The Manual

Lesson

Kate Kiefer Lee — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Gin-soaked olives get me every time. One taste and I’m transported back to my early twenties, having dinner with my grandmother. She used to order extra olives with her martinis. She’d line them up on a cocktail pick, dip them in her drink, and hand them to me. I’d savor them, one by one.

We could sit there for hours. We’d talk about my work, and she’d fill me in on all the latest gossip at her retirement home. She’d tell me stories about delivering codes in the Coast Guard and the years she spent teaching. Sometimes she’d talk about her darkest days, living with an alcoholic husband, eventually leaving him, and surviving breast cancer. She always had some kind of advice for me. We loved each other’s company.

When she got too sick to go out for dinner, she said she missed her martinis. I think it was the ritual she missed more than anything. So my husband started making them for her in her room. He’d pack up the liquor, a shaker, and a jar of olives, and he’d make us all a round. I have this picture of my grandmother in her hospice bed, breathing tubes in, holding up her glass and just barely smiling.

She’s gone now, but every once in a while my husband will order a martini with extra olives. He’ll put them on a fork, dip them in his drink, and wink when he hands them to me. I think it’s his way of saying “I loved her too.”

And with the gesture, he gives me a memory. A moment with my grandmother. No story, no photo, can take me back to that time with her like the taste of a gin-soaked olive. One little olive in the right place at the right time, and it’s as if she’s at the table with me. The taste connects the past to the present in a way I’m never quite prepared for.

I’ve been experiencing nostalgia more and more lately. It can take over any of the senses—a taste, a smell, or a song can bring on memories so vivid they feel like dreams. The older I get, the further back they go. You can’t stop time, but you can hold on to it.

Every once in a while, I’ll hear a song or pick up a scent that brings back an experience I haven’t thought about in years. It makes me wonder what purpose these memories serve. Maybe they exist to comfort us. I get the strongest nostalgia during seasons of change, and I most often remember simple, happy times.

You can’t force nostalgia, and you surely can’t escape it. It’s a strange gift that way. Our brains record moments so we can relive them later, and we subconsciously assign meaning to sounds, smells, and tastes that serve as signals. When we get the signals, we go back to those places.

We have so little control over what our brains are recording in the background, and we can’t always predict when we’ll experience the memories. Maybe the best we can do is be present, pay attention, and try to give our brains something good to record.

I had the best time at dinner with my husband the other night. The weather was nice and the drinks were strong, and we were making plans. I was so content. At some point between dinner and dessert, I looked around in what felt like slow motion and thought, Will I remember this moment? What will remind me?

Putting Work in Its Place

Kate Kiefer Lee — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Ricky Scott is a pitmaster in a place called Hell’s Half Acre, South Carolina. He’s also the Director of Public Works for a nearby county, and in his spare time, he serves as a volunteer firefighter. I learned about Scott from a short documentary called Thursday in Hell’s Half Acre, made by 1504 Pictures for the Southern Foodways Alliance.¹ “I have a day job, but after four o’clock on Thursdays I take off and go over on down to the barbecue business,” he says in the interview. Once a week, he smokes a pig and serves it to his neighbors. He’s open for three hours only, and he sells out every time.

There are a lot of people like Ricky Scott out there, splitting their time between things they need to do and things they want to do. He could quit his day job and try to live the pitmaster dream, but the Thursday-only barbecue business is working out just fine.

At some point in your life, someone has probably told you to “follow your dreams.” Maybe you’ve said it to someone else. It’s the quintessential inspirational advice. We tell our kids to follow their dreams from a young age. We say it in songs and commencement speeches, hand letter it for posters and journal covers. Most of the time it’s empty advice, designed to trigger emotion but not action.

These days, “follow your dreams” has sister phrases like “do what you love” and “quit your day job.” If you listen for these mantras, they’ll lead you to an entire genre of storytelling in creative industries, particularly in web design. The stories come in different forms: essays, marketing campaigns, conference talks, interviews. They’re usually formulaic, involving someone turning a personal experience into motivational advice for a wide audience. They are treated as gospel.

These stories can be deeply inspiring. Now, more than ever, people can direct their own paths and make a living from creative work. For many, the barrier to starting a business and selling your work is low. You can make a website in an hour with Squarespace. Raise thousands of dollars in a month with Kickstarter. Begin selling your products tomorrow with Etsy. Share your work instantly on Twitter, and measure it all with Google Analytics. There’s so much possibility for entrepreneurs and freelancers. If you have the right combination of resources, flexibility, and skills, you can start following your dreams right away.

For someone who knows they want a career change, is in the position to make one, and just needs to take a few steps to get there, motivational advice works. Personal testimony can be transformative. Finding a tribe of like-minded people who put a lot on the line to pursue their passions may be just the push someone needs to move forward.

But where does that leave the people who don’t have a calling or enough resources? To drop everything and do what you love, you need a safety net, flexibility, and a passion that also happens to be a marketable skill. It’s a beautiful thing when someone turns the fire in their belly into a fulfilling career, but the stories we tell about creativity don’t apply to everyone.

It’s time we examine the messages we’re sending about creative fulfillment and explore new ways to talk about our work.

Opening Up the Narrative

Work is one part of life. It plays different roles for everyone. There’s not a single, teachable path to professional fulfillment. Translating “this worked for me” into “you should do what I did” is an anecdotal fallacy that can be as damaging over time as it is inspiring in the moment. When delivered without empathy, this kind of advice isolates people and devalues the kind of work most of us do every day.

Our world is much bigger than our industry. The concept of work, and expectations for professional autonomy and creative freedom, completely change when you shift your gaze outside the design community. Even within the mostly insulated design world, there’s nuance. There are varying levels of privilege. When we speak to people in our industry, we must consider the effect our words have on those who have chosen, or have had no choice but to take, different paths. And creating a more inclusive, more diverse, deeper-rooted design community requires—at the very least—speaking to people outside of it.

If you have a success story about pursuing your passions, choose language that’s sensitive to people who are different from you. You could make a command like “quit your day job” or “do what you love,” or you could soften the tone by saying “I quit my day job” or “here’s what worked for me.” Opening up our language will open up our audience.

It’s helpful to tell the whole story, including victories, failures, and all the vulnerable spots. Sometimes we get squeamish about the financial side of conversations about work, but it’s important. If you cashed in your retirement account, had resources from a past job, or called on an existing network of people to help fund your dreams, that’s part of the story. Stories of artists who quit their full-time jobs and and put everything on the line are compelling, but the same decision may be irresponsible for different people. We can glorify risk taking, but the risks should be calculated.

We can also explore new places to share stories about creativity and passion. I’ve witnessed some of the most inspiring conversations about work at neighborhood events, political functions, or standing in line somewhere. I’ve even changed my perspective by following people who aren’t like me on Twitter. It seems so simple because it is. We all benefit, as individuals and as a community, from actively seeking out perspectives that are different from our own.

The Myth of a Calling

Mantras like “do what you love” and “quit your day job” often presume the listener has one clear creative passion that they can ultimately profit from. But not everyone has a calling. It’s a myth that in order to be truly happy, you need to find and pursue your one true passion. Many people have joyous lives filled with interests and hobbies and people they love, but not passions.

Even if you are blessed with a singular passion, it doesn’t have to be your full-time job. Some people aren’t comfortable turning their passions into a career. Maybe they want to keep their passions for themselves. A writer or artist who does intensely personal work may choose not to turn it into a business. Maybe they practice their passion as a way to relieve stress, and the experience would change if they made it their job. Maybe their full-time job funds their dreams, and they want to pursue their passion while relying on a steady paycheck. Or maybe they love their job very much, even though they have deep interests outside of work.

Some people have passions that are inherently unrelated to work. There are many among us who’ve always wanted a family. They go to work every day; and every night, they follow their dreams home to their families. Passions can also take the form of hobbies, fulfilling people emotionally or intellectually outside of work.

We encourage children to explore all of their interests, try new experiences, and embrace change. But at some point during young adulthood, a switch flips and you’re expected to know what you want in this life and go get it. This perspective is reinforced in school: in your first year of college, it’s time to choose a major and think about your career goals. Change becomes uncomfortable. What if we show ourselves the same grace we show children? People who deeply love more than one thing shouldn’t feel pressured to choose a dream.

The myth of the calling leads people to believe that if they answer the call, they’ll reach some sort of creative enlightenment that transcends work and transforms their life. That scenario is possible, but so rare.

You Can’t Always Do What You Love

Of course, you will never do only what you love. To change the narrative around creative careers, we have to start with a realistic perspective on work. Most people spend a majority of their time working. And just like the other major parts of life, work is sometimes fulfilling and sometimes not. There is gray area. You can love your job most of the time. You can kind of pursue your passion. You can stand behind your work even if it’s not your dream job.

It’s helpful to look at your career from a holistic perspective, made up of different tasks and components with varying levels of meaning. For an art director at a publishing company, work may look something like this: 60 percent design and illustration, 20 percent meetings, ten percent writing, five percent travel, and five percent budget spreadsheets. Similarly, a potter has to perform a lot of tasks that are unrelated to pottery but related to her pottery business: Sending invoices, financial planning, maintaining a website, hiring and managing employees.

Even for someone who practices their passion as a career, it’s not going to be 100 percent passion all the time. When you look at it that way, pursuing your interests by freelancing isn’t that different from pursuing your interests by working for a company and doing something you like most of the time. No matter the career path you choose, you should expect both sacrifices and rewards pretty much every day.

It’s always going to be a mix. So you weigh the pros and the cons, including tangible things like pay and time off and intangible things like friends at work and pride of ownership. And there’s no shame in weighing the paycheck heavily; we all work for money.

Making Work Meaningful

I love my job, but I wouldn’t say I do what I love the most in this world. I care about the company, my coworkers, and the people we serve. I’m invested and engaged at work. But if my job ever becomes my deepest source of happiness, my life will fall out of balance. This is my truth. It may not be yours.

A 2015 Gallup poll of employee engagement said “the percentage of U.S. workers engaged in their jobs rose from an average 31.7% in January to an average 32.9% in February.”² This is a three year high. Most people are either indifferent or actively disengaged at work. That’s a problem that we can help solve.

Here’s a more achievable goal than “follow your dreams”: be engaged at work. Look for meaning in it. This is hard sometimes. Being engaged at work takes work, and it’s an ongoing process. Turning a creative passion into a job is certainly one way to find meaning in your work, but it’s not the only way.

I’ve seen friends become disillusioned because early in their careers they told themselves that by working at a tech company they were going to change the world. You may not be changing people’s lives on a large scale (or you may be!), but are you changing the way people work? Are you improving someone’s day, making it easier for them to do their job, or giving them information they need? Chances are, you’re helping people. You can find purpose there.

No work is wasted. Even if you’re not in your ideal career, you can start taking small steps toward it right now. You may be doing that already, without realizing it. If you learned a new skill, met friends or mentors, or became a better communicator, then your imperfect job served a purpose.

What’s meaningful to one person may not be meaningful to another. The more we can align what we value with what we do, the happier we’ll be at work. Someone who values efficiency, consistency, and predictability may like working in production. Someone who values creativity, independence, and adventure may prefer working as a freelance designer. You can be yourself at the office if your job is in alignment with your values. It’s a joy to bring your whole self to work.

So, instead of asking ourselves what we want to be doing all the time—because we’ll never do only one thing—let’s ask some more practical questions: What do I want to do more of? What do I want to do less of? Can I stand behind my work?

Room to Grow

People evolve and passion can be transient. When you ask children what they want to be when they grow up, they say things like astronaut, teacher, movie star, or president. But when they actually grow up, figure out who they are, and hone their skills, other options become available to them. Your dream one day isn’t the same as your dream ten years later, when you know more and have access to more. Following your dreams around can get complicated.

Even if your current job is not your final destination, it can mean something to you. Even if you’re not in a field related to your personal interests, you can be happy and fulfilled at work. And if you’re working to pay the bills so you can take care of your family, that doesn’t mean you’re denying your dreams. It might mean exactly the opposite.

“Follow your dreams” sounds nice, but it’s almost always more fulfilling to follow your needs.

I can’t stop thinking about Ricky Scott in Hell’s Half Acre. Rewatching the documentary, my respect for him grew deeper. Every day he goes to work at the county office and does what he needs to do. As a firefighter, he volunteers his time doing hard work that matters to him and his community. And on Thursdays, when he’s doling out pulled pork on Styrofoam plates, he’s simply doing what he loves. He’s arranged his life in a way that suits him. It’s malleable, can change at any time, and it’s not for anyone else to replicate. He has financial and emotional needs, and his abundant life fulfills them. Ricky Scott’s work does not define him.

“Some day I may go full-time with barbecue,” he says in the film. “But so far, rather than doing that I’d rather keep it like it is right now. I put one hundred and one percent in it, and make sure it goes on as long as I can do it.”

Thursday in Hell’s Half Acre, 1504 Pictures for the Southern Foodways Alliance (2015). ↩
Amy Adkins, “U.S. Employee Engagement Reaches Three-Year High,” Gallup, March 9, 2015. ↩

Lesson

Heather Ryan — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

My father is a quiet, visioned, and deeply intelligent man. When I was a child, he taught me Morse code, BASIC, and how to read the colored stripes on resistors. Scattered amidst his plans of Tesla wind turbines were his plans to build an adobe house by hand. When I was in second grade, he moved us all out to the base of the Organ Mountains, smack in the middle of the north Chihuahuan Desert, where he started making bricks of red clay and straw.

Just on the other side of the Organ Mountains was the White Sands Missile Range and the White Sands Test Facility. It was not uncommon that large jets would come streaming overhead, faster than the speed of sound. If you were around and cognizant in the 1980s, you may remember the undulating and ever-present threat of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. When the supersonic aircraft would fly by, we would hear a tremendous boom as the sound of their movement caught up to us. My brother would often get very serious when this happened, telling me that it was just a “sonic boom,” but that it could also be a nuclear attack. We would then go hide under the kitchen table and wait for the fallout.

Like many children living during those times, there was a very real possibility in our minds that the end times could be just around the corner. Being a planner, I spent many hours imagining different scenarios in which the population of Earth was decimated in a nuclear holocaust. In many of these scenarios I was a lone, miraculous survivor, left to fend for myself. I wasn’t too worried about this because in my mind I was the queen of the desert. I knew all of the trails like the back of my hand. I had mastered the art of diving unscathed, at top running speed, through barbed-wire fences. I built numerous secret forts in mesquite and creosote bushes. I could catch lizards and “horny toads” by hand faster than anyone around. I was a scrawny, scrabbly, nine-year-old survivalist and I knew that I would be just fine.

Most often in these extended fantasies, I would leave the desert, make my way to the biggest library I could find, and set up camp within. It was my greatest dream to live in an abandoned library, with nothing but time and books. I dreamt of reading every single book in the library and knowing everything there was to know about life and existence.

Walking now in my mind through that imagined landscape, I feel the echoes of a civilization lost. As a child I delighted in the notion of unfettered access to the world of recorded knowledge, but now, as an adult, that world feels somehow vacant and hollow. Something very important was missing there. What was it?

I get this same sense as I am “walking” through archived websites. I wander through the walls of text and the blinking, animated gifs. Old, flashing headlines remind me of flashing neon in some abandoned city. The old websites seem haunted by the ghosts of the people who created them. I’m sure that most of the people who created the sites are still alive, but it’s the ghosts of who they used to be, of the time we used to live in, that haunt the pages. I am especially struck by this when I visit web pages I created in the late 90s. My ghosts are captured there in the glowing, rendered bits.

If this is the case with mostly static websites, imagine then what it’s like to wander preserved virtual worlds. I haven’t been to Second Life in a while, but I shudder to think of what it would be like to visit. What would a preserved World of Warcraft be like when there are no people filling the space, chatting, fighting, building? What will Minecraft be like in twenty years?

As archivists, we are tasked with preserving the past and the present for the future, but how much of the true picture can we actually preserve? It seems that despite our best efforts, the most we can possibly accomplish is to save the files and the spaces where only the echoes and reverberations of life ripple out from the screen. Just like my end-times fantasies as a child, I realize that even with the wild abandon of having access to everything recorded, it’s just not the same without the people.

Messages to the Future

Heather Ryan — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

As a young artist, I was driven and aching to communicate my perceptions of the vast and intricate world around me. I was known to thievishly appropriate any and all materials that held some promise of articulating my vision. If it spoke my language, I used it.

My art knew no bounds of material “appropriateness” and it certainly didn’t exist anywhere but the present. I created art to satisfy the very immediate need to communicate in my own language. I gave very little thought as to whom I was communicating or even to how far in time my message could ripple.

In art school, however, things were different. I sat in art history lectures where I learned about art that was created hundreds and thousands of years ago. I was taught how to select materials that would survive through the ages and would serve to extend my message to future generations.

Being the contrarian that I was, I rejected what seemed to me an egotistical extension and instead became fascinated with the concept of ephemeral art. I designed a number of performances that were intended to not be recorded or documented, or to speak to the future in any way other than through human memory itself. I designed edible sculptures that were to be literally consumed and physically digested. I was very much enamored with the idea of speaking to the present, and only the present.

During this time I also started my career as a print and web designer. I was thrilled by the connection between abstract code and the immediacy of communicating directly to thousands of people I didn’t know. In 1998 I was hired by a university agricultural department, where I transferred print journal material on topics like best cotton strains and beef bull breeding to the department’s new website. Doing so moved the material from its archival form to one that facilitated access. In comparison, the web was very much about sharing and finding information now; but even back then, our notion of “now” on the web was much longer than it is today.

To Capture a River

I can’t even begin to wrap my head around how quickly a moment goes by on the web today. Back in the early days of the web, there was an actual sense that one could read just about everything on it over a long weekend. Then, websites were more static. They consisted mostly of linked pages that were sporadically, if ever, updated. Even the old bulletin board forums seem slow and steady compared to the raging flow of thoughts and facts rushing by on the web today.

Captured moments of our history used to be monolithic: monumental and made of stone. Our archived history has traditionally been built around pivotal moments, leaders, or grand representations of an age. We go back to our archives to learn about wars, inventions, kings, and cathedrals. These recorded “moments” we look back on span years, decades, and sometimes centuries. The shorter, lived moments of day-to-day thoughts and experiences were rarely recorded.

Today connected society is so able to record each lived moment, and at such a granular level, that the record is beginning to supercede the experience itself. Not only are we able to record the moments of moments, but we are able to instantly broadcast these moments for other connected people to consume across the globe.

We are also living in an age when we are constantly connected, and where it takes only a few seconds to open up a portal to look into the constant flow of these broadcasted moments. This ever present, ever flowing river of recorded events is changing not only the way we live, but also the way we collect and preserve these moments as history.

History, as the future will know it, is happening today on the web. And so it is the web that we must capture, package, and preserve for future generations to see who we are today. But how do we do this? The web is made up of billions of molecular-sized moments that are constantly rushing past and being superseded by newer and smaller units of recorded time. How does one capture such a thing?

Archiving the Ephemeral Web

The web is the grand realization of my youthful infatuation with ephemeral art and the enigmatic now. Since then I have moved into a career that revolves around preserving access to captured moments of history, and I am coming face-to-face with some of the impracticalities of my early idealism. Looking at the web as a phenomenon or thing in itself, it’s a beautiful wonder; but capturing it and documenting it can sometimes feel like a nightmare. On most days, though, I find it to be a juicy and delicious challenge. Luckily for us, so do quite a few other people.

One of the first visionaries in this area was Brewster Kahle, who founded the Internet Archive in 1996. The Internet Archive is home to the Wayback Machine, a digital archive of website snapshots from 1996 to now. If you haven’t yet visited the Wayback Machine, I invite you to take a minute to look at some late 90s websites. Boingboing.net and wired.com are good ones to start with.

Less than twenty years after these early websites were created, there is a palpable sense of history in them. For me there is a sense of nostalgia, since I was creating my own sites at the time. For those who were very young or not yet born, these sites tell stories of a time unknown to them, when the internet was new and vastly uncharted. It truly was like the Wild West in those days.

If you dig a little deeper into the Wayback Machine, you will notice that not every day is covered for even the most prolific websites. In the early years of the web, this probably didn’t matter so much, because sites weren’t typically updated as often as they are now. If you look at some sites in 2015, you will see that many more days are covered; some sites are captured several times a day.

Clicking links in archived web pages, especially older ones, often leads to a page that informs us that there is no archived copy of the site or page we are looking for. Many web pages have holes in them, where images are now missing. Charmingly, however, a number of the old animated gifs are still blinking back and forth through their cycles. They are still moving, still alive in some sense, but at the same time, eerily abandoned.

It’s easy to see how difficult it is to capture the whole of the web; every day and every moment that it’s changing. What Brewster Kahle and his colleagues are doing is at the very least herculean. There is no way to capture the web from above, like you could take a picture of an ocean from a plane. You have to take snapshot after snapshot from within as it goes by, and piece it back together like a stop-motion film.

Archivists want to preserve history as it is wherever possible, but in the case of archiving the web, it’s not as simple as taking periodic snapshots and re-hosting them. Even collecting as much as they do, the Internet Archive is not able to collect everything or to preserve all of the functionality built into all of the sites on the web. Unsurprisingly, there are a number of legal complications with archiving websites and a number of website owners who prefer that their sites are not preserved in perpetuity. Adding to this is the challenge of keeping up with all of the technological changes and innovations that are happening on the web every day. Over time, these challenges are only going to punch more holes into the already patchy record we have.

To Innovate or to Preservate

Innovation is one of the most celebrated concepts in United States culture. As a child I was inundated with stories about famous inventors, and I listened rapturously as my teachers diefied them. I don’t know if these stories made me want to be an inventor, so to speak, but they definitely fueled me in my constant search for the best and most innovative solution to every activity in my life.

I found these stories rattling in the background as I mapped out the most direct route across campus, or the most efficient method to make a sandwich. I would maximize efficiency in everything I did and would often imagine devices and contraptions that could make it even more efficient. As an artist, I pushed myself to never follow the status quo. It was my goal to always do things different and better. I wanted to break out of the boundaries of the expected and everyday. I wanted to change the world.

This same type of thinking is the driving force behind the endless stream of technological innovation we celebrate and grapple with every day. As a society, we are living through an exponential growth of technological advances. It is a brilliant and dazzling time.

Unfortunately, the charging rhino of innovation is at the very heart of what is making it so difficult to preserve the web and our other digital creations. As new technological innovations rise up, the old ones fall further and further away. Each new iteration of hardware and software takes us steps away from the older ones. Each step we take away from our older technologies and their familial operating systems, connecting cables, file formats, and browsers, the more difficult it becomes to return to them.

One of my favorite teaching props is an old eight-inch floppy disk. Just last week, I held it up during a lecture and people in the room actually gasped. I asked them if they could tell me where I might go to read what’s on the disk. The only person who knew was a fellow digital preservation researcher whose job it was to find a disk reader for some eight-inch floppies that were donated to his university’s digital archives.

My three-year-old laptop has a CD/DVD drive, but newer models don’t. When is the last time you bought a CD? How long until the crowd gasps in awe when I hold one up during a lecture?

Technological innovation is a strong driving force in our culture, and one that I don’t expect to slow down. I hope it doesn’t. It is a beautiful and thrilling experience to innovate. But innovation creates real tension with our ability to access our recorded history. And the more complex a technology (or website), the more difficult it is to access over time.

Ultimately, it’s up to the librarians and archivists to keep up and become innovators themselves, which believe me, I find to be a wonderful challenge. But, just as my professors taught me in art school, wise creators are ones who imagine their creations in the future and create them in such a way that they may make it there.

Bridging the Interstitials

As digital archivists we have been tasked with reaching beyond the moment of gathering already created content and into the moment of creation itself. We sometimes find ourselves at loose ends, primarily because there has been an historic disconnect between the archivist’s place on the digital content life cycle and the creator’s. If we consider the life cycle as a truly cyclical thing, creation and archiving are friendly neighbors, but in reality we are facing different directions: the creator pitching into the future and the archivist receiving from the past.

The challenge now is figuring out how to turn around once in a while and face each other. The questions we need to ask now are: 1. How can websites be designed to be stewarded into the future as remnants of the past; and 2. In what ways can archivists adjust their practice to accommodate the rapidly changing landscape of information sharing on the web?

Until recently, it seems that the historical aspects of the web haven’t entered much into the process of web design, policy, and innovation. But did you know that a large majority of web users think that when sharing their thoughts, images, and videos online they are going to be preserved in perpetuity? No matter how many licenses the general population clicks “Agree” to, or however many governing policies are developed that state the contrary, the millions of people sharing their content on websites still believe that there is an implicit accountability that should be upheld by the site owners.

In well-run corporations and government agencies, there is an acknowledged relationship between records creators, records managers, and archivists. When things are running properly, all three work together to ensure that the handoffs between them are as smooth and efficient as possible.

Along with the web as we know it, there has also emerged a new model for information creation, sharing, management, and archiving. Unfortunately, however, each of these things happens more or less independently, with ad hoc processes for transferring from one stakeholder to the next. Everything in this space changes so quickly that information management and archiving has developed into a reactionary practice. The Internet Archive is a reaction, just as the Archive Team and the International Internet Preservation Consortium are reactions.

Relatively speaking, the web as information infrastructure and commons for global human interaction is very new. When new things jump into existence, the processes to bridge the interstitials tend to take a while to catch up. Clearly, website creators are stirring to the fact that their creations are historically important and that there are organizations of professionals scrambling in the trenches to steward their creations into the far future.

Right now, just as website creators are coming to this awareness and web archivists are finding some footing, is the perfect time to pause and turn to face each other. We can start asking each other the important questions about who we are and how we operate. Most importantly, we can join our innovative powers to design a stronger, sleeker bridge between our spaces.

Lesson

Mills Baker — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In early 2005, unsure of what to do with my life and in desperate need of income, I took a job as an agent in a call center. It was an inbound B2B operation, so each day I clocked in, sat down, indicated to my phone what “state” I was in—ready!—and took around 110 calls from businesses all over the country over the course of eight hours or so.

While I was surprised not to hate it, friends and family were closer to shocked. I had never seemed to anyone likely to enjoy a business or corporate environment of any sort, let alone a call center, typically considered the worst imaginable place to be: a labyrinthine “cost center” of cubicles whose low-wage occupants are basically despised by their employer because nothing they do makes money. Indeed, because it’s viewed—incorrectly—as nothing but an expense, a typical call center is micromanaged to wring maximum operating efficiency from the people and machines inside. Often, there’s no choice for leaders: failure to control costs can result in off-shoring.

But I loved the people I worked with, who were fun and sincere in their desire to help customers: an oddity that forever imprinted the import of culture on me. From the first day, goofy passion for service abounded in leaders and peers. It was not immediately contagious, but it gradually became a natural value. And helping people with even trivial things feels good. Weirdly, we had fun. I wound up working there for five years, moving up and eventually managing operations.

If you work in a call center, you have precise allotments of time for absolutely everything you do; all your activity is tracked by the phones, the computers, and badges, the doors, the cameras, and the IT systems in general. Each day, each week, each month, you see how your average call time stacks up, whether your QA scores took a dive, whether you’re using too much time on bathroom breaks, and so on.

Because of high churn, policies must be binding and comprehensive; mitigating the possibility of unfairness, corruption, or liability is a priority, so managerially disempowering “automatic policies” are favored. I saw many people get fired against the will of their bosses, an upsetting absurdity. But without these policies, favoritism, inconsistency, and simple human variance meant perceived or actual unfairness.

Of course, making policies for every potentiality is the essence of bureaucracy. When systems cannot be adaptive, they must be prescriptive. The system cannot be adaptive to the single mother a few minutes late because her daycare had a fire alarm. Otherwise, the young man who just doesn’t seem to wake up on time will sue when he’s let go because of the inconsistent treatment. Given how many people pass through a call center in a year, this means that lawsuits can become a major cost. So policies proliferate.

I hated these policies as an agent on the phone, naturally. As I moved up, I hated having to administer them, debate them with other managers, apply them. By the time I had nearly 100 people reporting to me, I was in regular wars with HR over policy enforcement. I knew and liked my people, so I made exceptions when I deemed it sensible, which was often. In doing so, of course, I was making the organization inconsistent, ‘unfair’; I was increasing its liabilities, and in a diffuse way the difficulty of it remaining viable and my friends keeping their jobs. Thankfully, no feedback loops were short enough for this to trouble me. Moreover, I generally felt that quality service demanded a humane culture which respected individual realities more than bureaucratic mandates. So I had my own rationalization for ignoring policies, and the performance of my teams—in my opinion—validated my approach.

Still, I always knew that my rationalizations, even if somehow true, were not why I did it. Mostly, I liked being liked. It seemed obviously more important than policies or promotion that I not disappoint the trust of people I considered friends. We had achieved something like a little community, many of us there for years, and desired accord with one another mattered to us deeply. Looking back, the tension between mitigating externalities through centralization and policy as opposed to decentralizing control in the hopes that successful, useful communities will form seems fundamental to me. In real systems of scale, there will always be real trade-offs.

Containing Multitudes

Mills Baker — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Consider the uncle.

A friendly enough figure from your childhood, he’s now part of the constellation of family members with whom you share much and little at once. He tells amusing stories about your parents. He’s an avid fan of the same sports team that you are. You love his children, your cousins. But he also has unpleasant political opinions that you strongly dislike hearing.

He approaches you at a holiday gathering and begins to reminisce about your mother’s infamously rowdy youth. It’s riveting and hilarious. You’re wide-eyed, nodding along, looking directly at him with attention and a slight, involuntary smile on your face. But after a few stories, he digresses into his take on some political controversy, and here is another side of the man: his position seems not merely incorrect but deeply objectionable. Your replies are short, the bare minimum; you don’t maintain eye contact; perhaps you excuse yourself, mentioning that you need to refill your drink. (And perhaps you do.) Whereas the first subject yielded great conversation, the second halts it.

At the next gathering—assuming that he’s normatively socialized—your uncle might be likelier to bend your ear about your mom and cousins than about his opinions on politics. Your subtle, soft signals conveyed to him that you prefer some subjects to others, and both of you get more of what we all seek in social interactions if he respects those preferences. He gets your affection, attention, and appreciation; you’re entertained by stories of mom’s salad days. Best of all, no painful confrontations or laborious, preemptive declarations of acceptable subjects were needed. Fluidly, you came to an understanding that will be iterated on over the course of your lives. He will occasionally test your interest in proximate areas—as you will his—and together you’ll negotiate a conversational arrangement that works fairly well for both of you.

If we can only dream of such a successful resolution with family members, we at least know this process with friends and acquaintances. This “mutual personalization” of relationships is a constant, ubiquitous, and vital part of how we order our lives. We send and receive signals about one another’s attention, interest, and mood unceasingly, often involuntarily. Likewise, we tailor our own attention, expression, and behavior to achieve appropriate concord with interlocutors, and in doing so as individuals we aggregate into groups aligned around shared norms.

Our signals and responses range from the subtle and unconscious to the overt and deliberate, and they’ve evolved with us over the course of millennia. They are sometimes described as part of etiquette; they help us maintain harmonious relationships in different areas of our lives (and at different times). For groups, they constitute community standards and can even become the status quo. A rich set of subtle and multivalent signals allows individuals to preserve themselves even as they meet the demands of others and of groups, for good and ill.

Online, it’s a different story.

Instead of using the rich signaling vocabulary humanity has developed, our digital social relations are governed by very simple data models and UI schemes. There are often just a handful of actions users can take in social software, and most are overt and public. Except in the most advanced systems, the options regularly sum to a single choice: “I want to see everything from my uncle” or “I never want to see anything from my uncle.”

If only your uncle were that simple; if only anyone were.

Containing Contending Multitudes

Humans “contain multitudes,”¹ but it’s hard to feel at ease with our multiplicity when any utterance might be met with confrontation or sudden, summary rejection. While we can fault the judgmental, the truth is that we designers have created this situation; for example, by giving hundreds of millions of users a single room in which to discuss football games and funerals, protest marches and gossip, or by making stressfully explicit who “follows” whom. In such spaces, it’s amazing that any expressions occur without blowback.

This is bad enough for each of us, but worse is that individual anxieties about judgment, expression, and norms aggregate into group tensions. The impossibility of subtly negotiating multiple communities’ expectations and boundaries results in much of the notoriously intense harassment, moralizing, othering, and shaming we see online. These tribal behaviors are, after all, some of the tools communities use to substantiate themselves for their members’ well-being.

That’s not because there’s anything necessarily wrong with these communities, either. To feel safe and to communicate efficiently, people must have shared norms. Individuals and groups incessantly and instinctively attempt to establish such norms online, largely without stable success. We have few walls, little privacy, less tradition, no soft signaling, and more emboldened—often anonymous—interlopers. The online scrum is, in many ways, a battle for reliable community norms in spaces that hold many partially or fully incompatible people and groups.

In sum: we are living in simple software, and preferences collide. Deprived of gentle means for achieving mutual personalization, we cannot escape undesirable interactions and content without social costs. Painfully, we also become the objectionable other to people with whom we’d have perfectly rewarding, fluid, continually refined relationships in real life. Everyone must take everyone else in full or not at all, and if everyone is either in or out—of social circles, of scenes—community membership becomes a contentious proposition. Belonging becomes binary; total identification with a community is mandatory, and communities must aggressively assert their norms and both protect and police their memberships. They punish non-compliance within and react against the other outside, as threatened communities do.

For people and communities, this has not only social implications but moral ones, as online spaces become zones of culture conflict in which we must judge and be judged. The “chilling effect” on expression is real; some individuals muzzle the selves they suspect aren’t universally palatable, while the brash come to dominate discourse. For systems designers, it is one of many problems that approach the political in nature. Many attempt to address the problem with increasingly legislative policies about what is and isn’t acceptable behavior. But who decides what’s acceptable is itself a political question.

One serious error is to think that there are “good” users and “bad” users, and that we need merely to provide reporting tools to allow the ferreting out and banning of the latter. While there are truly bad actors who must be removed, they cause a minority of clashes. In real world terms, crime is less common than incompatibility in its many forms. So social software designers shouldn’t aspire to be legislators of what’s “good” but rather framers whose systems allow individuals and communities to determine their own mores. This is a difficult challenge, but a mandatory one; as the Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.²

For designers of products with many users, it’s crucial to understand not only the practical relativity of good and evil, but also that humans have many selves, some of which come and go during their lifetimes. A well-designed system—like a well-designed government—mitigates the costs of discordant differences while allowing individuals the maximum degree of freedom to be themselves, even as it encourages communities to form and benefit from their own norms and traditions.

Your uncle isn’t an evil person, after all. But when you must judge him in full, he—like most humans—falls short of perfection. On the other hand, you know some of your opinions must irritate him. Do you want a world in which unanimity of opinion is required even for mere acquaintanceship? Of course not!

Still, seeing his posts bums you out, makes you feel argumentative, sets you off on vexing internal debates with imagined foes about issues you don’t even intend to be thinking about. So: do you unfollow your uncle? Do you care how that makes him feel?

And what if, rather than an uncle, it’s a friend or colleague, or a boss or mentor? And imagine this dilemma repeated for every relationship between every pair of people! How will your community—whatever it is—achieve a safe and reliable composition that lets members “be themselves” without getting aggressive about intruders who don’t share your norms (aggression which may itself be norm-violating)?

Why do these ostensibly social systems make social life harder? And what can be done about it?

Patterns We Copy

Most social software is based on existing software patterns rather than how we live and coexist. Real-world social dynamics are so complex that we can hardly understand them, let alone imagine how they might be mirrored in, say, a user interface. Even if we were to try and match their complexity—presenting a user with hundreds of sliders, checkboxes, and options for responding to posts or reacting to another user—all we’d accomplish is overburdening her with administrative tasks. It would never accurately capture her full social sentiments, and regardless, it would be time-consuming and annoying.

Indeed most of our interfaces require explicit, conscious action, and that in itself is problematic for the replication of our full range of signals, many of which are, again, unconscious or ambiguous. Sometimes the precise mechanism of a signal is that its ambiguity—your uncle may wonder, “Does she really need a drink, or is she tired of my talking politics?”—permits both parties to interpret it in the most personally palatable way. Face-saving is important. User interfaces are not generally well-suited for ambiguous signals, let alone unconscious ones.

But clever designs find ways around this. Consider the issue for a dating app: How can we make finding a partner no more painful than it is in the real world, and hopefully less? How can we mitigate the anxiety of people in a delicate social situation involving approval and rejection?

We can start by considering how people protect feelings in real life. One very common method is lying. Say you ask for a phone number from someone at a bar and get it, but it’s fake. This saves face that night—while you’re intoxicated, with your friends, in public—and allows you to process your feelings however you like the next day: “I must have been too drunk to hear the number right!” Even if you do feel rejected, it’s still less likely to embarrass you than being rejected face-to-face; and besides, what can you do? Indeed, lying is a popular solution: “I’m seeing someone” also works in this case. We lie even to our friends: “Sure, I’d love to do that!” we say face-to-face, and later send the email “Oh my gosh, it turns out we have plans.” And so on.

But lying isn’t really supported in software. We can lie to other people through software—for example, all profile bios—but lying to software—having software operate with false ideas of what we want or think—isn’t compatible with achieving utility. A dating app that people lie to about whom they like will not work very well!

Another solution is to use intermediaries: “Pat, can you ask Lee if Jesse likes me?” Long after grade school, forms of this persist. We attempt to validate whether we’re liked (or not) through a third party in part because intermediaries translate and soften signals. But dating services in which you involve your friends as wing-people are rare.

The answer provided by the double-opt-in mechanic common to Tinder and many other services borrows from both of these real-world solutions: Have an intermediary systematic function depersonalize some of what happens, rendering signals ambiguous. This way, no one can know that they’ve been rejected. Individuals can be more at ease and the community will have fewer disturbances caused by the social costs of approval and rejection.

In effect, this outsources lying and uses a third party to soften the blow. When you “approve” of a person but never hear back, it is the service’s refusal to distinguish between “people who haven’t seen you” and “people who reject you” that saves you face, as though the service is giving you fake phone numbers. You can only wonder: “Was there just a harmless miss, or was I rejected?” This is an outstanding solution, because it not only restores but actually amplifies the ambiguity of the real-world social process. In truth, it’s hard to approach people and ask for numbers. It’s often the case that we can tell when we’re liked or disliked; and with mobile phones, creeps test phone numbers right away anyway!

So this solution enhances the capacity of individuals to make free choices with reduced fear of social cost. In this sense, these services improve on reality by taking the solutions we use in the real world, abstracting them to consider their consequences, and then figuring out how software can achieve the same consequences with different mechanisms.

Translating Mechanisms

Let’s try to generalize the problem for any social software: How can we enable mutual, painless personalization of social experiences online? What features of evolved real-world individual and community social dynamics can we replicate with current technology?

There are countless possibilities at many levels of design. I’ll mention one abstractly: systems should be able to fluidly recognize and concentrate communities of users with soft borders, permitting less explicit affiliations and departures but still supporting zones where community norms abide. There are systematic and user-interface problems to solve, but doing so would likely reduce the community defining and protecting behaviors that make public spaces online so problematic. Networks in which we can be our bar-selves, work-selves, gossip-selves, activist-selves, parent-selves, critical-selves, and other-selves without interference—city-like networks in which the bar and city hall aren’t the same space, but also aren’t private, rigidly defined, members-only spaces—are hard to imagine visually but will exist someday.

In the meantime, there are other technologies being used to solve these sorts of problems. Among them, machine-learning personalization is the assistive intermediary function par excellence. Best-known as what powers Facebook’s “Top Stories” news feed, machine-learning personalization aggregates hundreds of explicit and implicit signals, including some that are subtle or even unconscious. It acts as the intermediary whom we blame or credit and whose role lessens the social cost of our preferences. It continually explores our preferences and refines its model as it (and we) change over time. Meanwhile, it requires little to no administration and is fundamentally diversifying, as it creates maximally individuated software experiences.

It achieves this diversity through a process very much like that used in real-world social situations. When a machine-learning system first “meets” you, it must make some truly random guesses, unless there’s any inherited contextual information from the start (for example, you’ve connected another service that it can mine for data). As it learns about you, it can increasingly relate you with cohorts (based on vectors of signals). It can also continually introduce test content in the proportion you seem to favor, from proximate or orthogonal cohorts or even randomized. This is more or less how humans operate when they meet, of course: some inherited data—perhaps an outfit or an introduction—guides initial explorations, but as we form a mental model of whom we’re dealing with, we get better at guessing whether they’ll enjoy talking about sports or politics or technology or food. If we’re smart and decent, we don’t stereotype; such signals are directional, but not exclusionary. So too with machine learning, which never “finishes” learning about each user or reduces her to a flat, unchanging profile.

Indeed, machine-learning personalization of content is possibly the most democratic editorial process yet deployed at scale. In a well-personalized feed, no one’s conception of what’s best matters but yours, and that remains true even if you don’t know what you like or lack the time, ability, or interest to describe all the valences of interests and habits that constitute your full identity. A system with sophisticated machine learning has, in effect, deployed an attentive assistant whose priority is to find out what you care about, which people you want to hear from, what content you find objectionable, and even how your moods and tastes vary with time and context.

But machine-learning personalization has been controversial in the design community, partly because of confusion about how we socialize in reality.

Firehose or Fascism

Critics of machine-learning personalization tend to make one of three claims.

First, some fear that personalization concentrates “control” in the hands of the network owners, who tinker with opaque algorithms whose details we can never know. But networks owners don’t want control; they want our use and attention. Personalization can be computationally costly, but companies choose to bear those costs because they must provide users with good experiences—whatever that means to each of us—or we’ll find other networks. Machine-learning personalization doesn’t mean that networks—let alone persons working for the network—decide what you see; it means that you decide what you see. A bad feed, which through omission censors content users want, will eventually drive us away from any network, no matter how popular or powerful.

A second view is that even if we control our feeds, personalization partializes our view of the world, trapping us in “filter bubbles” that deny us access to novel or dissenting views. However, this is mistaken too. Personalization is a constant, daily fact, not a new technological phenomenon. We all adjust our signals, our environments, our social circles, our media intakes to be as we want, and typically we only gainsay the choices of others (especially others whose opinions we disagree with). But no one should cede control of their bookshelves, evenings, television remote, party invitation list, or the like to an imposed conception of “what a person should experience,” dictated by these critics or anyone else.

Furthermore, non-personalized social software is not an option: as networks scale and every user’s graph grows, simple chronological feeds become unmanageable. We can burden the user with the social and administrative costs, or we can have systems bear those costs for them, as traditions and norms do in the real world. But we cannot prescribe the social and informational diet, as it were, for others, and it’s especially important that designers remember this; we are not arbiters of what’s good; we create so that humans can be empowered to pursue their own ends, not ours.

The third major concern is that machine-learning personalization is difficult, and poor execution results in frustrating software, content, and social experiences. This is absolutely true, and will remain an issue—as it is on Facebook, for example—until machine-learning solutions improve, are standardized, and are commoditized. But this is true of everything in technology, and these problems are soluble.

The Illusion of Control

Machine-learning personalization is just one means of achieving real-world ends in software, of course. But it’s illustrative of how open-minded we should be in evaluating technology. It’s crucial that designers think seriously and pragmatically about consequences rather than mapping their reactions to moralizing narratives. The idea that personalization is about corporate or political control is an emotionally satisfying but inaccurate one. It ignores how humans, human societies, and machine learning all work. It also ignores the problems personalization is trying to solve: to help people navigate an ocean of content and many types of social connections.

If some of our experiences have made us wary of personalization, most of us have had moments where the opposite is true, too. How brittle personalization is—how dependent our experiences are on it working well—is itself variable between products and designs. How much personalization interferes with a user’s cognitive model of your software, for example, is something to think about and mitigate.

But the time when there were primarily power users online is over. Most users do not want the “control” of RSS and Twitter lists and blocking, muting, and unfollowing their fellows. Nor do they want our view of what they should read, whom they should know, or how they should act. They want to be empowered to find the information that matters to them, share and interact with the people they choose, and experience the world on their terms. Not only does personalization not thwart information diversity, it helps diverse individuals live and learn as they please. And empowering people with that kind of control should be—for designers who favor democracy—a lifelong goal.

Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass (1855). ↩
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 (WestviewPress, 1974). ↩

Lesson

Jessica Collier — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I often tell the story of my academic transition by starting in media res: “The day after I filed my dissertation, I went to work full-time as a consultant for a small software company.”

Really, the things that I did the day after I filed my dissertation—a Saturday—were: 1. cry, partly out of naked relief and partly out of sheer terror, and 2. go on a long hike up at Point Reyes to banish the existential but also weirdly postpartum dread of starting anew, all over again.

I went to work as a full-time consultant on Monday. The elision of the weekend might seem insignificant, but it does a lot of rhetorical heavy-lifting. It indicates immediate turnaround, pulled off without hitch or hesitation. Picking up in the middle of the action, it omits the decision-making process that led to a non-academic career. Specifically, I don’t say: “I realized that, while I enjoyed teaching, I didn’t want to devote as much time to it as most academic appointments required. I also realized that writing for the narrow audience that academia provides felt increasingly claustrophobic and unfulfilling.”

I’ve told this story in a conference room, one-on-one with a CEO. I’ve told it in front of a panel of eleven people at a job interview. I’ve told it at parties and family get-togethers over glasses of wine. Each time, I’ve presented what was in fact a genuinely traumatic transition as a foregone conclusion.

I learned from the best how to polish away rough edges. My PhD advisor—a position for life, which is why I speak of it in the present tense though I am as fully doctored as it is possible to be—is a very deliberate, detail-oriented, and patient person. Her ability to read, closely and beautifully and ruthlessly, everything from novels to paintings to advertisements to dissertation chapters is inextricable from her penchant for transmitting heady life lessons masked as professional truisms.

“Jessica”—she prefaces advice with solemn first-naming—“Jessica,” she said one rainy afternoon well into my doctoral candidacy, looking up from a stack of printed draft pages strewn with comments in her green ink, “these projects are with us for years.”

We were in a cafe, sharing a plate of biscotti. My iced coffee was sweating on the wood table. Despite the caffeine, I was exhausted, chafing under what felt like an endless apprenticeship-cum-prolonged-adolescence that was becoming harder and harder to explain to my loved ones who existed outside of academia (namely, all of them). I wanted to send out the marked-up pages as an article—publish or perish—and she was keen for me to hone the work further, holding it tightly to my chest until the day that it was so perfect, so magnificent, so seamless a thing that it would appear without warning in a journal as though sprung from Zeus’s forehead. Her compact advice—These projects are with us for years—was exemplary of the only kind of writing she deemed suitable for the eyes of the world: polished and refined, distilled and precise, packing endless meaning into well-chosen words.

Under her mentorship, I acquired a verbal tic intended primarily for initiating discussion of the kinds of texts that she believed in producing: “What can we say about this?” Standing in front of a class, she—and eventually I—would read a passage from Anne Bradstreet or Margaret Fuller or Emily Dickinson or Henry Thoreau, then look up and ask, with a small smile that betrayed just how many things there were to say, “What can we say?”

