Photo Credit: Kayak the Rockies (Flickr)

Ah, technology. The better half and I are currently sitting on the ferry to The Grey Lady, where plan to spend 5 leisure-filled days hobnobbing with the créme de la créme of society. Or so they say.

Blogging will be relegated to all things jaunty and sunny, hopefully in photographic form.

Monday afternoon was a beautiful one. Since I found myself with some free time, I decided to engage in this summer’s leisure activity of choice: Sitting on a quiet patio with a good cocktail or two and some great reading material. Luckily, such a patio exists not two blocks away from my front stoop.

Because a good cocktail is better enjoyed on a full stomach, I ordered the crab cakes. It came with a mixed green salad.

The salad came with tomatoes.

The tomatoes came with their own surprise inside.

As a result, I spent Tuesday in bed, in the fetal position, when not positioned over my toilet. In my current state, I had some time to reflect upon how the effects of large-scale industrial agriculture have effected our food culture here and abroad. From monoculture farming and genetically modified seeds, to  new livestock breed patenting, the industry has gradually been allowed to disassociate food from its place of origination.

Hopefully the general cultural zeitgeist afforded by the global marketplace and by the Internet — the fracturing of markets into micromarkets differentiated by niche products or regional availability — will reinforce the economic viability of alternative agronomics such as Community Supported Agriculture and the slow food movement.

Until then, I suppose we’ll need to be comforted by the fact that foodbourne illness outbreaks are discovered and broadcast in near real time, allowing faster response time.

Meanwhile, at the far end of the food supply chain, I’m heading back to bed.

With all of the issues I’ve had on this blog — a horrendous hosting provider, a failed experiment with unproven blog software, family craziness, and a case of walking pneumonia, to list but a few — perhaps the reason I’ve been silent here as much as I have was because I have embarked on a career change. I’m happy to announce that just about four weeks ago, I joined the Experience Design team at Molecular.

A career move is not made without significant introspection. It was a pleasure to spend three years working with the bright folks at Miller Systems — many of whom I call friends — but over the six months before the move, I realized that my career interests were moving in a different direction, and after meeting several members of the Molecular team at various events I realized that they were the perfect fit for a number of reasons:

• I cherish the thought of collaborating with a group of folks who are like minded in their pursuit of designing total experiences that inspire.
• Molecular’s focus and industry leadership in emerging interactions — discovering patterns and themes in everyday use of technology, how those patterns evolve over time, parallels my personal and professional interests.
• To know that those i work with know that experience design intersects and intertwingles with art, sociology, psychology, literary studies, cinematography, and cultural anthropology as much as it does technology.

As a result, the future focus of this blog will be on the general themes found in this post. Blogging will be more frequent, often more topical, and occasionally (hopefully) more thought provoking than it has in the past.

I’ve moved hosting providers from the atrocious Dreamhost to the more website-friendly HostDiscovery.

Thanks to Dave for the video find.

After dealing with various crises at the 9-to-5, bronchitis, a cheap hotel in Albany, NY, a coolant leak in my car, Skaneateles, NY in a snowstorm, and more bronchitis, I’ve officially caught up with the rest of my life and finally feel like I can blog again.

Lots has happened since my last post here. Facebook launched, and then relaunched (and then re-relaunched) Beacon. Google launched Open Social on which LinkedIn launched their own platform.

I mention these things because they dovetail nicely into what has been occupying so much of my time. Specifically, I’ve been spent in the last few months immersed in either designing total experiences or being hindered by applications that have been organically grown without much thought to their experience at all.

It’s been a very tiresome, but very educational experience.

I’ll be spending much of my time here detailing some of the lessons I’ve been learning, and (hopefully) they will coincide with what others in my discipline have been experiencing.

In 2001, maleszyk.com began as a personal blog that chronicled my life as a single guy working to make a better internets. I talked about the women I dated, the movies I saw, the music I listened to, and what I had for dinner.

What I didn’t talk about, at least not at length, was what is commonly termed in our society as my “work.” Not because I didn’t enjoy it, but because I didn’t feel I was engaged enough to have anything worthwhile to say on a regular basis.

Over the last few years as a consultant in user experience design, I’ve been quietly but intently watching, listening, and thinking about the dramatic ways in which what I have been doing for a living for the past 11 years has been dramatically changing the world that we live in. The rise the move toward miscellaneous, the power of the long tail, and the increasing focus on findability in an information economy has changed the way we date, watch movies, listen to music, or decide what to have for dinner.

And here I am, standing in the middle of all of it, a member of the information cognoscenti. I hope to contribute my wisdom, if just a small part, to the crowd.