Full Circle Associates

I'm in the throes of a variety of projects that have 'design' as part of the task. The monumental reality of how we each differently perceive and experience an online space rears it's large, shadowy head again so I'm reading design articles. Again.

I am particularly looking for insights about the challenge of fitting content and process tasks to technology - especially when learning the technology is a secondary learning goal. Pointers appreciated. Right now I'm looking at two polarities: the polarity of simplicity and range of goals (which is like, but not quite the same as depth and breadth) and the polarity of short term efficiency with tools and long term gains of struggling with and learning new tools. If this is not clear, that is because I'm not clear. It's evolving and I'm reaching out in case someone has that insight or link which will help me go to the next level of thinking.

In my cyber strolls, I came across Uzanto, which offers an intriguing list of articles on design. Previously I've linked to their article on Roller Coasters vs. Driver's Seats: Design and the Concept of Situational Control By Rashmi Sinha, published on Uzanto.com, June 2004. Some of the other articles are:

• Understanding Organizational Stakeholders for Design Success
  By Jonathan Boutelle, May 2004.
  
• Cost-effective methods for rapid user research and usability testing. July 2002.
  
• Beyond card-sorting: Free-listing methods to explore user categorization.
  
• Persona Development for Information-rich domains. Sinha, R.
  
• Interaction Design for Recommender Systems - Kirsten Swearingen & Rashmi Sinha.
  
• Usability Testing as part of the Iterative Design Cycle
  
• User Interfaces for Music Discovery. Presented at AudioIcon 2002.
  
• Interfaces for Exploring Large Web-Based Databases: Recommender Systems & Metadata Based Browse Interfaces.
  
• Beyond Algorithms: An HCI perspective on Recommender Systems
  
• Collaborative Filtering by Humans and Computers. P