It is, to be honest, the most foolproof way I’ve encountered to dive into lines of text. I mean, what can we say about that advice, those seven words articulating a worldview that seems to revolve around endless incubation? Graduate school can feel like a continuous present, with no clear sense of the future. You mull, and you mull, and you mull, iterating on the same ideas until they’re worth something in the academic marketplace. But how do you square that with the capitalist model of knowledge production at the core of contemporary academic life, let alone the model of material production at the core of private industry?

Technological products, after all, will not be with us for years. You have to get them out the door. Tech is all future—what you ship today, you’ll iterate tomorrow. The entire industry evolves so quickly that it’s hard to make the present count.

When I read it closely, These projects are with us for years is a summation of a particular model of professionalism. In this model, all of the struggle, the labor, the gut-tearing process of thinking and writing and creating ideas must be rendered invisible, folded into something larger that is always in process. The final product is never completely final, but it’s an ever-expanding representation of what your mind is capable of. And you—smooth and polished, seamless and self-possessed, never scrappy or harried—grow to embody your work.

I am a deliberate and detail-oriented but rather impatient person. I want to create thoughtful work. I want to put it out into the world so that it can develop with the aid of oxygen, breathe in the zeitgeist and shape itself accordingly. And I don’t see these desires as mutually exclusive.

In the end, I left my academic career behind. I did not, however, leave everything it bequeathed me. I’ve retained that verbal tic. I’ve internalized the need to theorize about what I do—to think not just about getting work done but about articulating how to do it and imagining the larger ramifications of that process. And I’ve realized that the most important piece of that rainy day advice is not simply the idea that good work is cumulative, but the concomitant notion that as you gradually iterate on your work, you become a different version of yourself.

The thought processes honed by creating things—those are what last, what carry over into the next things you build and how you live. Maybe it doesn’t take seven years to create one substantial thing, but it takes far more than seven years to become a person capable of creating something worthy of being called a life’s work. These projects are with us for years.

Our Narratives, Ourselves

Jessica Collier — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson¹

When I was new to the technology industry—not wide-eyed exactly, but still doing a lot of double-takes at strange terms and blithe turns of phrase, followed by a lot of surreptitious Googling—I was struck by how very idealistic the whole enterprise seemed. Cycling down Valencia Street in San Francisco, past the coffee shop where I had crammed fifteen hours a day for my doctoral qualifying exams, the sense of possibility was palpable. I felt, like Emerson crossing Boston Common, the extraordinary at work in the everyday.

Indeed, Silicon Valley takes a lot of lessons from transcendental idealism. Its ethos combines a sense of connectedness to a larger force with the freedom to define yourself; the promise of this strange, exhilarating, half-mythical cocktail is that you determine your own fate. It’s a boomtown mindset, undoubtedly—there a lot of people stumbling around drunk—but also a concrete manifestation of something that the Transcendentalists understood on a more philosophical level: you can change the world by imagining it differently.

This piece is about reimagining narrative. The pervasive sense of possibility means that, as an industry, we exist in a perpetual state of self-definition. Neither our products nor the organizations that produce them are static for long. In such an environment words matter, of course, but why? How do we deal with language in the course of designing things that we think might, just might, change the world, even as those products themselves are always changing? Finally, in doing this thinking around narrative, what can we learn about our industry and ourselves?

Works in Progress

We’re constantly seeking to make technology products more human. The current emphasis on storytelling stems, we claim, from the belief that fewer things are more inherently human than the power of narrative. And this isn’t just tech talking: it’s a grand American tradition to reap the rewards of telling a good story. Benjamin Franklin, that abundant source of aphorisms and productivity tips, is infamous for a story in his Autobiography about, of all things, fishing.

On a sea voyage from Boston in the 1720s, Franklin’s ship is becalmed off Rhode Island, and his fellow passengers begin catching cod. On a “vegetable diet,” he views “the taking every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter.”

This view seems “reasonable,” but Franklin, previously “a great lover of fish,” is also hungry. As the cod in the frying pan begin to smell appetizing, he battles with desire until recollecting that, when the fish were sliced open, smaller fish were taken out of their stomachs. “If you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you,” thinks Franklin and dines happily.

“So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature,” he reflects of this story in the Autobiography, which he began writing in 1771, “since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.”² What the reader might be tempted to call a lack of conviction Franklin pins instead on a renewal of principle: hungry for fresh fish, he simply revisits his original reasoning and finds it in need of iteration. Presented with the most deliberate artifice, this evolution is nonetheless organic, imbuing the colonial recollection with a sentiment that should feel familiar to us today. The narrative structure does as much work as the events of the story, defining Franklin not as a vegetarian or pescatarian but as someone who is always redefining himself.

It’s the tale, in other words, but also the telling.

People in Progress

Industry catchphrases reflect a penchant to iterate fearlessly on products—rapid prototyping, “fuck it, ship it,” lean principles, “fail fast”—but rarely do we delve into the constant evolution around how we define ourselves as we build them.

One of the things that I learned early on, without any Googling at all, is that professional identities change before our very eyes. There wasn’t, for example, a community manager or head of people ops at most organizations five years back. It’s hard to know how marketing and support hybridized into “community,” or when precisely human resources began morphing into “people operations,” but our colleagues who work in these fledgling fields would likely agree that they represent an evolution in thinking rather than a simple etymological switch.

The field of design in particular has undergone a long and dramatic change. In 1986, Brenda K. Laurel wrote that designers “remain a ‘luxury item’ in the consumer end of the industry.”³ Ten years later, design was still a nascent discipline. Over the last two decades, however, it has professionalized fiercely. Though it’s still common to hear reductionist arguments about design as a way to “make things pretty,” a good designer is now considered a necessity for any organization intent on building something usable and useful.

The new luxury item of the design and development process is the writer. Even in the midst of a content renaissance, designers, product managers, and engineers often fill the writerly void, inserting language in their particular style and paining persnickety custodians of voice and tone everywhere.

As a writer, my job titles have spanned various permutations of “user experience writer” and “content strategist”—including, for the minimalist win, “writer.” “Design” is occasionally thrown in. “Wordsmith” and “storyteller” have been tossed around. I’ve been referred to as a “word engineer,” “word designer,” and “word expert.” All of this is fair: I deal primarily with words, which are a type of content. I work on UX and product and exploration teams. I craft (design? engineer? smith?) narratives.

My résumé, then, is a slow-motion capture of the chaotic evolution of our thinking around narrative. If you look closely enough, this etymological chaos reveals a lot about our industry-wide relationship—ambivalently attentive, intermittently enthusiastic—to words.

All the Content

For writers who care deeply about language in web and product design, content strategy is a gateway drug. Content strategy is not, however, exclusively or even primarily focused on writing. To deploy Kristina Halvorson’s widely quoted definition, “Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.”⁴ The term surfaced in the late 1990s as a strategic approach to dealing with what the typical user faced on the web: a morass of words and images and data and sounds and video and comments in desperate need of architecting. Formulating itself as an umbrella discipline, content strategy claims jurisdiction over, well, everything that the user encounters on the web plus the organizing principles behind it:

Everything is content … What about design? Yes, it’s content. Structure? Content. Metadata? Also content.

— Rachel Lovinger⁵

The web is content. Content is the web.

— Kristina Halvorson⁶

In the web industry, anything that conveys meaningful information to humans is called ‘content.’

— Erin Kissane⁷

These definitions are provocative by nature, open for interpretation like a Rorschach inkblot test. As a result, they sometimes lead to disclaimers. “Is content strategy the same as content marketing?” asks Jonathon Colman. “No, never.”⁸ Content strategy “doesn’t belong to any of us any more than graphic design belongs to advertising or project management to aerospace engineering,” contends Kissane.⁹

These sources, along with many others that have shaped content strategy as a discipline, point to two related challenges. First, like the value of design in 1986 or even at the turn of the millennium, the value of writing and careful language is still not assumed. We are well on our way, but content strategy, the intuitive entry point for changing hearts and minds, is a “big, big world” that—and this is problem number two—currently covers perhaps too many sins for its own good.¹⁰ It’s time for a conversation about what sits under the “everything” umbrella.

Get Thee to an Ivory Tower

This discussion might seem rather academic, but that is, frankly, kind of the point: it’s a way of pulling back the curtain on how we specialize and adapt in an industry that moves quickly. Indeed, as we map the content terrain to make it more legible for both practitioners and observers, we might take a page from academia.

Consider the field of English, which I use as an analogy because many writers and content people have a background in literature, myself included. Like content strategy, English is a big, broad discipline rather than a niche one; it contains multitudes. To accommodate the specialization necessary for careful thinking, it has splintered into subfields. Practitioners identify their work by period as well as by ethnicity or nation or “other”—gender and women’s studies, animal studies, African-American studies, disability studies.

Specialization does not, however, mean silos. Disciplinary boundaries are permeable and overlapping. A nineteenth-century American literature course, for example, might cover Transcendentalism, slave narratives, sermons, philosophical essays, poetry, and popular novels by female writers, with texts that include prints, paintings, caricatures, and material objects in addition to books. This approach makes the implicit argument that you can’t understand a sliver of cultural history like nineteenth-century American literature without context. You can’t produce good work in a silo.

Forging a field that claims substantive ties to a broader discipline does not require living in an echo chamber. For writers, now is a moment to define not just how we manage “content,” but how we approach the language that constructs the user experience. What does it mean to think more deliberately about narrative, writing, words—not to divorce them from content writ large, but to formulate practices for the corner of content strategy that accounts for linguistic style and nuance? What does it mean to practice narrative design?

The Narrative User Experience

We’re familiar by now with the assertion that every product tells a story. We work so hard to tell good ones, but words matter even more when, in product design as in poetry, we’re using fewer of them. Deconstructing stories and designing them for particular contexts is a specialized craft—a craft that requires engaging with language on its broadest and most persnickety levels simultaneously to create precise, systematic nomenclature.

Words are extraordinarily powerful product tools, but we’re not yet accustomed to dealing with them in the design process. Organizational dynamics and workflows often conspire to contain the messy work of narrative with a modular approach:

“What’s a better word for [insert random word]?”

“I’ll just lorem ipsum this for now.”

“Can we get a line of copy?”

“I need words here.”

The peaceable response would be to say, “Just a sec,” “Fine,” “Yes,” “OK,” and generate some words for whatever piece of interface or mockup or wireframe your well-meaning colleagues are pointing at. But if you’re concerned about overall user experience, it is, instead, a thousand times, “No.” Narrative is a collaborative effort. Each time we move a user through a flow, designers and writers together have the responsibility to help them relate to it and make meaning along the way. It should, then, come as no surprise that work approached in a piecemeal way doesn’t end up being as good as it could be.

Despite the odd panoply of titles, the core of my job has always been to fashion, in concert with interaction design, a consistent narrative experience that guides users through a product or interface or feature. Acting as a drive-by human thesaurus or a drop-words-here copywriter made me bad at that job, but the product suffered, too. I wanted to change the nature of the conversations happening throughout the design process, not by claiming everything as my purview but by honing in on what really matters when writing for the user experience: a holistic approach to language.

As we build products, we would do well to think more deliberately about the narrative we want users to take away. What is the thesis of this feature? How does it allow the larger product to fulfill its destiny? What are the microelements with which the user interacts that allow the narrative to take shape gradually and organically? What impact do those elements have on the larger interface? Narrative UX addresses the linguistic facet of these questions so that users can immerse themselves in an experience—so that the seams, which often chafe when product language is halting or robotic or poorly considered, melt away.

Always Be Rewriting

Let’s return to that term, storytelling, which often manifests when we talk about user-facing language. We tend to account for its intense hold on our collective imagination by noting that, in an age when people are wired tautly together, stories are a natural unit of human intercourse. But naturalizing something, claiming that it’s innate rather than learned, is an easy way to discount the work and skill required to create it. Popular conceptions of the art of storytelling—the fact that stories are, simultaneously, what we read to children before bedtime and what we believe to be a key conversion and retention tactic—belie the complex structure and linguistic precision that go into the practice of writing for users.

Good stories aren’t the breezy outcome of inspiration any more than they’re the final, neglected task on a product manager’s checklist. Rather, good stories are the sum of many technical decisions. We prize an accessible, conversational narrative experience for users, but an easygoing tone isn’t easy to achieve. We want the magical experience of the final product to supersede the labor that went into creating it, to be greater than the sum of its parts. That means doing to our products what professional writers do: endless drafting, fearless cutting, perpetual revising.

It’s the tale but also the telling. What Ben Franklin teaches us, in an industry that’s constantly redefining itself, is that demonstrating to the world who you are and what you stand for is an iterative and ongoing process. Though famously influential, the Autobiography was never finished—Franklin worked on it from 1771 until his death in 1790, expanding and recollecting and correcting and revising. Technical decisions over the course of almost twenty years crafted what we experience as the final product, a narrative construct that becomes conflated in most reader’s minds with the man himself.

Then as now, narrative is a moving target. We reimagine it because, in order to evolve, we must. The promise of Silicon Valley’s transcendental ethos—the freedom to define yourself by tapping into a larger force, thereby determining your fate—is really just a commitment that we make to transcend our current state. We design the narratives that we think might, just might, change the world by always rewriting both our software and ourselves. We shape our own history by writing over it a more refined narrative than the one we wrote yesterday. Channeling Emerson, we write our imagination into reality, and idealistically into a better future.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (James Munroe and Company, 1836). ↩
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1888). ↩
Brenda K. Laurel, “Interface as Mimesis,” User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986). ↩
Kristina Halvorson, “The Discipline of Content Strategy,” A List Apart, December 16, 2008. ↩
Rachel Lovinger, “Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data,” Boxes and Arrows, March 27, 2007. ↩
Halvorson, 2008. ↩
Erin Kissane, The Elements of Content Strategy (A Book Apart, 2011). ↩
Jonathon Colman, “The Epic List of Content Strategy Resources,” Jonathon Colman (blog), February 4, 2013. ↩
Erin Kissane, “Content Strategy Is Not User Experience,” Brain Traffic (blog), February 10, 2011. ↩
Ibid. ↩

Lesson

Kelli Anderson — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Our eyes followed the whoosh as it traveled from one end of the room to the other, provoking whoas of admiration. That sound bounced off the floral wallpaper, around ceramic pineapple soap dispensers, and reverberated into the four corners of a space where it was not supposed to be.

We had covered the bathroom mirror in an invisible graffiti of hairspray. Now with contraband cigarette lighter in hand, my buddy Adam and I took turns setting sticky lines ablaze. Flaming cat face after flickering obscenity, each drawing was a purple-orange burst for only a moment. The mirror emerged unscathed each time, as if some kind of exculpatory miracle had just occurred. But on the other side of the looking glass, our minds had forever changed. We were now officially skeevy teenagers, here to break the rules.

By violating the code of domestic conduct, we transformed a suburban bathroom scene into a lightshow of flaming danger. Herein lies the design flaw of all rules: they reward the breaker, not the follower, with an addictive sense of expanded possibilities. Surrounding any prohibition is a beckoning vacuum—a space within which almost anything can feel novel and thrilling. And so we found ourselves basking in our radical change of scenery without ever leaving the room. Which was a good thing because I was grounded. For like ever.

It won’t come as a surprise that I was stuck in my room for most of adolescence. The same blue, lumpy paint coated the walls before and after I had watched Kubrick, read Marx, heard Nirvana. I lacked the power to actually modify my physical surroundings. But I could flip the table with panache, if only for a surreal moment. From there, the sweet taste of one broken boundary tended to spread.

I’d like to think I’m less skeevy as an adult now, but I still struggle with rules. Breaking them is an impulse when engaging with anything, even if I find myself gluing the shards back together in the end.

When I landed in the Tokyo airport last year, I was confronted with a confoundingly different approach to rules. At odds with the silent march of roller-bag walkers, I darted across the low-pile carpet to peer into shop windows. There I found that every little object had been reinvented: 50 different ways to construct a notebook, 20 different variations on the nail clipper.

And yet, everyone walks single file. Everyone stops for “don’t walk” signs. I paused, How could this be? How could such prolific experimentation be nurtured in a place where rule following is a national pastime?

As part of a cultural exchange for designers, I continued my travel out to Takaoka, and then Kanazawa. I visited several design, art, and robotics studios around the country. Wherever I went, I saw wildly unorthodox versions of everyday things and therefore persisted with my inappropriate line of questioning.

I met a designer who had discovered that an additional bend could transform the metal paperclip into a much superior clip-and-carabiner combo. When asked why no one had realized this before, he simply guessed that no one ever looks closely at something as simple as a line.

“We take lines for granted,” he said. A line is too fundamental a thing to attract the focus of intentional innovation: innovation has to come from the line itself.

Similarly, I met a metalworker who had deviated from a traditional casting technique to establish his own metalwork genre. He described the departure this way: “I accidentally dropped one of the rods. I thought it looked incredible floating in the molten metal, and so, I kept it.”

The common sentiment was that it was the subject’s role to free itself from the complacency of the human imagination. It wasn’t, as I had assumed, the designer’s impulse to challenge established morphologies. Materials have a slow way of revealing their more radical properties on their own terms, as you spend time with them.

Common wisdom tells us that having more choices is always better. The strategy is to keep as many options open for as long as possible. But what if the opposite were true? In the scientific method, for example, one can only gain understanding by narrowing possibilities. Scientific experimentation requires that commitments be made, that everything be strictly controlled except for the lone variable under investigation.

I know now that in truly experimental spaces, something more akin to scientific observation transpires. When everything else is fixed, ordered, and controlled, rules can function like a microscope, attuning our senses to things we couldn’t perceive otherwise. This focus subdivides our gaze into prisms of greater and greater subtleties. The boundary between black and white is then split into a hundred interstitial tones, so that the rules we thought were there are revealed to be the illusion they truly are.

Conversing with a Möbius Strip

Kelli Anderson — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Note: Kelli has also published an updated version of this article.

In the film Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?, Michel Gondry takes advantage of Noam Chomsky’s open-door interview policy to see what he can learn about him.¹ Over the course of several visits, he greets the elder linguist, gets comfortable, revs up the clickety Bolex camera, and reads a prepared question—smuggled in, we imagine, from another universe entirely.

As viewers, we can only hear them. (Gondry later sets the words to a visual track of hand-scrawled animation.) Standing in for facial expressions are the audible artifacts of attentiveness: the variations in pacing, the backing up, the stopping short.

Beloved for his you-just-have-to-see-it videos, Gondry initially seems an unlikely fanboy of the guy known as “the father of modern linguistics.” However, Gondry’s experiments with film’s illusionistic loopholes and Chomsky’s discoveries of how language acquisition works share something remarkable in common. Both men abandoned the prescribed methodologies of their fields and instead tested hunches into unknown territory.

Next question.

After a deferential pause, the filmmaker falls out of step with his subject by posing a question that’s uncharacteristically far afield. It’s about bees. But just as quickly as a buzzing motif is rotoscoped in, Chomsky shuts the thing down. The serene colors abruptly turn to confusion, capsizing the frame into waves of colored lines.

Gondry’s question relates to how bees build ambitious, complex worlds for themselves by crafting the single shape of a hexagon over and over again. Since the hexagons probably weren’t mandated by some sort of bee-zoning committee, we must assume that bees simply “think in hexagon.” Of course, Gondry’s bees in this metaphor are really us, and he is really asking Chomsky, “Is language our hexagon?” Does language define the limits of everything we dream up?

The limits of my language are the limits of my world.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein²

Gondry would have been better off asking cognitive scientist and linguist Lera Boroditsky the bee question. For the past ten years, she has been researching how language shapes thought, documenting the relationship between our word-reality and our sense-reality. Her experiments demonstrate that our brain’s aptitudes really do differ according to how different languages frame the world for us.

For example, the language of the Kuuk Thaayorre, an Aboriginal Australian group, designates space in terms of the cardinal directions (your north leg, a south turn, etc.), rather than our relative left and right.³ When dumped in a maze-like building for a few hours, the Kuuk Thaayorre performed far better than their western counterparts in signaling researchers back to the entrance. It turns out they are superior spatial thinkers and better navigators.

Boroditsky explains why this is the case: “An obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly.”

A similar observation led Boroditsky to test whether differences in color terms leads to differences in how we see color, comparing English and Russian speakers. In Russian, there’s a word for light blue and one for dark blue, but not blue. They’re simply two different colors, like orange and yellow.

Boroditsky tested the two groups in a lab to see if light and dark blue actually look more distinct to Russian speakers’ eyes. Judging by differences in the time it took them to identify the colors, they do. The Russian speakers could distinguish between the two colors instantly, and the English speakers lagged behind, sometimes by seconds.

Boroditsky’s research suggests that language shapes our sensory experience of the world because it directs us to pay attention differently—language focuses our gaze on concepts for which there are words. An obvious conclusion, perhaps, but this has broad implications for the deprioritized zones. Even in an age when we can collect deep, nuanced data on almost anything, there are big holes in our scaffolding. For example, when we get sublimely dizzy staring up into a cathedral ceiling, shift to and fro to see the end of a long corridor wag, or glance back at an empty apartment, we feel—through our senses—the profound weight of spatial events. But try to tell a friend about it and it evaporates like a dream.

In the final essay written before his death, sculptor Donald Judd noted that his life’s work with space yielded “particular and plentifully-diverse knowledge” to him, but that “to almost everyone it doesn’t exist.”⁴ Why do we have terms for linguistic minutiae like “synecdoche” and “metonymy,” while we lack granularity for visual, spatial, audible, and tactile phenomena?

Try to find the words to describe a normal, everyday something—like how cilantro smells—and you’ll quickly find the edges of language. All interfaces create the illusion of comprehensiveness, as if to say, “This, and only this, is what you can do.” It’s to be expected then that language, as an interface, pulls the imagination into its own orbit.

To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.

— Paul Valéry⁵

So how do we ask a question beyond the bounds of an interface? Is there a way to converse with the material world in its own vocabulary? Many art and design thinkers have attempted to give proper, permanent expression to those unlabeled experiences we encounter.

The artist Robert Irwin may be the unofficial mascot of coherent discussions with the unnameable. In 1977, and then again in 2013, he installed a piece so large that it consumed the entire cement fourth floor of the Whitney.⁶ However, when the show opened, people often walked right by it. Irwin recalls, “People would step out of the elevator, say, ‘Hmm, empty room,’ and hop back in before the doors shut.” But the floor was not quite empty—and in Irwin’s work, “not quite” can mean “the entire world.”

When I visited the reunion tour in 2013, there was nothing I could name—no sculptures, vitrines, frames, hardware. The space appeared to contain only a single stretch of sheer material dividing the room into a grid of four chunks. It was all dramatically oriented to a single window.

Traditionally, one would call this an empty room, but to the senses, it was full—loaded with shifting shapes, corners, shadows, surfaces, dramatic lines, textural changes, rays of light, blurriness, and sharp edges. Lines pivoted and cascaded around me in an orchestrated slow shift as I walked from corner to corner. This new sensitivity stuck with me beyond the museum walls, as I noticed the skyscrapers bending in a canopy above my head. All of those instances of nothing had been filled with an exhilarating something.

“The purpose of art has always been to wake people from such non-thinking,” Irwin writes.⁷

Much like adding a word to one’s vocabulary, experience itself is indeed transmittable and readily becomes part of the beholder’s world. Indeed artists, scientists, and craftspeople pass their ideas forward through demonstration.

Everything is an event on the skin.”

— Ludwig Helmholtz⁸

To start his conversation with Chomsky, Gondry simply had to pick up the phone and make an appointment. To start a conversation with a material, we only have to pick it up and “play.” Prolific designers like Charles Eames have already encouraged us to have faith: there is much to learn from the firsthand.

However, there is an undervalued but essential second step in the conversation: observing the reply. Irwin says that his job as an artist is more about listening than doing. The passivity of his approach belies its radical implications. Letting a thing begin the conversation is often appropriate, but it threatens the structured assumptions of the professional world.

“Curators would call and ask me, ‘If we invite you [to create an installation], what are you going to do?’ and I would have to say, ‘Well, I don’t know what I’m going to do; I’ll just spend some time there and then decide.’”

Rather than forcing his will upon his subject, Irwin thinks we make the best use of our most sophisticated hardware when we keep our antennae up. We can gradually attune our senses to subtlety in much the same way that we’d slowly train our brains to speak French. In Designing Design, the man behind MUJI, Kenya Hara, echoes this sentiment when he expresses that the joy of paper is not about what we do to it, but what it does for our minds.

“It’s not the delicacy of the paper in and of itself … but the finely-tuned human senses paper can awaken … the distant universe and our immediate world can both be found here.”⁹

Hara notes that touch—as well as sight, smell, taste, and hearing—are all responses to pressure on the skin. Skin is our single natural interface on the friction of the world—whether that friction is a pin prick or a photon of light bounced from a magazine page onto our retinas. It’s the turnstile through which all information must pass—our first front in understanding anything, not just the touchy-feely stuff. It’s keeping our brains in check with material fact. In this way, we navigate the friction of the universe intellectually, through our skin.

Perhaps even abstractions and logic—while resolutely immaterial—can be accessed by hand. Mathematician Masao Morita asserts that sensory thinking plays a more vital role than expected in his field. For example, researchers believe that the geometrically perfect circle was first discovered by hand.¹⁰

Morita explains that Stone Age technology succeeded where thousands of years of artists later failed, through a gesture that just happens when you work with stone tools. By rotating a small, hard stone into a larger slab of softer clay, a fixed centerpoint is established. Further rotation scrapes away the softer clay at a fixed distance from the centerpoint. The one and only shape that can result from such an action is a circle, a perfect one.

Similarly, some logic concepts are best transmitted through touch. Most third graders have taken a strip of paper, twisted it once, and taped the end together to make a one-sided object.

In spite of its simple recipe, the Wikipedia article describing the “non-orientable” surface of a Möbius strip is unreadable at best. With an elegant little curl, the Möbius strip tears apart everything we’ve been told about flatness and dimension in our world. To backtrack on those labels—to explain exactly how this shape defies seemingly fundamental boundaries—requires a tangled web of language.

In a Möbius strip is a profound mismatch between what we can see with our eyeballs and what we believe is true. It forces us to reconcile with our minds, by scrambling with our hands, something that subverts our inherited understanding of reality. In these instances, the vast feedback-generating machine of the universe is literally yelling back at us: requiring that we intellectually understand with our hands to make new, novel sense of an experience with our brains.

This uniquely human method of physical reasoning is being used to tackle complex modern engineering problems inaccessible by other means. The authors of Geometric Folding Algorithms explain, “Because the topics are tangible, physical intuition makes them accessible via a wide variety of preparations.”¹¹

On the screen, when Gondry wants to know something, we hear a pause, and he can simply ask his interview subject a question. We anticipate that Chomsky might answer in return (unless: bees). In their careers, however, both men had to interrogate the unknowns of their respective fields with a creative and nimble form of give-and-take.

This process is much like bouncing a ball off of an object in the dark to assess its shape. The feedback we receive when engaging an idea this way is always better than the models we construct in our brains. This is how friction helps us think, learn, adapt, and eventually understand. It keeps us tethered to material facts in a way that other investigation methods do not.

With questions asked through actions and answers received from the senses, we use friction daily. We experience it when we push to assess the stability of a chair, wait for an echo to locate distance, or walk across an empty room to assess its size. And when we press our fingers into spinning clay to feel it bend, we’re using sensory wisdom to converse with the pre-existing mechanics of the universe.

By simply feeling it out, we can conduct a conversation with a line, a sound, a color, a taste, a chunk of code, or a material: “Does this work? … No … OK, well, what about this? Huh. Interesting … Oh! What about this?” The surprises that occur along the way often present as nuisances—roadblocks to best-laid plans—but are also exactly how we get to new information.

When something that we didn’t ask for happens, it’s a gift. We get answers in places we didn’t even realize we should question. By observing responses to physical questions, we can get out of our own minds and enter into an empathic understanding of how things really work.

By the time the film ends, Gondry has successfully navigated a conversation with a man who is notoriously difficult to know. He does this by listening and deftly recalibrating according to his subject’s signals. He has broken past Chomsky’s talking points and has revealed some underlying truths.

The shape of the conversation was far too idiosyncratic to have been hatched using the raw ingredients of knowns, assumptions, and expectations. It had to play out unscripted, as a genuine experiment with all of the glorious uncertainty, messiness, improvisation, and misunderstandings that entails.

While talking to people will always be unpredictable, in the future there will be fewer opportunities to be surprised by our conversations with things. The rise of haptic (touch) tech will means that more of our stuff will behave exactly as expected—invariably lightening the load on our give-and-take physical intuition.

Designers like me are building a new sensory world of interactions with a single goal in mind: to accommodate exactly and only what the user wants to do. We will work to eliminate all physical and psychic friction. We will shape interfaces that are an exacting mirror on the user’s intentions—a mirror that signifies nothing about the structure underlying the exchange. No balls need to be bounced in the dark here.

The real reason bees “think in hexagon” is that the hexagon is—undoubtedly—the best and only shape for the job.¹² Pack a bunch of circles together and there will be gaps at the corners. Pack a bunch of triangles together, and you’ll find yourself needing twice as much wax than if you had employed a more capacious shape.

The hexagon is the logical and elegant conclusion to a specific problem—an example of perfection in design refined by millions of years of natural evolution. It is also an endpoint, precluding any further investigations into the unknown. Human beings, however, need the unknown. Without it, we are just talking to ourselves.

Unlike the interface of physical reality, there is only the illusion of exchange in these digital haptic experiences. We will no longer listen for an echo in response. We will no longer push to feel the structure and principles beneath. It will be harder to justify persistently asking how and why when there is nothing beneath the interfaces except our own intentions reflected back at us. Our future will be response-free: populated with things that don’t push back.

Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, directed by Michel Gondry (2013). ↩
George Pitcher, The Philosophy of Wittgenstein (Prentice Hall, 1964). ↩
Lera Boroditsky, “How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?” Edge.org, June 11, 2009. ↩
Donald Judd, Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular (Sikkens Foundation, 1993). ↩
Lawrence Weschler, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (Expanded Edition): Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin (UC Press, 2009). ↩
Roberta Smith, “Ineffable Emptiness, From Dawn to Dusk: Robert Irwin’s Light-and-Space Work Returns to the Whitney,” New York Times, July 25, 2013. ↩
Weschler, 2009. ↩
Kenya Hara, Designing Design (Lars Mueller, 2011). ↩
Hara, 2011. ↩
Kenya Hara, Subtle - The 47th Takeo Paper Show (Takeo Co., 2015). ↩
Erik D. Demaine and Joseph O’Rourke, Geometric Folding Algorithms: Linkages, Origami, Polyhedra (Cambridge University Press, 2007). ↩
Robert Krulwich, “What Is It About Bees and Hexagons?” Radiolab (blog), May 14, 2013. ↩

Lesson

Eric Meyer — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

My paternal grandparents traveled a lot. Grammy had become a serious birdwatcher in retirement. As a result, Granddaddy had become a serious photographer, back when that was a very expensive and bulky proposition. They traveled to every continent in their seventies and eighties, taking boats up the Amazon and safaris across Africa. They usually left the country at least once a year.

As each of their grandchildren reached the appropriate age, which was twelve or thereabouts, Grammy and Granddaddy would take them along on whichever trip was coming up. It could be England, or the Pacific Northwest, or wherever.

When my turn came, they were headed to Churchill, Manitoba, by way of the northern American plains. We packed up their International Harvester light-duty truck and wandered our way through the Dakotas and across the border to Winnipeg. Part of the trip took us across Canada by way of the Canadian National Railroad; another flew us to Churchill, on the shores of the Hudson Bay.

One day, we took a small boat out onto the Churchill River, the three of us and our captain perched on plank seats. The boat was completely open, and though it was summer, it was still pretty cold. My thin gloves didn’t do much to protect me, and so the cutting wind quickly chilled my hands.

The rocking of the boat, the pain from my fingers, and the general bleakness of the day all combined to bring out the whiny, surly early teen in me. Mostly because I was an early teen, so those things were never far below the surface. I probably complained, and I certainly pouted, as I hunched over in a shivering ball on the plank seat near the center of the boat.

Granddaddy, meanwhile, was checking his camera gear and film rolls while Grammy kept a lookout for our quarry. I wiped my nose with the back of my hand and cursed my lot in life, that I should be suffering so in an open boat on the open bay. I may or may not have composed some angsty, overblown blank verse in my head.

Finally, after what was probably whole minutes of time, we spotted what we were there to see: a small pod of beluga whales, swimming a few dozen feet away in the water, occasionally breaking the surface to blow out sprays of exhalation.

Granddaddy lifted his camera to his eye, sighted, and took some shots. Then he looked over at me, still huddled and grumbling and glowering on my seat.

“Are you going to take some pictures, Eric? We came all the way out here just to see these little fellas.”

I whined something about how it was cold and I was cold and my hands hurt too much to hold the camera. After all, it was a Canon F-1, with a solid metal body that was just waiting to suck what little warmth I retained out through my fingertips.

He listened to my complaints, considered for a moment, then said gently, “Well, I’ve always thought it’s worth a little temporary discomfort to get to do something remarkable.” And with that, he turned away and lifted his F-1 back to his eye.

After a minute or two—long enough to make it clear that this was all my idea, nothing to do with anything he’d said, obviously—I lifted my camera and started snapping my own pictures of the ice-white backs of the whales moving through the cloud-gray water.

My fingers didn’t hurt any less, my nose didn’t run any less—but while those aches are now thirty-plus years in the past, I still remember those whales’ backs, just a few feet away from us. I would remember even without the prints and slides Granddaddy developed from the best shots I got, out there on the waters of the Churchill River.

I don’t know if I ever told Granddaddy how deep an effect that simple sentence had on me, but I’ve heard him say it over the years, even after his death. I heard it as I finally stood atop Fubo Hill in Guilin, China, my body shaking and a fever spiking, and looked down into the Lijiang. I heard it as I adjusted my snorkel and mask in the shallow waters of a Caribbean shoreline and tried to calm my deep fear of open water.

And I heard it when I was learning to soothe each of my newborn children, my eyes sandy and my body aching from lack of sleep, cradling and rocking and crooning to them as we got to know each other a little bit at a time—a little temporary discomfort for us both, but in exchange, the most remarkable thing I can imagine: parent and child, bonding together.

We Are What We Build

Eric Meyer — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

My wife Kat and I spent almost every moment of Saturday, June 7, 2014, lying in bed with our middle child Rebecca, who turned six years old at 7:24 that morning and died shortly before 7:00 that evening.

There is no way I can communicate what that is like to someone who hasn’t been through it. But I had tried, over and over, through blog posts and tweets. I had used the tools at my disposal to try to help people who knew me, or even people who merely knew of me, to understand even a little bit of what we were going through. From the day after Rebecca’s cancer was discovered until the days after it finally crushed her brain past the point of survival, I had shared what parts of her story and our story I could bear to write.

There were many reasons I did this—some selfish, some selfless, some unexamined. I wrote about why I wrote, at one point.¹ Through it all, I stayed open to the world. I shared what I was learning about coping with a child’s illness, the travails of uncertainty and bureaucratic error, the surges and crushing of hope. I laid bare some of the most personal moments of my life, even as I kept silent about many others.

When I put up the memorial post for Rebecca,² I included an invitation that someone had suggested: that anyone who felt comfortable wearing purple to Rebecca’s funeral should do so. This is perhaps a little unusual, since the dress custom for funerals tends to be “black and formal.” But honestly, a room of people all wearing black would have made Rebecca roll her eyes in boredom.

So I put it in there, as a message of sorts to those who were coming to the ceremony, that this was not just a moment of mourning but also a remembrance and a tribute to Rebecca. Online, a number of people announced their intention to change their Twitter avatars to purple, in sympathy and solidarity. The hashtag #663399becca was coined, combining Rebecca’s name with the CSS color code for a very nice shade of purple. Matt Robin proposed that the web community get it trending on the day of the funeral.³

Jeffrey Zeldman, my friend and business partner at An Event Apart, wrote a post supporting and promoting the idea.⁴ Jeffrey has a significant online presence, and that post, along with his tweeting about it, really helped the idea take off.

The day of the funeral, my Twitter feed was a wall of purple avatars, and I believe the hashtag did indeed trend, at least within the US. At a certain point, I had to completely turn off Twitter notifications, because my phone was going crazy. Not that I was spending a lot of time looking at my phone that day, but I wanted to preserve the battery for necessities like phone calls.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, a suggestion was made to honor Rebecca by adding to CSS a named color equivalent to #663399.⁵ The idea rapidly gained widespread support, not just from the community but also the browser vendors, and by June 21 the Working Group had officially accepted the proposal.⁶

And so, in a corner of the language I dedicated so much of my life to understanding and explaining, there is a memorial to my little girl: the named color “rebeccapurple.”

This was quite possibly the last thing I expected. When the proposal arose, I could barely make myself think, let alone objectively evaluate the merits of the proposal, which is why I stated that I was deeply honored by the proposal and would accept whatever decision the Working Group came to, pro or con.⁷ (I meant it, too. If the WG had declined to add “rebeccapurple” to CSS, I would have blogged in support of their decision.) I couldn’t really think about it in any coherent way, then or in the immediate aftermath. Besides adding the color to Rebecca’s memorial page on my website, I didn’t really think about it for a few months.

What pushed me to think about it was Gamergate.

Whatever you might think of Gamergate—and there’s a lot to think about it—I believe I can say at least this much without stepping on any land mines: it was when actor Adam Baldwin coined the hashtag #gamergate, and greatly boosted the signal on two videos made by people critical of Zoe Quinn, that the whole thing blew up into what we now think of as Gamergate, no hashtag.

In the process, there were threats—vicious, horrible threats—against not just Zoe Quinn, but also Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian. All three women had experienced such threats in the past, but not with the same frequency or intensity that was seen during Gamergate.

I wasn’t even that deep into the situation—this was August and September 2014, when I was still pretty grief-stricken, and at any rate I’m no more than an occasional gamer—and I was sickened and horrified by so many of the things I saw. I cannot for an instant imagine what it must have been like to be at the focus of it all, or even near to the focus.

As my brain often does when confronted with horror, I retreated to analysis, hoping to draw something useful and constructive out of what seemed like a pointlessly destructive situation. It was an instinct that had helped me through everything that happened with Rebecca, and it helped me cope with the nauseating details I saw before me.

From that analytic distance, I realized I was seeing something structurally similar to the #663399becca campaign, but with such a different outcome.

In both cases, a situation that had already existed reached a sort of tipping point with the coining of a hashtag and a signal boost from a prominent personality. In response, groups of people organized to act.

With #663399becca, a collective tribute gave way to a formal, digital memorial. With #gamergate, a collective outrage gave way to terrible, real-world consequences.

We can look at these examples and say that the difference in outcome is the difference in input—that starting with positive intent leads to positive outcomes, and negative intent leads to negative outcomes. That’s certainly true. But it’s not the whole truth.

Some say that the medium in which these things happened is like a road, neutral to its uses—but roads are not neutral spaces, and neither is the internet.

While a ribbon of asphalt is neutral to its uses, we are not neutral to the uses of that asphalt. We decide where the road should go, which includes deciding who will have access to that road and who will not. We determine speed limits, caution areas, rules of the road. We don’t let people drive on whatever side of the road they feel like, or endanger pedestrians and other drivers. We establish laws and enforcement mechanisms. We even require licensing of the people who drive, to try to make sure that they understand at least a bare minimum of the rules before we allow them to use the road.

This is not an argument that we should license internet use. It’s pointing out that roads are not nearly as neutral as we all too often pretend. We set much lower speed limits around schools; we paint lines to indicate where passing is permitted and where it is not; we hire police officers and judges to penalize those who disregard the rules. Nothing about a road is neutral except for the raw material itself.

For that matter, almost nothing we do online these days is neutral. In the early days of the web, we were excited just to be able to look up some information and follow links from page to page—web surfing was a real thing back then, in the pre-search-engine era. Then we were thrilled to have great maps and the ability to have goods shipped to our houses. And back then, we were still trying to figure out what to share, and how and when to share it.

Now we share ourselves freely, continuously, one tidbit at a time but at a rapid pace. Social networks have emerged, and we share our thoughts and feelings with the world almost effortlessly, all the old hurdles of hosting and software installation outsourced to companies dedicated to making it simple. The web lets us do this without regard to time and distance, allows us to connect with people we otherwise would never have known existed. This should come as no surprise: humans have always longed to communicate, and most of all to be heard.

That’s how blogging came about. People starting putting their thoughts online, writing their own personal serial magazines, sharing themselves with whoever would listen. Some lost their jobs over what they shared, while others landed jobs. In every case, the motivation was the same: to be heard.

Now, anyone can follow that motivation, and millions upon millions do. Tweets, Facebook statuses, Tumblr posts, Instagram shares, Medium articles; these all exist to let us easily share what we think and feel and see with the world.

That’s one of the biggest differences between the early web and what we have now: that it’s easy to share ourselves. Entire business sectors have been built and vast fortunes made on making that impulse easier to satisfy.

The challenge now is in how those fragments of our lives are treated. This is as much a social question as a technological problem, but the two are not separable. What Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and every other at-scale social network does now—everything they make possible or impossible, everything they make easier or harder—will shape what we think of as normal in a decade or two. It won’t utterly control the way we use the web, but it will undoubtedly influence our online behavior at a deep level.

As an example, in 2030, will we think it’s acceptable to mute or block people who try to communicate with us? That seems like a ridiculous question to ask—of course it’s acceptable!—and yet, if networks make it harder to do so, or even if they make it easier to not do so, then the answer to that question could well change. Our grandchildren may think of the act of blocking as quaint and archaic, or even outright wrong.

Or, they might well think of our current situation as unthinkably permissive and damaging. If social networks make it easier to block harmful feedback and make attacks more difficult in the first place, then the answer to the question may change to the point that nobody thinks to ask the question anymore. The ability to mute and block and filter could become second nature.

If that seems too overblown, think about the differences between what constituted acceptable behavior when you were a child and what’s acceptable now. Not in the sense that “these kids today are disrespectful little punks, unlike like when I was a kid” (the inaccurate complaint of every generation), but in a social sense. Right now, kids think nothing of getting together physically to interact digitally. Looking at a mobile device while in conversation is something adults frown upon but kids don’t think of as abnormal, if they think of it at all. This didn’t happen because kids are less attentive to their friends. They just grew up in a world where that was possible, and they found it desirable. As they grow up more, everything they find on social networks, both content and capability, will seem just as normal. What they think of as risky or strange or acceptable or desirable will be profoundly shaped by their experiences.

Kathy Sierra, who has been targeted for harassment more than once, relates in her book Badass that the horse trainer’s mantra is: “Make the right thing easy and the wrong thing difficult.”⁸ Now consider the converse: what is easy comes to be accepted as the right thing, and what is difficult comes to be regarded as the wrong thing. That’s why I say what we do now isn’t neutral. Everything we do, from what we share to how we interact with our networks to how those networks are structured, is influencing the near future of our societies. Not just the hyper-digital developed world’s societies, but all societies everywhere, because what happens online will shape what happens offline.

And speaking of concepts that may make no sense in a couple of decades, consider the idea that there’s a distinction between online and offline. We often try to demarcate them, talking about the virtual and real worlds as if the internet is a different planet that we sometimes visit and then return home. That’s never been true, but the mobile revolution has made the fiction obvious. The internet is no more a separate, “virtual” world than are books or songs. We talk to each other directly, and share ourselves, whatever the medium.

We wouldn’t say that by making a phone call we enter a different world; when we go online, we aren’t going away either. Wherever we go, we take ourselves with us, and seek to be heard.

And so the question is, will our future be more like #663399becca or more like #gamergate? Will we see communities work together, or camps tear each other apart? Both will happen, of course, but which will become the norm? Will our societies and we ourselves become more constructive or more destructive?

Any one of us can and absolutely should make such choices for ourselves, but there’s more at work here than individual choice. How we build our systems of interaction will matter a great deal to the future. If we build them in a way that encourages positive collaboration and discourages destructive attacks, that will influence anyone who uses—and, more importantly, grows up with—those systems.

And so those who build the systems of interaction have a unique responsibility, because what they allow and forbid defines them. As Derek Powazek has said, “What you tolerate is what you are.”⁹ What networks allow, and more importantly what they encourage, defines them as well. A network where it’s easy to attack and difficult to defend makes a very different value statement than one where it’s difficult to attack and easy to defend.

Either way, the nature of a system says something very clear about the people who create that system and what they value; just as much as how we use those systems, and what we tolerate in the behavior of those around us, says something very clear about us and what we value. It’s a statement we make to everyone around us as well to everyone yet to come. This is our legacy, our message to the future about who we really are and what we truly value. We are what we build. It’s long past time we started building wisely.

Eric Meyer, “On Writing,” meyerweb.com (blog), April 4, 2014. ↩
Eric Meyer, “In Memoriam,” meyerweb.com (blog), June 9, 2014. ↩
Matt Robin, Twitter post, June 9, 2014, 5:14 p.m. ↩
Jeffrey Zeldman, “The Color Purple,” zeldman.com (blog), June 10, 2014. ↩
“Name #663399 “Becca Purple” in CSS4 Color?”, WICG (forum), June 12, 2014. ↩
Daniel Glazman to www-style@w3.org, June 21, 2014. ↩
Eric Meyer, “rebeccapurple,” meyerweb.com (blog), June 19, 2014. ↩
Kathy Sierra, Badass: Making Users Awesome (O’reilly Media, 2015). ↩
Derek Powazek, Twitter post, December 23, 2014, 2:19 p.m. ↩

Lesson

Paul Ford — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been listening to this old radio show called Vic and Sade. It’s a hard show to explain. It ran for fourteen years, 1932–1944. It ran on weekdays in the middle of the soap operas. It was fifteen minutes long. And it had seven million listeners. It was a big part of America and very influential. The people it influenced went on to be influential themselves. Yet not many of the recordings survive. It’s mostly a memory, a footnote.

The show is focused on only a few characters: Vic, an accountant; Sade, a housewife; and their adopted son, Rush. There were other characters later, a wacky uncle and so forth. The man who played Rush went off to fight in WWII, so they replaced him for a while. Every single episode was written by a man named Paul Rhymer.

Nothing happens. Not Seinfeld nothing, but nothing nothing. Someone wants to buy a hat. Or they sit on a porch. No jokes. The characters are only half-listening to each other. They repeat themselves. It’s a signature of the show that the characters repeat themselves.

During the whole run, America is basically in hell. In 1941, British commanders are raiding Bordeaux. The USAF is intercepting Luftwaffe patrols off Algeria. There is a tank battle at night for El Alamein. And on Vic and Sade they get a letter from Aunt Bess or talk about cherry phosphates. All this ephemeral stuff. It’s almost designed to disappear, and most of the recordings are gone, along with a few scripts, like this one:

RUSH: What’s Mrs Driscoll want ya for?

