Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Christian Crumlish

Christian Crumlish — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:22 GMT

Good story. Can’t wait to see the new design in action.

A little feedback on publicsquare: The urls it makes could use work. maybe the slug should be editable? also, google and some other search engines don’t recognize underscores as word breaks, so that can harm findability. (Hyphens do work.)

Christian Crumlish — Sat, 05 May 2007 03:27:17 GMT

Also, they’re a month apart next year. Yay! say my braincells

Christian Crumlish — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 19:53:25 GMT

Can’t wait to see this article!

Christian Crumlish — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 04:38:55 GMT

My understanding is they plan to do Interaction | 10 in Savannah again, then back to Vancouver, etc., at least at first. David Malouf has written about this on the ixda list, I believe.

Christian Crumlish — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 16:11:07 GMT

I have been maintaining a list of pattern libraries and am also in the process of completing a redesign of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, which will include a section where that list can be shared. If anyone else has such a list I’d be equally happy to point to it. Ideally, I’d like to distinguish “true” pattern libraries from catalogs of visual examples of patterns.

Christian Crumlish — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:39:30 GMT

Just added a few more to our list (the same one linked in Erin’s comment above)...

Christian Crumlish — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:39:30 GMT

This is a great article and a vital conversation. We’ve got a section on collaboration in the social design patterns wiki, and I’d welcome feedback, suggestions, corrections, etc:

Most of the relevant patterns are under Collaboration (but a few, such as those related to calendaring, are under geo/location).

Christian Crumlish — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 19:46:52 GMT

ah, it stripped out the links. try this: http://www.designingsocialinterfaces.com/patterns.wiki/in…

Christian Crumlish — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 16:13:52 GMT

There’s a lot of truth in these criticisms. The pattern vernacular is like the stone in the stone soup tale that Jared Spool has used as a metaphor for a lot of tips-and-tricks dressed up as methodologies. Thinking in terms of patterns has some advantages, for sure, and I’ve seen them help designers and developers communicate better. But it’s far too easy to waste time documenting the obvious things and gain little in terms of saved time or effort in the future and, as with any documentation scheme, pattern libraries can fall prey to inertia and bureaucratization or to ego and turf.

I actually haven’t found it to be true that most pattern curators are motivated by a desire to put their stamp on what is right. I think the pattern-slash-wiki ethos is much more about shared understanding and emergent standards and I feel that the work we did in the Yahoo library and on the social patterns project (wiki, book, etc.) were much more about identifying the best thinking and citing the sources and building blocks (in some ways a quasi-academic exercise) and much less about a prescriptive desire to tell the world what to do.