The first post

A new blog… like a newborn baby: you have high hopes for it, but you can’t really imagine what it will turn out like. You just have to nurture it as best you can, then wait and see.

I’m a technologist. I grew up immersed in the wonderful hobby of amateur radio, graduated in applied science, worked all my life in high tech settings. And I’ve always had this fascination with Human Factors Engineering; that is, applying the basic technologies in a way that makes sense from a human perspective, that makes its use by people easy and intuitive and efficient and – inevitably, to my way of thinking – enjoyable. Unfortunately, while I can strive for this goal in my own products at work and at home, I keep running into commercial products that violate it in diverse and bizarre ways, and into trends that make promising technology evolve into a real pain.

I hope to make this blog into a channel where I can share my thoughts – opinionated ones, in many cases, but still relevant, I hope – about improving the design of many everyday products that surround us, and about the less common cases where a really good design makes my day.

I hope you, my readers, will find all this sufficiently interesting to chime in and make this a lively dialog, maybe even one that can make product developers pay attention to our need for more usable products. Welcome to my blog!