VIC: I have nothing to conceal; I’ll tell ya.

RUSH: [Chuckles] She stuck on ya?

VIC: She didn’t say. However, I’ll disclose what I know of the matter. Mrs Driscoll is putting on a pageant an’ your pop has been asked to take one of the principal parts in it.

RUSH: You’re gonna be in a play, huh?

VIC: Right. Tonight promptly at seven I appear at the Driscoll mansion for the first rehearsal.

RUSH: Whatcha gonna be in the play?

VIC: The Voice of the Congo.

RUSH: [Chuckles] What?

VIC: There’s nothing humorous about this, Ralph.

RUSH: The Congo is a river.

VIC: Mrs Driscoll is aware of that.

RUSH: She’s gonna give a play about a river, huh?

VIC: A play about many rivers. It’s called Shining Waters Flowing to the Sea. The idea is that the whole world is a network of streams. Somewhere all these streams join one another. That kinda makes us all cousins, see?

RUSH: No.

VIC: Well, it does. Reflect.

RUSH: Huh?

VIC: Think about it. Ya know the Mackinaw River, don’tcha?

RUSH: Sure.

VIC: Well, the Mackinaw flows into the Illinois; the Illinois flows into the Mississippi; the Mississippi flows into the Gulf of Mexico; the Gulf of Mexico also receives the turbid waters of the Snake, the Rio Grande, an’ the White. All these flow into the Pacific Ocean an’ join, through devious routes, the Nile, the Niger, the Amazon, an’ the Elbe. Follow me?

RUSH: No.

VIC: It matters little. Nevertheless, by means of all these shining ribbons of water, every man on earth is joined by strong bonds to every other man on earth.

What was that? Commentary on world affairs? Small-town satire? Exploration of the meaning of family? All of the above?

Most of what the show does is comment on how people communicate: how they listen or don’t, the way they might nap for a few minutes and rejoin the conversation, the triumph of the neighborhood over the global in terms of news. (Do Nazis want to spy on Canada? Well, the Mayor wants to join Vic’s lodge.) And the characters are self-aware—for example, Vic is the “Exalted Big Dipper of the Drowsy Venus Chapter of the Sacred Stars of the Milky Way,” a position of supposed great importance. He’s also fully aware that his club, the Sacred Stars of the Milky Way, overcharges for everything to the point of scamminess—yet he remains an absolutely loyal member. The characters know their own faults and the faults of each other, and that makes easy jokes impossible; they can see it coming.

Since I started listening to these shows, on no particular schedule—often I pop them up on my phone and fall asleep to them—I’ve noticed how many of my own conversations are like those on the show. The world is going on, parachutes dropping from the sky, and I’m talking with my wife about the trash can, or about whether I should put up new curtains. It’s not that the big world isn’t there. But the dramas of my life are over the smallest things, the things I do control. The color of the paint, the disposition of the children, the condition of the cats. I try to keep up. I do keep up. I read the paper.

When I moved to New York City, I became, suddenly, quite depressed about the world, and I told my father about my condition. “That’s easy,” he said. “You started reading the Times.” Meaning that the world was now at my doorstep, in all of its weird, baffling anger. And I still see it.

As the smaller ways of getting the news have folded, and the larger ones have engorged themselves, I keep feeling more pressure to care, to become engaged or—change that first “g” to an “r”—enraged, about things over which I have absolutely no power. It’s not wrong to be aware of them, to think of ways that you might contribute or alter the flow of human effort. As a writer I have the privilege of getting a small group of people to think about B when otherwise they might have thought of A. None of it means that I stop flowing to the sea, but perhaps one of the hardest lessons of life is that I am a river, not the ocean.

On File Formats, Very Briefly

Paul Ford — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In my life are many file formats, hundreds. They come and go, file formats. But there are some I have loved.

I love them for many reasons. Take the HTML page. Not the modern bundle of anxieties and commercial intent that is HTML5, but the very first popular version (2.0, if you’re interested in versioning arcana). A document starts out:

<HTML>

Look at that audacious uppercase! Well here we go! And then I’d type along for a while, writing in my text editor, filling in <P> tags and <IMG> tags. Finally, at the end of the document, I’d write:

</HTML>

Save that text file, move the files onto a web server using an FTP program, and I was done for the day. My peers and I took pride in memorizing all the various bits of the standard, all the tags. There were guides, and they fit onto a single page.

In those days, as a culture, the web hadn’t really gone to war over standards. The web, the web proper, was the work of a few handfuls of people. There weren’t hundreds of people on mailing lists scolding each other. It was just HTML. And between those tags could be anything.

HTML came along as Microsoft Word was in its ascendancy. A little history: Microsoft ran everything, and word processing was the tantamount function of a computer. But Word was horrible, really. It was just unapologetically designed for the worst sort of corporate functions. And through force of will and marketing, and the rise of Windows, Microsoft was able to force everyone into its iron grip. Thus replacing the far more superior WordPerfect, with its reveal codes.

WordPerfect was always the best word processor. Because it allowed for insight into its very structure. You could hit a certain key combination and suddenly the screen would split and you’d reveal the codes, the bolds and italics and so forth, that would define your text when it was printed. It was beloved of legal secretaries and journalists alike. Because when you work with words, at the practical, everyday level, the ability to look under the hood is essential. Words are not simple. And WordPerfect acknowledged that. Microsoft Word did not. Microsoft kept insisting that what you saw on your screen was the way things were, and if your fonts just kept sort of randomly changing, well, you must have wanted it that way.

Then along came HTML, and what I remember most was that sense of being back inside the file. Sure, HTML was a typographic nightmare, a bunch of unjustified Times New Roman in 12 pt on screens with chiclet-sized pixels, but under the hood you could see all the pieces. Just like WordPerfect. That transparency was a wonderful thing, and it renewed computing for me. I was in my early twenties but there was such ennui—NeXT wasn’t catching on, Apple was crashing, and Microsoft was all paperclips. On the web, if something didn’t work, you could hop right in and tidy it up, and hit reload. And hit reload. And hit reload. I imagine I have hit reload five or six million times in my life. If you were to identify the single characteristic of a web person, it would be that their thumb and index finger have certain calluses where they press the command/control and “R” keys. Just thinking of reloading, my fingers instinctually go into a sort of crab-claw formation. I’m always ready to refresh.

HTML showed up to support the community of physicists at Tim Berners-Lee’s workplace, but it showed up in a world of Word, and PowerPoint, and Excel. And QuarkXPress and Pagemaker. There’s no proof the web was intended as a reaction to those specific programs, but it functioned as one, for me. It came along at a time when computers were everywhere but still suspicious. People feared them, they feared being alienated and exhausted by having to learn so many new things. Simply not being afraid of computers was, back then, almost a career.

If there is another format that defines the web, it is Photoshop. Not that Photoshop files have any place on the open web. Lord no. But the web as a visual medium was constructed in Photoshop. The various shadings and trends of the first fifteen years of the medium were invented there. Often they were inherited from Photoshop features. Would we have had a web of drop shadows without Photoshop?

Those were long years, the years of drop-shadows. Everything was jumping just slightly off the screen. For a stretch it seemed that drop-shadows and thin vertical columns of text would define the web. That was before we learned that the web is really a medium to display slideshows, as many slideshows as possible, with banner ads.

Photoshop is a program, but it’s also a language. When I work with a designer, it is the language we share. I know there are alternatives, just as there are alternatives to Word, but it is most likely, in the course of a workday, that if I am going to be discussing a mockup or a design, that Photoshop will have been opened along the way. Photoshop is a way for a designer to talk to an executive and a web developer and an information architect at once. We all talk a little Photoshop. When you open a well-defined Photoshop file, it is a revelation. Well look, you think. This person has named all their layers. They have named all their sub-layers. They have created an organized hierarchy out of this website. A good web designer is ultimately a taxonomist. They dare never simply sketch in a line without knowing where it belongs—to the page at hand, to some imaginary template, as a divider between banner ads. Layers are the grammar of web design.

The Photoshop file format itself, however, is impenetrable. Where <HTML>…</HTML> was almost an invitation to do something fun, everything about the interior of a PSD file is alienating, confusing. A Photoshop file is a lump of binary data. It just sits there on your hard drive. Open it in Photoshop and there are your guides, your color swatches, and of course, the manifold pixels of your intent. But outside of Photoshop that file is an enigma. There’s no “view source.”

You can, if you’re passionate, read the standard on the web, and it’s all piled in there, the history of pictures on computers. That’s when it becomes clear: only Photoshop’s creator Adobe can understand this thing. Here’s the list of four-letter abbreviations that are used to set the blend mode of a layer, taken straight from the standard as formatted:

'pass' = pass through, 'norm' = normal, 'diss' = dissolve, 'dark' = darken, 'mul' = multiply, 'idiv' = color burn, 'lbrn' = linear burn, 'dkCl' = darker color, 'lite' = lighten, 'scrn' = screen, 'div' = color dodge, 'lddg' = linear dodge, 'lgCl' = lighter color, 'over' = overlay, 'sLit' = soft light, 'hLit' = hard light, 'vLit' = vivid light, 'lLit' = linear light, 'pLit' = pin light, 'hMix' = hard mix, 'diff' = difference, 'smud' = exclusion, 'fsub' = subtract, 'fdiv' = divide 'hue' = hue, 'sat' = saturation, 'colr' = color, 'lum' = luminosity`

They’re like characters in a kid’s book. Smud, Plit, and Diff went down to the river one day to go fishing. Nestled in the code of the open-source Mac OS X image-viewer Xee there is this comment, written by a coder:

/*
At this point, I’d like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format. PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns.`
*/

The poor guy. The thing is, he’s trying to unpack decades of decisions, to make sense of them. But at this point the Photoshop format—most file formats of great age, in fact—is more like a legal document. Parts are open to interpretation. The computer is the ultimate judge, but you never know how it will rule. Later, that same open-source programmer writes:

/*
Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his fifty-eighth birthday. That last detail may not be important for the purposes of the simile, but at this point I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format.
*/

You feel for the programmer. Because if you’re going to create an image viewer you need to deal with Photoshop. But when you think about it, when you look at the way that files and programs tend to go, well, the fact that Photoshop would be a puzzle seems inevitable. Look at HTML5.

There was a point many years ago now when the web looked like it would be for documents. It would be structured and organized, and everything could be linkable. A great number of standards emerged around the Semantic Web, around XML and XLink and XPath and so forth. Don’t worry if you don’t know what these were. They were just ways to link ideas together. Many of them had real, practical utility. Many did not. They did, however, all share a sort of vision of documents as open, accessible things. And for a long time there was a neo-political movement online that advocated for accessibility: for websites to be as readable to all people as possible, for them to be self-documenting, clearly structured sets of interlinked objects that a blind or disabled person could access as easily as a sighted person. There was a related advocacy movement away from using whatever tricks might work to make a webpage work visually, and towards using style sheets—abstracting out the visual from the meaning—so that the intent of a page might be intuited by software.

I was, and am, on the side of the accessibility advocates. But we didn’t plan on many things: the rise of mobile, of course, because you must always acknowledge the rise of mobile. But video, which is as inaccessible (or more so) than a typical Photoshop file, with the video file a big blob of mathematically-compressed data that could be a church service, pop video, or pornography, with hardly any way to look inside without actually looking. An opaque medium.

The rise of YouTube was in some ways the death knell for accessibility. But the moment it all changed for me was the moment when Google Maps first appeared. Because it was a software application—not a set of webpages, not a few clever dynamic calls, but almost aggressively anti-document. It allowed for zooming and panning, but it was once again opaque. And suddenly it became clear that the manifest destiny of the web was not accessibility. What was it? Then the people who advocated for a semantically structured web began to split off from the mainstream and the standards stopped coming so quickly. The new HTML standard, HTML5, started as a codification of existing practice—documentation rather than prescription. The idea being that, as this is the web we’re going to have, we should get used to it, rather than keep trying to force people to use arbitrary structures in the hope that one day we will achieve some sort of perfect base of eternal knowledge.

As a result, at many levels, the web feels done. While it’s better documented than Photoshop, HTML5 is hardly a pleasant thing. It’s a set of overlapping historical ideas about files: video, code, text, fonts, audio, and so forth—all jammed together. The pieces do not thrive in harmony, but rather sit uncomfortably astride the same bench, bound together by arcane calls in the language JavaScript. Which, as we on the web are constantly reminded, is actually not that bad once you get used to it. Except it is, reader, it really is bad.

There is a now-old trope in the world of programming. It’s called the “worse is better” debate; it seeks to explain why the Unix operating systems (which includes Mac OS X these days), made up of so many little interchangeable parts, were so much more successful in the marketplace than LISP systems, which were ideologically pure, based on a single language (again, LISP), which itself was exceptionally simple, a favorite of “serious” hackers everywhere.

It’s too complex to rehash here, but one of the ideas inherent within “worse is better” is that systems made up of many simple pieces that can be roped together, even if those pieces don’t share a consistent interface, are likely to be more successful than systems that are designed with consistency in every regard.

And it strikes me that this is a fundamental drama of new technologies. Unix beat out the LISP machines. If you consider mobile handsets, many of which run descendants of Unix (iOS and Android), Unix beat out Windows as well. And HTML5 beat out all of the various initiatives to create a single unified web. It nods to accessibility; it doesn’t get in the way of those who want to make something huge and interconnected. But it doesn’t enforce; it doesn’t seek to change the behavior of page creators in the same way that such lost standards as XHTML 2.0 (which emerged from the offices of the World Wide Web Consortium, and then disappeared under the weight of its own intentions) once did.

It’s not a bad place to end up. It means that there is no single framework, no set of easy rules to learn, no overarching principles that, once learned, can make the web appear like a golden statue atop a mountain. There are just components: HTML to get the words on the page, forms to get people to write in, videos and images to put up pictures, moving or otherwise, and JavaScript to make everything dance.

You can take apart these formats and find out which decisions were made to create them. You’ll find that within them each carries the weight of its own past. Whether it’s Photoshop reacting to the enormous power of computers by doing ever more things with images, ever more channel ops and blends, or HTML opening up to accept every kind of data, serving not as a way to present documents but as a sort of glue. Or even old Microsoft Word, which in a long and painful and political battle, finally settled down and “opened” its format, countless hundreds of pages of documentation defining how words appear, how tables of contents are registered, how all of the things that make up a Word document are to be represented. The Microsoft Office File Formats specifications are of a most disturbing, fascinating quality; one can read through them and think: Yes, I see this. I think I understand. But why?

And yet there we are. Even Word is opened now, just regular XML. Strange XML to be sure. All the codes once hidden are revealed. For a fan of file formats, it is a golden age. But a slow one. Updates happen less often. There is less drama to be shared. And so, while Photoshop, or the web, or even Word are all very much alive, used by millions, billions of people, they have also become something unexpected, by which I mean: these files are history.

Lesson

David Cole — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

For a time, I was a salesman.

I would stutter over the phone, “Basically it’s a way to create sustainable revenue from your work as an independent creator, like a recurring Kickstarter…”

“Yeah, like a subscription service…”

“The fees? Well, it’s comparable to Kickst— Yes, 2.9% plus another 5%…”

“Well, Etsy has a different fee structure, so you can’t really compare th— Sure, but we also help you with…”

“Okay, no, I understand.”

I flew across the country. I sat in cafés all day waiting for shaky prospects. I took call after call with the bored and the unconvinced. I begged the rest of the team for changes and features that would help me make just a single sale—anything to stave off the encroaching dread of my job.

I had been working for a small consultancy, and we were heavily lopsided on designers. Because of this, it was decided that the best use of my time would not be designing anything but running sales. It seemed to make sense at the time: design and sales have a lot in common. They both require a nuanced understanding of the product’s intricacies, the customer’s demands, and the market’s dynamics.

But there’s a reason the stereotypical salesman is charismatic and extroverted—the opposite of the traditional designer, so quiet and philosophical. If you haven’t worked in sales, it’s a lot like going on a job interview: you have something you think someone wants, but you’re not precisely sure who will be a fit. So you meet and talk and hope it clicks for both sides.

The difference is that a job interview in the professional world is tightly vetted; a small fraction of applications turn to phone screens, and a small fraction of those turn into real interviews. In sales, it’s assumed that the success rate will be close to zero, so you optimize for quantity instead of quality. A common benchmark for cold calls is over one hundred per day. One hundred little loops of hope, negotiation, and, in most cases, rejection. It was a feeling I recognized, like designing something that went on to fail. Except, I wasn’t designing anything, so I only ever experienced the failure part. And it happened every hour of every day, like a Groundhog Day nightmare on fast-forward.

I finally understood why stakeholders outside of product development could make requests that seemed so absurd: they’re on the outside. As designers, we get to directly craft the end result. It makes us responsible for failure, but that comes with also being responsible for our success. In sales, you still get the blame, but none of the power to make change. You’re expected to find the right buyer for a product as it is, not as it could be. As a designer, I was tuned to perceiving the future, but as a salesman I could only promise the present.

Sometimes I find myself saying that I don’t really identify with the title of designer. That I’m much more of a generic “builder” or “maker” personality. I say that I care about the outcomes, not the output. Sure, sometimes that necessitates design, but sometimes it needs development, or management, or, yes, sales.

But really, I like sitting at my desk. I like putting on my headphones, taking pen to paper, sketching and coding for hours on end. I like the immediacy of the craft, the directness of my contribution.

What’s needed, what you’re good at, and what makes you happy: shoot for all three.

Made to Measure

David Cole — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The story is now infamous: between 2006 and 2009, Google tested 41 different shades of blue in order to determine which would generate the most clicks.

It came to light after designer Doug Bowman left his Visual Design Lead position at Google due to their data-driven culture. He wrote this about his departure:

I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions… I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.¹

The post spread quickly through the design community, with many designers expressing their disgust with Google’s approach. Fast Company ran a wonderful, violent headline on the story: “Google’s Marissa Mayer Assaults Designers with Data.”²

In the five years since, the event has become a legend in our field. “41 shades of blue” is now shorthand for flawed decision-making by data, as opposed to relying on the taste and instincts of an experienced designer.

In the same timeframe, the broad notion of design has undergone a remarkable transformation. Apple’s sustained dominance has popularized the concept of a “design-led” business. Design at Apple is not an afterthought, determined by A/B testing. Rather, it’s the starting point. An ad explaining their design process declares, “the first thing we ask is: what do we want people to feel?”³ They rely on intuition and principles of form. They believe money will naturally follow from there, and it has.

It’s not uncommon to encounter these two modes presented as a dichotomy, with headlines like “Should designers trust their instincts—or the data?”⁴ This model, positioning design and data against each other, reflects a misunderstanding of what data is and how it can be used. The design community needs to reframe our discourse on this subject in order to take advantage of a critical opportunity to advance our practice.

The Data in Intuition

One significant barrier to moving this conversation forward is that intuition and instinct are difficult to define with precision. Intuitive decision-making is actually the product of several different forces. It’s a mix of rules of thumb, anecdotes from previous experiences, information from “soft” sciences, and listening to your gut.

And data, in the popular conception, seems to be defined as something along the lines of “hard numbers measured by a computer”. Survey results plotted over time can also be data, as can a single survey result, or an in-person interview with a user. Data can even include the conversation with a relative about what you work on, and their difficulty in understanding it. All of these are data points containing information about how people use and understand your design work.

In truth, “data” fragments into many different sub-sections: usage data from server logs, data from split testing, data from aggregated or classified qualitative sources, and so on.

Really, data and intuition aren’t totally distinct: intuition is derived from past experiences and previous observations. It’s simply not useful to talk about these approaches as mutually exclusive, much less antithetical.

Idle Fears

Why, then, is there so much concern surrounding the relationship between intuition and data? The “41 shades” story points us to the answer.

In one read, this story comes off as an attempt to eliminate the designer from the process. If you can test every possible permutation imaginable, down to the finest details, you don’t need a professional to spend time reasoning about the differences.

And in another read, this story flies in the face of what we’re taught as designers. Color choices emerge from defined principles about form and aesthetics. One shade of blue “means” something that another does not. What happens if the best performing blue isn’t in-brand? Surely these decisions can’t be made in isolation.

Both of those reactions reflect valid concerns, but from the outside we don’t know what Google did with the information. Did they pick the best blue and move on with it? Did they take the time to learn why the best blue did so well, so they could re-apply those learnings elsewhere? Or perhaps there was no difference, and they fell back to the designer’s preference. Or maybe there was a huge difference, but they still went with the designer’s choice for aesthetic or brand reasons.

Imagine you were the designer in the group that ran that test, and one shade of blue performed significantly better than another. How could that be possible? Is it an aesthetic property of the blue? Perhaps it matches the other colors in some more satisfying way. Or does it have to do with how different it is from the other colors on the page? Maybe it’s the blue that is most distinct from black on the largest variety of screens. There are so many interesting possibilities to dig into.

Because the thing is, data is just data. It can’t be wrong, even if it can be misunderstood. If one blue outperformed another, and the test was constructed correctly, then it must be happening for a reason. The question of why opens up a vast learning opportunity. If there’s knowledge to be gained at that level of granularity, imagine how many different areas of inquiry there are in a single piece of design work.

Real Risks

By assuming the worst whenever we tell this story, we’re signaling that testing design changes can only produce negative outcomes. It’s so much more complex than that. Here’s what we should actually be concerned about when we hear a story like this:

Most websites, especially if they’re products, are complicated, multi-dimensional beasts. When discussing the improvement of a metric, we should ensure we’re not hurting ourselves elsewhere. It’s often true that behaviors are linked in unexpected ways. Clicks may be up, but long-term retention might start going down in a few months.

We should also acknowledge that numbers are just numbers. They can only tell us a limited amount of information. A healthy testing culture complements quantitative testing with a qualitative component. Maybe the best blue got the most clicks, but only because it was extremely bright and distracting. In-person testing might reveal that people click a tiny bit more, but with so much stress and frustration that it’s actually worse overall.

While I believe many more things are measurable than designers tend to think, some aspects of our work can’t be tied to a number. Brand loyalty, for example, is too long-term to tie to a single change. Major new features can take many months to show their impact, and it rarely makes sense to withhold a feature from your customers for that long. Some effects are too external to the system, like how a change might affect recruiting—a dynamic that is heavily influenced by the market and competitive forces. Some types of monitoring—say, surveying audiences that are hard to identify or access—may simply be too expensive or time-consuming to bother with. Despite all of this, deciding something is not measurable should be a conclusion subject to a lot of scrutiny. It’s much healthier to start with the assumption that testing is possible and data is valuable.

The big fear here is that companies focus only on what they can measure, at the expense of everything non-measurable. But we should not allow this fear to keep us from measuring as much as we can and applying the results.

The smarter approach is to build internal consensus that some important things simply can’t be tied to a metric, and go from there. As an example, consistency would be very difficult to measure. If it’s even possible, it would be quite complicated and expensive. Yet, few would argue against the idea that consistency matters. Evaluation is still possible through defined and agreed-upon principles that the whole organization respects.

These principles don’t need to be arbitrary: the difference between a three-pixel and a five-pixel line is significant. It’s also explicable. Our understanding of why certain visual design choices work better than others may be incomplete, but I can think of many good reasons to prefer one thickness over another. Varying line thickness can convey hierarchical relationships, or divide space with different amounts of strength, or establish a harmony with the stroke of some type, and so on. We can’t just attribute our design decisions to “good taste”—there are real reasons when we look for them.

Perhaps the most problematic aspect of the “41 shades” story goes unmentioned. It happened before the 41 shades:

A designer, Jamie Divine, had picked out a blue that everyone on his team liked. But a product manager tested a different color with users and found they were more likely to click on the toolbar if it was painted a greener shade.

As trivial as color choices might seem, clicks are a key part of Google’s revenue stream, and anything that enhances clicks means more money. Mr Divine’s team resisted the greener hue, so Ms Mayer split the difference by choosing a shade halfway between those of the two camps.⁵

Splitting the difference between two colors and just shipping is much riskier than running a test. Without a point of comparison, the success or failure of using that shade will teach us nothing. Maybe it fails. Then who was wrong? The designer, because it was slightly bluer? Or the PM, because it was slightly greener? There’s no way of knowing, and both parties lose. In the words of David Deutsch, if a solution is “no one’s idea of what will work, then why should it work?”⁶

Of course, it’s often the case that learning isn’t the primary goal of a test. Simply reaping the results from a high-performing variant can be the only concern. And it’s true that digging deeper into the dynamics of some change might not be worth the time or effort. That’s fine, but that choice should be recognized as both a missed opportunity and a real risk. When you learn nothing about why something succeeds, you don’t get to re-apply those learnings in future work. And more importantly, the more your product succeeds without your understanding why, the more likely it is that something will break without your knowledge. Imagine climbing into a rocket where the engineers aren’t exactly sure why it takes off, but hey, it sure is fast. Enjoy your flight!

Designing for Reality

If this just sounds like risk mitigation, it’s because I’m focusing on the fears I’m seeing in the design community. What gets much less attention is all of the untapped opportunity. Utilizing data as a designer isn’t just about building variants and running split tests.

Learning how to access and study existing usage data opens you up to an expanse of knowledge. There’s a lot more to this than checking the dashboard of Google Analytics. Robust logging organized meaningfully can be used to dive into every nook and cranny of your work. Monitoring key flows and tracking cohort-specific usage can surface issues you wouldn’t notice in simpler metrics, like time on site or monthly visits.

One of my favorite applications of data is during the design process itself. When you can quickly sample how people are really using your product, you can completely eliminate dummy behavior from your workflow, replacing Lorem Ipsum with the language people really use. Our tooling at Quora is sophisticated enough that static prototypes rarely exist for long: our first pass on the code often has production data immediately running through it. This means you’re designing for reality, which is often quite distinct from the ideal.

Really, that’s what all of this is about: designing for reality. The way we design today is unlike anything done in the past. Our work is beginning to reach billions of people simultaneously. We’re building products that need to facilitate relationships across the globe. The scale, scope, and complexity of our work demands a nuanced understanding of our systems and the people within them.

Returning to Apple and Google: let’s remember that these companies may be direct competitors, but their strengths rarely overlap. Apple makes a point not to keep user data, and it’s held them back in cases like Maps, Siri, or Ping. When large amounts of information or complex social behaviors are at play, data-centric companies like Facebook and Google have repeatedly bested them. The iPhone, for all its wonders, is primarily a single-user device that succeeds when it is beautiful and delightful enough to warrant an expensive purchase. Those dynamics do not apply to every product in every market. We should be equipped to design ourselves out of any problem we face, and increasingly that requires an ability to handle tremendous complexity.

Designers too often see data as a threat, when in fact it’s an opportunity. Our collective fears are unfounded, based on a misconception of what’s possible. Embracing data affords us deeper understanding, faster learning, and more nuanced reasoning.

Douglas Bowman, “Goodbye, Google,” Creative Outlet of Douglas Bowman (blog), March 20, 2009. ↩
Alissa Walker, “Google’s Marissa Mayer Assaults Designers with Data,” Fast Company, October 13, 2009. ↩
“Apple - Designed by Apple - Intention,” YouTube video, posted by Apple, June 10, 2013. ↩
Braden Kowitz, “Should Designers Trust Their Instincts—Or the Data?” Google Ventures (blog), 2013. ↩
Laura M. Holson, “Putting a Bolder Face on Google,” New York Times, February 28, 2009. ↩
David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (Penguin, 2011). ↩

Lesson

Jennifer Brook — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

There were twenty-four of us in the Workshop for Art Research and Practice. At WARP, a bootcamp and brand new program for incoming freshmen to teach them contemporary art and ignite their practice, we were encouraged to pursue big ideas, take risks, and, at times, fail. We learned about the postmodernists, performance art, conceptual art, installation, neo-expressionism, and land art. The post-1970s art world—a phenomenon none of us had been previously exposed to—exploded into our classroom and became the obsession of our waking thoughts and dream lives.

We were handed smart readings and a list of three hundred living artists whose work we were expected to know by the end of the semester. We discovered the impossible sculpture of Sarah Sze and Louise Bourgeois’ seductive and frightening forms. We learned about artists like Joseph Beuys, David Hammons, and Andrea Zittel, who broadened our understanding regarding the role of the artist. We watched John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, and made performances, sculpture, self-portraits, and public art. Assignments were always conceptual, and it was our work to think deeply about them and respond.

We stayed up all night in the studio together, not out of fear or obligation but because we loved working alongside one another. One student installed a twenty-foot replica of Optimus Prime in the courtyard. Another group organized a Situationist-like happening: six students in chef costumes jumped out of a white van and wrapped The Potato (a thirty-million-year-old ten-ton rock situated in the main campus square) in tin foil. The WARP bootcamp was notorious on campus, and any antics, WARP-initiated or not, would result in an immediate phone call to Sean and Bethany, our professors, at least a few times a semester.

Not all projects were performative or funny. Many of the works were deep, thoughtful, and revealing of the maker. I remember a beautiful final sculpture made by a friend: a small rusted house filled with wax. Another project, a series of love letters, each mailed in increasingly small envelopes, created an uncertainty regarding whether they would navigate the postal machines and arrive intact to their intended recipient.

We made ourselves vulnerable in front of each other and were, for the first time, treated seriously as artists.

And then a few weeks before our final class, our professor Sean stood up on a platform intended for nude models and offered another kind of reveal: “Your community, the artists and makers you meet and share your work with, will matter as much to you as your own art practice. They will be the reason you will continue if you find yourself stuck and they will be the ones to always show up at your openings, who truly understand and care about your work. Your community is everything.”

His sermon was prompted by one of our final readings, an essay by Dave Hickey titled “Romancing the Looky-Loos”. His words were, in fact, a kind of last lecture after an intense and life-changing semester. A beacon for our lives as makers and artists in college and, more importantly, beyond.

His words and the emotional nature of his sermon have stayed with me. I was nineteen and had never, until joining art school, felt I belonged to a community. After months spent with the same small cohort, sharing, critiquing, and championing one another’s work, the discovery that this was a community and I was a participant affected me.

Since this lecture, my creative practice has changed and, in turn, so has the shape of my community. But the ideas about participation, bearing witness to and championing each other, is an ideal I relentlessly pursue.

I’m incredibly grateful for the community I’ve found. I’ve met colleagues and friends who care deeply about the work they do, and even more about one another. It seems this ideal of participation, of showing up and championing each other, is already in the DNA of people who work on the web. For the next generation of practitioners, let belonging to and participating in a community not be a lesson to learn, but something entirely native to our profession.

Platforms as Cultures

Jennifer Brook — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

There is one way to understand another culture, living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language. At some point understanding may come. It will always be wordless. The moment you grasp what is foreign you will lose the urge to explain it. To explain a phenomenon is to distance yourself from it.

— Peter Høeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow¹

When I was living in the woods for several years in my early twenties, I had very little contact with digital or internet culture. My obsession was The Book. I spent years learning how to use the machines, tools, and materials that are midwife to books: Vandercook proofing and platen presses, guillotines, paper, ink, binding thread, and board shears. Through living in the mountains of North Carolina, a community of craftspeople and a surprisingly high concentration of book makers, I immersed myself in a culture and a language of the book. I became fluent. My books started to get collected by museums and rare book libraries. During the day I’d work in a studio alongside other makers of the book, and at night I’d return to my little dwelling in the woods, to sketch, fold paper, and read about the book’s history.

I began to read Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s The Coming of The Book,² a bright yellow tome that details the impact of printing from 1450–1800. In tumbling through its pages, I became enamored by the lives of people living in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, when a wave of technological change was shaping commerce, behavior, and culture. I read intently about the craftspeople and technologists who were shaping this culture—the papermakers, the goldsmiths-turned-printers, the journeymen who wandered from press to press learning the trade. I deeply envied these pioneers experimenting with printing and papermaking when everything must have felt like new and exciting territory.

Around this time, something else happened. Fast Company, a gift subscription from my father, would arrive once a month at my isolated internet-less treehouse. After several issues, its contents started to pry open another window. I began to read about design, the internet, and start-up culture. I would read essays by Paul Graham on computers at the local library and check out The Design of Everyday Things.³ I became enamored by these designers, technologists, and craftspeople who were a part of an acceleration.

Then it hit me. This continuum of humankind’s relationship to technology—a wave where the velocity of the material accelerates, peaks, and then slows—was a continuum I could locate myself in. Being a bookmaker, I was a craftsperson and technologist, albeit most of the technologies I mastered had peaked and subsequently slowed hundreds of years ago. The crest of this new wave was where I wanted to be.

Invisible Culture

Our pre-digital ancestors used material artifacts, architectures, and objects to understand their own and other cultures. When I first emigrated to digital, cultural understanding came slowly. It took time to see what was in front of me. The internet is not a place or a material; it is a context. And without material embodiment, I found it difficult to see the architecture and make sense of the digital artifacts. Eventually, this way of seeing emerged, and I discovered that the things we make exist in, respond to, and evolve in that context.

Kurt Anderson, in Vanity Fair’s “You Say You Want a Devolution?”,⁴ claims that very few advances have been made in material culture since the ’90s. While he briefly mentions personal computing as an exception, his focus remains with the material artifact. What he doesn’t address, however, is how many of the artifacts and architectures have become immaterial and often invisible. And that these invisible architectures and digital artifacts are changing and shaping our culture.

Without materialization, how then can we see or tell others to see digital cultures?

Seeing Culture

The city of Shanghai feels like it’s continually being born: shopping malls, standing cranes, concrete and steel exploding out of the sidewalks. It’s a city that feels like a metaphor for the internet. I spent my first morning in Shanghai wandering through the Urban Planning Museum, walking around a massive scale model of the city. I watched as young men dusted the white buildings, and workers tiptoed into the center to extract buildings that had been demolished and replace them with the newer structures.

Later in the day, a friend took me to a high-rise to show me the edges of an older Shanghai, one that has mostly disappeared. A tall fence surrounded an overgrown field speckled with a few remaining homes, a tiny pocket of resistors—people who refused to let the government tear down their homes.

Travel, departure, and leaving is how I generate an afterimage of my culture. It’s how I close my eyes and see the halo of the thing that surrounds me. Observing the neglect or absence of a digital platform can be one way to travel outside of them and see the edges. Looking at Flickr feels like staring at that near-empty field in Shanghai. It’s a culture many of us helped to shape, a platform that evolved, grew, and then declined. A few of us still inhabit Flickr, but in the back of our minds we know that at any moment, it could be torn down.

From Web Culture to Cultures

My friend Simon says we talk about the web as if it’s a single thing, when it’s really two different things: the web that provides the data and service, and the web that provides us access through a browser’s interface. I’d add that for the past several decades, the internet has also been our primary context.

This distinction matters as our work shifts from the browser to social and computing platforms. The internet is no longer being experienced as network, culture, and context simultaneously. While we are all still deeply dependent on the network’s data and service layers, the touchpoints, screens, kiosks, and interfaces are situated not only in the browser, but in countless contexts.

Only a few years after starting my work with the web, I took on my first app project while working at the New York Times. No books on the subject had been published, and there was very little relevant information available about designing apps for mobile. Everything had to be learned by looking at other apps, reading the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines, trying to understand patterns, or otherwise immersing oneself in the culture of the app.

There was, and still is, the notion that we can “create once and publish everywhere”. That both the content and the interface are culture-agnostic. However, in ignoring form, or failing to see that platforms are cultures, we ignore the possibility for what we make to be situated within and in dialogue with culture.

Today, as I work primarily on apps for mobile and tablet devices, these projects feel like completely different territory. Different languages, values, behaviors, and new subtle protocols. If you’re making something that will exist within a computing or social ecosystem, whether it’s an app intended for a smartphone or a tumblr blog intended for the tumblr dashboard, the platform is a culture. The information architectures, the interface artifacts, the social objects, have been shaped by us and, in turn, shape our behavior. This is true for the web-as-interface, but what I was bearing witness to in my work at the Times, what we’ve all been participating in, has been a shift from a single dominant digital culture, the web, to an explosion of digital cultures.

If we want what we make to feel relevant, indigenous, and thoughtful, then it’s crucial that we understand cultural differences in order to situate our creations within it.

Listening Noises And Subtle Protocol

One surprise in becoming fluent in Italian was discovering how critical gestures are to the language. A single gesture can communicate an entire idea; gesticulation is a part of the transmission of signals, it’s one of the culture’s subtle protocols. In this way, the conversation is the context, and gestures are part of the interface. They are something that, if removed from the context of the conversation, would not make sense.

In telling a friend about the gestures, she shared that when she was learning Japanese, she had a similar experience during a lesson devoted to listening noises. These noises are subtle sounds you make, tiny intonations in your voice that tell the other person that you’ve heard what they are saying and understand its meaning. And it’s as much a part of verbal communication as the words.

The “like” or the “favorite” is a kind subtle protocol that gives us the opportunity to make a listening noise.

If we are designing for existing platforms, are we looking for and incorporating the subtle protocol native to the platform? Can what we create facilitate listening noises?

As a maker of digital things, I notice when the subtle protocol missing, when a certain interaction model feels outdated, or when good patterns are passed over for less suitable ones. I observe fluency in the voice of the copy, the tone of the content. If I’m truly immersed in a platform, I can tell when the maker was listening.

Hot Sweaty Dialogue

On a platform at the New Jersey airport, several feet in front of people holding small whiteboards scribbled with passengers’ names, a woman stood. She was a little taller than me and had a visible aura. She wore a uniform and welcomed us off our twelve-hour flight from Stockholm. Bleary-eyed and jet-lagged, it wasn’t until I was standing directly in front of her that I realized this woman was a hologram.

There’s a secret devious place inside me that loves work that is stubbornly not digital. I revel in people, places, and forms that are impervious to the link, or whose scope and experience doesn’t translate online. This is not the list-making archivist part of myself, the information architect, or the righteous citizen of this digital community. This is the tiny Anarchist. The Resistor. Deep down, I’m not form-agnostic. In becoming a maker, both of physical books and of digital forms, I’ve learned that content and form are not two strangers that come together with ease and obviousness. They are more like quarrelsome lovers engaged in a hot sweaty dialogue.

Yet I’ve found myself in the last few years experiencing similar feelings when I see an app that feels so effortlessly native, so digitally indigenous, that its intention as a thing would be compromised if it was translated or born as any other form. That it not only justifies itself as an iPhone app or book but does so with ease and elegance. That to incarnate into any other form would be possible, but not optimal.

Found In Translation

My current digital work and play happens across many different cultures. In the next five years, along with the dozens of existing forms we get to choose from, it’s entirely possible we will also have the hologram—or some other yet-to-be born form—to consider as a possible platform for our content, and a site for listening. As mobile devices and computers become smaller and more ubiquitous, our contexts will multiply as well.

Certain kinds of services that were originally only accessible via a browser actually do make more sense as apps. The same can be said about certain content that was previously only contained in books—that it clearly belongs on the network.

As new platforms emerge, it becomes our responsibility to make decisions about the appropriate form. To understand when something should become one form and not another, to elegantly and with confidence distinguish “possible” from “optimal”. And thriving as digital makers means cultivating an ability to see what’s invisible by looking for subtle protocol, making listening noises when we see it, and striving to craft work that is conversational and culturally aware.

Peter Høeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow (Harvill, 1993). ↩
Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of The Book (Verso, 1976). ↩
Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (Basic Books, 1988). ↩
Kurt Anderson, “You Say You Want a Devolution?,” Vanity Fair (January 2012). ↩

Lesson

Diana Kimball — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The happy news came over Twitter: Ellen was going to work at Kickstarter. All I could feel was anger rising in my throat.

Ellen and I met through mutual friends in 2008. At the time, we were studying at two different colleges in the same city; I was one year ahead. We learned that we’d both grown up in Michigan. Cast on similar paths by our shared interest in technology, we both interned at Microsoft and took jobs there as program managers after graduation. For a summer, we even worked on the same team in Mountain View. We both applied to the same business school; we both got in. Our paths were symmetrical in the extreme.

And now Ellen was going to work at Kickstarter, just months after I’d finished an internship there. Because Ellen had deferred business school for longer than I had, she was available for full-time work. Meanwhile, I was halfway through a two-year program, and committed to finishing in spite of myself. Yet the happy news still sent me reeling. I had always been a year ahead, but now Ellen had caught up—and in one important way, surpassed me. My face burned.

It took me weeks to write a measured note of congratulations. It took longer for me to come to terms with the implosion. As I wrote in a journal at the time, “I feel threatened by what we have in common. I don’t want to be replaceable.”

I knew my anger wasn’t about Ellen. I knew that. But my face still burned, my throat still tightened. My insecurity was unbecoming. I just didn’t know how to unmake it.

All of that happened in 2012. In time, the intensity receded. I graduated from business school; I took a job at SoundCloud; I moved to Berlin. And then one day in early 2014, I saw on Twitter that Ellen had written a blog post about how she came to work at Kickstarter. Interested, and sensing in myself the necessary calm, I clicked through.

Right there, in the second paragraph, I learned something I’d never known: Ellen came to Kickstarter through me. “I found out that Kickstarter had a Product Manager opening when Diana Kimball tweeted about it on April 25, 2012,” she wrote. That tweet kicked off a six-month quest to work at Kickstarter, which ended in an emphatic yes. Reading Ellen’s story, I felt foolish, deflated, uplifted. All the old anger, long settled, drained away.

Ellen gave me one more gift. Days after her blog post, she sent an email to thank me, at several years’ remove, for being the way she found out about the opening at Kickstarter. And then, she said something surprising:

I’ve always felt a little bad about how similar our paths are—between Michigan, Boston, PowerPoint, Kickstarter, HBS. I’ve never been really sure what to do about it, because I think we just happen to have similar interests/skills. I’m not sure why it makes me feel guilty, but I do hope you don’t view it negatively.

She felt it too! Heartened by the revelation, by the symmetry of our perceptions, my reply tumbled out:

I feel I can be very honest here—you’re not wrong! In fact, when I first heard that you’d taken the job at Kickstarter in fall 2012, I experienced a highly-charged heart-sinking sensation. After sitting with that for a few hours and talking it over with Erik (who happened to be there with me), I realized that whatever I was experiencing was important information, but that it was absolutely not about you… Today, I feel no twinge about the similarities in the paths we’ve taken. Your choices are so fully your own, and I’m just happy to exist in the same orbit, collecting experiences that we’ll be able to compare and contrast and chuckle over whenever our paths cross, as I hope they keep doing for a long long time.

In The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown writes: “Shame hates it when we reach out and tell our story. It hates having words wrapped around it—it can’t survive being shared. Shame loves secrecy.” For a long time, I’d kept my unbecoming reactions secret. By sharing her side of the story spontaneously, Ellen made room for me to unearth mine. The truth was embarrassing; a thrill; a relief.

On Mentoring

Diana Kimball — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

An idea came to me on the train to work. I went to Amazon.com on my phone, tapped in the name of the book I’d just finished reading,¹ and sent a second copy to my former professor. Then, I wrote him an email asking him to pass the book along to a student—“perhaps a bit shy, but mischievous”—who could use it. “My email address is enclosed on an attached note,” I continued, “and I’d love to hear from the student once she’s read it.”

The book landed with a young woman named Jane Chun. I heard back from her a few months later, just before Thanksgiving. When she came home to California to visit her family, we met in person for the first time. We had so much to talk about.

After Thanksgiving, Jane and I kept up our correspondence. Every so often, one of us would revive an old email thread or send a note to say, “thinking of you.”

Our exchanges intensified in the summer of 2011 when Jane wrote to ask for advice on an upcoming interview, initiating a back-and-forth that spanned several weeks. After the interview was over and the only thing left was to wait, she sent a note of thanks: “Throughout this process you have been such an incredible mentor to me, and I really appreciate all the time you have put into answering my questions.”²

My heart surged: I’d never been called a mentor before. Jane’s matter-of-fact tone made her words easier to accept. There was no coronation ceremony—no praise to resist. Just an observation, an offhanded remark. Its straightforwardness gave it the ring of truth.

When Jane called me her mentor, it changed the way I saw myself. I was spellbound by the sense of wholeness that came from being useful just by being myself. I wanted to feel that way all the time. I wanted everyone to feel that way all the time. The invocation of the word “mentor” was the turning point for me. I thought that sharing that soaring feeling could be as simple as invoking the word “mentor” more often.

So, I started a project called /mentoring. “Anyone can be a part of /mentoring,” I wrote by way of introduction on August 30, 2011. “All it takes is a few lines of text on your own website, blog, or other profile, expressing your openness to mentoring and offering a specific invitation to get in touch.”

Tense but hopeful, itching for escape velocity, I decided to go big: “I’m calling it ‘/mentoring’ because I hope that eventually it will be as natural a part of the internet as ‘/about’ pages. I’m placing my invitation at http://dianakimball.com/mentoring, and I invite you to do the same.”

The response was immediate and affirmative. Friends and strangers tweeted and retweeted about /mentoring; a few even put up pages based on the template I’d shared. I could feel momentum building. But almost as soon as /mentoring took off, I started to have misgivings.

As reports from the field rolled in, I began to feel like I’d sent my friends up a creek without a paddle. There were the basic questions I’d only lightly anticipated: when a stranger writes to ask for advice, how and when do you transition that conversation to the phone? Once you’re on the phone, how do you take responsibility for overcoming the awkwardness and opening up the conversation in earnest? As the conversation winds down, how do you broach the topic of whether the person on the other end can expect an ongoing relationship or needs to make peace with it being a one-time thing?

And then there were more difficult questions that emerged only in practice. If it turns out that the person is, quite transparently, trying to bolster their chances at a job interview with you—as actually happened to one friend of mine—how do you bounce back from the feeling of manipulation? What if their listlessness or lack of direction seems every bit like depression, but you don’t have enough context to say for sure, and it’s not your place to say, anyway? What if what they want from you isn’t actually something you have to give?

Alarmed by the legions of awkward interactions I felt sure I’d unleashed through /mentoring, I retreated from the project after a few short months. Although the instructions for setting up /mentoring pages remained online, and many friends’ open invitations persisted on their websites—whether through willing dedication, obligation, or inertia, I still don’t know—I promoted the project less and less, and eventually, stopped entirely. What started as a movement became a liability.

The awkwardness of mentoring had mesmerized me, though, and I wasn’t ready to let go. The whole experience of introducing /mentoring and then witnessing its gentle fallout had only reinforced my belief that the word had power. I needed to understand it. So in the spring of 2012, my friend Beau Rowland and I embarked on a research project: we were going to solve the mystery of mentoring.

The more Beau and I learned, the more complicated mentoring revealed itself to be. We read about the word’s origins in Greek mythology, the challenges of setting up mentoring programs in the workplace, and the should-be-obvious-but-easily-ignored importance of setting expectations and boundaries in any mentoring relationship. And then, in a book by an organizational behavior professor, we discovered something that seemed to explain it all.

