If you pledged already, you received the login info for the private site, replete with actual book excerpts. Proof that the book isn't just a myth! Yes! More chapter 1 edits continue in the meantime, of course.

Right now, I'd like to talk to you about my writing process, timeline, habits, approach, etc.

I came up with the idea of the book last December. Every winter in Chicago I put together a huge project to pass the time when it's -40 out, two feet of snow are eternally on the ground, and it's always either dark or gray outside. For example, two years ago, I learned how to build and maintain bikes, and then built one myself. Three years ago, I conspired with some friends to write a book for my girlfriend about the city. Last winter, I decided on Cadence & Slang, and continuing that will of course be this winter's big project, too.
What you already know: I wrote an outline of the book, handmade little chapbooks of it, and sent them off to 100 people.
What you don't already know: This was the beginning of four more months of outlining. I took the wording for this chapbook, and made an actual outline out of it. I added some points in where there were logical holes, or where stuff seemed threadbare. Per the suggestions of colleagues from reading the original chapbook, I reworded a lot. Writing for Cadence & Slang began in mid-April, and this outline operated as a mission statement for the book, something to hold onto during uncertain times.

Part of this outline building involved doing a big literature review. The last major writing project I embarked on that was related to my career was my master's paper, which by definition required a formal review of the current research context, to justify my investigations. And while I'm not codifying this in a twenty-page summary in Cadence & Slang, it's absolutely informing my writing. I'm citing and quoting from what I've come across, and I think it's strengthened the text quite a bit, made it less insular, justified points that risk controversy.

One problem with doing this right now is that I no longer have access to a complete portrait of current academic literature, because it's so closed-off and I'm (obviously) not in graduate school anymore. So I had to make do with books. (Fortunately, books published today are more applicable to Cadence & Slang than research.) I set up an Amazon wishlist, and wrote to close friends pleading them to gift me stuff off of it. Because I'm clearly friends with the most generous and excellent people ever, several did.

In tandem, I did a huge search for stuff at my local library. I work only two blocks from the main branch, so I would go there on lunch breaks, and I outlined and xeroxed any books I needed that they didn't circulate. I checked out anything that they did, and outlined and xeroxed those on my own time. The result: a 500-page-thick stack of condensed information pertinent to Cadence & Slang, spanning four dozen books, three centuries, and many fields outside technology. All of it mashed down into one big contiguous lump.

All of this helps on another really important front: researching fields like architecture, urban planning, typography, cognitive science, and how best to run a delicatessen helps cast interaction design as something that affects every aspect of a user's experience. We say an awful lot about "experience design," but very little can back that up if we design with our own customs, our own language. Or if design just affects the front end of a product, and not how it performs, or how it's marketed or supported.

If a book about this field is going to be useful, it has to be a progression, or perhaps an amalgam, of principles that we see in other parts of our lives. Our users view technology in the same way: they may use a computer, or an iPod, or a cell phone, whatever, but they still have their own lives to live, and they usually aren't using technology for its own sake. So why should we come from a different perspective?