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March 21, 2006

Publishers

I received an update from one of the two publishers I've floated my text by, and the results were generally very good. They had five reviewers look over the text and write extensive notes; while one of the reviewers flat-out hated the work, the rest found it to be generally pleasing but lacking in organization. Particularly useful were comments like this:

"I don't think the current structure works. The author can write, that's not in doubt. There is a strong emotive style, which strikes me as perhaps working better in fiction, polemic, or biography, although I realize that it is not my job to make such comments/judgements. I offer them only as feedback, to be discarded if not useful. From the evidence here, I would recommend turning this book into a polemic on interaction design and the difficulty and necessity of working with and adapting to other disciplines as part of the entire design and development process. I don't see the value in a scholarly approach in this case. Tell it like it is, and write for the true audience which are the oppressed and confused interaction designers trying to accommodate their ideals and talents to the context within which they have to work".

The next step for me, then, would be to rework a great majority of the structure of the text around a central theme; although the theme was certainly in my head, in retrospect, it was not made clear. The theme of the text is on Understanding Interaction Design (which is also a much more applicable title than what was originally used), and the content should reflect this theme: Interaction Design has very little to do with the intermingling of pixels on a screen, and everything to do with creating a cohesive and understandable dialogue with a human being.

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What's This?

My name is Jon Kolko, and I'm an Interaction Designer. I teach at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

I'm writing a book about Interaction Design theory. It deals with issues like linguistics, and metaphor, and the relationships between theory and practice. I don't know if the book is any good, but it sure felt good to write it.

I'm self-publishing the book through a company I've formed called Brown Bear LLC. I've never published a book, or written a book, or started a company before; this is all a large experiment. And this site is a quasi-chronicle of the development of the company and the work.