In Mentoring at Work: Developmental Relationships in Organizational Life,³ first published in 1985, Kathy Kram outlines a framework for the behaviors that constitute mentoring. She organizes mentoring behaviors into two broad categories: career functions and psychosocial functions. Career functions include sponsorship, exposure and visibility, coaching, protection, and challenging assignments. Psychosocial functions include role modeling, acceptance and confirmation, counseling, and friendship. Looking at those two lists, my mind woke up. No wonder mentoring is complicated! The term is loaded beyond belief.

Mentoring is a mess because it’s hard to know what it means. If agreeing to be someone’s mentor means volunteering to serve as a coach, a confidante, a role model, and a therapist all in one, what exactly does saying “yes” obligate you to do? The person asking to be mentored could mean any number of things; they might not even know what they seek. And when you think about it, that’s not surprising at all. How often can any of us name what we need?

Needs are holes; they’re hard to talk about. Before you can put words to your needs, you have to learn to see negative space. I didn’t recognize how difficult or important this was until I stumbled across a book called What We Say Matters,⁴ by Judith and Ike Lasater. “Learning how to identify our needs and how to get them met is a fundamental life skill,” they write. The book’s view of needs is broad; the authors refer to the work of Manfred Max-Neef, who named nine basic human needs: affection, creation, freedom, identity, participation, protection, recreation, subsistence, and understanding. Identifying and filling those needs as they arise is the work of a lifetime.

Critically, identifying needs and filling them are two separate steps. In What We Say Matters, the authors draw a distinction between needs—the gaps in our lives that reveal themselves through patient introspection—and strategies—the ways we bridge them. To illustrate the difference between needs and strategies, they use the example of love:

If I have a strategy for getting love from a specific person and that person does not give it, I am stuck without getting my need for love met. But there are always many strategies for getting any particular need met, and so it is with love. I can get love from many other sources in my life. Viewing love as a need frees me up to search for another strategy to get that need met.

In my experience, the impulse to find a mentor usually comes when something’s missing. But what? The tough love of a coach, the steady attention of a trusted confidante, the motivating proximity of a role model, the probing questions of a therapist, or something else entirely? Figuring that out would already constitute a major step in the direction of self-knowledge and potential satisfaction. As the authors of What We Say Matters point out, “if you ask for what you want, you’re more likely to get it.”

Yet the disentangling doesn’t have to stop there. Tough love, steady attention, motivating proximity, and probing questions can all be seen as strategies for meeting even more basic needs: to be challenged, to be understood, to be inspired, to learn. Finding a mentor can be one way to meet those needs, but it’s not the only way. Remembering that there are other ways can serve as a release.

It’s good that there are other ways, because mentoring is a tenuous thing. For mentoring to work, the stars have to align such that two people need each other at a moment in time. Mentoring relationships are relationships first and foremost, and relationships are forged through mutual vulnerability; anything less is a dead end. Those who seek mentoring need all kinds of things. But the figures on the other side of the equation often appear enigmatic from the outside. When people decide to act as mentors, what needs are they trying to meet?

When I decided to act as a mentor, what needs was I trying to meet?

The year I met Jane was a hard one. A sudden death in my family had thrown me, just after I’d started a new job in a new city. Through twelve months of self-doubt, I spent a lot of time reading on the topic of “how to be a person”—very much the genre of the book I finished that fated morning on the train to work. When it occurred to me to send the book to my former professor and ask him to pass it along, the creativity and generosity of the idea came as a surprise. Creativity meant my imagination was working again; generosity meant I felt strong enough to help others. Being there for Jane was a significant step in my own recovery. What I needed was to get outside of myself.

Not every mentor arrives at a willingness to help out of a desire to mend. Just as often, the ease and joy of mattering carries the day. Sometimes, the urge to be inspired by someone else’s aspirational energy comes into play. There are countless needs that mentoring can meet. The important thing is to make sure at least one need is alive in you, and to at least try to give it a name.

Looking back, the biggest problem with /mentoring was my assumption that what was true for me when I started the project would remain true forever. Simply adding the page to my website met my need to feel like someone with something to give. Encouraging others to do the same met my need to make a difference in the world at large. For a moment in time, everything lined up.

Yet as time went on, inbound mentoring requests rarely arrived when I was prepared to receive them. People poured their hearts out in letters, as I had asked them to. But since their letters arrived on their own time, I wasn’t always ready to reciprocate. And without the click of mutuality, most of those would-be relationships fizzled out before they began. If I agreed to speak with someone through the frame of /mentoring but couldn’t bring myself to be vulnerable in exactly the moment we spoke, the conversation went nowhere. One-way vulnerability—from them to me—became about power, not closeness.

Power dynamics are an unavoidable part of the idea of mentoring. One person is experienced, the other aspiring; one person is giving, the other seeking. But the best mentoring relationships subvert that power dynamic. In fact, all good relationships play with power dynamics. Status games are an important way of showing affection. In the book Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre,⁵ Keith Johnstone explains how this could be:

Many people will maintain that we don’t play status transactions with our friends, and yet every movement, every inflection of the voice implies a status. My answer is that acquaintances become friends when they agree to play status games together. If I take an acquaintance an early morning cup of tea I might say “Did you have a good night?” or something equally “neutral,” the status being established by voice and posture and eye contact and so on. If I take a cup of tea to a friend then I may say “Get up, you old cow,” or “Your Highness’s tea,” pretending to raise or lower status.

When we’re comfortable enough to shift between high and low at will, laughter and epiphanies erupt. Freed from the expectations of knowing everything or knowing nothing, we can get closer to the truth together. It’s why I asked my professor to introduce me to a student who was “perhaps a bit shy, but mischievous.” I wanted to meet someone who could hold her own. I wanted to help, but I didn’t want to be held to a rigid standard; I wanted to be myself.

To be acknowledged as a mentor in hindsight is meaningful because it is a form of thanks. To be asked upfront to be someone’s mentor is unnerving because it’s a boundless request, an inchoate please. The word has power both ways. But if we set aside the word and go back to basic needs, mentoring starts to look like something much simpler: friendship. Of all the possible outcomes of mentoring, the best one is ending up on the same level.

So it was that one day in June 2013, Jane showed up at the apartment my boyfriend and I shared in San Francisco. I was moving to Berlin and needed help like nobody’s business. She knew this, and decided to pitch in as part of saying goodbye. Jane surveyed the kitchen, clapped her hands, and began. Together, we bundled cups and bowls in bubble wrap and talked about our days.

Tina Seelig, What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 (HarperOne, 2009). ↩
Personal correspondence with Jane Chun, published with permission. ↩
Kathy Kram, Mentoring at Work: Developmental Relationships in Organizational Life(University Press of America, 1985). ↩
Judith and Ike Lasater, What We Say Matters: Practicing Nonviolent Communication (Rodmell Press, 2009). ↩
Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (Routledge, 1987). ↩

Lesson

Wilson Miner — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

For two people who hated talking on the phone, my dad and I had a lot of phone conversations.

I think it’s because the point in our relationship where we really started to relate to each other was around the time I left for school. I was a quasi-adult with half a thought in my head, and we were interested in a lot of the same things, so we enjoyed talking about them. When I moved far enough away that we didn’t see each other on a regular basis, we kept the conversations going over the phone.

Once, after his own father died, my dad told me that he realized he counted so much on being able to ask his advice, even for trivial things, that he often felt lost without it.

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to ask my dad for advice, or hear what he thought about a book we’d read, or a piece of classical music he’d been listening to. I still catch myself organizing my thoughts for those conversations in my head. I think about how to phrase the questions I’m going to ask him, and sometimes I still reach for the phone to call him.

One of the recurring topics over the years was work. My dad was a teacher, and also an author; he wrote forty books in his lifetime. We talked about the normal things, the everyday victories and frustrations of work, but we also talked about what we wanted out of the work that we did, and the kind of work we wanted to do. I was at the start of my career as a designer and he was getting close to the age when retirement might be an option, but I like to think we both had a perspective that the other appreciated.

I was lucky enough to have two jobs early in my career that I considered “dream jobs” at the time. I say that not because they didn’t turn out to be great jobs, but they did turn out to be real jobs. They were great experiences, but they were also difficult and frustrating to the extent that every job is. If I hadn’t had those experiences, I could see myself holding them out as some kind of perfect ideal: “this job sucks, but if I worked there it would be different.”

When my dad got sick, the tone of our conversations changed. Not right away, but when he started to talk about the book he was researching as his last book, a particular anxiety started to creep into those conversations. All the hours of research, poring over microfilm, the trips to the library or his office at the university that took so much of the energy he had left between chemo treatments.

Was this one worth it? Were any of them worth it? And the ultimate doubt for a lifelong historian—would anyone remember?

My dad always talked about some future book as the one he would be remembered for. I think it was sort of necessary to keep going, even in the beginning. To keep starting over with each new book, to believe that he had something left to say. Each book becomes practice, training for the next one, and the one after that.

Maybe if he’d had more time, if he’d retired and looked back over everything he’d written from a little distance, maybe he would have seen it differently. But he died in the middle of a book he never finished, that by the end he didn’t think was worth finishing.

The thing is, every book he wrote was a masterpiece. He only knew one way to write history: the right way. He put everything he had, and everything he knew into every single book. Even the ones he wrote on commission, corporate histories for companies commemorating an anniversary that were a reliable source of income but not such a reliable path to academic prestige.

Every time, he did the interviews, he dug up archives that nobody had touched since they locked them away, and he turned invisible corners of the past into stories that people actually wanted to read. His specialty was local and regional history, so most of what he wrote about was close to home. He gave people the story of their family, their ancestors, their home. He gave people their history.

There are no dream jobs. There is work that is worth your time, and work that isn’t. You’ll never be sure which is which, so there are only two ways to do the work in front of you: the right way or not at all.

Perennial Design

Wilson Miner — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

— Wendell Berry ¹

In the picture, I’m standing in a wheat field in western Kansas. I’m five years old; the wheat is higher than my head. It’s late summer, almost time for harvest.

My grandfather was born not far from where I’m standing. This is his land, his wheat. A few years from this moment, it will be my father’s responsibility, and eventually, maybe mine.

Even after he left this place—first for school and then the war—my grandfather still returned every year in the summer, just in time for harvest. When my dad was a boy, my grandfather brought him along. Later, my father brought me.

I was too young to remember that first trip, but there were others sporadically over the years until I was twelve or thirteen. The last trip was not long before my grandfather died. By then I was taller than the wheat, but I could still stand inside the enormous wheel of the combine harvester for another picture before my dad hoisted me up on the seat beside the farmer. I rode along in wonder as great swathes of wheat were devoured in the wide mechanical jaws of the combine and whooshed over our heads into the truck behind.

The Farm And the Prairie

Wheat, like corn, rice, and most domesticated grains, is an annual plant. Every year, new seed must be planted, which will survive only one growing season and produce only one crop. Each year, all the seed, all the water, and all the fertilizer that went into the soil is reaped with the harvest along with all the sweat and all the fuel required to plant it.

Because the growing season is relatively short, the soil has nothing in it for much of the year. When the rain comes, and there are no roots to hold the soil, it washes away the surface and takes a layer of topsoil with it. Even flat and well-managed cropland loses tons of topsoil per acre every year through erosion.

Through the development of fertilizers, irrigation, and bio-engineered crops, farmers have actually managed to increase crop yields over the years by finding new ways to extract more from less. Just as the car industry has developed incrementally more efficient gas engines to squeeze a few more miles per gallon out of a finite and dwindling reserve of fossil fuels, the agriculture industry has so far been able to increase production rates even as the destruction of the soil continues to accelerate.

Already, this engineered growth shows signs of slowing. Eventually, the clock will run out.

Much of the western part of the state of Kansas has been cultivated for farmland, but to the east, in the Flint Hills, the rocky landscape that gives the region its name has yielded less willingly to the plow. Here, the tall grass prairie that was the natural ecosystem of these plains before agriculture displaced it still covers several thousand acres of rolling hills. Much of it has been used as grazing land for livestock, but the deep, resilient root system of the native grasses keep hold of the soil, protecting against erosion.

In contrast to the annual grains that make up the foundation of our food system, prairie grasses are perennial plants. Each year, when the grass above ground dies in the fall and winter (or during a drought), the roots, which make up as much as 75% of the plants’ biomass, stay intact below and produce new growth in the spring.

Everything about the prairie ecosystem is self-renewing. In addition to protecting against erosion, the year-round plant cover actually returns more nutrients to the soil over time than they use, meaning that soil covered in prairie grass is actually improved rather than depleted over time.

The farmer needs chemicals to fertilize his crops and protect against infestations and diseases that target one plant at a time and spread easily. Because the native prairie is a diverse ecosystem made up of many mutually-beneficial organisms, it has been resilient enough to thrive for thousands of years without intervention.

Technological Sediment

It’s almost cliché at this point to bemoan the fact that the work we create as digital designers doesn’t last very long. Whatever we make is bound to be obsolete, replaced, or just plain gone in a few years or less. We’re like the farmer after a harvest, watching the rain fall on an empty field.

Steve Jobs gave an interview at NeXT in 1994 which resurfaced from the Silicon Valley Historical Association archives after his death.² In response to one of the questions, comparing Silicon Valley to the European Renaissance in the fifteenth century and Jobs himself to Isaac Newton, he replies matter-of-factly, “All the work I’ve done in my life will be obsolete by the time I’m fifty.”

With his unceremonious departure from Apple almost a decade behind him and his triumphant return not yet on the horizon, he takes the long view: “It’s sort of like a sediment of rocks. You’re building up a mountain, and you get to contribute your little layer of sedimentary rock to make the mountain that much higher. But no one on the surface, unless they have X-ray vision, will see your sediment.”

With digital interfaces, there’s only so much we can do to make our products more durable. We’re limited by the ephemeral nature of our materials. And we’ve learned to work in a way that takes advantage of the fact that digital material is so easily disposable. We try things; we learn something; we erase things, and we try again.

But the process, the way we got there, has a longer lifespan. The process is the sediment, the deep root system where we store up knowledge over time. Each product we create is just what surfaces above ground, a crystallization of the sum total of everything we’ve learned up to that point.

If all we celebrate is what is visible on the surface—the fragile plant and not the durable root system—we limit the scope of our ambition to the shortest possible horizon. Are we making layers of sediment for future generations to build a mountain, or are we planting each year’s crop of new products and watching them wash away once their short-term value is harvested and consumed?

The emergence of ideas like “responsive design” and “future-friendly thinking” are in part a response to the collective realization that designing products that solve one problem in one context at a time is no longer sustainable. By refocusing our process on systems that are explicitly designed to adapt to a changing environment, we have an opportunity to develop durable, long-lasting designs that renew their usefulness and value over time.

Durable Systems

Pentagram recently designed a new system of pedestrian wayfinding signs for New York City. The designers chose to create a complementary system to the subway signage system designed by Massimo Vignelli almost a half-century earlier.

That signage system, which has itself become an icon of the city, has evolved significantly from the original standards, adapted through an often chaotic process of implementation challenges, budget constraints, and the messy reality of a living city. But for all its growing pains, the core system is still in use and is still actively being adapted and extended.

Vignelli designed another system, in 1977, for the National Park Service (NPS). The modular system, called the Unigrid, allowed the NPS to create multiple sizes of brochures, fold-out maps, and posters by reusing the same elements and structure across all the materials.

Like the subway signage system, the Unigrid system was designed to bring order to a chaotic process. The NPS is a widely distributed organization with widely varying needs and staff capabilities. Because the Unigrid was designed as a simple, modular system, it was straightforward to create many different brochures separately that felt like part of the same system. Because it was designed to be modular and flexible, it was possible to adapt it to new needs over time without dismantling the foundation of the system.

Even the most ambitious systems don’t always have what it takes to survive. Vignelli’s New York City subway map, which he designed alongside the subway signage system, was famously replaced a few years later after continued complaints from subway riders. Vignelli was quoted by the New York Times, calling the replacement map a “mongrel” for its messy mixing of “naturalism and abstraction” (Vignelli’s map was much-hated by New Yorkers for wildly misrepresenting above-ground distances in favor of diagrammatic purity). Michael Hertz, the designer of the map which long outlasted Vignelli’s own, responded that “mongrels” or “hybrids” are “usually healthier, smarter, and longer-lived creatures than his ‘thoroughbred’ turned out to be.”

Dead Branches

Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.

— Italo Calvino³

The largest shopping mall in the world is a ghost town. Built on former farmland in the suburbs of Dongguan, China, the New South China Mall covers 9.6 million square feet, with leasable space for as many as 2,350 stores. It has seven zones with features that mimic landmarks from international cities like Paris, Rome, and Venice, including an eighty-foot replica of the Arc de Triomphe, and a 1.3-mile canal complete with gondolas.⁴

It’s almost completely empty. There is no airport in Dongguan to bring shoppers from more populated areas, and there are no highways that reach the mall’s location.

The New South China Mall is the largest, but far from the only mall in the world standing vacant. All over the world, the great hulking masses of “dead malls” loom over the suburbs, the ghosted outlines of dismantled signs on the walls of the department stores like the shadows of an earlier age of commerce.

Edged out by the rise of “big box” stores like Wal-Mart and Target, and unable to adapt to the changing calculus of a series of economic downturns, the shopping mall has become a symbol of stagnation and decay. But it began as something completely different, an ambitious idea in the mind of the man with the now dubious distinction of being credited as the “inventor” of the shopping mall.

Victor Gruen, an architect and city planner who grew up in Vienna, was disgusted by the American suburbs. Inspired by the broad plazas and civic centers of Europe, he hoped to design a new built environment that would restore a sense of civic life and community to the sprawling, isolating chaos of the suburbs. As the architect for the Southdale Mall near Minneapolis, the first enclosed shopping center in the United States, his original designs included plans for a 400-acre development with apartment buildings, houses, schools, a medical center, parks, and a lake.

Gruen designed an ambitious system to right the wrongs of the suburbs, and fix the mistakes of the urban downtown in the process. Whether or not his grand plans may ever have succeeded, what he hoped to create was a diverse system of mutually beneficial elements which could have an impact greater than the sum of its parts. He held on to that hope, even as the developers he partnered with convinced him to build the minimum viable commercial product which would support the construction of the rest.

Of course, the only part of his plans that ever got built, at Southdale or any of the other countless developments which rapidly copied and expanded on its model, was the shopping center. Instead of building Gruen’s system as the foundation, the developers extracted just the most lucrative piece and optimized it in isolation for one outcome: profit. Once chosen, that metric became the one thing that every other part of Gruen’s idea would eventually be traded against.

By the end of his life, Gruen left America as disgusted with his own invention as he had been with the suburbs when he first arrived. Appalled by the metastatic sprawl the malls had spawned and the “ugliness and discomfort of the land-wasting seas of parking,”⁵ he eventually disowned and disparaged his own creation. In a speech in London in 1978, he declared, “I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments.” He died in Vienna in 1980. He never returned to America.

The Failure Of Success

It’s natural to want the things we make to last. Even the smallest things, the ones made of the most fragile stuff. We want them have meaning, to be useful, to be bigger than ourselves somehow. Every product we launch into the crucible of the real world, every project we deliver to the mercy of a client or leave in the hands of our colleagues after we leave a job. Every acquisition, every exit, every pivot, every shutdown, every bitter end. Somehow we hope to invest some quality in the things we make which will outlast our involvement.

The modern practice of agriculture is based on a system of annual monoculture because it’s what gets results. Because the plants have no long-term systems to support, all their energy goes toward producing grains, which means bigger harvests. By planting huge fields with only one crop, the large commercial operations, where most of our food is produced, can operate as efficiently as possible. Year over year, annual monoculture feeds the most people the most efficiently. It’s also completely, transparently, inherently unsustainable.

We can’t afford to follow the same model. We’re beginning to recognize our own monocultures just as the short-lived efficiencies we extracted from them begin to unravel. The premise that we can design for a manageable number of combinations of screen sizes, platforms, contexts, and devices is quickly eroding. The diversity of variables in our ever-changing digital environment demand thoughtful systems designed around principles durable enough to outlast increasingly brief cycles of obsolescence.

When we start with the assumption that optimizing for rapid, unbounded growth is a goal, we immediately narrow the possibility space. There are only so many choices we can make that will get us there. The same choices that made annual monoculture and the shopping mall the most efficient engines for short-term growth and profit are the same qualities that made them unsustainable in the long term.

There are more ways to scale than growth. There are more ways to deepen our impact than just reaching more people. What if we put just as much effort into scaling the impact of our work over time? Can we build digital products around sustainable systems that survive long enough to outlive us, that are purpose-built to thrive without our constant cultivation?

A Little Bit Of Money And A Hundred Years

If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.

— Wes Jackson

A few hours east of my grandfather’s farm by interstate highway, just outside of Salina, Kansas, there’s a barn. It’s a barn like many other barns around here, but every year for a few days in the fall, it fills up with people. They come from all over, for an event called The Prairie Festival, and set up camp in the surrounding fields.

They come for many of the same things you’d expect from a harvest festival in the American Midwest—food, music, dances, bonfires. But they also gather in this barn every year to discuss “the problem of agriculture,” in the words of Wes Jackson, who founded The Land Institute here with his wife Dana in 1971.

The Land Institute began with the radical idea to question the entire premise of annual monoculture and look for an entirely new system of agriculture to replace it. Using the native prairie ecosystem as a model, teams of researchers and students here are working to find a new way of feeding ourselves which would sustain and enrich the soil instead of depleting it.

They’re using many of the same techniques, like hybridization and selective breeding, which have been so successful at increasing yields in commercial grain crops, to develop promising strains of native, perennial plants into viable food-producing crops.

A few years after he started the Land Institute, Wes Jackson was asked about its chances for success. Was it even possible to develop a perennial mixture of plants which can even approach the yields necessary to be a viable alternative to commercial grains for food production? His response was characteristically understated: “Given a little bit of money and up to a hundred years, we can do it. I see no reason why it can’t be done.”⁶

Thirty years later, The Land Institute now hopes to be able to grow enough of its most promising grain, a type of wheatgrass they call Kernza™ to begin supplying it to farmers within a decade. But this is just a proof of concept, not even a minimum viable product. The hundred-year goal is not just to create one viable perennial crop, but to develop a “perennial polyculture”—many diverse systems of plants which can be planted in mixtures and form the foundation for continual improvement and adaptation in climates and regions all over the world. A sustainable system designed to adapt and survive.

Renewal

There’s a patch of land on my grandfather’s farm that’s set off from the rest on a small, sloping plot with rocky soil. The wheat has never grown as tall here, or yielded as much grain as the rest of the farm.

Last summer, the last wheat crop that would have grown on this land was harvested. This year, it will be reseeded with native grasses as part of the Conservation Reserve Program, a USDA program that offers a small incentive to landowners who restore or protect native grassland on their property.

The land has other uses: there are still a few oil wells pumping, and the grassland is good for grazing. But underneath the ground, a new root system is growing, and soon it will start to build the soil back up. Maybe someday this land will grow food again. Maybe my grandchildren will come stand out in this field too, just in time for harvest.

Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” Reclaiming Politics (1991). ↩
John McLaughlin, Steve Jobs 1994 Uncut Interview (Silicon Valley Historical Association, 2013). ↩
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (Harcourt Brace, 1974). ↩
Utopia Part 3: The World’s Largest Shopping Mall, directed by Sam Green and Carrie Lozano (2009). ↩
Malcolm Gladwell, “The Terrazzo Jungle,” New Yorker (2004). ↩
Wes Jackson, New Roots for Agriculture (University of Nebraska, 1980). ↩

Lesson

Craig Mod — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

How do you make yourself present? You go back.

Go back to things you’ve made before, long ago. Go back to places once visited, almost forgotten. Confront them—the things, the places. Look them in the eyes and ask them for their secrets.

Really—go, do that. They’ll tell you crazy stories.

I was almost thirty when I left Tokyo to work in California. It was my first real break from Japan in nearly a decade. Three months after leaving, I went for a visit. When I arrived, the ghosts of a past life hit me like a brick of nostalgia. There were the alcohol-soaked memories: the tomfoolery in front of Takadanobaba Station as a nineteen-year-old student, the long whisky conversations at Shinjuku jazz bars, sake beneath cherry blossoms in a packed Shinjuku Gyoen and Yoyogi Park.

There were the bike ride memories: dawdling mid-summer riverside rides down Arakawa or Tamagawa, circuitous backstreet explorations past the working women of Kabukicho, the dusty bookshops about Jimbocho, the noodle shops of Nogata.

The mundane architecture memories: midnight walks through city-center enclaves packed with cramped apartments and four-room houses, the warm kick in the belly you get from hearing stray TVs and late-night dinner conversations drifting amidst the otherwise total silence.

There were all of those memories and more. But now, they were vibrating against a different set of eyes. I stood outside Takadanobaba Station and saw a past self. I sat in the jazz bars and drank the same whisky and saw a past self there, too. Selves. In the corner. Them. Drinking with me. And I asked them to tell me what they remembered.

With Bill Evans playing in the background, the room full of tobacco smoke, hovering over round, lacquered mahogany tables, they told me of their worries. For them, the now. For me, the then. They told me their fears, and I listened and nodded and sipped my drink. As they told me more, I could once again see through their eyes.

Perhaps you were on the other side of the bar. If you were watching from afar, you saw a man flickering between two sides of the same table. Like a TV signal caught between channels. A static-filled jumping, sometimes snapping together into perfect clarity.

Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I sensed an expanse. Some distance traveled. Age, I suppose. Having aged. Having moved. Forward, one hopes. One always hopes.

I walked those same quiet back streets past those same cramped apartments. I heard the wafting of TVs past and TVs present. Voices from families old speaking to families new. Some houses had fallen apart, others were gone, others were just as they were. The same ladder in the same place. An ageless white cat. That apple tree. The very same dirty towel on the very same hook. Impossible. Like stepping through a slightly inaccurate time machine. I and the selves of the thens walked in silence. We walked and remembered collectively. Some things change, others don’t.

I rode down the bike paths of the rivers and asked my selves what their plans were. As we peddled in the chilly January sunlight, I listened patiently to their stories. Their goals to work on books. Their progress on web projects. I jumped between bikes, between eyes. The further we got down the path the bigger the jumps. Until the goals were so small, so distant, all I could do was smile.

I smiled riding down that river bank. Bundled up against the crisp air. I smiled and let the distance wash over me and fill me with an awareness of the now. I had gone back—to places, moments, feelings—and for the very first time, saw where I was in the present.

On Permission

Craig Mod — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

One night I am watching Dylan.

Years ago I spent four nights and five days on a mountain just east of Kyoto. We woke to the early cold and meditated, walked through the lush, moss-covered forest cemetery in the late-morning sun, then rested come afternoon. We ate simple, meatless monk meals, meditated again in the evening, and slept just after dark. We breathed the mountain air and drank the mountain water and by the end of the trip our bodies smelled very different. Not in an unbathed way, but as if the moss and the slowness and meditation had seeped below our skin and changed us from within.

Dylan is wailing. Dylan is booed. Dylan is alive—as in, not dead—I think to myself as the camera cuts.

This is the Scorsese Dylan. The Dylan of the documentary from the mid-naughts. Dylan far after the Dylan we think we know. It’s a long film, and I’m still on the first half, and I have never before given much thought to the man. As a child of the ’80s, I knew Dylan only as a phantom—a name, a piece of a soundtrack, a warbler, that song on the radio. His music never seemed to emerge from anywhere—as if the permission for it to be was always there.

These are our rules:

Your phone is in airplane mode
Your WiFi is off
You wake early and you shower and you make coffee
You grab whatever coffee you have; we have something from a small village in Ethiopia called Wato. We grind it and smell it and—as is so often the case with smell—we are gone, transported far from our kitchen, to a mountain in Ethiopia, even though we’ve never been to Ethiopia nor know the topography, know not even if there are mountains, landing, finally, back in our cramped kitchen with a tiny yelp of joy.
You open your music library and you pick something without vocals, or maybe you pick nothing at all; we open our collection of Keith Jarrett live recordings and hit play randomly—or, somedays, choose a recording to complement our present location. Tokyo? Budokan, 1978. London? Testament.
You drink your coffee and you get to work
You are not allowed to use the internet before 5 p.m.
You are not allowed to have meetings before 6 p.m.

This dismissed phantom of another era is a total stranger to me.

And yet it makes sense—everything he’s doing. I’m fascinated by Dylan’s rules. Fascinated by Dylan’s endless attempt to sever himself from his past. He tries—and succeeds—at such a young age to be a vapor. All the permission for what he does feels beholden to this self-immolation.

How fascinating is his language of provenance. He’s from New Mexico. No, he’s from the midwest. No, he’s traveled long and far down the Mississippi. How hard he works, this Dylan, to make himself a nobody from nowhere and everywhere. And in doing this—this self-erasure and reinvention and re-reinvention and deliberate obfuscation—he finds the space, the permission, to create his sound.

The rules must be followed exactly. No cheating. You must follow these rules exactly as they’re laid out and you must do so for no fewer than five days in a row. The longer the better. Follow them for a month and watch what happens. See how they seep into you.

Maybe nothing happens, of course. There are no guarantees, no warranty that comes with rules. Maybe you didn’t have anything in you (just as you feared). Though, that’s unlikely. This is why you don’t follow the rules for only one day. The permission to do the work you need to do emerges slowly.

Our rules are a starting point. A sketch. If you follow these rules and keep your eyes peeled, an ear to your heart, maybe you’ll notice how to shift them ever so slightly to make them work even better for you. Or maybe you’ll come up with a set of rules your very own.

The everywhere rule. That’s his rule. Invoked for years, perhaps now still. The Dylan from everywhere. Corollary of which is his wherever rule. He’s from wherever—wherever he needs to be from to acquire the permission he needs to inhabit the necessary voice.

I love his rule. I love how inclusive it is. How it bleeds through his morning, day, and night. How it doesn’t stop at five or six in the evening. Looking at Dylan’s rule makes me think about how rare it is—if you’re operating in our networked world—to maintain outside rules, to experiment, willy-nilly, no matter what. How can you have permission to be no one from everywhere if everyone is watching?

It’s 4:45 p.m., and I feel the 5 p.m. rule creeping up. I feel the dopamine receptors opening like the gaping mouths of guppies, a looming flake-filled hand of five o’clock hovering above the fish bowl.

I wonder about the waterfall of tweets. I wonder about the @ replies. I wonder how much mail is sitting in my inbox—something I haven’t checked since I went to sleep the night before. I wonder what news has been plastered on Techmeme, how AAPL and AMZN and TSLA have done today. I wonder what’s happened on Facebook, what new photographs are waiting, what new trending tidbits chosen by the algorithm are sitting atop my newsfeed.

And then I think about the algorithm itself. I wonder if it’s sad. If she is sad. It’s been nearly twenty hours since she last saw me. Since my last visit. Suddenly, with my new rules, I wonder if her feelings have been hurt, even though I know this algorithm has no feelings, or certainly none for me.

The trick to following the rules is to be an actor. Or, perhaps, because of the rules you are allowed to act. I don’t think anyone would deny Dylan the label of actor.

Part of acting is bounding your characters. To only introduce some characters to some people. Before Dylan found the Dylan we know, he was many others. He was Guthrie and Odetta and Cash and more. He was all these folk, their sounds, their cadences, and he was able to be these things selectively. He was able to draw lines around them, show them to some, but not everyone. He was able to so fully inhabit them because he was no one. His rule of being nothing from everywhere allowed him to shapeshift to anyone always.

So totally connected are we that when we deprive ourselves the network, we feel our mind shift. What we feel, really, is a blanket of whitespace descend upon our world.

The network becomes a white noise. The no network a white space.

Similar to how the smell of moss seeps into our lungs, the absence of network—the presence of whitespace—seeps into our mind.

We fly to Wato, to our imagined Ethiopian topography, because we aren’t Letterpressing while coffeepouring. We notice the cheap binding on an old Sandra Cisneros book, because we aren’t Facebooking.

I bike down the crooked lanes of Ikejiri, slowly, taking in the faded typography on the Shōwa-era shops—the tobacco salesmen, the bookstores, the shoe repairmen. I bike slowly because I am stuck, because I have run out of things to write, because I have worn some corner of my brain to a nub, because I severed the connection to the teat to which I usually stick my mouth at moments like these. The teat with the statistics and news and commentary all just right over there. So I augment my lack of infovision with biking down small back lanes observing faded typography. I notice that the old man selling tobacco lives above his shop, and has probably done so since before I was born—and that he really needs to tighten the space between the ‘A’ and the ‘C’.

Dylan inhabits his rules so fully, so unremorsefully that we begin to wonder if there is such a thing as following your own rules too strictly.

The longer you watch the more apparent it becomes: Dylan the isolate, lit well, sat in the studio before a black backdrop. There are many interviews with those who knew him, but it’s Joan Baez that we see over and over. Joan in her kitchen—probably in Northern California, although it’s never made clear—talking about Dylan, talking about the actor, the stone.

At the start of the film she is wistful in her remembrances. But sometime in the later half we see her facade shimmer—for an instant. Something surfaces—a wound, having been wronged—but as soon as it surfaces, it’s gone.

The film cuts back to Dylan, and we get the impression that he, too, knows of that shimmer. And that with any set of rules comes compromise.

Language is rules layered, often broken. Until you fully inhabit another language, you likely don’t notice these rules or how they’re bent. But once you understand the subtle shifts the mind goes through in switching tongues, you can observe it in others.

The difference in how the eyebrows move, the shape the eyes take on, points of focus, eye contact, the way someone holds their head on their shoulders—all things susceptible to change by tongue. You can use this material difference between Language A and Language B to try and extract some truth (C).

This muscle can be honed such that by simply watching the faces of passersby in a city such as Tokyo, you can see the language someone is speaking in their head. Or at least you tell yourself you can do this.

And yet rules themselves become language, they illuminate hitherto unseen language. There is the language of the mountain that becomes visible when we choose to listen—of the moss and the water and the walks. There is the general language we inhabit when networked. A language born from living in the endless stream, the pull-pull-pull-to-refresh.

Then, there is the language we inhabit in our self-imposed isolations. The language our lives become with waking and showering and flying to Wato and no network until late in the afternoon and no meetings until even later still. There is an experiential grammar and texture imposed by these decisions. And as you flip-flop back and forth, you can learn to read the differences and feel the mind wire and unwire and rewire itself. Born from those differences, the resulting awarenesses is itself a certain permission.

Dylan the no one, the vapor, the actor, was born off the network. Born in a time long before our sea of always-pushed-always-on devices. And yet, this doesn’t mean Dylan had to work any less hard to find his voice, didn’t have to work any less hard to pull himself from the din.

I watch this Dylan and see him systematically define his rules, inhabit them, draw from them a permission. As I watch I remember others and their rules—both from Dylan’s time and the present.

Susan Sontag banished books from her tiny apartment in Paris in the ’70s. Books were her white noise. The bookless apartment her whitespace. Watching Dylan I recall Pico Iyer’s yearly hermitage on the coast of California—two weeks of absolute permission. Stefan Sagmeister’s year-long sabbatical once every seven years. And on and on. The creators and their rules and their permissions tumble out from the screen.

There is no good network or bad network. No right disconnectivity or wrong connectivity. The best we can do—the most important thing we can do—is to cultivate awareness of the rules we inhabit. To understand the language they produce, and with that, the permissions granted.

One night I am watching Dylan, the next I am not. The next I am touching the moss or the mountain, I am flying to Africa, I am moving deliberately through the back alleys of a new city, I am doing whatever it takes to quiet the din, to lay a blanket of white space over the mind, to find the permission to do the work necessary.

Lesson

Ethan Marcotte — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

My grandmother’s name is Florence—never “Flo,” but sometimes “Flossie” to a few elderly neighbors with whom she grew up. My mother’s mother is, to say the least, a woman of decorum: a small lady of Irish descent who firmly believes some things shouldn’t be shared outside the family or, in fact, with anyone. That said, I hope it’s no breach of confidence to tell you she was born in northern Vermont early in the twentieth century, shortly before the world first went to war. But despite her age, it’s no exaggeration to say that her mind’s sharper than mine’ll ever be.

One of the earliest memories I have of my grandmother is her cooking. Not the food itself, mind—though that was, and still is, impressive—but rather the act itself. More the verb of cooking than the delicious noun in which it invariably resulted. In her kitchen, cooking was a symphony of tight orbits; she was an aproned blur as she paced about the kitchen, tracing a well-memorized path around her dining room table, moving from ancient gas oven to refrigerator to wood stove and back again.

And her arms moved nearly as quickly as she did, reaching into the oven to prod a pie or to pull a too-curious grandson away from the stove. Those arms once lifted me up to sit on the kitchen counter as she slid a batch of cupcakes into the oven. They once shooed me away from a bowl of cake batter with a flick of her apron, a flurry of green and white that framed her wry smile. They once offered a fistful of cracked corn to me in her soft, gnarled hand, which I’d then scatter throughout her henhouse; as the chickens swooped down to snap up the feed in a flurry of feathers and clucking, my grandmother would smile as I clapped and shrieked with delight.

She’s a special woman, one who raised me almost as much as my parents did. Two Christmases ago, my grandmother became a bit more special to me, handing me a humble-looking present, a tiny bundle wrapped up in newsprint, possibly from that week’s paper, with my name written on the adhesive tag stuck on the top. After a few seconds of wrestling with the manifold layers of newspaper—my grandmother can wrap, people—I managed to uncover a stack of three small books, each battered and worn.

I opened the topmost book, and tucked inside was an index card, covered with my grandmother’s impeccable cursive writing. The note said these books were her father’s diaries and that she wanted me to have them.

The three diaries are small, fragile-looking things, each bound in leather and well-used but not brittle—the newest from nearly ten years before my grandmother was born, the oldest from 1884, a full two decades before that. Some mold crept onto a few of the pages in the oldest diary, and its cover is beginning to flake, but that’s the worst of the damage; they’re in remarkable shape. I sat there, slowly turning them over in my hands, unable to speak.

After a moment, I cracked open the middle volume. The title page is breathtakingly ornate: “STANDARD DIARY” set in an elaborate script; beneath it, a zodiac etched in red and black, with “1892” at its center. Most of the front matter is dedicated to almanac data—lovingly typeset meteorological predictions, time zones, dates for phases of the moon—which would have been of interest to my great-grandfather, a farmer, whose daughter grew up to follow in his footsteps.

But it’s the heart of the diaries I cherish most, the blank pages my great-grandfather filled with his own writing. Each day has nine thin rules dedicated to it, three days per tiny page, each pair of pages spanning from Monday in the top left to Saturday on the bottom right. (Presumably, Sundays were reserved for a different kind of book.) Each day contained a brief phrase about the weather (“Cloudy and v. cold,” “Pleasant + warm”) with one or two significant events (“Marvin and I drained ice from Center Pond,” “Got the sleigh shod”). A few spare words in a sloping, schoolboy’s hand doggedly filled in each day over the course of decades.

My grandmother and I talk often, or as often as I remember to call. She makes a show of complaining when she hasn’t heard from this grandchild or that in a few days, always with a smile in her voice as she acts mock-aggrieved. She doesn’t cook as often as she used to. In fact, a task can leave her tired for days, whether it’s a half hour of peeling potatoes, a short drive to the market, or simply a few visitors stopping by for an afternoon chat. A small item on her schedule is an event.

She never says as much, though. Her talk is light, happy, filled with local gossip and questions about my wife and my work. She asks where I’m traveling next; I ask after the latest news from her country church. While we never talk politics or religion, we easily fill an hour with topics we both care about.

But, lately, I’ve started peppering in some new questions of my own: how well she knew her father, and where her siblings lived and worked. I ply her for information about life on the farm growing up, and how she met her husband. The music she listened to, the places she traveled, the places she wishes she’d gone. And as she answers my questions, I begin writing in a new journal I’ve just bought, filling the pages with stories I’ve never heard before.

Unstirring the Jam

Ethan Marcotte — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

not for the sake of stealing, but of open borrowing, for the purpose of having it recognized.

— Seneca the Elder¹

I was probably fifteen when my parents, apparently moved to build a bit of character in their sons, instructed my two brothers and me to paint a newly renovated room at their business and tasked poor Ray, one of the maintenance men, with ensuring we got most of the paint on the walls rather than on each other. (He was not, it should be noted, entirely successful on that front.)

We all liked Ray; despite having been born and raised in the hills of northern Vermont, Ray spoke with a Southern drawl, a slow, easy, approachable rhythm, and we all listened intently as he began showing us how to steadily apply a layer of primer with smooth, easy strokes. After he was sure his instruction got through our thick skulls, Ray sauntered off, saying he’d be back to check on our progress. It was hot, decidedly unglamorous work, but we made some progress, covering most of the longest wall in an hour or so.

And, after a time, Ray returned to inspect our work, walking up and down the length of the room. He came over to me. Considering my work for a moment, he pointed out a problem area: a bead of primer had coalesced on the wall and had begun slowly rolling toward the floor. As he pointed it out, Ray said, “Here’s the thing of it: if that drop dries, the paint will form around that shape. And whether you layer on two or twenty coats of paint, that drop’ll shine through.”

If I close my eyes, I can still see that solitary drop, slowly tracing a gentle line down an empty wall. Even now, as I enter my second decade as a web designer, I think there’s something fundamentally evocative about that layering: of a work attaining its form from something that preceded it, carrying the echo of something older within itself.

THOMASINA: When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backward, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?

SEPTIMUS: No.

THOMASINA: Well, I do. You cannot stir things apart.

— Tom Stoppard²

When I reached college, I found myself surrounded by teachers who were similarly hooked on this idea of layering, of looking at tradition as something that could define the shape of an idea. I remember when my jazz piano teacher hauled out some old records by Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker, albums on which Miles Davis had performed as a band member. After playing a few tracks on each, he pulled out some of Davis’s later recordings and began showing me how you can hear subtle but unmistakable hints of his former bandleaders’ influences—a borrowed phrase here, a quiet moment in an otherwise complex arrangement. And my literature professors were no different, helping me wade through works such as John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost. They showed me how Milton adopted the imagery of his classical predecessors, invoking the likes of Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. But specifically, he did so in the first two sections of his poem—passages that were, conveniently, set in Hell. (Nice little dig, that; a bit of a rap battle between dead white poets.)

These professors traced paths between texts, songs, and artwork, and even taught me a name for the connections: “allusion.”

Genres and movements are the forms and philosophies around which creators gravitate. But allusion allows an artist to draw connections between the current work and its predecessors. In its most basic form, an allusion is an intentional reference to an event, person, or concept. I might say that a particularly torturous deadline “was my Waterloo,” perhaps invoking images of a man doomed to crushing defeat. (Or at least, a few sleepless nights.) It’s a kind of rhetorical shorthand, but here’s the thing: it only works if, well, you know what Waterloo is and understand its historical significance. Metaphorically speaking, there’s something remarkably fragile about allusions, because they rely on the audience to truly work. Otherwise the reference is missed, “Waterloo” just sounds like so much gibberish to your ear, and my intended meaning is lost.

That’s not to say that you need to understand an allusion to enjoy a work. One of my favorite examples of this would have to be Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novel Watchmen. It’s a tale set in a bleak, alternative version of the 1980s: Earth is seized by xenophobia, fear, and nuclear détente. Its central characters are a band of flawed superheroes reunited by the death of one of their own and attempting to overcome a global threat. The story itself is exquisitely crafted, a beautiful, sweeping work that’s approachable to even the comic book novice. But the first time you read it, you might not realize that the main characters are thinly veiled references to minor characters appropriated from the already-defunct Charlton Comics library, which had been acquired by DC Comics before Moore began writing.

In an interview with Blather.net, Alan Moore once said, “there was a sort of a seed of the original Charlton characters but we took them further…. [It] was just taking these ordinary characters and just taking them a step to the left or right, just twisting them a little bit.” In other words, it wasn’t just that these older characters were templates for Moore’s work. Instead, by alluding to them, by reshaping them within the constraints of this new, Watchmen-specific universe, Moore created an area for discussion, for interpretation. What are we to make of Steve Ditko’s Captain Atom when we encounter Moore’s Doctor Manhattan, a godlike being who dispassionately regards humans as ant-like and inconsequential? And while Moore’s Rorschach is a violently insane vigilante, he becomes an indictment of traditional superhero values carried to their logical extreme, especially when you realize he’s a pastiche of Ditko’s Mr. A.

By adapting these characters into his work, Moore created a kind of hidden space within his own work. It’s a little narrative pocket that allows for discussion, for interpretation, but one that’s not critical to understanding Watchmen. If you’ve never heard of Charlton Comics, Steve Ditko, or his work, there’s nothing lost, and the story’s still satisfyingly gripping. But Moore has entered into a kind of critical conversation with Ditko—and with the idea of superheroes in general—and invited you, the reader, to participate.

But where is this conversation happening in web design? Do we have the ability to introduce this kind of allusion into our designs, to create these conversations in our work? A significant amount of web design is commercial art, which makes any kind of visual borrowing—no matter how well-intentioned or subtle it might appear to be—an inherently problematic proposition. That moving, thoughtful essays are still being published on the subject of copying versus creating elements of homage suggests we’re still trying to define the line between inspiration and blatant plagiarism.

Our closest analog to the use of allusion might be the web design trends over which we so frequently wring our hands. But let’s face it: when was the last time you heard the phrase web design trend mentioned in a positive light? Trend is the key word: whether it’s rounded corners or oversized sans serifs, hatched backgrounds or textured patterns, you can practically hear the derision drip off of the speaker’s tongue. It’s a word that implies a short lifespan, the very fleetingness of an idea, a thing without depth, created without much thought. What’s more, a work that’s part of a trend doesn’t exist in isolation: it’s part of a larger thing, a single entity mindlessly trudging alongside the rest of the herd.

I wonder if it would help if we were more overt in acknowledging our sources. A few years ago, in discussing a major redesign of his personal site, Eric Meyer took a moment to acknowledge one concept in particular he’d borrowed and adapted from another’s work, the grid-like design of the metadata and comments:

In this area, I was heavily influenced by Khoi Vinh’s [new site], and I definitely owe him a debt of gratitude and inspiration. As will be evident from even a casual comparison of the two sites, I took a general design idea Khoi uses and adapted it to my particular situation.

Like Moore, Meyer looked to Vinh’s distinctive design for the seed of an idea and, well, reshaped it a bit to suit his needs. And while you can definitely see strains of Khoi’s aesthetic, it’s not a direct copy. But additionally, and just as critically, Meyer acknowledges this debt. That’s not to say every act of alluding to an established work needs to be additive, or even constructive. In fact, the reverse can also be very, very true.

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

— Saul Bellow³

Even though eyewitness accounts are few and far between, we know that on Christmas Day in 1949, Charlie Parker strode onto the stage of Carnegie Hall. Behind him sat one of the finest jazz bands to ever share a spotlight: Red Rodney on trumpet; pianist Al Haig; Tommy Potter on bass; and behind the drums, Roy Haynes. By all accounts, and from the few live recordings that survived the performance, it was an astounding bebop performance. Over the course of the set, “Cheryl” came into rotation—not one of Parker’s better-known songs, but a catchy little blues/bebop amalgam in its own right. And about a minute or so in, he began his solo.

