Comments on: Soft Eyes, Hard Eyes, Design Thought from The Wire http://www.kipbot.com/blog/2008/07/29/soft-eyes-hard-eyes-design-thought-from-the-wire/ apophenic pretentia Fri, 30 Jul 2010 05:59:26 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.11 by: kip/bot/blog » We are all statisticians now http://www.kipbot.com/blog/2008/07/29/soft-eyes-hard-eyes-design-thought-from-the-wire/#comment-60634 Fri, 12 Jun 2009 11:08:26 +0000 http://www.kipbot.com/blog/2008/07/29/soft-eyes-hard-eyes-design-thought-from-the-wire/#comment-60634 [...] This does a nice job of highlighting that Varian’s charge is a mix of skills for managers, practitioners, and interpreters alike. Some of the steps are naive or described in a way that invites unhealthy simplisticism (simplicity == good, simplisticism, the thing we often get instead of simple is reductive, which is always bad). MINEing and REPRESENTing are the steps where numbers emerge into something living and actionable. MINE, as defined by Fry, is focused on software, rather than cognitive styles and elastic minds, for the generation of insights and pattern recognition. Certainly software is needed, but the hypotheses and candidate patterns you validate with the software come from soft eyes, something I blogged about a while ago. Similarly, REPRESENT is posed as choosing from a list of standard data tropes. But hey, it’s a software book and we all know Fry is more visual than that. [...] […] This does a nice job of highlighting that Varian’s charge is a mix of skills for managers, practitioners, and interpreters alike. Some of the steps are naive or described in a way that invites unhealthy simplisticism (simplicity == good, simplisticism, the thing we often get instead of simple is reductive, which is always bad). MINEing and REPRESENTing are the steps where numbers emerge into something living and actionable. MINE, as defined by Fry, is focused on software, rather than cognitive styles and elastic minds, for the generation of insights and pattern recognition. Certainly software is needed, but the hypotheses and candidate patterns you validate with the software come from soft eyes, something I blogged about a while ago. Similarly, REPRESENT is posed as choosing from a list of standard data tropes. But hey, it’s a software book and we all know Fry is more visual than that. […]

]]> by: Max Gadney http://www.kipbot.com/blog/2008/07/29/soft-eyes-hard-eyes-design-thought-from-the-wire/#comment-45387 Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:15:12 +0000 http://www.kipbot.com/blog/2008/07/29/soft-eyes-hard-eyes-design-thought-from-the-wire/#comment-45387 glad you posted this - i was looking for the quote - i've been thinking how 'Soft eyes' in (information/ interaction design) also speaks of designs that support the scanning and deciding - as well as the reading, absorbing - the overview before the drill-down etc - it's a totally cool phrase from bunk no doubt - thanks again glad you posted this - i was looking for the quote -

i’ve been thinking how ‘Soft eyes’ in (information/ interaction design) also speaks of designs that support the scanning and deciding - as well as the reading, absorbing - the overview before the drill-down etc

- it’s a totally cool phrase from bunk no doubt - thanks again

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