look at results from user testing.
In later life, turned entirely to the more arcane [...]

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Schrödinger’s Cat

My late night and red wine discussions tend to gravitate toward the paradigm of Schrödinger’s Cat
and the un-peg-down-ability of it all. xkcd has the ultimate cartoon on this matter: xkcd: Schrodinger. I think that henceforth, I’ll carry a printout of this in my wallet.

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