Then something interesting happened. The first notes out of Parker’s saxophone weren’t improvised; they weren’t even his. Instead, Charlie Parker started his solo by playing, nearly verbatim, Louis Armstrong’s opening to “West End Blues.”

If you haven’t heard “West End Blues,” I highly recommend giving it a listen. Not simply because it’ll give a bit more context for this anecdote but because it is a wonderful song. Written over two decades before Parker’s performance, the song reached extraordinary heights of popularity once Louis Armstrong recorded it in 1928—a recording that’s been lauded as one of the finest moments in American music. And one of the most remarkable parts of that recording was, in fact, Armstrong’s opening cadenza, a dizzyingly rapid succession of notes that soar, fall, and brightly rise again. It’s as distinctive as it is virtuosic, and Louis Armstrong’s signature introduction would have been instantly recognizable to any jazz fan in the audience. And here was Charlie Parker, one of America’s premiere jazz saxophonists, quoting it note for note.

What’s even more striking about Parker’s usage of “West End Blues” is how isolated the phrase is from the notes that follow it. Instead of appropriating it as a foundation for the rest of his solo, Parker pulls in the line then moves on to another idea entirely as though he’d never played Armstrong’s intro. It’d be a bit like singing the first line from “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and then continuing on to sing “Mary Had A Little Lamb” as though nothing had happened.

Parker’s solo wasn’t even a minute long, but his Armstrong-enhanced opening made quite the impression—if not with the audience in attendance, then certainly with music historians and scholars who’ve spent the subsequent decades analyzing why Parker did it. Not that jazz quotes were uncommon; even today, musicians pull in lines from other works, using the original notes as the basis for further improvisation. But many jazz historians note that by the time of the Carnegie performance, Parker had reached a particularly confident stage of his career and had long ago abandoned the practice of using other musicians’ notes in lieu of his own.

A few things are happening here. First, by leading with Louis Armstrong’s distinctive introduction, Parker pulled an incredibly popular musical phrase out of its original context and placed it in another song entirely—his song. Allusion is, on the face of it, an act of a younger author establishing some authority over an older, more recognizable work. And by keying off a musical phrase that would’ve been immediately recognizable to his audience, Parker managed to establish his technical prowess by co-opting Armstrong’s work into his own.

But all that aside, there’s an interesting historical context at work here. There’d been no small amount of animosity between the bebop movement and more established jazz figures like Armstrong. It’d come to a bit of a head that year, in fact, when Armstrong himself had dismissed bebop as nothing more than “jiujitsu music” a few months prior. So taken in that light, Parker’s solo isn’t just a masterful act of musical splicing; it’s a not-so-veiled rebuttal of Armstrong himself.

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

— Aldous Huxley⁴

This is all conjecture, of course. One of the many things I find beautiful, if not downright enviable, about Parker’s allusion is that he fearlessly adopts a musical phrase from years before his performance, reaching over two decades into his past to change the shape of his work. And currently, that breadth of history isn’t available to our very young medium.

By looking for inspiration in others’ work, adapting it significantly, and openly acknowledging those debts, I think we can move that phrase “web design trends” past that stereotype of unthinking, unambitious adoption and set a standard for evolving those trends over time. And, in doing so, we’ll invest a sense of memory—of history—in our adolescent industry.

That’s not to say I’m advocating the wholesale copying of another’s work; nor am I suggesting that slapping a “Hey, thanks for the logo!” on your blog will somehow make that copying acceptable. But perhaps your next redesign could acknowledge the work that inspired you and how you learned from it. By becoming more referential designers, we’ll begin to develop the methods for following a conversation, for charting a lineage across sites, across redesigns.

After all, Müller-Brockmann didn’t singlehandedly create the typographic grid. He, with the help of contemporaries like Emil Ruder and Max Bill, helped formalize and extend Jan Tschichold’s Die neue Typographie in which Tschichold, in turn, was drawing upon millennia of principles of grid-driven page layout. And years later, Khoi Vinh and Mark Boulton helped underscore how critical the typographic grid was to the web and how to make it accessible to the modern web designer. These aren’t isolated events but links in a lengthy chain. As outstanding as these individual links might be, they take their shape from their predecessors.

Despite the web’s youthfulness, I worry that, with a few notable exceptions, our industry isn’t accustomed to looking to the lessons of the past. I’ve met scores of designers who have never heard of John Allsopp’s seminal “A Dao of Web Design” or encountered Jeffrey Zeldman’s work. Now, some of this is complicated by the web’s ephemerality. Or perhaps more problematically, by our assumption—as builders, as designers, as workers of the web—that what we build won’t last. Too often, our work is measured in months, not years or decades. If we can’t acquaint ourselves with the history of our medium, much less preserve it, what will we draw upon?

I think the time is now, and the opportunities are here. Maybe this is a problem that will, over time, resolve itself. As the web and our industry age, we’ll develop the methods for having these discussions, for creating stronger bonds between our work. But it will take a very real desire from us to look past the now of the web, to draw upon its past to improve its future.

Seneca the Elder, Suasoriae 3.7 (As translated in the English edition of Gian Biagio Conte’s The Rhetoric of Imitation). ↩
Tom Stoppard, “Arcadia,” I.1. ↩
Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, (Viking, 1970). ↩
Aldous Huxley, Attributed. ↩

Lesson

Jeremy Keith — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Before I settled into making websites, I was something of a drifter. I spent my early twenties busking and hitchhiking my way around Europe. In retrospect, it was as if I were waiting for the web to be invented.

I eventually made my way to the town of Freiburg, in Germany’s Black Forest. There was still no sign of the web, so I continued to earn money by playing music on the street. German society has a reputation for efficiency and structure and, true to form, there were even rules for which times of the day were suitable for busking. I could play music on the street between 11 a.m. and noon and between 4:30 p.m. and 6 p.m. Playing outside those hours was verboten.

I sometimes bent the rules. Technically, I didn’t play on the street outside the officially designated times, but I did play under the street in a pedestrian passageway that had particularly good acoustics. I think I could legitimately claim that I was just practicing, and if any passersby happened to throw money into my bouzouki case, well, that was just a bonus.

The underground passageway had one problem. It was close to the local police station, and the occasional police officer would pass through on his way to work. One plainclothes policeman told me to stop playing the first time he walked past. When he caught me again, his warning was more stern. He recognized me. I recognized him. Even when I wasn’t playing music, we would see each other on the street and exchange glares. In my mind, I filed him in the nemesis category.

One day I was walking into town to find a good spot to play (during the appointed hours, I might add) when it started to rain. I didn’t have much further to go, but there was a tram stop right next to me and a tram was pulling up, headed in the right direction. “It’s only one or two stops,” I thought. “I might as well hop on.”

The trams operated on a trust system. You could just get on a tram, and it was your responsibility to have a valid ticket. This system was enforced with occasional inspections, but they were rare. I was taking my chances by riding the tram for two stops without a ticket, but it didn’t seem like much of a gamble. This was the day that my luck ran out.

Two inspectors got on the tram and started checking tickets. When they came ’round to me, I told them that I didn’t have one. The punishment for schwarzfahren—riding without a ticket—was an on-the-spot fine of sixty Deutschmarks (this was back in the days before the euro). I didn’t have sixty marks; I didn’t have any money at all. They asked to see my identification. I didn’t have any identification with me. They took me from the tram and marched me off to the police station.

One of the cops sat me down at his desk. He asked me for my details and pecked out my answers on his typewriter. Once he had my name and address, we got down to the tricky matter of figuring out what to do next.

I suggested that he simply let me go so that I could play music on the street during the appointed hours. Once I had busked up sixty marks, I would go to the transport authority and pay my fine. He gruffly pointed out the flaw with that plan: because I had no ID with me, there was no way they could know for sure that I was who I said I was or that I lived where I said I lived. So if they let me go, there’d be no incentive for me to pay the fine. I gave him my word. He didn’t accept it. We had reached an impasse.

At that moment, who should walk into the police station but my plainclothes nemesis. “You!” he said, as soon as he saw me. My heart sank. Now I was in real trouble.

“Oh, you know this guy?” asked the policeman at whose desk I was sitting. “He was riding the tram without a ticket and he doesn’t have money for the fine. He claims he’s going to make enough money to pay it by playing music on the street. Can you believe that?” he asked mockingly.

“Yes,” said the plainclothes cop. “He’s good. He’s got a really unique voice.”

I was flabbergasted! My sworn enemy was vouching for me! He looked at me, nodded, and continued on his way.

His word was good enough. They let me go with a slip of paper that I was to take to the transportation office when I paid my fine. I’m sure they thought that it was a lost cause, but I went out busking that afternoon and the next morning until I had earned sixty marks. Then I rode out to the transport authority—paying for my tram fare this time—and I gave them the money and the slip of paper from the police station. I kept my word.

There’s a lesson to be learned here, and it’s this: you should always give money to buskers.

As We May Link

Jeremy Keith — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The world exploded into a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else.

— Umberto Eco¹

I’ll never forget the first time I used the World Wide Web. It was in the early 1990s. I was in America visiting my girlfriend (now wife) at her college in Massachusetts. This was before Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, was released. There were no images on the web, but I was still stunned by the scope of what I experienced. Even back then, the web seemed limitless, without edges. That Encarta CD-ROM sitting next to the computer suddenly seemed pathetically constrained.

I bet you’ve got a similar story to tell. Telling stories is a universal human trait. Every culture in the world has a history of storytelling. In many ways, a culture is defined by its stories. The details may vary, but almost every distinct human culture has its own story about the creation of the world. These creation myths are often followed by another origin story, that of language.

For the indigenous peoples of Australia, language and creation are intertwined. The land is brought into being through song, and those songs must continue to be sung to keep the land alive. In the Judeo-Christian creation myth, language guarantees man his special place in the world:

And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field.

— Genesis 2:20

Language is power. If you know the name of something, you have power over it. Using the power of language, you can not only name animals but also objects and ideas. Once something has been converted into information like this, it can be transferred from person to person. All I have to do is move the meat in my mouth while passing air over the vocal cords in my throat and I can vibrate the air between us. As long as you understand the codebase in which the vibrations are encoded—English, for example—then you can decode the information. All I have to do is move some air, and I can change the thoughts held in another person’s brain. This is a remarkable evolutionary hack.

There are limits to how much information can be retained inside the head of any one person. That’s where writing, the offspring of language, comes to our assistance. Writing allows us to document things, ideas, and experiences and keep them outside our brains. I can translate a physical object into a piece of information that can be retrieved later, not only by myself but by anyone capable of understanding my writing system.

There are economies of scale with this kind of information storage and retrieval. The physical world is a very big place filled with a multitude of things bright and beautiful, creatures great and small. If it were possible to use the gift of language to store and retrieve information on everything in the physical world, right down to the microscopic level, the result would be unlimited power. That’s the principle underlying Laplace’s demon, a theoretical being that knows the properties of every particle in the universe and thereby has the power to predict their future states.

An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

— Pierre Simon Laplace²

This Newtonian idea of a clockwork universe was dented by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, but Laplace’s demon remains the logical conclusion to an ongoing human endeavor—the never-ending quest to name and catalog everything we see.

The Garden of Forking Paths

In the eighteenth century, Carl Linnaeus gave us binomial nomenclature as a way of cataloging species. At the same time, French astronomer Charles Messier was putting together a catalog of celestial objects. Both men were attempting to name specific things: animals and galaxies, respectively. One hundred years later, Melvil Dewey attempted to neatly classify all knowledge into a decimal system of ten main classes with ten divisions of each class and each division further partitioned into a hundred sections. We still use this for wayfinding in physical libraries today. This system was later expanded by the Belgians Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine into a Universal Decimal Classification that used punctuation symbols to unlock further subdivisions of categorization. These people could legitimately be granted the title of true information architects but they weren’t the first to attempt a classification of everything in existence.

Bishop John Wilkins lived in England in the seventeenth century. He was no stranger to attempting the seemingly impossible. He proposed interplanetary travel three centuries before the invention of powered flight. In 1668 he wrote An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, the gist of which is explained by Borges:

He divided the universe in forty categories or classes, these being further subdivided into differences, which was then subdivided into species. He assigned to each class a monosyllable of two letters; to each difference, a consonant; to each species, a vowel. For example: de, which means an element; deb, the first of the elements, fire; deba, a part of the element fire, a flame.

— Jorge Luis Borges³

Borges plays with this idea in his short story “The Library Of Babel.” Here, the universe consists of a single library, created from an infinite series of interlocking hexagonal rooms. This infinite library, containing nothing more than different combinations of letters and punctuation, holds every book that has ever been written, as well as every book that could ever possibly be written.

The problem with Bishop Wilkins’s approach will be obvious to anyone who has ever designed a relational database. Wilkins was attempting to create a rigid one-to-one relationship between words and things. Apart from the sheer size of the task he was attempting, this rigidity meant that his task was doomed to fail.

Still, Wilkins’s endeavor was a noble one at heart. One of his contemporaries, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, recognized the value and scope of what Wilkins was attempting.

Leibniz wanted to create an encyclopedia of knowledge that was free from the restrictions of strict hierarchies or categories. He saw that concepts and notions could be approached from different viewpoints. His approach was more network-like with its many-to-many relationships.

Where Bishop Wilkins associated concepts with sounds, Leibniz attempted to associate concepts with symbols—an alphabet of human thought. But he didn’t stop there. Instead of just creating a static catalog of symbols, Leibniz wanted to perform calculations on these symbols. Because the symbols correlate to real-world concepts, this would make anything calculable. Leibniz believed that through a sort of algebra of logic, a theoretical machine could compute and answer any question. He called this machine the calculus ratiocinator. The idea is a forerunner of Turing’s universal machine.

A Turing machine is the brainchild of the brilliant World War II codebreaker, Alan Turing. It has two parts: a strip of tape that contains information, and a table of mathematical rules describing how that information should be processed. It sounds simple, but if you have a strip of tape long enough—and enough time—you could use a Turing machine to simulate anything in the universe, including another Turing machine. At this point it becomes a universal Turing machine—an instantiation of Laplace’s demon.

Turing’s universal machine isn’t real in the sense of being an actual physical object, but it is a very powerful idea. To put it another way, Alan Turing told a story, and that story changed the world. By providing a theoretical framework for information processing, the concept of a Turing machine influenced the history of computing.

There’s another story about a theoretical machine. This equally world-changing story was told in the form of an article published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945. Written by Vannevar Bush, it describes the memex, a desk-sized machine for collecting and retrieving vast amounts of information stored on microfilm. He introduced the innovative idea of associative trails. This would allow users of the memex to create their own connections between documents. It’s here in this story of the memex that we find the first stirrings of hypertext.

That term hypertext, along with hypermedia, was coined by Ted Nelson in the early 1960s. Nelson, the prototypically brilliant mad scientist, produced a series of books that were part manifesto, part comic, and part computer science manual in his pursuit of his vision of a hypertext system eventually called Project Xanadu. But the project languished as vaporware for decades.

Small Pieces, Loosely Joined

It would take a young engineer named Tim Berners-Lee to turn the idea of hypertext into reality. The World Wide Web began as a story called “Information Management: A Proposal.” Berners-Lee received approval for this from his boss with the scribbled words, “vague, but exciting.”

Like many brilliant ideas, the World Wide Web is deceptively simple. Resources (usually HTML documents) are located at URLs and transmitted via the HyperText Transfer Protocol. If you want to retrieve a resource directly from the web, you need its URL. In other words, you need to know its name. But this way of naming things is very different from Carl Linnaeus’s or Melvil Dewey’s classification systems. While URLs must abide by a particular syntax, deciding what the contents of the URL should be is not predefined.

Instead of trying to create yet another taxonomic system for labeling resources on the web, Tim Berners-Lee left the naming of documents—and therefore the balance of power—entirely in the hands of the individual authors. It was a crazy move that seemed destined to fail.

However, there is one component of the World Wide Web that was predefined: HTML. The HyperText Markup Language that Tim Berners-Lee created was a modest vocabulary of tags that authors could use to structure their documents. It has undergone many revisions over the years, but one element was there from the start and will remain until the end. It is the alpha and the omega.

A stands for anchor. The smallest HTML tag is the most powerful. Using the href attribute, the author of one web document can create a hypertext reference that will point to another resource. The author just needs to know the name of that resource (its URL) and can form a connection without asking for anyone’s permission. The humble href opens up an Einstein-Rosen bridge, a wormhole between two previously separate places on the web.

For the first time, the power of grouping ideas and objects together ceased to be the province of hierarchical institutions and was placed into everyone’s hands. The result was phenomenal. The web’s growth was explosive. By the time I was introduced to the World Wide Web in that college dorm room in Massachusetts, it was already an incredible labyrinth of wonders—the collective work of ordinary people laboring separately to create the most astonishing collection of information that the world has ever seen.

There were early attempts to create order out of the chaos. Yahoo! started life as a directory of links, but it became clear that no taxonomy could encompass the diversity of resources on the web, and no company, no matter how successful, could ever hope to keep pace with the growth of the web. Trying to make a single directory for everyone was a hopeless task, but smaller, curated collections of links were more successful. Link-loggers—the precursors to today’s bloggers—were the shamans of the early web, wielding the power that came with knowing the URLs of cool and interesting resources.

This was an early demonstration that the web isn’t just a web of documents but also a web of trust where personal recommendations and a good reputation really matter. It’s a trend that can still be seen in our online social networks today.

Pattern Recognition

Sufferers of the medical condition apophenia are prone to seeing patterns of meaning in random unconnected data. In truth, we are all somewhat apopheniac. We draw constellations in the night sky. We hear music in rivers and streams. We recognize the man in the moon. Hypertext allows us to give full reign to our apopheniac nature.

Take any two random URLs; now publish an HTML page that links to both of them—you’ve just generated a completely new connection. You have also added a small part to the ever-expanding story of the human condition as expressed through the medium of the World Wide Web.

The web is just twenty years old, and I’m not sure that we have yet come to terms with the power that this new medium grants us. When we create websites, it’s all too easy for us to fall into old patterns of behavior and treat our creations as independent self-contained islands lacking in outbound links. But that’s not the way the web works. The sites we build should not be cul-de-sacs for the inquisitive visitors who have found their way to our work by whatever unique trails they have followed.

We should recognize that when we design and publish information on the humblest homepage or the grandest web app, we are creating connections within a much larger machine of knowledge, a potential Turing machine greater than any memex or calculus racionator.

In telling this story of hypertext, I have tried to express the grandeur of the endeavor to which we are all contributing. But these words are not enough. They are tethered to these paper pages and strapped to the linear structure of this book. Imagine how much more powerful this story would be if just some of the words within it were hyperlinks. Those links would act as portals, ready to transport us to related stories that would themselves contain further magical waypoints.

Alas, this is not hypertext. It is simply text.

And so this story ends.

Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, (Bompiani, 1988). ↩
Pierre-Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, (1814). ↩
Jorge Luis Borges, The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, (Sur, 1952). ↩

Lesson

Duane King — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I grew up on the top of a gentle slope in the Hill Country of Texas. It was beautiful there. Our land seemed to stretch out forever. Summer felt endless, and Christmas was always an eternity away. Time moved slowly and everything good was possible.

We had six acres of land that were my kingdom and I knew it like the back of my hand. In middle school, I cataloged every single tree on that piece of property. From my favorite climbing tree to the natural grapevine swing in the back corner of our land, I had combed every inch.

During those summers, I would wake up and make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I’d pack it with my Boy Scout flashlight in a red bandana that I fashioned into a hobo bindle. With my Daisy BB gun in hand, I would head out for a full day of hopping through barbed wire fences. Following the sun in one direction until noon, I would stop to eat my lunch before turning around for home. Occasionally I’d run into a critter to chase or, at times, one that cared to chase me. On some days, I would cross paths with the neighboring goat rancher, who would scare me off with mumbled curse words and a blast of his shotgun into the air. But mostly, things were peaceful. I was sun-kissed and smelled of the earth, the way a kid should. I had a mom and a dad and a little sister. We had two dogs and two cats. Everything was normal. Whatever that means.

One Sunday, when I was still in middle school, we all went to church. My mother stayed home, saying that she wasn’t feeling well. After church service, we skipped playing with friends and returned home quickly, as promised. But she was gone. Instead of her warm smile, three envelopes greeted us on the kitchen counter. She had left a note for each of us: my father, my sister, and me. We opened them and read. My note said that she was leaving my father, but that she still loved us as much as ever. I don’t know what theirs said, but I looked up at my father and sister and they were both crying. I didn’t. They came over and clung to me. She had said we weren’t supposed to worry. But we did anyway. It seemed to be the end of normal.

I can trace veins of worry running through my life from that day. Everything in my world was redefined. She left home—escaping to or from something of her own, something beyond my reach or understanding—yet she didn’t leave me. We were two black sheep of sorts, whispering conspiratorially of love and art and my dreams. Even as she was coming undone, she was the glue that held me together as I continued to live at home where things were still broken in other ways.

Many years later, I’d found equilibrium. I had my wonderful wife, great friends, and a thriving business. I did what I loved for a living, commuting between the bustle of New York and the serenity of Santa Fe. Things finally seemed normal again.

On the weekends, I’d grab a backpack and head out for another unexplored trail. This day, lungs filled and legs burning, the climb was vigorous but rejuvenating. At the top, the endless future stretched before me.

Back down at the truck, I checked my phone and saw a message from my stepfather. My mom had fallen, but she was “fine” and he’d keep me posted. He didn’t. I finally discovered she was in the hospital.

Hearing this was worrisome. A few years earlier, she had tried to stop. Her body went into shock. I’m circling around the truth here, trying hard not to say it. She was an alcoholic. So was he.

I went to the hospital. I walked into her room. Belly so swollen, she looked pregnant. Her skin, unholy hues of purple, blue, and yellow. Her body was failing, and her mind, too. In an instant, our roles reversed. I had to break through the fog of alcoholism that enveloped my mom and stepfather. I didn’t just have to tell them she was dying; I had to convince them.

She did die shortly after leaving the hospital, yet inexplicably not in their suburban, white-picket-fence life where all seemed normal. Whatever that means. She died to the tune of “I’ll Fly Away” in the living room of a 1950s-era mobile home belonging to her occasional dog sitter—a tiny, loving, Cajun lesbian spiritualist preacher. Details too rich to be fiction. As she died, the agony on her face finally softened into a smile. My stepfather died shortly thereafter. Just like that, they were both gone.

In retrospect, we were all sick. We saw what we wanted to see. Heard what we wanted to hear. We unwittingly deceived ourselves into thinking that everything was normal. The heartbreak is that this is normal in the course of life. Something happened. It happened to all of us who loved her, too. Consequences have no pity, and though the future still seems to stretch out endlessly, still rich and ripe with hope, I’ll never be the same.

Hyper

Duane King — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The other day, I began to think back to the way that I interacted with text as a child. A voracious reader from a young age, I would feign sleep each night as my parents left my room after tucking me into bed. Upon hearing the click of my bedroom door shutting, I would sit up and listen to the sound of their footsteps going down the hall. As the steps faded into the distance, I would crawl back under my covers, flashlight in hand, and read for hours.

I can still recall the golden glow of the flashlight and hear the rustle of the pages as I turned them. I still sense the feel of the faux leather covers that wrapped the set of children’s classics that was the stuff of my childhood dreams. These pages held no illustrations, so I had to complete the stories with vivid mental images of my own. Fritz in The Swiss Family Robinson, Captain Nemo, Black Beauty, Peter Pan, Tom Sawyer, Robin Hood, Robinson Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes, and Mr. Toad. I had imagined them all into reality and I was captivated.

When we read good stories, our minds are more fully engaged. We walk away from them with a sensory experience that has more depth. Finer detail. And not only are we able to read, we want to. This act is often defined as reading for pleasure. A form of play, reading for pleasure is a passion that carried over to my teen years and into my adult life.

And then I met the internet. At the same time, I was forced to focus on life and career. Somewhere in the process, my attention was stolen.

Over the years, I’ve had an uncomfortable feeling, a suspicion that something is rewiring my brain. I think differently (thanks, Apple). This is most evident to me when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or an article used to be a delightful pleasure. I could lose myself in a narrative and spend hours pouring over texts. These days, that’s rarely the case. My tolerance and patience are worn. Far too often, I read now because I must. And when I do, I can get lost as I follow the forks in the road. I get fidgety and lose myself in multiple threads of thought. I feel the same tendencies emerge when I write. My thoughts are scattered. I connect random ideas, expecting the reader to be able to reach the same conclusions and make the same connections. I think in hypertext.

The term hypertext was coined in 1963 to describe text, displayed on a computer screen, that contains references, or hyperlinks, to other text that the reader can immediately access. In other words, hypertext is a fancy name for the underlying concept that defines the structure of the internet. The name makes sense to me. For starters, the prefix hyper- means over or beyond. To me, that signifies the overcoming of the age-old constraints of written text and the change from linear, structured, and static forms of representing and understanding the world. We’ve moved on to a view of both text and the world that is fractured, decentralized, and mutable. Coincidentally, the same prefix, if used as an adjective, means to be overexcited or overstimulated. Hypertext therefore seems aptly named as its moniker is indicative of both its potential and its pitfalls.

Hypertext connects ideas and information. We have the freedom to jump around at will. We are not only permitted to explore, we are encouraged to. We are swimming in information. At times it even feels as if we are drowning in it. We have created a severe poverty of attention, making simple tasks such as reading a book, or even a magazine article, ever harder as our minds wander through hyperlinks. There are those who would argue that after decades of public brain rot caused by television, the internet revitalized long-form content consumption, but we forget to consider that wandering is built into the system. Consider that the reading speed for an average adult in the United States is purported to be around 250 to 300 words per minute. If the average time spent on a site is only fifty-six seconds, we must conclude that there’s not a lot of reading happening. In fact, if you’ve gotten this far in this article, you are already three times over that average—so, congratulations are in order. Thank you for reading.

I must admit that even as I begin to type this document, I feel pulled in multiple directions—a self-imposed attention deficit disorder of sorts. At this very moment, in the corner of my eye, the muted television screen beckons for my attention as Growl notifications on my laptop screen inform me that I have seven new emails. Like clockwork, my iPhone and iPad screens soon blink to life, their screens displaying Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram notifications that vie for my attention as well. I realize that we spend our days surrounded. Surrounded by screens. In fact, even in the morning, the very first thing I do when I wake up is turn on my iPhone and begin to check email. From morning to night, the routine continues in a futile attempt to keep up. Catch up. Create order. Instead, the only thing we seem to create is an expectation—and therefore an obligation—of availability. A culture of availability.¹ It seems to come from everyone and everything around you—the overwhelming expectation that you are, and should be, constantly on call.

We can imagine that, through our grandparents’ eyes, our daily experiences with screens would feel like an overwhelming visit to the television section at Best Buy during the holiday shopping madness, an onslaught of different channels playing at once. Our idealized vision of the internet interaction, however, is more akin to that of Minority Report, rife with elegantly multilayered images, messages, and utility. But over the course of time, the amount of information that we glean from the screens around us has changed so incrementally that we hardly noticed the increasing demands on our attention. For years, they crept up on us slowly before suddenly exploding beyond our capacity to absorb. And all the sparkly bits of data raining down from that explosion seem to crowd and cloud our vision with more force each day.

As humans, when we encounter too much information, instinct takes over in the interest of self-preservation. We begin to rely on pattern recognition to structure our experiences and make sense of the world at large. We scan and skim. It can be overwhelming and is, at times, an experience akin to that strange feeling of driving on the highway and suddenly realizing that you haven’t been paying attention to what you’ve been doing for the last fifteen minutes. How did I get here? There’s so much information out there that it’s impossible to keep up. Even if you did, you would likely only have a shallow understanding of it all, ingesting merely the outer surface and never reaching that good, creamy center.

The cognitive overhead required to maintain so many tasks comes at a high cost. Foolishly, we often pride ourselves for our ability to multitask, but this notion is folly. While a computer is well suited for context switching, the human mind is much less so. Shifts in context whittle away at our concentration and ultimately at our efficiency and sanity. Instead of doing more, we simply spread ourselves ever thinner. For many of us, it can even be agonizing to wait. We’ve trained ourselves to need constant stimulation and instant gratification. If we are stuck in line, we can’t stop glancing at our phones. It is the modern equivalent of drumming your fingers in impatience. Instead of engaging with others nearby, we are engaged with the screen. Engaged with words and pictures that are merely a representation of the world around us instead of the reality we live in.

The devices we love to connect with are the same devices that cause us to disconnect from one another. Everyone knows where everyone is and what everyone is doing, but how does that enrich our lives? We experience the world through screens and devices, and we often document a life event with a tweet or post rather than participating in the experience directly. Note the stream of tweets from people who are supposedly giving their full attention to listening to a speaker at a conference. We are left with the illusion of engagement when we are actually less involved.

The technological advances of our tools shape and morph our societies and lives. The printing machine disseminated the written word, putting news and knowledge in the hands of the people and in turn, affected the future of mankind. In doing so, we saw the slow goodbye to exquisite hand-penned manuscripts. Picasso once pointed out that every act of creation is first of all, an act of destruction. By this he meant that in order to create music, we must first destroy the silence. To create a garden, we must destroy the weeds. It follows suit that in order to create the new, we must destroy the old, even if something born of love and beauty is lost. As humans, we naturally seek order and completeness. We are resistant to change. All of this flux leaves us uneasy and can result in a malaise due to our attempts to view the world of today through the lens of the past. It can lead to a sort of time sickness. A restless feeling that is a byproduct of our culture of availability. The strain we feel is simply the result of society and experience being out of phase with one another, a matter of perception. An asynchronicity.

It’s not just the screen that has changed. It is also the mode in which we approach the written word. The written word is an abstraction of oral communication. An abstraction of sight and sound, with sounds captured as symbols, symbols converted into language, and language then transformed into narratives. The linear progression of the unfurling scroll forced a single perspective on the passive reader.

In contrast, the internet is a place of multidimensional simultaneity. Our perspective is continuously changing. Thought and action are interwoven with time. We must learn to live in flux: imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. We can almost feel the universe expanding with each collective breath. This process of postmodern fragmentation has been accelerated by the rise of the internet as a medium of communication. Knowledge is no longer envisioned as a static, unified body, existing in one dimension. It is no longer the sole property of our institutions, universities, and libraries. We share it between us. It is accessible. Information is no longer passive. It lives and breathes like an organism. It ebbs and flows. Not only are there variables, but now even the variables themselves are in flux.

You can see evidence of this in the way that we document things. Snapshots are being slowly replaced by movies; pictures by simulations. Words and studies and explanations and essays are being replaced by graphs and data visualization. It even applies to our own life stories. Autobiography is now spread non-linearly across the internet. Our lattes from this morning are on one platform, our childhood photos live somewhere else. Our days are a tangle of disconnected events, thoughts, and reactions, each with multiple simultaneous conversations that some people see and others don’t.

Media now allows for new modes of narrative. Modes that retain some aspects of the linear traditions of oral and written word but that allow for user control. Modes in which time is abstracted, giving us the ability to scrub time or to interrupt, replay, or skip the serial narrative, much like we can with a video.

We begin to have a dialogue with the devices and content, an active exchange of feedback and information that creates an environment that has begun once again to feel rich and alive. Our senses are stimulated. When we take full advantage of the potential of hypertext, the page once again pops to life. Just like the pages we read under the covers as a child.

Where is the hope in all of this, the peace in the hypertext? As designers, we hold a potent place in this ecosystem. As the creators of the technology and content that is our new, shared experience, we influence and inform. We are storytellers, and as we learn to master our personal narratives and those of our clients, it’s with these shared stories that we shape our culture.

Design is not a passive container, but rather an active process invisible to the eye. We have creative control. We can make smart decisions about the things we introduce into our lives and the lives of others. We also must fiercely edit—but not so much so that the taproot is cut away. Design is about choices and, with them, the world we want to make. The world is our lump of clay.

Make something good.

Renny Gleeson, Our Antisocial Phone Tricks,” (TED, February, 2009). ↩

Lesson

Nina Stössinger — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a Sunday, close to midnight, a summer seven years ago. I’m walking home from the movies to my parents’ house where I’m staying during semester break. The night is mild. I enjoy the walk; my mind is brimming with thoughts about the film I’ve seen and playful plans for maybe moving to Tokyo for a while.

The path is dim; some of the streetlights broken. I look up at one, its glass cover dangling and dead wires outstretched against the night sky, and it makes me laugh—it appears so grandiosely dramatic that I can almost hear scary music stirring in the background. Considering my surroundings, that might be fitting—a deserted footpath between a thicket and then the zoo on one side and the streetcar tracks and road on the other. I chuckle at this horror movie setting. I’ve walked this path so many times.

The scary soundtrack still hasn’t played a note when suddenly a hand reaches out from behind to cover my mouth, and a man pulls me into the trees. “No!” my mind shouts, at once yearning for denial and grasping that this is real. This is where the continuity of my memory breaks; I only know fragments. That night has shattered into dark sharp splinters of time suspended in my mind.

Branches scratch my arms and face. I’m screaming for help and wishing for a moment to just hand the man my money and iPod and walk away. But the words he’s mumbling reveal different intentions, and acquiescing to them is out of the question. I’ll have to defend myself.

Time is slow, sound is muted, and I’m strangely calm. I have snapped out of normal time, the normal me. Another Nina inside me has taken over who does not consider fear. Self-preservation is the only thing that matters; all attention is focused on the next move. Somehow in this altered state there is time to think, to evaluate the situation. Yes, I have to twist his arm this way. Mind the knife. Kick that shin. Duck out of his grip. Bite his fingers. Keep calling for help. It’s almost like a practice session from my karate class, yet all too real. I’m not a very strong fighter, but I must fight. There is no choice.

I see him pulling out the knife. “Put the knife away, please, I’ll do anything you want.” And he does put it away and I resume fighting—did he really think I wouldn’t?

The streetcar screeches past, the one I decided, back in another life, not to wait for. I want to wave but the man pulls me down. He is stronger. I scream. The streetcar is louder. I am pushed to the ground, knees on the pavement, heavily pushed from above. I can’t move now, can’t do anything. I feel the blade sharp against my side. I know now he just needs to push it. But so far, I’m still here, still alive. And my dear belly fat secures the pants he’s vainly yanking on.

Cut to us standing again, with my wrist in his tight grip, and I’m screaming at the top of my lungs.

And then from somewhere a bit away, someone yells back.

It’s a moment of clarity. In slow motion I see fear and doubt rising in the man’s eyes; his grip loosens slightly. I know it needs to be now; I twist my arm free, and I run.

I bolt in the direction of home, I run and run and finally dare to look behind me, scared, and I see nothing, he’s not there following me, and I run further into the trees and black tarry heaviness is creeping up my legs and I look behind me again and the man is definitely not there and then I can see the street ahead and I stumble into the open and there are the police.

I wave and I yell. There is blood on my clothes. I pant, say a man tried to rape me, he has a knife, he went that way. They dash into action. A little while later the weapon has been seized and the man arrested, and a calm policeman offers me a smoke. The other Nina in me says no thanks, I’m trying to quit. I’m not here yet; still in survival mode. This scene is bizarre, not as real as the place I just was.

It has taken me a while to fully return. Amazingly enough, my only physical damage that night was scrapes, cuts, and bruises. But I also felt a dent in my soul, a newfound source of fear. A fear so bottomless that for a while I thought I’d drown.

It was a fear I’d always refused to yield to. Yes, I practiced karate, but not for self-defense. As I saw it, that mindset belonged to a complex of worry and weakness that I wasn’t buying into. I wanted to feel free—too free to accept the fact that sudden attacks in my own life could be real. That night taught me the hard way that they are.

At first I feared I had forever lost any sense of safety. But gradually I found it anew—I go out again, I travel, I live. What I did lose was my naïvete, my recklessness. And good riddance. Because it turns out that I have actually become stronger knowing and living with my very real vulnerability.

Deeper Into Type

Nina Stössinger — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Picture for a moment that you are a director of a theater in another place, in another time. Exciting innovations in stage technology are made almost daily and your productions are the most advanced in the world. You use a new lighting system that you can dim and pan live, build movable stage designs for each play, and procure expensive props from out of town. You wow the audience again and again. They respond with wild applause.

You don’t give much thought to casting actors. There are just four of them in town and they only work locally. They are good actors, though, seasoned professionals ready to work with any content. You can require them to arrive shortly before opening night, show them their positions, and walk away as they are picking up their cues. You tell yourself the audience will get over seeing Romeo and Tybalt and Lord Capulet, Macbeth and Hamlet all wearing the same face, speaking in the same voice. There simply is no other choice.

Then a new generation of eager young actors, ready to tour, floods the scene, and theater work starts changing fast. You are quick to learn about casting actors; you are out scouting for fresh faces—ones the competition hasn’t spotted yet; you stage them beautifully, watch them perform. Sometimes they stumble; some of them mumble. But having a variety of actors from which to choose is priceless.

New Faces on Web Typography’s Stage

Hungry for the same diversity of faces to deliver content to its audience, the web design scene is enthralled by a newfound love for type, fueled by the advent of webfonts. In this typographic gold-rush fever, we’ve seen typefaces shine. But fonts soar to the top of trendiness only to soon be labeled overused and then cast aside. We’ve seen showcases and freak shows; illusionists creating shining beauty from next to nothing, their abracadabras written in CSS. It’s wonderful to see web designers get excited about type, learn to love type. I think what web typography needs next is not hotter but deeper love.

Yes, type is sexy—especially in a medium as starved for typographic expression as the web. But it is mistakenly viewed as merely concerned with the so-called visual layer of design. As designers become excited about type choice, big type, sexy type—and web type the competition hasn’t used yet—it is all too easily forgotten that typography’s visual and functional aspects are deeply intertwined.

Leaving aside type design (the actual design of type), typography is designing with type, and two aspects of it are central: selecting type and typesetting it; in effect, casting your actors and directing them in delivering the content. It is worth noting that the term typesetting originally encompassed much more in print typography, where one would be manually perfecting hyphenation and line returns, eliminating widows and orphans, etc.—tasks that in web design are either automated or virtually absent.

There’s an important distinction to be made here between display type (used in a large size and for few words at a time, such as in headings) and type for body text. Display is more glamorous, freer, easier. It has to be legible, but most of all it needs to work visually (read: look good and be appropriate). With body text typography (on which I will focus), surface beauty matters less. This craft is murkier, more complex; its repercussions reach more deeply into the functional layers of design.

As more webfonts have become available that are appropriate for text sizes rather than just for titling, body text is becoming our new focus. Knowledge of typographic design methods (such as grid systems) is spreading. We’re also seeing increased calls for a “typography-out”¹ approach. This phrase describes designing from the body type “outwards,” letting the character of the main typeface “bubble up to whole experiences,”² rather than forcing the type to meet other, predetermined design considerations. Shifting our discourse to these topics has the potential to carry web typography forward, past the point where we’re simply enraptured with new typefaces.

Making It Convincing

Does that typeface look convincing delivering that copy? Look it in the eye. Does it feel appropriate and inviting? Does the texture lend clarity and liveliness and draw you in? Does it feel at home on screen or is it struggling? Even typefaces that look great in print won’t necessarily shine in the still-crude resolution of most screens, where details get lost in the pixel grid, lending antialiased noise instead of graceful finish. Elegantly thin letters turn out too spindly, and if special care has not been taken with the hinting, things can quickly fall apart in Windows-based browsers.

Does the expression of the typeface match the text? The differences between text typefaces are certainly small as they all share the same basic structures, but they’re not negligible—any more than all actors look the same because they all have two arms and two legs. Wouldn’t text spoken loudly by a big bald guy sound quite different when uttered by a petite lady with glasses? Tone, volume, facial expression, and body language of the speaker color and shape the content, and—though the effect is subtle at text sizes on screen—typefaces do the same. Indeed, studies have shown that laypeople rather consistently attribute atmospheres or feelings to typefaces and that congruity between this perceived feeling and the content can make text easier to read and process.³

Besides casting the right actor, making typography effective depends on how you direct that actor to speak.

Every typeface interprets the text, but typeface alone does nothing. […] Type size, length of line, line increment, column depth, position of the text area on the page… all contribute to the total impression it makes.⁴

My father is an actor, and growing up I remember him endlessly reciting his lines in the living room. He would repeat the same sentences over and over and over, with minute or surprising variations in tempo, in air between the phrases, in volume, in intonation and pitch. As he was thinking about the text, he was anchoring it inside himself and finding the point, I think, where it clicked, where it became his, and became true within the overall concept of the play. Only then could he deliver those words in a convincing way for the director to evaluate.

Good actors don’t pretend. The text is true to them when they speak it.

Now when I’m sitting at my desk, designing, say, a book, I imagine I’m in a similar state to that of my father—one that is a strange marriage of playfulness and meticulous attention to detail. For every project, every setting, I look anew at the actual words in my layout, I play with the type; make it slightly bigger, slightly smaller; let it breathe over shorter line lengths or longer ones; use more or less leading, and try to add emphasis through italics or boldface or color or a different font—until the type feels natural and convincing in its role. Like a good actor, good type, selected and set well, does not pretend.

Typefaces As Interfaces

Picture a designer creating a menu for an upscale restaurant famed for its rich and complex culinary creations. Fancy food deserves fancy type, so he picks out an elaborate script typeface, takes a long time setting it beautifully—elegantly subdued in size, and with all manner of extra swashes—and prints it on shimmering stock in metallic ink. It’s stunning. However, in the atmospheric dim lighting of the restaurant, it simply cannot be read—and thus fails at its most basic task, leaving dinner guests frustrated.

Letters aren’t just visual elements, little drawings for us to enjoy. Typefaces are interfaces. They make words visible, convert them to patterns of black and white for us to decode. Here is the actor that lends your text its voice. Let this actor be annoying to listen to, let him stutter or mumble or be difficult to follow, and your audience likely won’t listen—or at least not favorably, no matter how pretty the actor might be if you look at his features up close.

Making It Effortless

So while it matters to get the atmospheric quality right, what’s really crucial is to make the typography work. Ideally, to make it feel effortless: easy and inviting to read.

In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn.⁵

Reading is a fragile task. It requires sustained focus and is easily interrupted. In this context, the goal of typography must be to reduce distraction and irritation as much as possible. That’s not the same intention as making text look beautiful; rather than drawing attention to its own prettiness, text typography should strive to make itself, if not invisible, at least inconspicuous.

The harder text is to read, the more effort is asked of readers. This will cause some to simply abandon the piece; and for those who do continue, their impression of the content may be negatively affected. In a study fiercely criticized on the type scene for its lack of typographic sensitivity, Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz nevertheless made a finding that I think is fascinating and fundamentally relevant for anyone who communicates with type. They found that the exact same content (a set of instructions) was perceived as more demanding and less attractive when presented in a typographic setting that was harder to read.⁶ This implies that if you want to make something seem easy and accessible, make it easy to read—not just on the semantic level of the text but also on the formal level of typography.

When working, it’s difficult to precisely evaluate how readable your text is. The act of reading is not a fully conscious task; typography is really only noticed if it’s not ideal, if it gets in the way of the reading experience. And even then, readers will likely not be able to pinpoint what irritates them. Even if they comment on the content or the language, it’s quite possible that their irritation has originally sprung from a badly spaced typeface whose letters stumble into each other, or by the type being too small or too fuzzy or the lines too long or too tight, or even from an annoying blinking element way across the page that keeps tugging on the eye and the attention.

Powers of Observation

There is no recipe for making text effortless to read. But some guidelines and conventions are risky to break. Regularity of texture is important: gaps and clogging distract. Exaggerated monotony hurts too: lettershapes need to be clearly distinct from one another. A not-too-long line is helpful: a sixty to seventy character limit is a good rule of thumb. Sufficient (but not excessive) line spacing helps avoid errant line returns. Longer lines need more line spacing. Intuitive visual hierarchy clarifies the structure of the text. Decide just how active the emphasis needs to be: subtler emphasis is less visible from a distance but also less jarring to the reader up close.

Learn from experiences made in the old craft of print typography, and learn to see why they might be relevant. But also question if you might need to deviate from some of them. Web designers will have a different perspective on some problems than will their print colleagues.

Don’t just read about typography; explore it. Really look at books, at dictionaries, newspapers, magazines; observe how their formal vocabulary works. Maybe you’ll spot devices that seem promising for web layouts too. For example, many books use first-line indents instead of vertical spacing between paragraphs. Book design has its conventions but they aren’t set in stone; each book designer has his own sensibilities, constraints, and reasons. Some of these guidelines have been carried over to the web; some have been abandoned. How much thought was put into those decisions? Examine conventions in print design, and question usual practices on the web. Understand them fully, then try to adopt, adapt, or transform what promises to be useful. By all means play.

Stay honest. It’s better to respect constraints than feign typographic sophistication. Observe the subtle but crucial difference between the appearance of fake and real small caps. Fake small caps are actually spaced caps set at a smaller size. Type snobbery is one reason to reject them; a better reason is seeing that they don’t speak loudly enough. They look as if someone counterintuitively picked a smaller font size (which of course is exactly what happened). On a low-resolution screen the effect may not be as jarring as it is on paper, but it still doesn’t really work.

Focus on your own medium, the rules and conventions it needs. And all fascination with the new typographic web aside—don’t be blinded by excitement. The point can be made that the advent of webfonts has actually made some things worse in web typography; the biggest elephants in the reading room are the rendering differences between platforms and browsers. The web has gained a lot of pretty text, but also more dysfunctional text settings. We’ve all seen spindly, poorly hinted letters that fall apart on XP or fat letters that inflate beyond readability on the Mac. Type that’s set too small or lines that get too long. Incomplete character sets that let unusual diacritics default to a fallback font, causing the line to hiccup. These things do matter. They do hurt.

The Elbow Grease of Ants

If we accept that, as Oliver Reichenstein wrote, design for the web as a text-based medium is “95% typography,” let’s not just discuss OpenType feature support, CSS drop shadows, or even which implementation of grid layouts to use. Let’s instead take a closer look. What good typography requires is sensitivity and respect for the inglorious and invisible craft of making text work.

For far too long, many of us… have been guilty of focusing on decoration: the colours and the shapes and the textures. […] I’m talking about stripping away all the cruft and getting back to good, solid design principles, like well-formed grids and decent measures and incremental leading and appropriately paired typefaces. As the web is content and content is type, it’s no surprise that at the heart of this approach is typography.¹

The challenge then is this: Really dive into the micro-world of type. Learn to see; develop an eye for type, one that you trust. Force yourself to slow down. The web may be a fast medium, but reading is slow, and so is crafting text that is meant to be read. It takes time, and curiosity, and the patience to really stop and sniff the serifs, to precisely observe what changes with each decision. If design, understood as craft, generally requires elbow grease, setting body type well requires the sort of micro-level elbow grease that ants’ elbows would have. And lots of it.

