Blast from the past
Two of my old co-workers from MAYA, Mike Higgins and Bill Lucas wrote an article for the Design Management Journal entitled Digital Carvings: Brand Totems for the Emergence of Infocentricity, ($5 for non-members).
Though I haven’t worked at MAYA for more than four years, that place was an integral part of my design training. Carnegie Mellon did little, my first job did even less, but my tenure at MAYA taught me just about everything I know about design, information architecture, usability, etc., and Bill Lucas was one of those did the teaching. If it wasn’t in Pittsburgh, I might still be there.
This article, while a bit on the geeky side, talks about their information-centric interaction paradigm in the form of Regex, a descendent of Visage, a product that I worked on and off for three years.
While I haven’t done much with true info-centricity in the MAYA sense, I have taken the design philosophy behind it and used it in every project I have subsequently worked on. It is the idea that you should never design any sufficiently complex system at the page level. Rather, design the DNA (or LEGO bricks) and then build the site from these building blocks. I’ve been calling this “modular design”. I really need to get motivated to write down my own thoughs on modular design, Bill, you may have inspired me yet again.
