Ambient Findability

Look at the title. Now back to this body. Now back to the title. No, the title does not say Fidelity, but findability. What exactly is finability, though? And why is it next to the title word, Ambient? Is that a book?

Yes, the book, Ambient Findability was written by Peter Morville in 2005. Though I haven't completed his book yet, Morville I feel that I've gotten at least a small grasp on understanding what Morville was trying to  say about findability, and it's really amazing. With technology constantly getting more and more advanced, the internet is constantly advancing, too. With the internet advancing, there has to be an accessible way to find all of the information that people want to find. This is findability.

Today, there is a constant use of findability through words and tagging. If you see within all of the blogs, there are always tags that help people better find some information that they might want to find within my blog. The way in which you might search on Google to find information, is tagging findability. The way in which people search to find a video on Youtube is also findability. Searching for a friend on Facebook is finability. The whole internet is set up by tagging words to make them findable.

This is what I believe Peter Morville was really trying to express would happen. Most everything in technology is made to be more accessible, easy to use, or just better. For people to be able to find what they want, all information needs to be made findable. This is one of the things that I think Morville was really trying to express.

Typing Type

So there were a couple of pages within Ellen Lupton's book, Thinking With Type, that I found very interesting. This book is a book that talks about how printed typing fonts came to be, and how they were shaped and changed over time.

thinking with type

Dart280

One of the pages I found very interesting was page 36, as you see to the right. It is all about the anatomy of typing, and what certain parts of the font mean. I found it very interesting to see how mear lines that I type or write myself had parts with names, and an anatomy just as a body would.


Another page that I found very neat to learn about was page 16. This page showed pictures of different ways that different people throughout the years figured out their way of creating a new font. I found it really beneficial to find out exactly how the structure of some of the letters were created, and by whom.

All together, this book really helps me understand how many changes have went through the typing world....and are still going through the typing world. This helps me better compare technology, and how it is constantly changing, but only because of different preferences and to try to better something already made.