Design is about obsessively caring to the point you will annoy most everyone around you.⁷

So cast the best actor you can and work with the text to really make it shine. Then sit back and watch. And know that even on an empty stage, this actor could deliver an experience more powerful and intense than a stage full of bells and whistles built around a voice that doesn’t reach the audience or just isn’t all that memorable. Know that the right type, set well, can make all the difference, can drive your site and carry your layout. Even—and especially—if readers don’t consciously take notice.

Elliot Jay Stocks, “The typography-out approach in the world of browser-based web design.” ↩ ↩²
Tim Brown, “More Perfect Typography.” ↩
Richard L. Hazlett, A. Dawn Shaikh, Kevin Larson, Barbara S. Chaparo, “The Instant Impact of Onscreen Aesthetics: The Effects of Typeface Personality,” (unpublished research/publication proposal, 2008). ↩
Jost Hochuli and Robin Kinross, Designing Books: practice and theory, (Hyphen Press, 1996). ↩
Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, (Hartley & Marks, 1992/2005). ↩
Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz, “If It’s Easy to Read, It’s Easy to Do, Pretty, Good, and True,” (The Psychologist, 2010). ↩
@rands on Twitter, November 28, 2011. ↩

Lesson

Tiffani Jones Brown — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

My husband Matt and I are sitting around the kitchen table with Nanny, engulfed in chain smoke from her Winston 100’s. It’s Christmas in Selma, Indiana, and a blizzard has hit this eight-hundred person town where I used to live with my grandparents. Only the farmers’ sons on their snowmobiles can pass the roads, so there’s nothing to do but play Skip-Bo and talk.

Nanny is animated as she tells us stories from her past. The whites of her eyes have yellowed from years of smoking, but they light up as she recounts getting into fights at the county fair, growing up a coal miner’s daughter in Appalachia, stoking drama from the Free Will Baptist Church she attends.

I have always been mesmerized by her stories. Even as a little kid I was always the last one at the table, head desperately nodding so I could stay awake for every word. I loved seeing the wrinkles on her face come alive, the cross around her neck sway, her excessive jewelry shine.

Tonight, though, things feel different. I haven’t been home in almost a year because I’ve been busy running a design agency in Seattle. I find my thoughts drifting as I think about the work I have waiting for me back in a house with filtered water and the internet. For the first time, I notice myself tuning out.

I linger over a scene from the week before: Some web friends and I are at a professional meetup at a bar. People are friendly, but there is a heightened energy in the air—we’re all checking our phones obsessively, tweeting overheards, snapping pictures of one another mid-sip.

The difference between my two worlds feels like a record skipping, and I wonder if the disjointed parts can ever be balanced, even connected. How do Nanny’s stories factor into my life now? How do the two relate?

I am stuck on this thought when Nanny interrupts. Her drawl sounds like static and sandpaper bent over a steel guitar. She’s telling a story about Halloween in Jamestown, Tennessee, in the 1950s. As a practical joke, she and her sisters moved the outhouse, leaving the well beneath exposed. Then they sat behind a tree all night, waiting for someone to fall in.

“J.D. Pritchett never came by to fall in,” she says. “But, boy, Daddy almost did. I thought for sure he’d whup us when he realized what we’d done but instead he just stood there, scratchin’ his thick head, wonderin’ what happened to the outhouse.” She looks each of us straight in the eye to make sure we know how funny it is.

I’ve heard this story a hundred times, but I still love it. I feel grateful for the image I will always have of three young girls cracking up in their nightgowns, waiting for their father to fall into a shithole.

I look up at Matt and notice that for the first time in months, he, too, is completely absorbed. Focused. His phone and camera are nowhere in sight. He’s just sitting there with a huge grin on his face, looking back and forth between Nanny and me. We’re all having fun. We’re all laughing. Nobody wants to do anything next.

Nanny’s stories seem to have a special power over everyone she tells them to. You show up at her house, she stuffs you with pinto beans and cornbread and instant coffee, and the rest of the night you just sit there, doing nothing but listening to each other talk. The feeling is of being transported to someone else’s world, into another life, so that the one you’ve created, great as it is, fades into the background for a moment.

This must be what people mean when they talk about why good stories matter. It’s what they mean when they talk about exposing yourself to people who are different from you. Such people, great storytellers or not, have a story; they teach you there is life out there beyond your own.

Back in Seattle, my inbox is growing and my clients want their content. But right now, I can’t think of anything more productive than just sitting here, letting Nanny’s stories wash over me. When I go back to work, I know it will be with a greater appreciation, a deeper sense of empathy. That’s what listening teaches you.

It’s what good stories are for.

Practicing Passion

Tiffani Jones Brown — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’m at South by Southwest Interactive listening to a keynote on doing what you love. The speaker is pacing furiously across the stage, talking a mile a minute, insisting that unbridled passion for our work is the only way we’ll ever amount to anything.

“I want you to ask yourself whether you love what you’re doing,” he commands. “Is the answer no? Is it?! If the answer is no, I want you to stop it. Stop it right now.” A rainbow of spittle sprays into the theater lights. “If you’re not doing it for the love, you’re not doing it! Follow your passion and then—only then—will you kill it.”

He keeps talking about dedicating your life to your one true passion. I shift in my seat as I wonder: am I passionate enough to really kill it? A montage from earlier in the week forms: I’m sitting at my computer, staring at a responsible-looking woman and her Labradoodle in the hero image of BizFilings.com. I’m with two silent, stony-faced marketing executives in a boardroom, explaining a copywriting choice. I’m brushing my teeth at 2 p.m. I’m standing in line at Chase.

Sure, I’d been excited to start my own business. And sure, I’d loved the idea of writing for a living. Yet banal and frustrating tasks—the kind you approach with a groan, not a fist-pump—make up much of my job. So do I feel over-the-moon about my work? I truly like it. I feel good when I get better at it. Passion overstates the point.

Applause, and my thoughts snap back to the auditorium. The speaker basks in his standing ovation. I’m weary as we glue iPhones in front of our faces and file out the door.

Sparks and Currents

When it comes to building passion in work, we often take a just-add-water approach. “Do what you love,” say the self-help gurus we parrot, “and the rest will take care of itself.” Not riding an adrenaline rush? You must be in the wrong profession.

This is like saying that if you aren’t feeling sparks for your partner every day, you should ditch him. Of course, people who’ve sustained happy relationships understand this attitude reflects a shallow take on what love is. Real, lasting passion is about sticking it out through difficult, not-so-sparky times. It’s about doing things to ground the sparks in a strong current.

We should treat our jobs like this, too. Instead of asking “what will make me feel passion?” we should ask, “how can I make passion happen?” The answer is to cultivate a way of living and working that makes passion more likely.

Passion takes practice.

Twirling in the Junkyard

To practice passion, we must first set the proper expectations: Your work, even when you love it, will not always please you.

I went to grad school to pursue my true love, philosophy. I had dreams of sitting in periwinkle fields, effortlessly penning ideas in leather-bound journals. Instead, I spent massive amounts of time underlining ancient texts and painstakingly outlining arguments. You can’t do philosophy without being downright mathematical in your thoughts, and math is not, to put it lightly, my strong suit.

Over time, to my surprise, I somehow started to enjoy the outlines and even the math. They made my papers better. So I relaxed into them. At some point, the process became more than palatable, even meditative.

Philosopher Slavoj Žižek talks about this feeling in the documentary, Examined Life. In one scene, he stands in front of a junkyard, giving a lecture on ecology and ideology. He sweats as he gestures wildly at the trash. “This is where we should start feeling at home,” he says. “This is part of nature! Because what is love? It is not idealization. Every true lover knows this… You seek perfection in imperfection. Find poetry in the real and imperfect!”

Love is not idealization. Find poetry in the real and imperfect.

Doing what we love involves things we don’t love. Learning ballet, I expected to be bounding swan-like across polished wood floors, pink toe shoes glimmering under theater lights. Instead I spent most of my time doing the robot from first to second position. Once I gave up on the romantic ideal of toe shoes, I could relax into the miniscule movements that might eventually earn me a pair. The things I disliked became comforting and rewarding.

If you’re a designer, this probably means learning code and copy. If you’re a content strategist, it might mean cozying up to Excel spreadsheets or becoming fluent in the language of engineers. As in work and the rest of life, passion comes not from idolizing perfection but from embracing what we love in its totality.

Gym Class for Creatives

It’s easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.

— Flannery O’Connor¹

It’s summer in Selma, Indiana, and I’m outside throwing softballs against the barn. I’m practicing my grounders. To make it harder on myself, I throw the ball far to the left and to the right, like my Poppy taught me. I do this for about an hour until I’m so exhausted I have to sit down in the gravel. I feel my heart beat in my chest and watch the heat rise off the corn as I rest. I feel tough and confident, like a 5th-grade girl version of Larry Bird.

If you grow up playing a lot of sports, the importance of practice is drilled into you. “Practice makes perfect,” your coaches repeat as you hurl free throw after free throw. Even those of us who didn’t grow up playing sports instinctively accept this.

We recoil at the idea, however, that “creative” work might be bound by rules similar to, say, wrestling. And yet, research has shown that this is, to some extent, the case. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi puts it this way:

The more a job inherently resembles a game—with variety, appropriate and flexible challenges, clear goals, and immediate feedback—the more enjoyable it will be regardless of the worker’s level of development.²

In other words, taking a sports-like approach to work makes us enjoy it more, by helping us get into a sports-like state of flow—the feeling that you’re so involved in something that nothing else seems to matter, or even exist. Workers who regularly slip into flow report feeling much higher job satisfaction and happiness than others do.

You can get into flow doing almost any activity, no matter how good you are at it, no matter how mundane the task. Only two things are required: the activity has to have a clear goal and a challenge. You need to be really plugged in and focused; what you’re doing must stretch your body or mind. You won’t achieve flow while multitasking or surfing the internet but you might, odd as it seems, while doing a content audit or cleaning up comps.

A graphic designer I know is especially good at this. He shows up at work earlier than I do, then pumps out multiple versions of his designs—regardless of how much he likes the assignment—before lining them all up on a board for his teammates to evaluate by midday. Rinse, repeat. When he gets stuck, he takes a break. Rather than watering down the artfulness of his work or mechanizing it, this athletic approach actually improves it. He sprints through the week and produces interesting work on a schedule while seeming to truly enjoy it. Watch him at his desk and you’ll see he’s not only focused, he’s immersed.

If you want to have passion for your work then do what your coaches told you: set challenging goals for yourself every day, work hard to achieve them, and evaluate how you did at the end. Structure it in a way that makes absorption possible. Do it, in other words. Then do it some more.

Courting Terror

If your Nerve deny you—Go above your Nerve.

— Emily Dickinson³

I’ve known I wanted to be a creative writer of some sort since I was a little girl. Before I could read, I remember nabbing books from my grandparents’ crusted 1950s Friendly Zoo Animals encyclopedias, scooting an old wood chair into the middle of the kitchen floor beneath the brightest light, and then pretending to read while my family ate their fried chicken and potatoes. After I learned to write, I would scribble poetry and songs out the eyes and ears of common warthogs and giraffes in those same encyclopedias. “Tiffy’s gonna be a writer someday,” my Nanny—whose parents made her quit school at 8th grade so she could take care of her siblings—would beam.

But my high school years came and went and, save mandatory school papers and an occasional literary outburst in the margins of a P.G. Wodehouse novel, I barely wrote a thing. Same with college. I pretended I was too busy focusing on my real courses to do anything creative, but in reality I was too terrified to write.

More than once, I vowed to start writing, trekked to the library late at night, then sat paralyzed in front of the computer while the papers of prolific English majors poured out of the printers. I’d slouch home at 3 a.m., fear hardening into defeat. I’d never be even an ounce as good as the writers I admired. Plenty of people whose parents never went to college don’t become writers. Why try?

Years later grace came, as it often does, in the form of people who love me. “You said you wanted to write. Send me something next week,” they’d prod. Then, after two weeks had passed with no writing, “Tiff, where’s that thing?” Then the final straw from my husband, “Stop being a wimp. Write, Tiff.”

I had a writing phobia. I needed to systematically desensitize myself to it. So I signed up for a class.

The first day of “Personal Essay for Publishing,” I was relieved to find that my fellow students seemed as terrified as I was. We went around the table, apologizing for our lack of talent until our teacher made his introduction.

“You know that feeling you get, when you’re completely panicked in front of a blank sheet of paper or have no idea what you’re going to write about?” Emphatic head-nodding around the table. “That’s how I feel about six hours out of every day. Complete terror. The whole point is to write through that. Stand on your head, do your Vipassana, fall facedown on the grass—do whatever you need to get your mind out of panic mode. Just keep writing.”

Every day I wrote furiously, pounding away at the keyboard during my commute from San Francisco to Palo Alto. I belched out one thousand words a day. After a week of this, I read over my essay—only to find that it was completely incoherent and embarrassing. The standard fare: “I’m not a writer. This sucks.” Delete. Try again. Delete.

A week before my essay was due, I had nothing to show for my labor. I was still terrified. So I did what any mature adult would do. I threw my laptop across the couch, guzzled two glasses of wine and then sat in the dark, loathing myself and tearing up repeatedly until 2 a.m. “Just put your butt on the ground and write,” I heard my teacher say. So I did. I sat down on the floor. I decided to write just one sentence. But then one turned into two, and then three—until I had something decent. Not great, but decent.

A few days later, I read the story out loud to a kindly, well-dressed audience at the Book Passage near the Embarcadero. I wasn’t a wimp.

Dragons and Princesses

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.

— Rainer Maria Rilke⁴

“What Would You Do if You Weren’t Afraid?” Every day, the big, red question stares down at me from the poster where it lives in my office. It reverberates in my head while I fill my coffee mug and visit the paper clips drawer. The message makes my fears more apparent to me, while de-sensationalizing the concept of fear itself.

We’re all afraid. Might as well barrel through and do what you want to do anyway.

Those who do barrel through may notice that, instead of eradicating fear, doing what you love brings brand new fears roaring to the forefront. With each new skill or personal milestone, there is more to learn and possibly more to be afraid of.

I used to be terrified of writing. Now I am merely very afraid of it. I keep pushing through Word docs and text files with the vague hope that eventually I’ll land on something that feels good. Until then, I have to make a choice: To write, and then write some more, even when I’m nervous. To accept the imperfections.

To practice my passion until I feel it.

Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962). ↩
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, (HarperCollins, 2009). ↩
Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, (Little, Brown and Company, 1976). ↩
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, (Dover Publications, 2002). ↩

Lesson

Paul Soulellis — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

After the relationship ended, I let go of twelve clients, closed my office, and left the country.

What had happened was this: I was in a relationship that failed. After being with someone for six years, and struggling, and growing, and wanting it to work, and working so hard, and realizing that it had failed, I came to understand that sometimes, no matter how much it hurts, you have to leave the one you love.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I would also leave everyone else. For six months following the breakup, I slowly dismantled several of my most intimate professional relationships—therapist, employees, clients.

I was tired. I didn’t want to accommodate anyone anymore. But I wasn’t thinking about it like that—what happened next was more like a series of scripted operations. Like the autopilot kicking in again after turbulence. Suddenly it’s smooth, and you forget that you’ve been jostled around. Later, you find bruises.

Soon after my partner moved out of the apartment, I ran into Louise Fili on the street. I told her how much I missed Italy. We had been there together earlier in the year for an intense program in typography with the School of Visual Arts.

“Why don’t you apply to the American Academy in Rome,” she suggested.

Two months later, I found myself accepted there as a visiting artist. I scheduled meetings with clients to let them know that I was closing Soulellis Studio and leaving the country for six months. Maybe more.

What I told everyone was this: after working as a creative director and running a small, successful design studio for exactly ten years, I wanted to see what would happen without clients.

What kind of work would I do?

I asked myself if I had a personal design philosophy. Could I create work that was more satisfying if I was producing it for myself? Did I need an audience? I sensed that without clients, I might be free to explore these areas between art and design.

I allowed myself to ask these questions before leaving, but I really had no idea where the journey was taking me. I had a sketch, at best—I would produce new work in Rome and then study Greek in Athens, my father’s homeland, for a few months. I knew I would be stretched in new directions but had no idea how I would react. This terrified me.

My only plan was to be present in the world by looking and listening and being open. And to myself. After years of trying to make a relationship work, I needed to return to myself. To do that I had to get comfortable with uncertainty. I needed to get back to curiosity.

I was leaving the office to get to work.

I called it a six-month sabbatical. I guess it was important to name it. To give it some definition and shape in the face of self-doubt. I feared loneliness. I feared mistakes. I was afraid that if I wasn’t careful I would destroy everything I had worked so hard to build in my career.

It turns out that careful was only half of it. The other half was a letting go and an opening up to serendipity; the breakup was a break from the familiar. It allowed me the luxury of not knowing what would happen.

Eighteen months after the breakup, I find myself in a very different place, my work transformed. I have an artist’s studio now but continue to consult with design clients. I recently showed work in a gallery for the first time in my life. Even my creative process has changed. Uncertainty and fear, the duo that accompanied me throughout the breakup and the sabbatical, seem to be here to stay in a now-cherished concept that I struggle to shape and incorporate in my creative process: design humility. It’s a lens that seems to have emerged from all of this, one that might bring a new clarity or discovery.

My sabbatikos (Greek for rest or week, derived from the Aramaic sabbata) was neither a fixed period nor a rest. Six months turned into twelve, and one year now turns to two. It began as a painful rupture, but this breaking profoundly reverberated through every aspect of my life.

“Give me a break,” we say to express exasperation or disbelief—a cry for space, a protest. The break, in fact, was a bend in my life. A space to breathe, unbroken. An opening for growth.

Design Humility

Paul Soulellis — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I went on a mushroom walk recently.

It was part of a tour of the old Black Mountain College campus, near Asheville, North Carolina. This is where some of the American avant-garde converged for a few hot moments in the early 1950s, and I wanted to taste some of that. The mushrooms themselves didn’t draw me there. I wasn’t one of those children who grew up near wild raspberry bushes, marking the seasons by what was pickled and preserved. I grew up playing on the lawns of suburban Long Island, unable to identify a weed from a salad, or a Judd from a Lewitt, for that matter. Instead, I was genuinely curious about what kind of insight into Cage, Rauschenberg, Cunningham, and Albers might come from walking in these same woods and looking for their ghosts among the mushrooms.

This wasn’t an unfounded curiosity; the artist John Cage was an amateur mycologist. In 1958 he won an Italian television quiz show by answering questions about mushrooms, and he taught mushroom identification at the New School in the 1960s. I hoped I’d discover a good reason why the man who had famously given us chance operations and 4′33″ was fascinated by spore-bearing things that grow deep in the forest.

Our guide didn’t mention him at all. She was a chatty Brit with a beautiful basket and a wide-brimmed hat, the perfect combination of whimsy and nerd and charm. We were in good hands.

Not that much happened. We walked around Lake Eden, and into the woods a bit, and by the side of the road. We wandered together, and at times one or two of us would fall back, or stray closer to the water or to a particular tree. Frankly I don’t remember anything she said. We weren’t really doing anything. Except observing. I found myself walking slow but looking hard—at tree trunks, along the bottoms of bushes, within patches of grass, at the edges of things. There was intention, and a focused observation, but still—we were wandering. A focused wander.

There was a joy in this looking around, and I was rewarded a few times with my own discoveries. Things I might normally have missed. A purple mushroom first, and then a white one that had already decayed, leaving behind what we were told was a “mushroom print”—a faint, white shape flat against the dark dirt, like a negative shadow. And just as we started out around the lake, not thirty seconds on the path, someone pointed to what looked like ten pounds of oyster mushrooms clinging to a rotten stump at the water’s edge. “Dinner!” our guide merrily proclaimed.

Chance

Cage would flip three coins six times to draw I-Ching hexagrams, yielding random numbers between one and sixty-four. He used the numbers to make decisions in his music, his visual work, and even in his writing. Later in life he was given a rudimentary computer program that generated the numbers for him. He explained chance operations this way: “I gave up making choices. I’ve merely changed my responsibility from making choices to asking questions. It’s not easy to ask questions.”¹ He would devise methodologies that used chance operations for determining how long a musical piece should be, or how long to hold a note, or where to locate an element on a page—all of the creative decision-making in his work.

By embracing chance rather than choice, Cage tried to remove his own judgment—the artist’s ego—from the artistic process. One result was an opening up to all of the ways in which art imitates nature. “The first question I ask myself when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful is why do I think it’s not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.”¹ Chance frees us from the constraints of our own likes and dislikes. Chance reveals nature. For Cage, taste (and along with it, history and tradition) was irrelevant.

I’m interested in this idea: that beyond our own personal tastes, all sounds (or colors, or shapes) have equal value. Using chance-determined results to break free from predetermined choices in order to realize something new. This requires a kind of humility, a giving over to nature. The yin to this yang, of course, is absolute certainty, always lurking just ahead of indeterminacy. A commitment to the answers. An understanding that three coins tossed six times doesn’t simply yield any number. It yields a specific number, and this specificity can be heavy.

And so it is in mushroom hunting. The undirected, yet deliberate wander through the woods, fully engaged but not knowing what will come into play. Open to surprise. Unsure even if anything will be found. And understanding that when a mushroom is discovered, all uncertainty must be left behind. Identifying the fungus before ingestion puts us face to face with the greatest of certainties, a matter of life and death. Perhaps this play between the freely focused wander and the gravity of the tangible discovery—of what nature gives us—is what appealed to Cage.

I did an experiment recently. I used Cage’s very analog coin-toss method for yielding numbers to create a process for selecting colors—pairs of 6-bit web colors. I did this once a day for a few days, and to ritualize it I formally posted the chance-determined results on my website. The very first time that the color pair was revealed to me was thrilling. I can honestly say that this was unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced in my creative career. Every formalized decision-making process that I had been taught vanished at the moment that I looked at those colors on my screen. All rationalization and careful justification that I had taught my clients—everything that allows me to be considered an “expert” in design—became irrelevant as I accepted these colors into my life.

A few days later I expanded the experiment to 24-bit colors. I was now asking for pairs of chance-determined colors from 16.7 million possibilities. The first time that this process yielded two colors that I would never have selected myself—what I would normally reject as an ugly pair—I felt resistance. Using randomness as a tool to open oneself up to what lies beyond good taste goes against the very basis of design expertise. Cage said that “the highest discipline is the discipline of chance operations, because chance operations have absolutely nothing to do with one’s likes or dislikes. The person is being disciplined, not the work.”¹

I just sat and stared at the screen, absolutely astonished that I could feel so light and free, and at the same time so serious, about a pair of colors. Like a gift.

But I also felt anxiety.

Anxiety because I was posting the results, no matter how ugly, to my website. For me, this was a key part of the process. It’s one thing to conduct an experiment in the privacy of one’s own studio; it’s another to publish the results to an audience, in real time. To a waiting design community poised to judge. For a recovering perfectionist like me, “amplified vulnerability” is frightening. I wanted to move, once and for all, beyond any sort of fear of judgment—not by becoming arrogant but by embracing humility.

Exposure

I built my website exactly ten years ago to show finished work. It was a static design portfolio site and it served me well for several years. I updated it with new projects from time to time and kept the client list current. Eventually, I shifted over to a blog format and started adding other kinds of content. Design-related ephemera, inspiration, and the occasional process shot from the studio were mixed in with finished work, and Soulellis.com started to open up. I was getting more attention and a more diverse audience.

And then, a bigger change happened. I had closed my office and was about to take off for Europe to do non-client work for an extended period. Just before leaving, I relaunched the site and called it a “design journal.” Soulellis Studio simply became Soulellis, without a physical place, and I started to use the website as a virtual studio. An organic space to post work as it developed, not just when it was finished. In fact, I was less interested in the completed projects and much more curious about how the work (and I) would evolve emotionally along the way as it was publicly exposed on the site. Posting my work to the blog felt a bit like a slow walk in the woods—wandering but deliberate, private but exposed.

Soulellis became more than an archive. It was a journal and an active work area and a place for critique—I would come back to it repeatedly after posting, to re-look, re-evaluate and refine.

Using the designer’s website as a public window into the creative process, instead of as a closed portfolio box, introduces a new kind of risk. The uncertainty becomes part of the work, and the designer exposes ugly dead ends and nonlinear thinking in full (or mostly full) view of the audience. This requires exposure and vulnerability, but the potential reward can be a rich, amplified growth that only comes from feedback loops that aren’t possible in more private realms. Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Dribbble, and other social venues are performative spaces for exposing in-progress work, but they favor the polished and trendy. Maybe we need to demand more from our audiences—a slower read, a wider view. This suggests longer-form platforms, like the personal blog, where exposure of works in progress can appear with all their emotion, authenticity, and even messiness, intact.

Uncertainty runs counter to how we’re trained to articulate our design values. We’re taught to express clearly and certainly, and to manifest our beliefs within a system—a framework of standards and ideals (think minimalism). Consistency, wholeness, and ease of understanding are rewarded; ambiguity and periphery and doubt are not. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this assertiveness is the design manifesto (think F.T. Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto,” Walter Gropius’s “Bauhaus Manifesto,” or Dieter Rams’s “Ten Principles for Good Design”).

Bravado

We’re drawn to manifestos but oftentimes there’s a blurry line between spirited conviction and presumptuous command. A design legend proclaims that only a half-dozen or dozen typefaces are necessary to do good work; this kind of limited view is a shutting down of possibilities, an exaggeration of ego that only exposes the designer’s limits. This faux-masterful display is a kind of design arrogance.

I hear a tone in the design community today that stops short of design arrogance but flirts with self-importance and conceit. It’s a kind of firm-footed stance—a self-reliant projection of confidence and certainty that’s become the de facto voice of Twitter and many design blogs. Rather than the focused drift of foraging in the woods, design bravado is more like a golf course strategy—the swing, the swagger, the show of conquering the landscape.

Designers with an open view to the future and a firm connection to the digital are fond of this declarative voice. Sweeping pronouncements about industry turbulence (“the end of print,” “the death of the logo,” etc.) or one’s rank (“I have developed quite an antenna for people talking design without showing design in the past few years”—the kind of tweet that simply leaves me speechless) are sticky with conviction and puff.

But with so much uncertainty in the design world, an expansive projection of confidence can take on charismatic appeal. Entire industries (publishing, branding, design, web), disciplines (art vs. design), and our own “likability” in the world (friends, fans, and followers) are under constant scrutiny and threat. It makes sense that design bravado might be so popular at a time when all of the traditional assumptions about how we work are being questioned.

Yet, design bravado can be a valuable tactic for rallying and creating momentum, and some designers have translated this machismo into a never-before-seen kind of thriving entrepreneurship. Notebooks, posters, and apps—even tattoos—shift the designer from service provider to sleek thing-maker (for an audience comprised mostly of our own peers). This has its merits; design bravado is sexy, good for the career, and good for business.

Humility

What happens when one sets design bravado aside and looks the other way?

After the web color experiment, I designed a 294-page book using chance operations. I wanted to discover just how far I could remove my own ego from the process, so I generated lists of random numbers with Random.org. Like Cage, I devised simple methodologies to use the numbers to manipulate content and make decisions about book structure, page size, grid, layout, and typography. I relinquished many of my trusted techniques for decision making in design and gave myself over to chance operations. This work was unlike any design project I’d created before, but it was firmly grounded in an art tradition (the book was created for a gallery environment).

I love this book, but it has left me with more questions than answers. I’m thankful for that.

And I question just how far over into design I could take this—if there’s any place for chance operations in the client relationship or in real-world problem-solving.

Whether or not chance operations has agency applications, I suspect the design community at large has much to gain by more openly confronting ambiguity, self-doubt, and complexity in our relationships and in our selves. I’d like to counter the celebratory stance of the moment—design bravado—with a more humbled position. A slow ramble: sensing, collecting, and being fully present to changes in light, weather, and sound. Searching, discovering, and acknowledging one’s own presence in the environment but without placing our selves at the center. A non-judging acceptance of all that nature delivers. The value in the focused wander is tremendous.

Perhaps it’s the courage to confront self-doubt that empowers us.

Let’s call it design humility—a vulnerable, observant posture. Fully engaged and open to risk. It’s difficult to articulate it, but I know design humility when I see it. I see it when Milton Glaser talks about failure. “The only way to confront the realization that we’re not as good as we think we are”—that the master is not the genius that everyone expects him to be—“is to embrace failure.”²

I see it in Kate Bingaman Burt’s inspiring talk for Portland Creative Mornings. “You should start projects because you feel like you’re going to explode, or vomit, or both.”

I see it in Bruce Mau’s “Incomplete Manifesto for Growth”: “Allow events to change you…forget about good…capture accidents…drift…”³

I see it when designers and performers speak passionately at an Occupy Wall Street rally about artists using their work to enable change in the world.

I see it in the tweets of John Maeda, who says that humility is “a leader’s greatest strength.”

I want to see more design humility in our conversations. I suspect our work will take on thicker value if we start to openly acknowledge the full range of emotions we invest in our careers—from insecurity to courage. The rewards might be richer, and the conversations more interesting, if we freely expose ourselves in real time to our peers as emotional beings who are sometimes afraid, sometimes gutsy, but always human.

Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, (Routledge, New York, 2003). ↩ ↩² ↩³
Milton Glaser, “On the Fear of Failure,” (Berghs Exhibition, 2011). ↩
Bruce Mau, “Incomplete Manifesto for Growth,” (Blog, Bruce Mau Design, 1998-2011). ↩

Lesson

Josh Brewer — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A few years ago, we uprooted our family and moved to San Francisco. The company I was working for at the time as Creative Director had just taken a small round of funding with the specific goal of rapidly expanding the business. Moving was a big decision for us, but we were enthusiastic about taking this next step in our lives.

My wife, whose full-time job is raising two children, also happens to be an incredibly talented decorator—or organator (organizer + decorator), as she likes to call herself. Her knack for arranging a space and bringing it to life is amazing, and I was constantly encouraging her to start a blog and begin sharing her delightfully smart and creative ideas. But she was always a bit reluctant.

“Who’s gonna read it?” she would ask.

“Just start the blog,” I said. “You’ll be surprised.”

Turns out I was in for the surprise.

Dana finally agreed to let me design and build her site. I became the designer and my wife became the client. To conduct the process as professionally as possible, I even set up a formal session during which we began to talk about what she envisioned for her new blog: how it would be organized, what the content would be, the look and feel—all the usual things you discuss when meeting with a client for the first time.

Seek first to understand is a principle that is absolutely essential for good interpersonal communication. I picked it up years ago from Steven Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I work hard to incorporate this principle into both my personal and business relationships and consider myself to be pretty good at using this to elicit the real problem that needs to be solved in order for a design to be successful.

Surely, this process would be easy. Dana was passionate about her topic, and she was my partner in life. The love of my life. I was an experienced web designer who highly valued good communication. What could possibly go wrong?

However, as Dana and I spent more time together, starting to design and build her new blog, we found ourselves increasingly frustrated with each other. To be candid, she was actually becoming irritated with me. I, on the other hand, was routinely channeling nearly all of the negative clichés about designers you can imagine. Pronouncements like, “You just don’t do that.” and “That’s just wrong!” began to roll off my tongue, complete with eye-rolling and defensive body language.

And, great communicator that I was, I would become extremely annoyed when I had to explain why. My furrowed brow of frustration was pretty much the antithesis of “Seek first to understand” and more like “Stop talking to me, leave me alone, and just let me make this thing for you; it will be awesome, and you will like it, and so will other people.”

Finally, one day, as we were slogging through another session of trying to get this thing off the ground, Dana said, “Okay, forget it. I don’t want to do this with you. Honestly, if this is how you treat other clients or the people you work with, you should be ashamed of yourself.”

Ouch! Did she really just say that?

Cue defensive male posture and ready the rebuttals.

Fortunately, I managed to stop myself and instead opened up to what she was saying. It wasn’t easy. Here was the woman of my dreams, the one person that I know and am known by more than anyone on the planet, the wife to whom I pledged my heart and my life, telling me in no uncertain terms that I was not listening, was not open to her feedback, and was not taking what she wanted into account.

Okay, Mr. Seek-first-to-understand-professional-designer-guy, where is your essential principle of interpersonal communication now?

It was nowhere to be found. In fact, it turned out my ego was running the show more than I wanted to admit. I mean, after all, people would see her site and know I designed it. It would represent my abilities and reputation. I had to make sure it was perfect.

Notice how much of that was all about me? Wait a minute. Who was I designing this for?

That’s right, my wife.

So after I got down off of my high horse and humbled myself enough to listen, Dana and I were able to work together to create something that reflected who she is and what she loves rather than a showcase for my skills as a designer.

This experience serves as my constant reminder that design is for the client, not for us, and that humility and openness are qualities not only worth cultivating but critically important for working with every client—even the ones who once said, “I do.”

The Sky Ain’t the Limit

Josh Brewer — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It was 1940, and the Allied forces supply lines were heavily under attack—losing ships, men, and thousands of tons of vital supplies to enemy submarines each month. A man named Henry J. Kaiser won a contract to build cargo vessels for the British war effort.

Less than a year after Kaiser secured the contract, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, devastating the naval fleet stationed there. Suddenly the United States found itself at war. The immediate need for ships that could power the US war effort was critical. Kaiser stepped forward at just the right moment and achieved the impossible.

Kaiser was an industrial visionary who had helped build Hoover Dam, one of the greatest Public Works projects in US history; the Grand Coulee Dam, which stripped the Great Pyramid of Egypt of its title of Greatest Man-Made Structure on Earth; and the Oakland Bay Bridge, whose great span carried hundreds of thousands of people each day to the shining city of San Francisco. All were constructed in record-breaking time. Incredibly, whenever he seized an opportunity that was supposedly beyond what he had the experience to tackle, he achieved results that far surpassed what anyone expected.

Despite knowing nothing about shipbuilding, Kaiser was able to keep the US war effort afloat and simultaneously change the entire shipbuilding industry. In just three months, Kaiser’s crew had everything in place required to produce the nearly 1,500 vessels necessary to assure victory and the protection of the nation. Kaiser the dam builder had the beginnings of what would become one of the most successful shipyards in naval history.

Kaiser was a leader with purpose, vision, and commitment. He was the driving force behind enormous projects and monuments that stand to this day. He changed lives, industries, and even had a hand in the fate of our nation. But he didn’t do it alone.

Kaiser won the shipbuilding contract because he had a proven and trusted team that had conquered insurmountable challenges in the past. These were men who shared Kaiser’s belief that anything was possible and who, under his guidance and direction, were given the freedom to experiment, invent, and establish new systems needed to overcome the challenges before them.

This time, he focused his team on innovating the shipbuilding process. They eagerly took advantage of the latest technology available and created an entirely new process that transformed a previously slow, manual practice into one that enabled thousands of people (skilled and unskilled) to help construct the vessels that played a part in the Allied victory.

For example, Kaiser did away with the current pattern of using rivets to join all the seams on a vessel, which required pairs of skilled laborers to accomplish all the work. Instead, he found that welding the joints and seams produced as strong a ship—if not stronger—and cut the finish time from twelve months to approximately five days. By changing one specific step in the process (welding seams), Kaiser and his team were able to set a world record for fastest ship built. Kaiser did more than assemble ships; he revolutionized an industry.

Kaiser earned the trust and respect of industry giants throughout his career. More importantly, he knew how to instill his vision in his teams, which motivated and inspired them to do far more than they believed they were capable of achieving.

What if a design team applied these kinds of principles? How can a leader—a creative director, art director, or anyone responsible for design in an organization—help a team be more efficient, passionate, and capable of greatness?

The era of the Rockstar Designer is waning. How many of us cringe at this notion already? The era of great design teams is dawning. We need to change our attitudes and approach projects with much less me and much more we if our industry is to help lead and shape the future of business, commerce, and society. Unfortunately, the notion that designers are divas—who are difficult to work with and who care nothing for business goals—continues to undermine our industry as it attempts to mature.

A design team must be well versed in the business and product goals of the company, understand the basics of the technology powering the product, and be able to both visually and verbally articulate answers to the problems they are presented with. As such, we cannot be content with simply pushing pixels around, writing perfectly semantic markup, or delivering copious IA wireframes.

How many designers and teams aren’t really doing due diligence: researching, examining branding and business goals, learning the intricacies of their client’s product or service, unearthing the desires and experiences of the people the client wants to reach? Too often, the same design style—beautiful and finessed as it may be—is churned out whether the client is a baby boomer health-and-fitness service, a sewing machine manufacturer, or a start-up with a new gizmo for collaborating on projects within organizations. Regurgitated style over slim substance is the opposite of design and certainly the enemy of innovation.

If we take a cue from Kaiser’s approach to achieving the impossible and his facility with team organization, we would turn loose the talented, passionate people we hired to do what they do best. We would do everything possible to remove the friction around process and move past these clichés about design (and clichés within our designs) once and for all.

As we can see with Kaiser, our design teams need the type of strong leadership that provides just the right amount of freedom, original vision, and structure for people to shine.

Miles Davis, one of the most influential jazz musicians in the last sixty years, was a man with an unwavering vision. Through a lifetime of dedication and a relentless pursuit of his passion, he ushered in whole eras in jazz music. In 1959, Miles assembled a group of some of the most talented musicians in the industry—including saxophonists John Coltrane and “Cannonball” Adderly, pianist Bill Evans, and others—to record what would become one of the most important and critically acclaimed works of jazz of all time, the album Kind of Blue.

Miles’s vision for what he intended to elicit out of these men was clear and direct. He provided a new musical framework that allowed them unprecedented freedom of expression. He was intent on creating a new form of expression that broke away from bebop’s dense, complex style of jazz, which had evolved during the previous decade. His vision—and the talent and ability to think in new ways backing it up—changed the landscape of jazz forever and launched most of his sidemen into jazz stardom.

Another visionary, Steve Jobs, once said, “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” When leaders hold themselves to a higher standard of accountability, the team will also rise and hold one another to a higher standard. Miles Davis was revered for his mastery of the trumpet and was known for his exacting standards of musicianship. He was an innovator. He pushed those around him to greater and greater heights and was relentless in his demand for excellence. Sometimes, these words from Jobs and stories of other people who make magnificent things happen rush by us but are not taken to heart. Are we actually stopping to examine precisely how we fail and succeed at this in our work?

Great leaders do not tolerate an environment where people belittle, demean, or humiliate each other. Rather, they promote and provide honest criticism (constructive, objective, and useful) and challenge people to reach beyond what they believe they can achieve. Great leaders also guard against a sense of entitlement among team members and within themselves—that irrational expectation of favorable treatment and unquestioned compliance with one’s expectations—as it can be cancerous to the team and potentially to the entire organization.

It is essential to keep an eye on all these facets of leadership and often equally important that we not take ourselves too seriously. Kaiser was known for having painted his cement trucks bright pink simply because he thought it was a happy color. As ridiculous as it seems, little acts of playfulness like this provide a respite from the mundane and encourage a team to have fun.

Both Kaiser and Davis were known for being playful, and yet they demanded a great deal out of those working closely with them. Kaiser in particular focused on cultivating a diligent management process that was—in his mind—the key component in ensuring the speedy completion of any project. So playfulness must know its place. Too much process can cause a design team to get lost in a quagmire of rules and regulations, ultimately stunting creativity. People like Kaiser know that process must have a purpose; it doesn’t exist for its own sake. However, with too little process, you end up with each designer doing what is right in his or her own eyes, a design free-for-all that loses sight of challenge and purpose.

Discipline is a set of self-imposed rules, parameters within which we operate. It is a bag of tools that allows us to design in a consistent manner from beginning to end. Discipline is also an attitude that provides us with the capacity of controlling our creative work so that it has continuity of intent throughout rather than fragmentation. Design without discipline is anarchy, an exercise of irresponsibility.

— Massimo Vignelli¹

Designers are notorious for allowing themselves more latitude than they should for the sake of creativity. The result can lead to a visual language that lacks consistency and meanders in purpose. Yes, a rigid process can lead to a rigid product. However, eschewing process in favor of “flexibility” or “creativity” will only perpetuate the notion that designers are unpredictable and lack a sense of accountability.

Research has shown that children function best and are most secure when they have structure and clearly defined boundaries. Designers are no different. Ask yourself when the last time was that you and your team put your process under the microscope? We all know how design and development companies describe their process on their websites. But let’s be honest, that description often does not reflect the day-to-day reality of the life of a project.

Even a semi-defined structure will reduce the tendency to fixate, over-think, and over-iterate on a problem. Involving the entire team in the process of developing this system helps you reduce general confusion and allows the team to work quickly and iteratively within those constraints, producing a higher quality product in the end.

Standardizing a basic set of tools that are used by the whole team will also radically improve the way the team operates and the methods by which they deliver results. Standardization, then, helps everyone to feel a greater sense of ownership of the final product. Using the same set of tools is a big step toward ensuring consistency in design patterns, allowing for iteration, and the speedy propagation of design changes across the team.

When some designers are using Photoshop® and Illustrator®, some are using Fireworks®, and still others are spending their day in OmniGraffle®, expect a fair amount of friction around the sharing of files, assets, and overall comprehension of the project. A smaller set of common tools will help to decrease friction and also allow the design team to talk about the designs in a consistent manner. And that, invariably, will lead to more credibility with other teams (or clients).

Credibility also comes when a design team creates a culture that fosters and rewards the ability to rethink standard practices that may not be best practices. The ability to deliver a solution that was clearly the result of thinking outside of conventional methods will continually attract talented people who refuse to be limited by the way things are done today.

Kaiser said, “The fundamental assumption is that there is nothing that reasonable men undertake which cannot be accomplished.” Some called this positive ignorance, but to others it was simply vision mixed with audacity and entrepreneurial prowess. His spirit and optimism could be seen in the astonishing techniques the Kaiser engineers were able to invent. How do you quickly yet safely build a dam so gigantic that it would normally take two hundred years for its concrete to cool and, therefore, dry? They embedded water pipes into the concrete itself, to carry away the heat. Now, that is innovative design thinking that ignored conventional best practices of the day.

The people who have helped define what it means to design in this era of the web pushed forward, confident they could challenge conventional wisdom and uncover new ways to do things. Men and women like Zeldman, Holzschlag, Clarke, Veen, and Bowman helped lead the Web Standards movement at the turn of this century. More recently we have designers like Marcotte, who challenges us to think responsively, and Wroblewski, who urges us to take a mobile first approach. These people and others like them are the living proof of the positive ignorance in our field, an irrepressible optimism that there is nothing that we can’t do, even if we can’t do it quite yet.

It is the implementation of all of these concepts together as a system that will allow a design team to have the time, space, and resources to do what it does best—articulate, refine, and solve problems beautifully. Design can be most powerful when it helps people to see that which does not yet exist.

Now, more than ever, design teams are being given the chance to help lead and shape the future of businesses. The day may be coming soon when corporations and institutions respect the opinions and contributions of design teams as much as they do the engineering and financial divisions of their organizations.

If you want to create things that people love, if you want to cultivate a team that can accomplish the impossible, it is essential to find the kind of leaders who are driven to find ways to change the behavior, process, and thinking of their teams.

The era of great design teams is upon us. It will be led by men and women who challenge what we think is possible, inspire us to do more than we believe we can, and encourage us to be even greater than they are.

These leaders free us as teams to reach inside ourselves and create what has never been seen or done before.

When you’re creating your own shit, man, even the sky ain’t the limit.

— Miles Davis

Massimo Vignelli, The Vignelli Cannon, (Lars Muller Publishers, 2010). ↩

Lesson

Trent Walton — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

“How am I going to find a job? Where should I live? What if I can’t afford car insurance? How does anyone ever find the money to buy a house? What happens if I get married and have kids? And, oh God, what about medical insurance? I haven’t even begun to think about that! What am I going to do?”

“You’ll figure it out.”

That’s it? That’s the advice I get after what had to be a ten-minute gabble session from me over the phone with my dad (who was almost certainly flipping channels between the Formula One race highlights and the Barrett-Jackson car auction). Just before my graduation from college, this was his simple reply? But I wasn’t surprised. Not at all. This was and is his go-to response, and I’d heard it hundreds of times before.

I can see myself back in elementary school, out in the garage with my mechanical-engineer, industrial-contractor, grease-monkey father (whom I know I’m nothing like). He was spending his Saturday doing what he loves—tinkering, cursing, and bleeding all over his 1969 Shelby GT 500. He’s had this car since 1970 when he convinced a used-car lot owner to hold it for him until he got that job at US Steel. His college paper route didn’t yield enough for the down payment. He knows that car inside and out, especially after having to rebuild it when my mom accidentally flooded it by driving through a low water crossing after a tropical storm.

I was having a problem with my fourth-grade math teacher and had just finished explaining this (over garbled speech and ratcheting noises) to his feet, the only part of him not under the car. “She’s always singling me out, but it’s not just me. It’s the entire table! They make jokes, and I can’t help but laugh. Now I’m the only one with detention! I’m the victim here. What am I going to do?” The teacher wouldn’t even let me change my seat (not that I really wanted her to).

“You’ll figure it out.”

My ten-year-old brain couldn’t help but think, “This guy doesn’t understand that I have real problems. School is hard. Life is hard. I’ve got so much to figure out, but he doesn’t know what it’s like. He’s an adult. He’s got everything under control. Everything is easy for him.” It wasn’t until much later in my life that I realized this wasn’t true.

In 2006 I was contemplating going full time with our design company, Paravel, with two of my friends. My father had recently retired after spending thirty-five-plus years working at an industrial contracting company, which he started with two business partners in the 1970s (okay, so maybe we’re somewhat alike), working with companies like Shell and Dow. It was high-stakes work, and operating a small company like his that dealt with mega-corporations took gumption. When I reached out to him for business advice, his reply was the same. “You’ll figure it out.”

Occasionally, I catch him in a rare, contemplative mood and take advantage of that to pry out stories about life at the company. I truly thought things at his office were steady and predictable. I had no idea people got injured out in the field and that taking care of employees was the biggest part of his job. I hadn’t known that big companies tend to push smaller companies around, delaying payment and chiseling estimates as much as they can. And I certainly had never even dreamt that he once had to put his beloved Shelby up as loan collateral to help pay his employees.

I realize now what my dad is best at: figuring it out. He’s resourceful. He’s a connector of dots. You can have all the pearls of wisdom, talent, and potential in the world, but if you can’t string those qualities together they’ll never be put to good use.

It turns out that “You’ll figure it out” was the best advice I’ve ever been given. It was a conditioner of sorts. It trained me to organize, dissect, and solve. It taught me how to head toward and be prepared for point B even when I don’t yet see that it exists. It challenges me to be brave.

Gosh. Maybe I’m more like my dad than I realize.

At least, I hope like hell I am.

Tongue-Tied

Trent Walton — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

“And what is it that you do?”

I have my answer, but I hesitate. I’m at a wedding reception, a backyard barbecue, an airport terminal. A preface would make me sound timid; further explanation, overeager; naming clients, self-involved.

