My square meal has six sides.

I'm going to talk about nutrition and information visualization for a while. Nutrition is something I haven't ever really understood very well. For most of my life, I've been sort of reactive about my eating habits, adjusting my diet based on whether I felt I needed to lose weight or gain energy, etc. It's worked well enough for me, but it's not exactly a good way to define one's nutritional plan to get anywhere beyond "surviving" and into the realm of "healthy". I could try harder to understand nutrition, but this is America, so instead I'm going to blame education. Specifically, I'll blame the USDA.

Make sure to have a glass of milk or a History wedge piece from Trivial Pursuit with every meal. (Credit: http://robertleehaller.com/foodgroups.htm)

The cup-holder quotient

Cars are a fascinating platform for user experience design.  From the aesthetic and reflective value of a flashy or quirky car to the behavioral considerations of the interior design (can you tell I'm a Don Norman follower?), there are so many factors to the design of an automobile and so many ways in which a car interfaces with its owner's life that the challenges faced-- and often the solutions created-- can be quite intriguing.

Also, they can be quite shiny.

I've read plenty of material on the various human factors of cars and their design.  Also, I've been in a car or two in my day, and I've come up with a theory quantifying how carefully car manufacturers design for the user.

Voice-operated vs. voice-augmented interfaces

Mention the term "voice control" and one of two scenarios usually comes to mind.  The first scenario is of stilted, error-prone interactions, often involving the user repeating himself as the computer dumbly responds with "I don't understand."  Worse, it can lead to the user shouting, "No!" as the phone asks if he would like to call the ex-girlfriend he hasn't gotten around to deleting from his contacts yet.  This would be the "real world" scenario.  The second scenario that may come to mind is of magical understanding, where the computer has all the language comprehension of a fluent speaker.  It readily parses natural language and produces instantaneous results to any query or command.  This is the "Star Trek" scenario.

"Computer, calculate warp trajectory."

"Did you say, 'Call Charlotte Padalecki?'"

There's a pretty wide gap between the two scenarios, and there has been a tremendous amount of time and money invested in pursuing the second scenario.  The idea of controlling a computer with voice commands is an enticing one, to the point that it is in fact often referenced as an archetype of "futuristic" interaction.  This is for good reason: it's not going to happen anytime soon.