“I’m a web designer,” I say, and leave it at that. I shuffle my feet, and I feel the beginning of that awkward, apologetic, self-conscious smile. I know what’s coming.

“Oh, that’s nice,” is the flat, polite reply.

Dammit. That didn’t go the way I wanted it to. Again.

Once more, I’ve proven to be a poor representative of the industry I’m so proud to belong to. I know what comes to mind when I use the term web designer—an overenthusiastic adolescent fresh from MySpace with a pirated copy of Photoshop® and a code editor, or maybe a clipart-loving temp worker who knows how to save a Microsoft Word® document as an HTML file. I always want to follow up with, “But I’m one of the good ones. Really! Here, let me pull up this site for you on my iPhone®.” But I’ve already lost their interest.

People in our field are problem solvers, engineers, researchers, and craftspeople responsible for architecting how we all live and interact on the web. Why is it so hard for me to explain that? Why can’t I be smooth?

I have one brother-in-law in his last year of law school and another doing cancer research. They don’t have the same problem. When people hear lawyer or scientist, they generally know what that entails. They think of them as intellectuals, critical thinkers, and invaluable members of a professional community. I feel that what web designers do is just as exciting, challenging, and interesting. Regrettably, few people I encounter out there regard web design in the same way we do.

If we ever want to stop sitting at the proverbial kids’ table, we need to do more to gain respect, and one of the most important ways is to be able to clearly express who we are as a profession. How do we articulate the complexities of what we do in a way that everyone will not only understand, but respect?

Web design is just moving out of its infancy. We started with HTML and moved from table-based layouts toward CSS-based layouts and from building websites to building fully functional web applications. User experience, content strategy, and information architecture have become central to web design and have led the industry into its formative adolescence.

Remember the aforementioned youngster who’s representing us in the imaginations of people I encounter? Even though the industry has matured, there’s a reason he’s still our mascot: the low barrier of entry. The web is chock-full of free resources for anyone looking to learn HTML; this open access is one of my favorite things about the web. However, with so many people operating under the moniker of web designer the span of capability becomes incredibly broad.

Case in point: every time I drive into Austin, I pass a plywood sign propped up by two milk crates in someone’s front yard. Spray-painted on the sign is “Need a website? Call 555-555-5555 for web design services.” This person may be talented, but the absence of a url on his billboard has me thinking we’re entering GoDaddy Site Builder® territory. This guy is a web designer. He shares a job title with Josh Brewer and Naz Hamid. How can this be?

Anyone, even Mr. Spray Paint, can become a web designer. And, in some ways, that’s a good thing. Some of the best designers I know are self-taught. The problem arises, however, when there are more adolescents and spray paint guys representing our field than there are Josh Brewers and Naz Hamids.

The Evolution of Our Role

In the early 1990s, the world hadn’t yet realized the economic and social potential available to them through the web. People weren’t buying things online, updating their statuses, or checking bank accounts from their smartphones. Websites were not yet a crucial element behind the success of a business or idea. Web designers (in the sense that we know them today) did not exist.

Most of the hired talent were regarded as binary clerical workers, employed by department heads of large organizations, doomed (as I imagine/remember) to windowless, server-filled basements where, as webmasters, they sat waiting for their supervisors to storm down and bark out the next site update. Think Austin Millbarge à la Dan Aykroyd in Spies Like Us.

Then the internet exploded. Dial-up moved to DSL, and DSL moved to broadband. Everyone wanted to access everything all the time. When organizations realized that customers wanted to be served online, demand for websites and web designers grew. “Millbarge! We’re moving you out of the basement.”

One could now buy a Fender Telecaster on Amazon, turn around and sell it on eBay, then take the proceeds and reserve movie tickets at Fandango. Web designers moved from accessory to necessity by architecting the places where organizations met their users online. Businesses were built around our trade, and we evolved from the keepers of the code department to trusted consultants and decision makers.

Then Steve Jobs pulled an iPhone® out of his pocket. In a few short years, we went from building static sites for desktop browsers to dynamic web applications for any device in existence. The complex implementation of these techniques alongside the emergence of technologies like CSS(3), HTML(5), and web fonts set the stage for us to exhibit the depth of our expertise, the weight of our experience, and our growth from amateurs to multifaceted professionals. We not only build things people view like brochures, but things that people use.

These challenges have forced us to evolve over the years from those binary clerical workers to innovators, and from those challenges emerge a total that is greater than the sum of its parts—internet mojo. This intangible sense of how websites materialize to best serve an individual or organization (based on very tangible experience, skills, and knowledge) is where we, as web designers, derive our value.

Have we evolved so quickly that we don’t yet grasp the importance of our profession? If we don’t respect what we do, how can we expect others to? Like it or not, we are all ambassadors for our field, and it’s our duty as such to have a dialogue with clients about the how and why, not just the what. When we quietly deliver code and pixels with no discussion of objective or strategy, we’re asking to be treated like we belong back in that server-filled basement. But we’re worth more than that.

We know this. Our industry knows this. Most of our clients know this. But not the guy I’m sitting next to in the airport terminal.

Lockhart: The Undisputed BBQ Capital of Texas

People drive from every corner of the state to eat barbecue at Kreuz Market (est. 1900) in Lockhart, Texas. I’ve made the pilgrimage numerous times to enjoy their unique brand of barbecue: “smoked meats straight from the pits on pieces of butcher paper, [served] with no forks, no sauces, and no side dishes.”¹

In 1990, the owner, Edgar “Smitty” Schmidt, sold the business to his pit-master sons Rick and Don, but bequeathed the property—building and all—to his daughter, Nina. A family dispute forced Rick and Don to move a half mile down the road to a new location, taking the business and the Kreuz name with them. Nina reopened in the same building under the new name Smitty’s. The feud climaxed when, on the night before his grand opening, Rick Schmidt dragged the coals from his father’s pit fires (though everyone who tells this story swears that he lit a torch) and paraded them down the street through a crowd of onlookers to the new location.

Why was Schmidt inclined to do this when he had the necessary tools and materials at his new place? He knew that what makes Kreuz Market barbecue worth a hundred-mile drive isn’t just a recipe or a smoker, but his own pit-master mojo—all the experience and technique gained from years of nursing brisket and sausage. He knew that for Kreuz to retain its value, he had to publicly substantiate this.

I eat barbecue just like people use the internet—mass consumption with no idea how to produce it myself—but the legend now associated with Kreuz Market serves as a testimony to the power of asserting what it is that makes us valuable. As web designers we would do well to follow Rick Schmidt’s example.

Talk About It

We must articulate what we do through our own successful results. It’s as simple as this: Do your best work, then talk about it. Take jobs that provide opportunities to solve unique problems or ones that require technical innovation, and grind it out. Half the jobs I get into start with no clear way from point A to B. It’s a struggle, but it pays off when I get to contribute to the work of my peers and help shape the future of the web.

Similarly, the evolution of the medical profession shows us that this collaborative attitude is the best way forward. People have been practicing medicine since antiquity, and thanks to the efforts of those who shared their experiences, those who followed were able to build on their knowledge and ultimately develop more effectual practices.

The ancient Egyptians recorded medical procedures, such as wound treatment and surgery, on papyrus. The Greek physician, Hippocrates, left posterity a host of recorded medical insight, among which is the Hippocratic Oath, still taken by doctors today. Thanks to the writing of Galen, the Romans were able to improve surgical procedures and create better surgical instruments.

It wasn’t until after the first European university, a school of medicine attached to a monastery, was created in the Italian city of Salerno, that the term doctor—from the Latin word for teacher—was used to describe medical practitioners. This was a turning point for medicine because establishment of a curriculum meant that professionals within the field had to come to a consensus on best practices. (I see us headed the same way, toward establishing our own informal curriculum when we debate things such as progressive enhancement or how best to build for mobile devices.) The Renaissance saw scientists improve those practices through medical research, and the printing press allowed for more efficient and economical documentation and information sharing. The following centuries built upon these advances, adding to them vaccinations, X-rays, sanitation, better surgical tools, and, God bless them, anesthetics.

Documentation and discussion have helped advance the industry, bringing with them numerous medical breakthroughs as exciting for the doctors as they are for the patients who benefit from them.

Those of us who build for the web know how exciting it is to contribute to advancement. I can easily recall the sense of wonder I felt working with web fonts for the first time or seeing a site I built reshape effortlessly into an iPhone screen. We become impassioned, bursting at the seams with new ideas to share with our peers and clients. Of course, our peers will understand what we are saying; our clients may not. People are unlikely to respect what they don’t understand. This is why we need to develop an entirely new craft: explaining the complexities of what we do in ways people can understand.

I’m always tempted to overexplain web design, pulling terms from our quickly evolving lexicon like information architect, content strategist, or user experience designer. These terms may be helpful, but it’s usually only a matter of time before they’re buried in tech speak. I might as well tell people my job is to go to Toshi Station and pick up some power converters. Detailed description and full comprehension aren’t necessary for people to understand our worth. A little bit of clarity goes a long way. Good results go even further. I don’t know the best way to smoke brisket or how to stitch an open wound, but I do know what great brisket tastes like, and I really appreciate the retained use of my hand after being attacked by that damn window.

One of the best ways I’ve found to provide digestible examples for nonindustry folk is how I approach my portfolio. If our strength lies in our comprehensive knowledge of the web and problem-solving skills, but our portfolio is limited to screenshots, we’re selling ourselves short. A web designer’s portfolio should be a set of case studies rather than just a gallery of images.

Explaining how people use and interact with my creations goes over much better than only listing the nuts and bolts behind the deliverables. After all, these wonderfully intricate things we build have become part of people’s lives, things they use every day.

Write about your process, your unique way of addressing each client’s needs. If you’re like me and spend more time typing than speaking out loud, this can be a valuable exercise. This sort of debriefing helps me when I need to verbalize the intricacies of my work in person to actual human beings.

“And what is it that you do?”

I have my answers locked and loaded. I’m ready to pounce on any question he may have or shred of interest he may exhibit in any particular area. I’ve got stories to tell and examples from other fields to tie in. Bring it on.

“I’m a web designer. I run a small web shop out of Austin, and we’re currently building a site that sells vintage car parts from computers and smartphones.”

Perfect! This guy can take the conversation anywhere. We can talk about small business, Texas, or vintage cars.

“Oh, that’s nice,” he says as he looks back at his Kindle.

Dammit.

Joe Nick Patoski, “Pit Split,” (Texas Monthly, February 1999). ↩

Lesson

Cennydd Bowles — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

My first day on the job, and I could barely stifle my laughter. My desk. My phone. My PC. I wore a polyester tie and my lone pair of formal shoes. I nodded a lot and forgot everyone’s names. The very idea of me as a member of the business world was hilarious. What did I know about it?

I’d stumbled out of university straight into a government job (a government job!) offering businesses advice on start-up programs, employment law, tax codes. An alien world. With so much to learn, I found my pride soon overtook my amusement. I immersed myself in the differences between sole traders, Ltd. companies, PLCs. I studied how money sloshes around within business. I could recite the principles of the Data Protection Act 1998 by heart. Want to know which forms to fill in for your first tax return? Easy. Hell, I’ll even send you the PDFs.

Most callers were after free cash, of course. There wasn’t any. But occasionally we took inquiries about obscure topics that demanded a bit of research. I loved these challenges. I knew how search engines worked. I could sweet-talk a database into revealing its most intimate secrets. Armed with a keyboard and the witless arrogance only a young graduate can possess, I became the guy with answers. There was nothing I couldn’t find an answer to. A Master of Science intellect augmented by the power of technology. Just try me.

Shortly after I joined, the country was struck by an epidemic of foot and mouth, a highly infectious disease affecting livestock. An episode in the 1960s had paralyzed the country; now history was eager to repeat itself.

The government, initially slow to react, finally realized the gravity of the situation and announced an enormous cull. Ten million sheep and cattle were killed and then buried in lime. Politicians stood in front of piles of burning carcasses to give interviews, deciding that the need to assure the public that Something Was Being Done outweighed the negative image.

Although I lived in the city, our county was largely rural. Hundreds of nearby farmers were forced to sacrifice their herds and quarantine their farms to prevent infection. Yellow warning signs dotted the fields. Wellington boots were considered potential vectors of disease. The countryside was closed for business.

As expected, the government announced a large pot of money to compensate farmers who’d lost income. I found the details online and added them to my database. File > Save.

I took a call early one morning. An elderly voice, meek and sad. For several decades, she and her husband had ground out a decent, albeit hard living on their farm. Now her business was effectively closed, and she was worried about the future. I sprang into action, calling up my database with a single hand as she talked. Technology saves the day. There’s this fund, you know…

“Oh yes, we’ve applied for that. But they say they have such a backlog it will take a few months. It looks like we’ll be bankrupt before then, sadly. What do you think we should do?”

A squall of panic. The cursor blinked at me while I hesitated. I’d no idea what they should do. What did I know about business? I squirmed for the first platitude I could find: something about keeping their costs down and using up savings. The caller sighed kindly at my trivial advice.

We began to talk about her life on the farm and how it was changing. She was a hostage in her home, imprisoned behind the quarantine. She couldn’t see her friends, attend her societies. She couldn’t escape the daily reminder of a livelihood draining away. We discussed the happy past and the worrying future. At times her voice grew faint, but it never rose into anger at the hand she’d been dealt—that remarkable stoicism that only a lifetime can teach you. She paused occasionally to dry a tear and blow her nose. Quiet, resigned, heartbroken.

We talked for two hours. I seethed at my helplessness. I’d told her everything I knew, and it had been useless. A couple’s way of life was coming to a wretched end. As our call drew to a close, I wished her luck.

“So sorry I wasn’t able to have more answers for you.”

“It’s okay. I understand. Sometimes just listening is helping, you know.”

That night I cried for a while when I got home. My answers, my knowledge, my hubris had been useless because no reply would make any sense. I thought of her attitude and her words to me. She just wanted to make a connection with someone. To feel understood at her lowest point. To be promoted from a statistic to an individual.

Sometimes just listening is helping, you know.

The Things of the Future

Cennydd Bowles — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Ninety percent of everything is crud.

— Sturgeon’s Law

When the archaeologists unearth the things of today, they may be forced to agree with Theodore Sturgeon. We have produced an awful lot of crap. Razors with ever more ludicrous numbers of blades. Luminous cans boasting of the calorific scarcity of their sugar water. Future generations may conclude that modern commerce was built around posturing and one-upmanship, with genuine innovation confined to a few niche sectors.

It’s tempting to think that we webfolk should be spared from this accusation. But before we break out the high fives, are we really the innovators we think we are? Or are we part of the problem?

Mass-market product design—and yes, web design as well—has seen its value slowly diluted. For every breakthrough web app, a hundred banal Groupon clones are greeted by copy-and-paste clamor from the usual sources. We have become a community overexcited by things that don’t matter. In the words of author and economist Umair Haque, many of our dominant businesses and products have become pedestrian, predictable, and pointless. Leaders who buck the trend are rightly celebrated but lamentably scarce.

Thankfully, this downward slide of pseudo-innovation has no future. Public perception of business is near breaking point. Just 12 percent of the British public holds a high opinion of business executives—a figure that has halved within a decade. In the US, 84 percent of the public blames business leaders for the recession. Public attitudes are shifting away from consumerism and instead demanding change, accountability, and social responsibility from business owners. With growing concern over privacy and intellectual property, the big businesses of the web are no more immune to public distrust and press indignation than the industrial corporations.

On a more personal, immediate level, we’re stalked by the shadow of a second recession and environmental ruin. We have neither money nor energy to waste on trivial things. Those luminous cans with their limited-edition packaging appear even more pathetically wasteful. Another photo-sharing app is meaningless to regular people who are busy worrying about their jobs and finances.

Designers and builders need to scout out different paths than the ones that landed us all in this junkyard. So what principles will guide the future of product design? And what role will the web and its designers play?

Refinding Humanity

The product landscape is littered with things that are lifeless and drained of personality. In contrast, the things that resonate with us on a human level are the ones we return to and rave about to patient friends.

Messaging—how our applications communicate with people—is a fine starting point in our quest for personality. Good naming helps. It’s hard to love something that answers to Office Pro 8500A e-All-in-One Printer. But conveying a likeable verbal persona throughout an application requires a deep focus on all elements of the content puzzle, from strategy to microcopy, from tone of voice to error messages. It’s a complex recipe that’s easily overcooked. The digital scrap heaps are filled with products that tried too hard, irritating us with faux amiability (as seen in our most hated paperclip, Clippy) or descending into wackaging, the infantilized copy that plagues rounded typeface web 2.0 apps and juice cartons alike.

To make deeper connections between products and their users, we should search for ways to humanize the functionality of our applications. For example, take the A Bit More button on the Breville Die-Cast Toaster®—a subtle master stroke that frees a weary world from mornings of undercooked toast. Or BankSimple’s Safe-to-spend function, which answers the single question on our minds when we check our balances: How much do I have left?

The designers of these humane functions saw an opportunity to wrap technology around the human. In doing so, they reversed the roles found in decades of bad design. A well-designed product makes tiny, beautiful sacrifices for its users.

But can we go deeper? Could our apps become more appealing if we let them off the leash? We learn about our friends’ personalities by seeing how they behave in different circumstances—what might happen if we allow our devices and applications a little behavioral variance? Digital technology has become two-way. Devices not only display information but can learn about users through sensors and analysis: where they are, what their social ties are, and so on. Combine this power with applications that let users state intent—“I’m off to the movies with Kushal”—and designers have plenty of opportunities to create pseudo-emotional responses. So let’s imagine a Twitter client that knows you’ve been in the pub for six hours and suggests you don’t send that sleazy tweet. A mobile phone that grins as you both stagger off a rollercoaster. An MP3 player that rolls its eyes as you queue up “Living On A Prayer.” If we can escape the constraints of our old mental models, technology could move from being a tool to being a companion. A pet. Even a friend.

Do Make Me Think

Technology can even become a mentor when we most need help. The preeminent apps of the future will help us tackle so-called wicked problems: those that have no clear solutions. Apps could help us reduce our energy bills, chastise us for not recycling that carton, or encourage us to lose those pesky love handles. Given the growing global importance of wicked problems like climate change, obesity, and an aging population, designers may soon find that better technology becomes essential to our very survival.

While the usability movement has rightly focused on making technology fade into the background, in certain cases we may want to reverse that strategy deliberately. To tackle the wicked problems of the next few decades, designers may need to build applications that encourage users to question their own attitudes or behaviors.

These discursive apps needn’t be complex. Weightbot, a simple iPhone weight-logging app, uses careful design to help people manage their weight. The app is structured to suggest daily use—skip a week and those blank days sure stand out—but it also rewards good behavior, tantalizing users with graphs showing how far they’ve come and when they might hit their goal. In the near future, networked discursive apps might spot patterns of infection and advise feverish sufferers not only how to manage their symptoms but also how to prevent spreading the disease.

Products That Last

The design industry dwells, of course, at the heart of a particularly complex wicked problem: sustaining the planet’s diminishing resources. That this is a challenge for designers of physical products—cars, bridges, packaging—is clear, but it’s a mistake to think sustainable design is irrelevant to the web. Although our raw materials of bits and pixels are essentially infinite, sustainability goes beyond conserving resources. Web designers should adopt the mindset of building things that last.

Surprisingly, our love of the cutting edge makes this more difficult. It’s understandable that we all want to design for the latest sparkly devices and shiny technologies. However, the thrill of the new distracts us from our true target: designing apps that work with tomorrow’s technology.

It’s not as far-fetched as it may seem. Bill Buxton¹ famously claims that all technologies have a thirty year ramp-up period. Alert web designers can read the signals: we stand on the brink of an explosion of diversity. We’ll have to design for input methods that include touchscreen, voice, and GPS alongside the trusty keyboard and mouse. The web will sprawl onto screens that range from three inches to fifty, from cheap pixellation to super-high definition. Bandwidths will vary between blistering and glacial.

Astute web designers should be considering these issues today since our applications will live in the future, not the present. The Future Friendly campaign recognizes this:

Disruption will only accelerate. The quantity and diversity of connected devices—many of which we haven’t imagined—will explode, as will the quantity and diversity of the people around the world who use them. Our existing standards, workflows, and infrastructure won’t hold up.

Future Friendly is, at heart, a manifesto for sustainable web design. It acknowledges that we’ll have to find new ways to work, but it also suggests the payoff. Built the right way, web applications will have a longer shelf life, reach users wherever they may be, save our clients, and enhance the reputation of our industry.

In Search of Value

Future Friendly endorses the idea of building things that matter, not things that clutter. And thus we reach the critical issue of the web’s future: differentiation that’s genuine, not illusory.

So many of today’s products, both physical and digital, try to stand out from the noisy market by brand differentiation. The whiskey for the discerning man; the mail client for Linux geeks. Luke Williams of Frog Design argues² that, far from clarifying the marketplace, this microdifferentiation increases cognitive clutter. Instead of positioning ourselves apart from our competition, we should instead aim to make the competition irrelevant.

Designers can only do this by building differences that users can feel, not just read about. It’s simple to rip off another website’s brand, tone of voice, or even features, but it’s very hard to duplicate the experience another product offers. To make a true mark on the world, web design must focus on the value it offers users. We should strive to create the next Wikipedia, Dropbox, or Instapaper—products that are impossible to relinquish once they’re part of everyday life.

Sadly, many businesses still underestimate the importance of delivering meaningful value. We can help to illustrate the problem with the following equation:

Total value = business value × customer value

An application must offer something superlative to both the business and the user; if either of the terms in the equation is zero, it’s a waste of our time. Yet so much of our industry is focused on the business side alone. Just look at the job descriptions, the entrepreneur porn that so many start-up types are addicted to: exit strategies, pricing, pivots, who’s bought whom. Important stuff, sure, but it’s only half the story.

We can redress the balance by influencing business to focus on our natural territory: looking at what’s in it for the customer. Designers shouldn’t be satisfied with clones and fast follow strategies that slipstream innovative companies and hope to pick up some of the crumbs. We must ask searching questions about the things we make and what they each offer their users. We must be strong in our conviction to put humanity at the heart of what we do.

We must give in to the lure of the path less followed and reject the notion of replicating what’s come before. This means testing our designs with real people, not just relying on data. It means questioning every assumption and shortcut, not falling back on pattern libraries. It means risk, bravery, glorious embarrassment, and everything that’s good about life. It means harder work and a few arguments. That’s fine. What some may label arrogance, we will recognize as simply a need to have pride in what we do.

But this isn’t just artistic flightiness. Focusing on making great things also gets results. In 2006, consultants Teehan + Lax created the UX Fund, a $50,000 investment fund split across ten companies who have a reputation for delivering great customer experiences. It outperformed every major index. Data from the UK’s Design Council suggests that businesses can see a return of £225 for every £100 they invest in design. Put simply, people will pay for great things.

It’s comforting to know that designers can draw on this economic ammunition if we need to, but to see design as a purely commercial pursuit is to overlook its full power. Great web apps spark unmeasurable emotions: loyalty, trust, love. When the time is right, we’ll have to convince our clients and bosses to look beyond the metrics and to put faith in their intuition to do the right thing.

While you and I have lips and voices
which are for kissing and to sing with,
who cares if some one-eyed son of a bitch
invents an instrument to measure Spring with?

— E.E. Cummings

To do the right thing means to recognize that the business-user relationship is joined by a third axis. Great products also meet the needs of society as a whole. So we should design for the good of the web, for the good of design, for the good of the world. Successful web businesses echo the philosophy behind the web, using open standards and APIs to allow people to build great things on top of their products. Designers have a powerful opportunity to bring the open, collaborative mindset of the web into commerce, working together toward a higher goal of profit through shared prosperity.

So the future can be saved. If the web design community can make things that help not only business, not just individual users, but everyone on the web, we can arrest our slide into mediocrity. Create valuable, wonderful things and the economics will follow. In this new environment, we’ll see personal success defined through the success we bring to other people’s lives. In tough times, the right response is not division, but solidarity. I can’t wait for this future, and I hope to meet you there.

Bill Buxton, Sketching User Experiences, (Morgan Kaufmann, 2007). ↩
Luke Williams, Disrupt, (FT Press, 2010). ↩

Lesson

Karen McGrane — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Fresh from sleep, in the first few minutes of wakefulness before my brain comes fully back online, I run a few simple scripts to help me start my day. I complete these familiar routines like I’m a robot programmed only for these tasks. Exit bed. Navigate to kitchen. Boil water. Make tea. Only when the tea is brewing and I’m seated in front of the computer am I capable of conscious thought.

On this morning, like every other morning, I grab the teakettle and turn the cold water on full blast to fill the pot.

Except this morning, not like every other morning, the spout of the faucet breaks off, clattering into the sink. Behind it, a geyser of water explodes, transforming my tiny kitchen into a decorative fountain. The icy water shoots directly at my face, blinding me for a moment and making it difficult to breathe.

Don’t panic, I think.

Scenes of past plumbing disasters flash before my eyes. They all seem to feature a stranger’s torso inside my cupboard, exploring the mysteries of the pipes below, ass hanging out.

To the shut-off valve!

I fall to my knees and frantically begin removing the items densely packed in storage below the sink, cold water falling on my head and shoulders like rain. The laundry soap. The garbage bags. The dust pan and rags and furniture polish. The hammers, and even an electric drill. All of these land in the growing puddle of water on the kitchen floor, so I can reach the handle all the way in the back of the cabinet.

It won’t turn.

I struggle with this balky knob so stiff and sticky from disuse. Nothing.

I stand up, and the freezing water smacks me in the face again. For an eternity of a few seconds, I’m paralyzed. Paralyzed by shock. Paralyzed with indecision. Gasping for breath and shivering from cold, I stand there, too stupid to move.

Should I go take a hot shower and hope that the problem will fix itself? Would crying help? Maybe I should call someone. But who would come over here so early in the morning?

I reach for the house phone to call the doorman. The water continues to blast me in the face. I try to staunch the flow of water from the broken faucet by holding the teakettle over it. With the kettle in one hand and the phone in the other, I try to hold back the water and dial the phone at the same time, a comedy routine I picked up from watching old I Love Lucy episodes.

This attempt to solve my problem fails miserably. I can’t turn to the doorman for help. I have to rely on myself, my wits, and my adrenaline-fueled strength. I have got to shut this water off.

On my knees again in the inch-deep puddle, I engage in a fierce battle of woman versus knob. I wrap the sodden dishtowel around the handle and try to bend the knob to my will. Nothing. I put on the dishwashing gloves, hoping their rubbery surface will help me gain more leverage. Nothing. Finally, with both the gloves on and the dishtowel wrapped around my hand, I turn with all my might, and at last I feel the knob start to give.

The absence of water is like silence. I pause for a moment to catch my breath then call down to the front desk.

When you live in a large Manhattan apartment tower and you call the building staff to tell them there’s a flood in your apartment, someone instantly materializes at your door.

Haki, the super, surveyed the scene wearily, a man all too familiar with the titanic power of a plumbing disaster to pull one from the depths of sleep. He stepped into the kitchen while I dashed to my closet to grab a sweater to pull on over my soaking wet T-shirt.

When I returned, he was in the hallway, stooped to pat my dog on the head. He stood up and explained, “Okay, Luis will be up in a few minutes to clean this up. Miguel will be up later to fix the faucet.” He paused for a beat. “And I turned the water off.”

I’d spent the whole morning spluttering water out my mouth and nose, and now the words spluttered out the same way. “No that’s what I did see I turned the water off I found the knob under the sink it wouldn’t turn that’s why it took so long I turned the water off I did that already that’s what I did.”

He stared at me, his face blank. “No. You needed to turn the water off on the faucet,” pantomiming the familiar turn of the wrist.

Right. The faucet handle. Why didn’t I think of that?

A moment’s shock and confusion, and a routine ingrained in my muscle memory disappeared. A task so comfortable, I’d performed it thousands of times, and yet I forgot how to do it just when it mattered most. Instead, I cycled through unfamiliar strategies, desperate gambits, a dozen bad decisions.

Designers dream of solutions to these problems, a magic wand that turns confusion into engagement and delight. But an instruction manual for my sink, even one filled with witticisms and clever turns of phrase, would have evoked hoots of derision, and pop-up boxes offering warnings or advice would have prompted wild-haired screeching.

Who am I designing for? The rational, composed, perfectly-in-control savant? The expert automaton, programmed to complete each task flawlessly? Or the messy, error-prone, distracted human? Remembering my own catastrophes, disasters, and bone-headed moves helps me be more sensitive to the fact that they happen for everyone—even the people who use the products I design.

Ear Trumpets and Bionic Superpowers

Karen McGrane — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

“You’re lucky,” said Mr. Pelcek, my elementary school guidance counselor. “At least they’re not bigger. When I was a boy, hearing aids were huge boxes people wore around their necks, with cords running up to their ears.”

Was I also to be overcome with joy that I wasn’t lugging around an ear trumpet, like the elderly characters in Saturday morning cartoons? No one ever wants to wear hearing aids, especially not a ten-year-old.

Wearing hearing aids and admitting you even have hearing loss are two different things. Determined to act just like the other kids, I kicked off a decades-long campaign to deny, ignore, and cover up any evidence that I couldn’t hear. Instructed to sit in the front of the class so I could hear better, I scorned the front-row dwellers, those unfortunates branded as nerdy, and defiantly sat in the back. I kept my hair long and avoided wearing attention-getting earrings. And I honed my skills in pretending I could follow. Even when I couldn’t.

I initially believed in minimizing people’s awareness of the challenges I faced—gave myself a simpler front-end interface. It took years, but I finally accepted the inherent complexity of hearing loss. I learned that people were even willing to work harder to communicate with me if only I’d let them know what they needed to do and why. My goal should not be to hide my use of hearing technology. It should be to find ways to make it appropriately visible.

As designers, we obsess over making technology easy to use and intuitive. But now I appreciate interfaces that are appropriately complex—technology that makes its challenges visible in the right way, at the right time. What elevates our profession from merely smoothing out the rough edges to making a meaningful—even transformative—difference in people’s lives is our ability to wisely decide how and when to communicate complexity.

The Invisibility Cloak

Our profession has a mantra: no one wants to use technology. People merely want to achieve their own goals, complete their own tasks. We’re judged successful if we remove any unpleasant friction; create a pleasurable, seamless interface to the mysteries that lurk within; and make technology invisible.

Ask an audiologist, and he’ll tell you: People want invisible hearing technology, too. People seek out the tiniest, most unobtrusive hearing aids. It’s a form of magical thinking: If no one can see it, then I don’t really have hearing loss. In recent years, as I’ve become more open about my hearing impairment, I frequently hear this response: “Really? I had no idea.” I’m ambivalent about this reaction. I’m proud of myself for passing, for successfully playing the part. Yet I now know that maintaining my facade came at a price. The cost I paid was pretending to understand even when I didn’t.

Conversation has a thread. During an evening out, you lose it and pick it up again in the encompassing din of roaring and clanging and buzzing. It’s all just noise until a robust pair of consonants springs forth: a th or ch or gr. Suddenly you have your arms around that thread, grab hold and follow that digraph down into the structure of the language beneath. Now you can grasp it—one sharp sound opens the door to an hour of conversation. But it’s exhausting. No matter how hard you try, you will eventually tire; your mind wanders for a second, and you’ve lost track. You struggle to maintain but eventually let go and just let the raw sounds and syllables wash over you. Language devolves into guttural noise, meaningless utterances, like that of the adults mumbling in Peanuts television specials.

How often can you ask someone to repeat herself? I’ll tell you. Three times. The first time, you offer a casual, quizzical look and say, “Excuse me?” The second time, you look a bit more serious, and ask, “Say that again?” The third time (and this is when things get real) you sit up straighter, stare the person in the eye and invest in a full sentence like, “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”

If you’re lucky, she repeats herself more clearly. Restates the point using different words. Turns and faces you directly, so you get the full impact of watching her face move, feeling the air currents hit your ear drums. Praying all the while that someone else picks up the conversation, ideally a braying man with a loud, low voice.

Failing that, you’re in trouble. The wheels of conversation grind to a halt, caught in awkwardness and bewilderment.

Better to fake it. Smile and nod. Learn to mirror facial expressions, become a spot-on mimic of someone who can hear. Laugh a half beat too late at jokes you don’t understand. Be considered a great listener because you hang on to a person’s every word, lean across the table, focus intently on her face—as if she is the most important person in the room, or the world.

But in a conversation, the point of listening is to communicate. And I wasn’t succeeding.

I hid the fact that I had hearing loss because I feared that the interface to me was frustrating. Who would want to engage with me if extra effort were required? But instead of helping people become aware of what I needed, I hid my challenges and glossed over the difficult patches. I put a simpler front-end on the experience of talking to me, one that made a difficult task seem easier. But by doing that, I only made it harder.

Challenge = Improvement

Working at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s, Douglas Engelbart led the team that designed and developed NLS (oN-Line System), a revolutionary computing platform. The project goal was “augmenting human intellect.” NLS is known for being the first to implement many conventions now familiar to us, including the mouse, hypertext links, and multiple window displays. These innovations made their way through Xerox PARC and into the Apple Macintosh graphical user interface, and in many ways are the features we think of when we call a modern computer “easy to use.” But NLS itself was not easy to use, nor was it easy to learn. Why? Engelbart’s philosophy was that to truly enhance human intellect and collaborative work, the interface needed to be powerful. Operating this powerful system would require trained users committed to learning a new interaction model, in support of a greater goal.

In the fifty years since NLS was in development, our values have shifted in the opposite direction. Ease of use is paramount, ease of learning reduced to intuitiveness. Consumer apps are expected to divulge their mysteries within seconds, lest they be abandoned in favor of something more obvious. A toddler’s ability to operate an iPad (so easy a child can use it!) is held up as the ultimate example of discoverability, the interaction paradigm for our new generation.

Designs that make technology completely seamless to the user often deserve admiration. But can we balance our desire for intuitiveness with a wider recognition that some tasks are complex, some interactions must be learned, and sometimes the goal isn’t invisible technology but appropriate visibility? I yearn for more respect for Engelbart’s ethos, in which computers are thought of as tools that harness our collective intellectual capacity to solve the important problems facing humanity—powerful tools that merit the investment of time required for mastery.

Communicating with me can be more difficult than talking to people with normal hearing. By treating that as my failure, a problem that needed to be hidden, I missed out on opportunities to connect with people. When we seek obviousness above all else, we’re doing the same thing. When interfaces that must be learned are considered failures, we miss out on opportunities to create more powerful, meaningful engagement.

Powerfully Unsexy

In a 2010 SXSW keynote, Evan Williams of Twitter stumbled in response to a question from Umair Haque. After an uncomfortably long pause, he grabbed me with the most meaningful statement of the whole interview: “We want Twitter to reach the weakest signals. We want it to be inclusive, and by using SMS we can reach anyone.”

We may set our aim on dazzling the very consumers who already have too many options. But sometimes it’s the boring old unsexy technology that can reach people in new ways, make something out of nothing, make a thunderously transformative difference in people’s lives.

Back when I worked for a big-name agency, back when I worked on giant teams with resources and time and money at our disposal, I lusted after high-profile projects. I wanted the marquee names for my portfolio. I fought to win the media and fashion and consumer product brands, the clients I could name drop, the projects that would impress my peers.

Then I started my own firm, and my definition of a great client changed. No more boardroom presentations at giant corporate headquarters or large-scale redesigns. I wanted more intimate relationships, with clients who didn’t need a huge account-services cushion to help manage their internal strife. Instead, I made sure I had clients who hired me solely for my expertise and respected me for it. They were companies with problems I knew I could solve. I’d be working with nice people. And they would pay their bills on time. Household name was meaningless to me now. I wanted to be able to make decisions that would benefit people.

I learned to love the unsexy projects. I grew fond of places where I wasn’t trying out something perched on the precipice of the bleeding edge but rather was executing small, incremental, meaningful changes. Even if it was routine, it could still be exciting. And almost always more important.

My friend Stephen runs UX for a large financial services institution. I guarantee you they’re doing challenging and innovative work. Yet he told me once, “What we do might not seem very sexy. But we make a huge difference in people’s lives.” Enterprise applications often spill their guts—seemingly at random. Each is a giant database explosion of fields and inputs—screen after screen of layouts and workflows that make no sense. The challenge these designers face is not to sweep all that away but to find out how to communicate it at the right level for the user, improving the quality of a worker’s day-to-day life. These applications might not always be immediately intuitive, but they can be powerful and useful.

I love the idea that even if all we do on a project is create simple, nuanced changes, the results can make a significant difference in someone’s life. I know digital technology can achieve this because I’ve felt it myself.

Zeroes and Ones

I’d say to anyone whose job opportunities were opened wide by the web, whose friendships have been enriched by Facebook, whose finances have taken on a whole new twist with online banking and bill payment, or whose ability to solve the nightly dinner-table debate is now flavored by Wikipedia: Nothing in your digital life has changed even a fraction as much as mine has. Google’s power to answer questions or deliver information in an instant has nothing on the power of digital hearing aids to change the way hearing-impaired people communicate.

My friend Joe once told me a story about a mutual acquaintance who needed a wheelchair to get around. “She wants to get one of those new iBot wheelchairs,”—the gyroscopic, stair-climbing, all-terrain wheelchair which innovated many of the technologies inventor Dean Kamen eventually used in the Segway. “But it’s really expensive.” The iBot supposedly handled better than other wheelchairs and would even raise her up so she could sit at eye level with the person she was talking to. Was that worth $25,000? I replied, without hesitation, “To feel like I was on equal ground with everyone else, I would pay any amount of money.”

And then it hit me. Obviously I wouldn’t. I’d been scraping by for years with cheap, antiquated, analog hearing aids. I told myself they were good enough and had a few more years in them and would do for now.

I scheduled an appointment with my audiologist the very next day. I told her, “I want the best hearing aids money can buy.” Since I’d last purchased a pair of hearing aids, the digital revolution had swept this space as well.

A couple weeks later, I picked up my new digital hearing aids, had them custom-programmed, and went out into the night. I asked my friend Randy to meet me for dinner, and we met up at the bar at a crowded restaurant in a fashionable Manhattan neighborhood, a place I’d always wanted to go but never had. We sat close together on barstools and started talking. At least I did. “It’s so LOUD,” he said. “You have to SPEAK UP. I CAN’T HEAR YOU.”

Hey, that’s my line!

Years of struggling to participate in social occasions were replaced—through digital technology—with a clear, focused, intimate conversation, one that I didn’t have to strain to hear. Analog hearing aids amplify everything equally, so conversation and background noise move in lockstep, and the voice of the person I’m talking to gets drowned out by the roar of the crowd. Digital sound processing algorithms strip out the background noise, focus the microphone on the voice of the person next to me. The droning hum of other people’s conversations: Gone. The roar of the airplane engine, the buzz of the crowd at the baseball game: Gone. The endless asking people to repeat themselves: Gone. I could hear. I could hear well. I could hear superhumanly.

I felt like Helen Keller suddenly grokking the sign for water. Randy and I made the rounds of a few more bars that night, so I could drink it all in and hear it. Finally allowing myself to believe it all true, I headed home on the 6 train sporting a wide, irrepressible grin. As I walked through the door of my apartment, I burst into tears. Tears of joy, to be sure, but of gobsmacked amazement too.

My hardware purchase was a life-changing event. Parties, noisy restaurants, conferences, meetings, movies: All open to my participation in a way I’d never before experienced.

No one was jealous when I purchased these prosaic devices. I gained no geek cred from showing them off in a high-powered meeting. Imagine the designers who created this product: No one fetishizes it, their friends aren’t wowed, it’ll never be a Trending Topic. And yet its impact on my life brought me to tears.

Digital Superheroes

If I had a magic wand to wave that would enable me to hear like a normal person, I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t need it. Hey‚ if you had a volume knob for your life, one that didn’t shut the sound off altogether but just turned it down‚ you might not want to give it up either. Because I’ve mastered making what’s hard for me appropriately visible, I’m able to mitigate the downsides of my dependence on technology. Where I used to see only pain points, I now see the upside of a quiet hush where I can focus, my own private space where I can think clearly. What I used to think of as a disability, I now sometimes think of as a superpower.

Do you have the ability to grant your users superpowers? If you do, it might not be because your designs are simple, intuitive, or make technology invisible. A powerful interface might take time to understand; people might need to stretch a bit to learn it. Rather than striving to erase the parts of the technology that are difficult or challenging, you might seek ways to make them appropriately visible. Sometimes it’s only through communicating complexity that you can empower people.

These designs likely won’t get you written up in TechCrunch or on the leaderboard at the iTunes Store. But you just might profoundly improve the lives of a few people. Remove the daily frustrations that grind away at them, offer them meaning or whispers of love or a fresh chance, take pain and make the absence of pain seem like pleasure, or crack open the world and bring them right to the center of this great conversation of life that by all rights belongs to us all.

Superpowers, indeed.

Lesson

Mark Boulton — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It was 1975. The year the Vietnam war ended. The year the UK chose its first woman prime minister. It was a time of unrest and depression with interest rates and unemployment skyrocketing around the world. Everything seemed to have a slight tinge of brown and orange.

I was two years old, sitting in a hospital waiting room as I went to see my new baby brother with my dad. Thankfully, I was oblivious to the world’s troubles (a trait I sometimes wish I’d continued into adulthood). I wasn’t at all concerned. I sat there doing what I loved: drawing.

Throughout my life, drawing has been the one thing that I return to time and again. It’s always been there. Familiar strokes of a pencil. The right shade of gray. The smell of fresh pencil shavings. The dulling of my skin from graphite dust. Drawing with pencils is a sensory affair for me.

But, as school entered my life, drawing became—like writing—a tool to convey information. The pleasure I drew from it was still there but slowly diminished, replaced by writing, learning, socializing, and growing—all of which get in the way of that solitary, absorbing endeavor. Drawing was reduced to something simply practical: creating a diagram, or drawing a plan. Whereas once the act of drawing had brought happiness or contentment, now the end result was all that brought a sort of satisfaction—and a shallow one, at that.

Fast forward to 1991. I was eighteen years old and had just completed two years pursuing my goal to become a forensic scientist. The prerequisites for a degree in biology in the UK were three science subjects, studied for two years. I needed top marks to get into my university of choice. Results day came, and I knew in my heart what the news would be: I’d failed all three. Not just a respectable “Oh, never mind, you tried your best” failing, but a monumental, embarrassing, public flunking. A complete and utter washout. My parents had sent me to a private summer camp before the exams so I could receive intensive tutoring—all now wasted time and money. My friends all passed with flying colors and ended up going to the universities of their choice, studying medicine and engineering. I stood there amidst the celebrations, tears of joy—and the stifling disappointment of my teachers—wondering what I would do next.

I wasn’t surprised. I’d taken more pleasure in drawing cell structures than learning about them. I’d devoted an incredible amount of time and care to intricate drawings of chemical processes, taking immense pride in the smallest of details. Physics, mathematics, and chemistry were completely beyond my comprehension. Instead, I’d drawn the best scientific diagrams the teacher had seen from a pupil in thirty years of teaching. At a time of failing exam after exam, a time of constantly feeling stupid amongst my peers, the act of producing the best diagram in the class was a pure moment of happiness and pride.

So what do you do when you’ve completely failed and you don’t have any options? Which way do you turn when it becomes all too obvious that what you’ve been working toward for two years is just not possible? My choice was clear. I returned to what I knew I should have been doing all along: drawing.

I took a two-year course in art and design and completed it in one year. I attended art classes around the clock, had a permanent desk in the art rooms, and very quickly ended up on first-name terms with the teachers. For all the hard work, and with the constant underlying smell of pencil shavings, this felt more like home to me. I went on to college and then university, obtaining a first-class honors degree in typographic design. I met my wife. I worked as a designer and ended up running my own studio where I’m in the very fortunate position to work with some of the most talented people in the industry on projects that I feel make a difference. I travel and speak about what I do and am thankful I’ve made a dent in an industry in which I can do all of that. I do it all because I belong here, and all of this can be traced back to one morning in August in 1991 where the rug was quickly yanked from under my feet. One moment of complete devastating failure.

The bigger the failure, the worse it is and the worse you feel. There are people all around you who will make you feel that failing is bad. I learned that failure is necessary every day. And a big, catastrophic failure can be your best moment. A moment when you feel you have nothing more to lose. A moment that can be life changing.

Catastrophic failure may not be desirable, but without it, the kind of success that feels right in your bones is not possible because your successes—and, at times, your character—are defined by your failures and your responses to them. The bigger the screw-up, the better it feels when you turn it around.

So, go ahead; screw up. It’ll be the making of you.

Visual Design is Not a Thing

Mark Boulton — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Graphic design will save the world.
Right after rock and roll does.

— David Carson

It was a Thursday, I think. A cold, drizzly day in Cardiff, the capital of Wales. Nestled in amongst aging sycamores and field maples sits the most official looking building in Cardiff: the museum. The building is as you’d expect: slightly dirty white limestone, grandiose architecture, a musty smell of aging wooden furniture and floor polish masking the underlying whiff of decay.

It’s an old place full of old things.

My colleague and I worked for an agency that was designing the new wayfinding system for the museum. And that cold, wet day in February, we were tasked with prototyping our new signage system in the museum. Armed with several head-height mock signposts, reams of paper covered with illustrations, iconography, and all manner of words in different typefaces, we set about the first responsibility of our day: observing.

Watching people is difficult; your mind wanders. Who are these people? What do they do for a living? Why are they here and what did they eat for dinner last night? Casting those thoughts aside, we watched for pain and confusion, the pain and confusion that arise when you look for but can’t find the right way to go. When people are strongly task focused, or in a place of unfamiliarity, they need quick, unambiguous signage—messages that are the least disruptive to their mission. We would intervene in that process and provide a sign, constantly looking for their reactions to it. Good signage is only there when you need it, and in precisely the right place. We intentionally interfered with that flow, and, of course, it had hilarious results.

A Roach and an Arrow

We’d provided signage at the top of some stairs—a key decision point that begs the question: Which way do I go? To the left was clearly a dead end, a wall with no doors on a dimly lit landing. To the right was a well-lit, open door leading to an exhibit room. We placed two signs head height, one on top of the other: an illustration of a roach (a small, silver freshwater fish) which was pointing toward the exhibit room; and an arrow icon pointing toward the empty, dimly lit wall. It was cruel, really. We’d created a confusing physical space combined with incorrect signage. But the results after watching people for an hour were that people ignored the arrow and followed the direction in which the roach was looking.

Throughout the project, most of my time was spent prototyping, watching, and recreating. The project lasted more than six months, and I’d spent maybe a total of a few days in front of my computer creating black-and-white signs. Over the course of perhaps only a couple of days, I’d done anything for the project that involved typography, color, illustration, layout, or iconography—that which is now so-called visual design. But for six months, I was designing. I was a graphic designer doing what graphic designers do.

Graphic designers don’t make things pretty. Graphic designers solve problems. They work with research, they analyze and watch, they test and iterate, they tell stories. They’re not coloring things in. The graphic in graphic designer is not limiting or to be taken literally.

Relegation of the Old Guard

I started being a graphic designer in the early 1990s. I originally intended to be a commercial illustrator, but it was typography that captured my imagination and grew in my heart. During my final year in university, the web forced itself into my sphere of practice. I wanted to design books, but the web appealed to my impatient side. I didn’t have to wait for printers; I could just do it myself. I was a master of my own destiny.

Like many other graphic designers, I ended up completely jumping ship. Making the web beautiful was my new goal. It was a brave new world of experimentation as we struggled to get to grips with the new medium. Many designers very quickly jumped back to what was familiar, though. The web was a difficult place back then. Nothing worked as you’d expect, you had to try to understand HTML and CSS, your canvas constantly changed, and there were these other people involved—information architects, content producers, researchers. While design historically was a solitary affair, design for the web became a multidisciplinary practice.

Graphic design is a deep, rich craft. But it’s also a process defined by ideas, markets, audiences, and consumers. Paul Rand defines a graphic designer’s role thus:

The designer does not, as a rule, begin with a preconceived idea. His idea is the result of subjective and objective thought, and the design a product of the idea.

In order, therefore, to achieve an honest and effective solution he necessarily passes through some sort of mental process…Consciously or not, he analyzes, interprets, translates…He improvises, invents new techniques and combinations.

He intensifies and reinforces his symbol with appropriate accessories to achieve clarity and interest. He draws upon instinct and intuition. He considers the spectator, his feelings and predilections.

— Paul Rand¹

Throughout the 2000s, graphic design became a dirty, embarrassing word in web design. Other design professionals in the web industry thought that graphic designers merely concerned themselves with how things look—that they didn’t consider navigation, user goals, business goals, or other vital parts of any design project. In their opinion, graphic designers belonged to another field of practice entirely. Graphic designer equals print designer equals not quite good enough to think like a web designer. I myself have been subjected to this snobbery but have dished it out, too. It’s true that so much more is involved in web design than in your customary poster or annual report design. But that’s not the whole picture.

If Paul Rand or Josef Müller-Brockmann were practicing today, they’d likely be designing websites. Perhaps not exclusively, but they’d be applying the same critical thinking, the same graphic design process to designing websites as they would to designing a poster or an encyclopedia or a museum wayfinding system. And all these, from poster to museum wayfinding, require an extraordinary amount of user research, information structuring, observing, iteration, and, finally, production. Just like web design practice today. Graphic design is not defined by the medium of delivery. It’s a much broader practice.

Graphic Design and User Experience

What happened next altered the definition of graphic design forever, at least within the web design community.

I first heard of the field of User Experience Design in the early 2000s, about the same time as when Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think was published. Then, of course, came Jesse James Garrett’s seminal book: The Elements of User Experience in 2002.² In this book, Jesse created a diagram of user experience that had five planes of practice, like a big layer cake. I’ve listed Garrett’s planes here, with my own description of each:

“Strategy: User Needs/Site Objectives”: The strategy layer is where it all starts. What do we need this website to do and deliver on? What is the proposition?
“Scope: Functional Specification/Content Requirements”: The strategy transforms into scope where the features and content are documented.
“Structure: Interaction Design/Information Architecture”: The structure layer is where the information is shaped. How does the whole site sit together?
“Skeleton:Information Design/Navigation/Interface Design”: The skeleton is the layer at which the interactions between the user and site are documented. What do people do on the site? More importantly, how do they do it?
“Surface: Visual Design”: This is where the color, typefaces, layout all come together to create the look and feel of the site.

Quite rightly, Garrett’s book was a pivotal publication for the industry. It was a must-have for anyone who makes, writes for, or commissions websites. It clearly explained how good websites are constructed and the various roles and processes that are included. However, in one unwitting move, the industry’s response to Garrett’s layers relegated the practice of graphic design to the surface plane. This attitude was unfortunately reinforced by the recent rise in the opinion that user experience design—not graphic design—was the definition of good web design. Here on this surface plane, designers operate to make the product or website look great. They use color, typefaces, and layout. According to the industry’s perception of this model, what designers don’t do on the surface plane is design; they decorate.

Many also mistook this diagram as a process diagram. Agencies aligned their processes with Garrett’s five planes, and they assumed that meant that surface design came last.

Let’s be clear. From the position of graphic design, this model of UX is broken. It’s broken because graphic design is more than the look of something. It’s more than moving things around until they look right. Graphic design is a profession, a creative process, and a practice that has an established history. Graphic design is not decoration. It’s communication design, branding design, information design, packaging, and marketing. All of these things permeate the layer cake. They go way deeper than the surface plane; many go all the way to the bottom.

Studying to be a graphic designer is a journey. We work our way through initially understanding the problem, whatever that may be, thoughtfully considering the client, the business, the market, the goals, the audience and users, and then trying to find ways of telling the right story. To do this well, every graphic designer must be well versed in all aspects of the craft: research, writing, drawing, and of course, production. It’s our professional responsibility to completely understand the medium for which we’re delivering; be it print, television, radio, or the web. Yes, I did say radio. You see, many graphic designers are not schooled merely in graphic design. What they’re schooled in is communication and information design. It’s this schooling that ensures that what we do can work transmedia because it’s not about the medium.

A Rat and a Toilet

Back to Cardiff on that rainy, cold February afternoon standing beside a makeshift sign in a cold, dark museum building. I’m waiting for my colleague whilst slowly sipping tea that tastes like chemicals from the Styrofoam cup. On the sign this time, there are four pieces of paper stacked one on top of the other: a marsupial, an upward-pointing arrow, an icon of a man, and an arrow pointing right.

The museum is a quiet place. A place of learning, preserving, protecting, and recording. It’s not generally a place you’d expect to see a man standing next to a makeshift sign, drinking tea. Most people ignored me, instead following the arrow to a room full of stuffed animals; occasionally somebody would stop and momentarily stare at me with a quizzical look. One elderly gentleman plucked up the courage to approach me and ask what I was doing.

“Who are you?” he asked, as if not really wanting to know the answer.

“I’m a graphic designer working on new signage for the museum,” I said, smiling.

“Oh.”

I wasn’t really surprised with the response and hoped he’d just carry on so I could get to preparing my next sign.

“What do you think of the sign?” I asked.

“I don’t care what your rat looks like. I just don’t want to get lost in here. I’m dying for a pee.”

And, just like that, off he went to the toilet.

In that moment, my experience of the true value of graphic design swiftly came into crystal clear view.

Graphic design is as much about use as it is about look. The semantics of the title of the craft—the graphic in graphic design—hide the true pursuit of the craft. It’s not about graphics. It’s not about shapes and moving them in two-dimensional space until someone (usually the designer) deems them to be beautiful. It’s not about making things pretty.

Real graphic design is about creating things with stories, for people to use.

But what about the designers? What about the visual designers inhabiting the UX industry? What do they do? If they’re getting wireframes from people and told to make them pretty, they’re not designing. They’re decorating. They’re applying a surface level sheen to someone else’s thinking. Because if you just go by Jesse James Garrett’s diagram, the story is already being told on the four layers beneath. The designing is being done there. This fifth layer is hardly more than some swirly frosting with a cherry on top.

Good graphic designers concern themselves with the what, the who, and the how. The message, the audience, and the mechanics. This is exactly how professional web designers work on the web. If, as an industry, we feel we need to call this practice something, can we just call it what it’s always been called? Let’s call it graphic design.

Paul Rand, The Designer’s Role, (1946). ↩
Jesse James Garrett, Elements of User Experience: User-centered Design for the Web, (Peachpit Press, 2002). ↩

Lesson

Alex Charchar — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Waking every morning to the perfume of sweet and savory spices and the scent of fresh fish in the salty ocean air, I would try to wipe the glaring brightness from my eyes. I was fifteen years old and on the other side of the world, in an old Mediterranean city filled with family, fishermen, and Roman ruins. I was in Tyre, Lebanon.

Immediately finding the generosity and humility of the Lebanese relatives I grew up with embodied here, in Lebanon itself, in my cousin Mario—a man who only knew kindness—I was treated like an old friend as he introduced me to his culture.

Out for a meal one evening, we found a small café lit by a single soft light. We were to enjoy a dish of slow-boiled fava beans, garlic, and olive oil called Fūl m’Dammas.

We sat at a wooden table dressed with fresh Lebanese bread, a dish of salt and pepper, sliced onions and lemons, a small bottle of olive oil, and the always present carafe of water. The carafe had a small spout on the side, and everyone in my family—except me—has mastered the art of drinking from it. As they extended their arms and the carafe a foot into the air, the water always flowed from the spout to their mouths, not a drop lost.

Two bowls were brought to our table, and I began to tear at the bread, dunking it into the soft paste of beans before shoveling it toward my taste buds. It was astounding.

This simple meal burst with richness and layers of intense flavor. It may have been peasant food, but I was a king. My taste buds had been liberated after fifteen years of oppression! Having found bliss, I ate half the bowl without rest in only moments.

I watched Mario reach for the small bottle of olive oil. “Special, very good, you eat.” He poured out a teaspoon of the yellow-near-orange syrup and looked at me, his voice as serious as I had ever heard it, concern washing his face. “Only little. This very big. Little, eh?”

I was feasting like royalty! Only a little? Ha! I grabbed a piece of bread and soaked up all that was offered on the table, quickly chewing it. Mario nervously laughed, his face a mixture of shock and worry.

Suddenly I was in a world of silence, with taste and smell vanishing too. Then I saw it in the bottle of olive oil. A small chili, laughing.

A high-pitch pulse burst into a loud guttural thunk that reverberated throughout my skull. A scream began inside my brain, crying out, in this moment of stunned paralysis, “You’re a stranger, a naive child trying too hard to claim his place!” My senses crashed back to life as I simultaneously tried to leave my body.

I had done more than swallow fire. The sun itself had exploded in my mouth. The chef, a man with a toothy smile, had captured the fury of a star and distilled it into this ferocious syrup. My eyes watered as if they could extinguish the heat, my teeth melted, and my muscles seized. My arms flew out in hope of finding salvation.

But, wait! The carafe would save me! That damn carafe that I’d never been able to use! But this was my moment; this was when all in the universe would align to save me from this birthing star!

My mind screamed “Pour from the spout! No, no, the top! The spout! The top!” I chose neither and begged for grace. The water crashed around me, mostly finding the table, snaking through the wooden slats and onto my jeans, swimming into my bowl, drowning the bread, drenching my face and hair, with little finding my lips.

The laughter came from all sides—they could see I wasn’t from here. All I could do was wheeze and scramble for bread as my cousin poured me a glass of water, handing it to me quickly and patting me on the back, still gently chuckling.

I burned with mid-pubescent embarrassment. I hated him, I hated the chef, I hated the people smiling at me, speaking a language I was lost in. I hated the food and the trip and every moment. He was laughing. I wanted to claw at him. I wanted to hide in the dark hovels of the surrounding streets. I wanted to…I wanted to…I realized—my reddened eyes looking at their wide grins—that I just needed to laugh.

My cousin’s eyes weren’t mocking; no one’s were mocking. The room held no ego or spite or anger. They weren’t laughing for their own enjoyment but because they were witnessing something so familiar.

Had I listened to him from the first, I would have avoided pain. Had I held onto my pride, I would have suffered embarrassment and a damaged ego. It was my relative’s warmheartedness, not any particular strength of my own, that enabled me to put ego aside and relish and embrace not only that night of camaraderie but my entire immersion in the culture of my family.

Throwing his burly arm around me, he proudly proclaimed “Lebanese, eh! Lebanese!” He had appreciated my eagerness to join in. I had tried something dangerous and survived. I later found out that everyone started their use of that oil lightly, growing their tolerance over a childhood. I had played catch-up just a little too quickly.

Continuing to chuckle, he reached for the olive oil. “Just little. Very big.”

The Colors of Grief

Alex Charchar — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

On the twentieth of January, when she was less than twelve hours old, I lost my daughter.

With her went all the colors of my world.

The world had never been as bright as when I held my daughter. With Samarah in my arms, her head in the crook of my elbow, her knee in my palm, the world was so flushed with color. All the shapes and sounds receded. Everything slipped from the room, and I knew only her. Her chest expanding and contracting as her small lungs tasted oxygen, her face moving slightly, arms bopping softly, feet kicking gently. It was the most thoroughly comfortable I have ever been. For these hours, the sadness was banished to its cold corner. We knew what was to happen—the silent, frozen frenzy of the doctors had dragged a shadow over the delivery room—but in these moments, all that fell away. All that mattered was that she was in my arms, and I was desperately and completely in love.

I held perfection. Radiant, beautiful perfection.

Oh, how little I knew of beauty before that day. I discovered, too, through the essence of her, what complete inspiration feels like. I learned what being at one with your partner is like as you embrace your child.

As I sat in the brightness of it all, in the sheer brilliance of her, I felt a happiness I’d never known. What color was floating through? Yellow seems too dull and orange too empty, pink too soft, even an enveloping white too shallow. The most vivid color falls flat. The colors flowing from her were indescribably rich.

I fell asleep that night a father, proud of my wife for being a mother. Proud of this child for being our daughter, for all the beauty and uniqueness and love that she embodied, for each breath she had taken, for each beat of her heart. Each and every beat. We fell asleep exhausted and emptied.

Samarah was gone.

Ever had it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

— Khalil Gibran

Before she was born, I had been moving, over the last several years, to a deeper place in my work, past the considerations of surface detail. I had found much joy in notions pertaining to the bridging and transference of ideas between two minds through a piece of design and how chemical reactions are evoked, adrenalin is pumped, and happiness experienced through our arrangements of pigments and pixels. Perceiving that these pigments and pixels are nothing but the representation of ideas was most intoxicating.

Our internal responses to creative works and how readily we translate them for use in our language and lives is a subject that I found endlessly fascinating. The most obvious element is color; we use it to describe our moods. Do our eyes flash with red when we’re angry? Does a heart contract and turn green with envy? When we’re down, does our blood turn cold, washed with a bluish tint? What about when we’re being creative? What color pulses from us then?

But now—with so much already taken from me—when these intellectual questions and my creative energy slipped quietly into their own coma, I barely noticed.

I remembered colors and their workings; I understood them intellectually. I understood design. But the cord linking emotion and idea had been severed. The well of inspiration into which I’d routinely flung myself—that place of shapes and textures, ideas and questions—had been emptied. No bottom of mud or dirt, nor even dust or grit or grime. Empty.

I woodenly remembered everything, but knew none of it. I was resigned to the idea that I was no longer a designer by thought, no longer a problem solver or communicator. I hollowly resolved to carry on. I will simply be a designer by practice, I thought. I’ll go to work, do what I’m asked without consideration of whether it’s right or wrong. I know the software, that’s all I need. In the evenings I’ll forget of my work and consider it no more. I’ll read of it none, look at it less. It’s just a job, it’ll do, it’ll pay bills. No one will visit my site; it will just expire. Those dreams of mine were silly anyway. Who cares of my ideas? Tasteless and pithless. Bone without marrow.

I was only here to help my wife breathe again. Nothing outside of her mattered anymore.

Shadows of pale gray, icy white, a sallow yellow.

The sadness engulfed me. I sought happiness in old safe havens. They failed to push through the sickening thickness of it all. I avoided Twitter, ignored email. Sleep, an old companion turned foe, was a relentless, heavy drug, and I was listlessly forgetting to eat.

We yearned for distraction, no matter how fleeting, expensive, or superficial. Our mantra was a cheerless whatever we want. Want an iPad? Get an iPad. Want a book? Get a book. Want to rent a few movies? Get fourteen.

The television was turned on and stayed as such for weeks. On it, I found a small diversion by witnessing the making of things—any sort of thing. I thought this interest was sparked by my love of process, of seeing how something comes together. Reflection offered another thought: perhaps I needed to see that things were still being made.

We sensed no healing. Perhaps, though, distraction provided time for some hidden work to happen.

Flakes of rust. Grays smudged with barren beige.

The whatever I want attitude carried over well to the content I digested. I had for years avoided so much while focusing on design. Now, I wanted to break through any artificial constraints I had shortsightedly constructed during my studies.

I mostly read, eating hundreds of pages at a time, tasting the words, feeling their texture in my teeth, on my tongue, not moving from my seat, fully absorbing language etched into page. I wanted to be walled in by books and find escape. A safe room made impenetrable to things I did not want to feel. Yet, line by line, I was slowly revived; like a man waking after a long sleep, I was ravenous, starved for content. Only rarely did I waver in my conviction to finish the current so that the next could be experienced. Words made me savor humanity’s ability to find pride of purpose, happiness and energy, insight and thought. Somewhere along the way, I giggled for the first time. I cried and ached too—familiar pursuits of late—but when I did so, it was for the stories of others, not just my own.

I drank in everything I’d ever had a desire to explore, devouring the details that gave form to former inklings. I knew that the strength of stars is immense but not that their gravitational weight could alter the relativity of time. Engulfing myself in ideas about government and the building of nations, astronomy and physics, the struggles of the creatives, the questioning of normality, the lives of the great and the life of the mind, I wanted to know it all.

We spent much time with friends, creative friends, who had become family. One day my wife smiled. It made me drunk.

My own creativity was hidden, distant, still. Yet one day I think I saw

a little blip of blue.

It happened quietly and slowly. First I just wanted to look.

I tentatively stepped back into the comfort of illustration and photography. It was not long before graphic art walked into the room. Then design. Not the Swiss or modernist, minimalist, sparest and barest work I’d normally enjoy. Design with embellishment and a little life on its sleeve—the kind often found in good editorial. I became a design voyeur, still wanting to observe from a distance. I didn’t want to dissect and understand. I had no need to question, define or break apart, to talk about or act.

I imagined I was merely continuing my tender yet determinedly carefree search for whatever I want. But with an almost terrifyingly uncomfortable sense that, once again, I’d lost control of my self, my world, I was struck one day by the realization that a sort of pattern was shaping my path. Was it merely coincidence, or was it my subconscious taking the reins because it knew how to repair some of the damage? All of my lists of interests, all those things I decided to investigate after years of neglect, even the order in which I approached them—or they approached me—seemed deliberate. I discovered that I was traveling through—in a matter of months, not years—all the topics I enjoyed while growing up that had led me to design.

I became aware that this interest in a universe of subjects was funneling me toward the same endpoint at which I’d arrived before: design. But nuances born of my loss, small changes in my path, were ushering me to a destination that was, indeed, design, but design that was continually fed by and embracing much more of the mind, the heart, the things learned by cultures and people—galaxies, spices, rushing rivers, rhythms. An endpoint full and limitless, not narrow, that might make me a wholehearted designer who was better than he had been. But this is saying more than I really knew at that moment. At that moment it was the softest impression, the slightest sensation of light.

Throughout my life, I consider the books that sit untouched on my shelf, bought but not read. Some sit for years before I pull them down and crack the glue. I purchase them sensing the value within. But when they appear at my doorstep, and I leaf through the pages, I see that I’m not yet prepared to glean their secrets or even know where in the rows of text to search.

They keep their place, as I devour books either side, until one day I’m able to read one treatise the way it’s meant to be read. A day when I’ve learned what I must, so I may gain deeper insight than I would have when the parcel of books first arrived. As with good wine or coffee, one must develop a palate before knowing what hints of blueberries and light acidity with tastes of chocolate actually mean.

So, one by one, and day by day, I slid them from their dwelling places.

And day by day, no longer were my eyes a constant sting, nor was the pain inescapable. I’d look at my wife, the only reason I was able to reach this point, and see a smile, or more rarely, a fleeting laugh.

Soft greens and sepias, the quietest of yellows and gentlest of blues. Warm whites and creams.

I want to understand the world into which my daughter was born.

As I explore other fields, I bring new elements from each that I then weave through my creative work. As each idea finds its context in what I make, I realize that this marriage of seemingly disparate ideas is often how original and intriguing new ones are born. The language of graphic design is a collage of its own history and concepts pasted together with stolen and borrowed tongues, syllables collected to express ourselves and our ideas with words that we don’t have.

On the web, we’ve passively stood by as the profession and role of graphic design has been splintered into areas of specialization until the life blood has been sapped, and principles have become lifeless facts, limply memorized. It has been pigeonholed and marginalized when, in truth, it is the overarching language of our communication. This new diversity of my studies not only invigorates me, it is a transfusion resuscitating the living thing that is graphic design. I take snippets of language, and they become part of my design’s native tongue. Whether from history or art or comedy or film or science, they will help lend contrast and expose me to new ways of solving problems, expressing answers, and thus speaking to the world.

Design is artfully realized communication. Style alone is merely an elegant fool, an eloquent speaker of meaningless words, perfectly pronouncing broken sentences.

Artists, designers, filmmakers, writers, and others have noted throughout the centuries that our work is replete with the homage, the remix, the redesign, the intentional or subconscious appropriation, the impact of all that surrounds us or that we unearth in our days. Then why not cast our intellectual and experiential nets wide—and wider still? If the design process coalesces these influences to provide novel solutions, then it’s only logical to look outside of design as much as possible. The richness of our studies takes our ability to communicate to an entirely new level where we can speak in multileveled ways, reaching the minds, the hearts of those who look and experience.

We are not simply stylists or specialists but expert practitioners who can translate an organization’s abstract concept into a meaningful message that evokes the desired response. It’s curiosity, then, that makes for the magnificent creative.

So yes, I want to know of many things.

Reds and blacks and whites, so clean, so sharp. Vibrant blues and rich greens. Yellow, what a wonderful color.

My daughter was born and loved, then lost in a measure of hours. Not days or weeks or months or years. Just hours. Sixty minutes multiplied so very few times.

A life measured in hours spotlights how we use the relative abundance of time most of us receive and how well we earn our keep. I’m driven not merely to try, but to honestly earn each tick of the clock, each pulse of my heart that I have been allotted.

And so, more and more, I think of quality: the quality of my life, of what’s left of it, of how I choose to spend my time. I want to do the kind of work that somehow matters, that isn’t just a trade or a job but is based on that hard-won body of knowledge and principles that is part of who I am.

Not all of us have a choice, all of the time, to avoid that lesser kind of work, that kind that we aren’t proud of but that we produce solely, sometimes soullessly, for a paycheck. We must be vigilant lest we be branded by it, and not only feel our reputation sliding downward but also grow to loathe this part of ourselves that generates work that is quickly forgotten by us, our clients, the audience. In these times, we’re fortunate to have any kind of work. But if daylight brings only going through the motions and never diving too deep, relying on superficiality and being just good enough, then weekends or nights will be our only chance for work that fulfills us, takes us forward, flexes our creative muscles.

This sense of being a wholehearted, wholeminded designer that I discovered in my journey back, is something I now carry from job to job, as 9-to-5s pay my way through the 5-to-9s—those projects I stay up so late to labor through, or rise so early to beat the sun. How odd that as I sacrifice myself to do them, they feel like an indulgence or reward.

When we work on a project that is ours, that has its genesis in that internal library curated from what we absorbed every minute, every hour of our lives—then there is potential for the expression of thoughts that can change us and the thoughts and lives of others.

I now know that it is through love and passion and happiness that anything of worth is brought into being. A fulfilled and accomplished life of good relationships and craftsmanship is how I will earn my keep. To do any less with my time, time which my daughter goes without, is a wretched, unthinkable thing.

Creativity has, at its core, thoughts of the future, of something lasting. I live, now, hoping to create so that the world can taste a bit of the beauty plucked from the universe as she faded from our arms.

I’m here to catch the slightest whisper of the colors my daughter showed me—the ones I lost that day.

Time does not heal all wounds. Each sunrise picks away at any scab that starts to form. But through the journey of my days, the path now lit not just by losing Samarah but by knowing her, the anemic grays and jaundiced yellows of dawn are slowly transmuting to the colors of life.

Tendrils of tender green at the horizon, fingers of indigos and violets above, majestic swirls of rose and gold and pulsing crimson, soaring across the cerulean blue.

Lesson

The Standardistas — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Though we both now live and work in Northern Ireland, and have done so for many years, our roots are far afield. When we first met in Belfast, and began our working relationship, we were unaware that we had, in fact, experienced a chance encounter many years earlier.

One of us was born in Hong Kong to Scottish parents, the other born in Sweden to Swedish parents. Our fathers held careers that—uncommon for the time—saw us traveling the world extensively. We both coincidentally moved to Northern Ireland in the same year: 1994. In addition to this temporal coincidence, our lives have shared numerous other similarities.

Heavily influenced by our fathers, we share a passion for literary theory, in particular French structuralist and post-structuralist writing, and have both read extensively on the topic, having been introduced at an early age to the ideas of Barthes, Foucault, and Baudrillard. It was this shared interest that set in motion a remarkable discovery.

It turns out that—unbeknownst to either of us—our paths first crossed at Bombay International Airport where our families were stopping over (one heading east, from Scotland to Hong Kong; the other heading west, from Vietnam to Sweden). Though we didn’t know each other at the time—we would only meet properly for the first time nearly two decades later—we subsequently discovered that we must have passed within mere inches of each other one day in 1984.

Seeped in the clinging heat of the airport—the rattling fans unable to entirely close out the humidity pressing through from the outside—and immersed in the close proximity of people corralled tightly, stranded in that non-space neither here nor there, we both vividly recall seeing for a fleeting moment Louis Althusser. The appearance of this noted French Structural Marxist philosopher—in transit and passing through Bombay en route to a lecture at Cornell University—imprinted itself upon our memories.

Over time, this moment eventually became hazy, indeed, almost forgotten. Sitting down nearly thirty years later, sharing the adventures of our misspent youth, we by chance discovered—through nothing more than the catalyst of Althusser—that our paths must have crossed many years earlier; indeed, we might even have brushed past each other in that distant airport.

Realizing that we had been in such close proximity to each other so many years earlier reshaped the story of our lives. Before we unearthed this fact, our stories were very different. After we discovered it, our personal narratives, the stories we choose to tell, shaped not only the present and future, but also the past.

Though it was just a brief glance that day in Bombay, discovering that shared moment—a moment we have retrospectively woven into our narratives—shaped our futures. Althusser, a point in our separate journeys rediscovered and shared many years later, altered our trajectories and sent us down a shared pathway of influence, one that shaped our beliefs and opinions from that day forward.

What we learned in our conversation nearly thirty years later was that in the shared chaos of everyday life there lies an interpreted history. When historians look back on the movements of time and interrogate the past, they tease out connections, connections that they and they alone decide to make. Just as historians invent the past, we too create our own narratives from those moments we choose to include and connect.

Only in hindsight are the plausible connections possible to comprehend; with just a slight change in the frame of reference, we can see things differently. When cast through the prism of this shared experience, we saw the fact that although we may not be in control of our destinies, we may have some control over the stories of our past and that the act of creating this past inevitably shapes our futures.

Designing the Mind

The Standardistas — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Our industry has until very recently been a blue-collar affair: it focused primarily on the mechanics of how things work. As a consequence, function has dominated discussion and writing within our field. The canon of literature we have collectively developed has tended toward the how to, which at its best celebrates a lively, inventive, and sometimes remarkable method and craft. At its worst, it’s represented by didactic step-by-step guides which lead the practitioner down unquestioning pathways resulting in rote learning, an inability to recognize the need for more nuanced choices, and a tendency to accept the status quo and be mere copiers.

As our industry emerges from adolescence, our frame of reference as practitioners is inevitably widening. The question we need to pose is clear: How does the designer who is functionally competent grow professionally?

The answer to this question lies in developing analytical and critical thinking—reflecting on what we do, describing it, questioning it, and moving it forward into new arenas. In short, we need to become masters of criticality.

In the words of the American social theorist Thomas Sowell, intellectuals are “those whose occupations deal primarily with ideas”¹ as distinct from those who apply those ideas practically. It’s time for our industry to foreground thinking. Ideally, thinking and doing should work hand in hand.

So, with the foundations—the craft of our industry in place, how do we develop the thinking that is essential to moving our industry forward?

The answer lies in a three-stage process that involves the intertwining of input, synthesis, and output: firstly, widening the field of vision, opening out and looking beyond the obvious; secondly, digesting this newfound knowledge through dialogue and, as a consequence, forming new connections; and finally, outputting thought, resulting in a new canon of knowledge, a canon tailored specifically to our industry’s needs.

Libraries: Widening Our Vision

The first stage in the process is input. For the designer to grow and mature, to move beyond the world of superficiality and style, it’s essential to broaden the scope and widen the frame of reference. Reading acts as a catalyst, broadening a designer’s awareness and understanding; it introduces new inputs and a steady stream of provocations.

We live in an accelerated, connected world at a relentless pace. In that context, the tendency, especially among younger designers, can be to rush headlong into making when some thinking might have been better invested first.

On the Masters course we run, we begin by establishing a rich and varied reading program designed to encourage new thinking. The introduction of this stimuli, this new material, coupled with a period of reflection and discussion, is as much a part of the design process as the moment of picking up a pencil (or manipulating a mouse).

Setting our students a rich and varied reading program, we watch their minds blossom, witness their synapses spark into life while they make new and hitherto unexpected connections. So, what do we, as professionals, draw from this? And how do we map it onto the task at hand? The answer, we believe, lies in adding a new tool to the web designer’s toolbox. It’s a simple tool rich with potential: a library.

As important as the tools we’ve accumulated across the years are the books we’ve bought. They have shaped who we are as designers, and it’s telling that most of these books aren’t about what would traditionally be perceived as design. We need to widen our view, look beyond the immediate resources labeled design inspiration, allow ourselves to draw inspiration from a range of sources, and build our own working library.

On commencing this task, we need a wide frame of reference. We need to build our own system for querying these sources and investigating what we can learn from other fields of study, both neighboring and further afield. In his celebrated thesis “A Theory of Human Motivation,” noted psychologist Abraham Maslow describes this process aptly:

The facts that we acquire, if they are isolated or atomistic, inevitably get theorized about, and either analyzed or organized or both. This process has been phrased by some as the search for meaning. We shall then postulate a desire to understand, to systematize, to organize, to analyze, to look for relations and meanings.²

Our industry—crafting experiences for the web (and elsewhere)—is moving forward at a dizzying rate. We’re often so busy looking ahead that we forget to look back. In the past lies a wealth of knowledge that we can, and should, draw upon. As a profession, we need to look beyond the tried and trusted sources, cast the net wider and dig deeper. We need to widen our frame of philosophical reference to encompass a panoply of thought.

An industry in its adolescence can learn from other industries, considering how they’ve matured and the pathways they’ve taken to professionalism. Close to home, graphic design is an obvious case; a little farther away (and a little older), architecture also offers ample scope for the transference of knowledge. Both of these industries have developed considerable canons of knowledge; both also value the role of the critics—the thinkers around the topic—placing them on an equal footing with makers.

So, where might we look in our quest for inspiration?

One avenue we should certainly consider is psychology; understanding how the mind works is critical if we are to communicate effectively as designers. Abraham Maslow’s 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation”, mentioned earlier, is required reading, his Hierarchy of Needs—which forms the text’s core focus—is already falling under the spotlight of a number of well-respected web designers. Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things³ is also essential to an understanding of why some designs delight while others only frustrate.

Semiotics—the science of signs and how language works—also lies at the heart of communication. David Crow’s Visible Signs⁴ is an excellent primer, mapping the often obscure science of signs onto the practice of visual communication in a clear and concise manner. The discerning reader will doubtless also enjoy French philosopher Roland Barthes’s excellent Mythologies.⁵ Long a core text on fine art courses the world over, the mirror it held up to society in 1957 remains every bit as relevant today.

The disciplines of ethnology and anthropology are also rich sources for understanding how groups of people function. Our target personae represent more than individuals. Rarely found in isolation, they’re usually representative of one or many on- and offline communities and subcultures. Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody⁶ is a perfect primer for understanding the changes occurring in our connected culture and, when that has whet your appetite, Claude Levi-Strauss’s classic Structural Anthropology⁷ is an essential foundation to gain an understanding of man and society in terms of individuals, kinship, and social organization.

We could go on—subject areas near and far can, and will, offer considerable potential to the inquiring designer. The important point to note is that the list pushes the boundaries of what might be defined as design.

When entering a new subject area, becoming familiar with the established texts provides a great beginning for contextualizing subsequent material. What we’ve given you here is just a starting point; a bounty of other material has been published across history. Most reading you do will make for an even richer experience if you have studied the classics first.

Even when the theories aren’t directly transferable to our discipline, this reading equips us with new vantage points, ideas, ways of describing and interpreting the world around us.

Armed with this newfound knowledge, what next?

Conversation: Converging Socratically

The second stage in the process of developing critical thinking is synthesis. Though acquiring new knowledge is a critical phase in the process of evolving as a practitioner, we also must digest this knowledge, synthesize it, and articulate meaning. Drawing out the connections and mapping the terrain, and applying it to our field can be done in a number of ways, not least through dialogue and the written word.

Synthesis, the activity through which we digest the various inputs and locate, create, and fuse new unions is at the heart of the creative process. The art of discussion remains a superior method, allowing two or more minds to multiply the number of possible connections, leading to new ideas and conclusions thus far unconsidered.

We need to find forums in which we can delve deeper than the often facile exchanges over Twitter, or the sprawling comment threads on a blog, which rarely reach the levels of criticality one can quite easily achieve in something as simple as an everyday conversation. Although possible through means of electronic communication including blogs, articles, and even personal journals, let’s not neglect the opportunity for the rediscovery of the lost art of letter writing, used to great effect in centuries past to work through ideas and shape thought.

There is also a place for face-to-face discussion. The old-fashioned debate, where logical fallacies are exposed, meaning is articulated, and ideas are reconsidered should be brought back into fashion.

Systematic inquiry, the persevering endeavor in exploring an argument and its outcomes and offering alternative interpretations, is at the heart of a methodology practiced for thousands of years. Known as the Socratic method, this philosophical pursuit of knowledge and understanding is close in nature to scientific inquiry but also allows the investigation of unmeasurable, subjective quantities, making it eminently suitable for the subject of design, which almost always overflows into a territory where prescribed rules alone cannot provide a satisfactory interpretation.

A tried and trusted technique, it begins by simply asking a question that is then followed by a series of carefully considered challenges aimed at a deepening understanding of both the original question and its many possible answers. On reaching a conclusion, the initial question is asked again, and the process is repeated. By removing certainties and questioning preconceived notions, we can reach a deeper understanding of the subject. We’ve achieved this using nothing more than a spirited, polite debate.

The systematic process of narrowing in on an issue naturally leads to thoughts and ideas converging. The philosophical pursuit of knowledge and understanding does not, however, require long flowing beards or a Greek agora. In fact, converging Socratically can amount to something as simple and pleasurable as enjoying a fine discussion over a hearty ale. As Sherlock Holmes’s reasoning was stimulated and expanded by intoxicating substances, liquor, in moderate doses, can assist us in our pursuit of the truth. By sharing our knowledge, bringing new insights to the table, dissecting and interrogating each others’ ideas, we can bring forth unexpected, brilliant results.

With the connections teased out, with newfound knowledge digested, there remains just one phase in the process, that of writing it down.

Writing: Building a Canon of Knowledge

The final stage in the process is output, moving beyond the art of conversation and the fleeting nature of the spoken word towards the creation of a canon of knowledge, articulate and critical. We’ve considered the pursuit of meaning through dialogue; let’s examine the third, closely intertwined, phase: the articulation and manifestation of that meaning through the written word.

Developing the craft of the written word, being able to articulate why what you are doing works, is pivotal to growing as a designer. Analyzing and describing your craft through the medium of the written word enables you to gain another vantage point and another perspective. Through the process of analysis, you acquire awareness, gain new insights, and sharpen your perception. Being able to explain, convince, and inspire are essential characteristics of a distinguished designer, and design—after all—is in its essence, communication.

Throughout the design process, writing helps clarify, systematize, and structure your work. It sheds light on flaws of logic and exposes brittle foundations. By making a habit of writing, clarifying your thinking, and exposing your ideas to the light, you will grow as a designer.

Although there are great designers who can’t, don’t, or won’t write, there are also great designers who are able to articulate themselves through the medium of the written word. In their hands, we inherit a canon of knowledge, a canon that lives on, in some cases, long after the works themselves have passed on.

When we think of designers like Jan Tschichold, Josef Müller-Brockman, and Wolfgang Wiengart, or closer to home, Khoi Vinh, Tim Brown, and Craig Mod, we see designers who aren’t just leaving behind designed artifacts but who are also leaving behind a wealth of knowledge. By articulating their ideas, by working through their thinking, they leave a map that others can follow.

In every case, these designers push at the boundaries of accepted norms, pressing outward, establishing new possibilities. Often working at the frontiers, they not only establish new approaches and pathways but clearly articulate why what they are doing works and is important. From their hands, we inherit a canon of knowledge that shapes our understanding and, in many cases, influences the directions our industry takes. In short, they shape thinking.

Developing a Critical and Analytical Mind

Noted cultural theorist John Berger said, “Today the discredit of words is very great.” In this short statement, truth reverberates. We use words, yes, but en masse we appear to have abandoned them in favor of the glancing blow and the superficial cascade of thoughts. In a world of 140-character missives and ill-considered blog comments, words rarely seem to be used to dig deep anymore or applied to the search for profound truths. Everything is surface, sometimes depressingly so. If we are to grow, our vision must be wider and more educated, our thoughts voiced more carefully and on point, and our thinking and writing process repeatedly put to the test, gaining depth as we practice.

As an industry matures, reflection and introspection emerge as natural and essential prerequisites. We must embrace not only the doing and describing but also the analyzing and questioning of what we do. The development of a more critical, analytical relation to our subject is both inevitable and necessary. To grow as a discipline and as individual designers, we need to devote ourselves not just to the art of making, but also to the art of thinking.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, (Basic Books, 2010). ↩
Abraham H. Maslow, A Theory of Human Motivation, (Classics in the History of Psychology, 1943). ↩
Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things, (Basic Books, 2002). ↩
David Crow, Visible Signs, (AVA, 2003). ↩
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, (Paladin, 1973). ↩
Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, (Allen Lane, 2008). ↩
Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, (Basic Books, 1974). ↩

Lesson

Liz Danzico — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I like things. Full disclosure: a lot of things. More things, perhaps, than can be reasonably liked by one person. To me, rose-colored glasses have always seemed a curious concept as the world seems shiny enough without them. So I steer clear of conditions that might increase the likelihood of increasing the world’s sparklehood.

Choice then, becomes the primary tool to navigate like, as it gives each thing its priority, assigning an algorithm for liking, for doing, and for being in the world.

You see, for the like-striken, it’s hard to say no. Everyone and everything is interesting.

As I suffer from this condition myself, something a friend said to me several years ago has stayed with me:

“It’s easy to say no if you love something.”

Wrong. Wrong, I thought at the time. If you love something, say yes. Say yes to everything. Yet what did he mean about loving something, I quietly wondered. Did he mean to imply that having a focus for one’s passion also functioned as a tool to help make better choices?

In a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe said there are two kinds of writers: putter-inners (like himself) or leaver-outers (like Fitzgerald). These categories, like all categories, are of course oversimplified, but they still illustrate a great point. Just like saying yes, saying no creates your story. It’s what you leave out, not just what you put in, that forms a story, that makes a life.

Creative pursuits hold an inherent need for choice, whether we consider music, art, literature, dance, or design. Every great story is surrounded by white space of some kind. Blank spaces are powerful. The author and designer choose not to lay out a page with text to every edge. Its white space is part of the story it tells. What we choose to leave out creates the story.

Consider your favorite novel. You probably don’t recall the most memorable character in the book doing the most mundane of tasks—eating breakfast, getting dressed, using the bathroom, tying shoelaces—day in and day out. The author made an intentional decision to leave these details out. He or she, the leaver-outter in that situation, crafted a story about another arc that didn’t need those ordinaries.

As a reader, you didn’t consider those absences, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Their presence, like the silent subjects of sentences or the silent strength of typographic scaffolding, creates the supporting structure to guide the main story, the primary choices, that the author, the artist, the creator is making.

The same is true in layouts in design. In pauses between crescendos in music. In absences in architectural archways. In blanks in the maps of oceans. Rather than fill the spaces with unnecessary distractions, their creators have chosen to leave these areas blank. And the blanks speak for both what is and what is not there.

Choice-makers are doers. And doers seem to also be leaver-outers.

I’ve always paid attention to and wondered at the leaver-outers of the world, so I do often come back to that phrase:

“It’s easy to say no if you love something.”

No matter what it is—be it a business, a person, a piece of art, a career, a song, a family, a way of life, or a pursuit of any kind—it’s easy to say no to all the other choices that will present themselves if you truly love something.

Finding that thing is the hardest part. But that’s another lesson.

Names and the New Public

Liz Danzico — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It could be any dinner in any place. Every person around the table wants intimacy. And every one of you, whether you came here with that in mind or not, no matter what your intended investment, wants a relationship of some kind with this group of colleagues and prospective friends you’ve just met. Yet by dessert and coffee, you struggle to recall either the first or last name of any person with whom you shared this meal. You look around. There are eight of you exchanging personal, public, private information—and not one notices you as you scan the faces. You are thirsty, but you realize you can’t recall a single person’s name to ask for a refill. You are at once among friends and strangers. Nameless faces together. If asked, you might be able to identify each of their avatars, know where each is a mayor, know how to friend each of them in any given social network, but as for their names? Unknown. “Hey,” you say out loud to no one in particular, “I need water.”

Where once a person’s name was his or her primary identifier, we’re now seeing the spread of that identity as people intentionally scatter selves, supported by social systems in which identities are stored and accessed. As a result, acknowledging someone’s name is no longer the same sign of mutual respect or politeness. Nor is it a necessary signifier that indicates you’re invested in the person. What we may be seeing is a death of a single primary name as key identifier. It has been decentralized and decondensed. In social relationships, what has replaced it? And in what contexts do we recall and use each identity?

Blurred Boundaries

In Emily Post’s 1922 edition of Etiquette and Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home, Post outlines didactic manifestos for interacting with one another. Whether one is a lady or a man, married or unmarried, the queen or the president of a nation, it is clear which fork, which name, and which manner of addressing one another is appropriate. A specific scene in that text dictated the rules for behavior, and each was predictable during a business visit, in a letter, or at dinner.¹

But correct introductions are meaningless in a culture where boundaries have dissolved and situations are defined only by the people present in a given moment. How to behave is not an etiquette we can memorize, it’s a sensitivity that starts and ends with being able to read people in an instant. How important is it then to remember someone’s name when that sign is retrievable via any social network, any device that is likely within arm’s length?

There is a new public. The new public is one of context, one perceivable by behaviors. Remembering someone’s name, or deciding we don’t need to, is no longer a given. Our business for behaving—as executives, as friends, as inventors and scientists and designers, as humans—relies on our ability to be sharply aware of that context and shift as appropriate.

Through the shifts, people want to be polite. People want to call on one another in a way that’s meaningful. But they’re busy. And memories full. And now, some people-bewildered. In a culture where work spills over into play, time zones overlap, and reference points intertwingle, people no longer have rules for calling upon one another. The rules, if any were followed at all, have changed, and our behavior for interacting is getting a serious redesign. There’s a new public for behaving. And using names as the primary identifier for one another, as one example, is becoming extinct.

Adaptation

But before getting caught up in rhetoric of the death of predictions, what is more imperative to consider is the role its demise can play—the internet environment has allowed for a larger evolutionary pace. We’ve already seen radio give way to film, film give way to television, and television give way to the web. Underlying it all is an evolving ecology that shifts and clicks along—humming at times, dragging at others—to keep up with the fast pace that is the shifting nature of the media ecology.

The death of the name is not an extinction at all then; it’s an adaptation. Likewise, etiquette is not dead; it’s simply evolving. The evolution of any new behavior—similar to what we saw with the introduction of radio, television, film—is bringing with it a whole new range of manners. Where once we relied on a prescribed code of conduct written by one and applied to many, that is no longer the case.

We are seeing take shape what Andrew Heyward, former president of CBS News, calls user-generated context.² These behavioral and adaptive systems are evidence that the complex dialogues among people are occurring in fundamentally new ways; lines between consumer and creator have merged, and context, not content, is taking over as a guide.

The code of conduct has been replaced with a code of context. Watches have been replaced by the timepieces that are our smartphones. And while no one under the age of twelve is using those smartphones for email, we are using social networks like Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn at a staggering rate to stay in touch. We’re not calling one another but we’re talking more than ever before. And with that, we are writing more as well. We can confidently say, as these words are printed on this page, that the physical book is not going away; it too is evolving. To know your audience is not enough.

To the Contrary

As a culture that trades efficiency as currency, it’s curious that we’re creating more, not fewer, identities. Contrast that with Mongolian culture which has 300 words for color—and whose horses, as a result, have no name as we know it. They’re referred to instead by color and age. Duly practical and nuanced. What we might see and consider as white in English, the Mongolians see as variations of ash white and snow white and so forth. Perhaps we too are developing 300 words for social variation, with no one dominant name.

While technology is certainly affording us the ability to use only one identifier—at least consider the long-standing efforts of Chris Messina and OpenID—and we uphold efficiency as one of our values, it would seem otherwise. Identifiers abound. Redundancy abounds. And we, in spite of ourselves, seem to value this redundancy. Multiple names, then, are a new currency.

Consider any email you might receive on any given day:

October 24, 2011

Give me a call when you’re free.

Mike

Mike Rogers
phone: 212-555-3464
mobile: 212-555-5309
skype: mikerogers
gchat: mikerogers
http://twitter.com/name/
http://facebook.com/name/
http://linkedin.com/name/
http://mywebsite.com/
http://mywebsiteproject-one.com/
http://twitter.com/mywebsiteproject-one/

Our signature files have out-charactered the text of our email. It’s not enough to sign a note; we must ensure that all forms of contact are known. Our own 300 colors are on display. Yet around a dinner table, it may be rare to remember even one name.

Is this proliferation waste, is it branding, or is it a display of power? Thorstein Veblen, author of The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899, suggested a position on the latter regarding wealth and power. He observed that simply amassing wealth is not enough. One must display wealth in order for it to be powerful as an act of status and power. Wastefulness, therefore, was a necessary part of the display of wealth and power. Like the peacock’s feathers, he notes,

Throughout the entire evolution of conspicuous expenditure, whether of goods or of services or human life, runs the obvious implication that in order to effectually mend the consumer’s good fame it must be an expenditure of superfluities. In order to be reputable it must be wasteful.³

Therefore, in order to be reputable, we must present waste. In other words, the amassing of identities—in part practical—may be in other parts a power move. And it is in display that there is power.

The New Public

If power is in the display of multiple identities, where are they or should they be displayed? Prior to about 2003 when social networks became popular, the mall and the movies were where teenagers would display their wealth. But since that time, the networked place has largely replaced these spaces. Networked publics are not a defined set of people in a bounded space but rather a flexible category where people conceptualize the boundaries but do not control them.⁴ Because of this, networked publics allow knowing people both in the moment (e.g., around a table) and contextually (e.g., only ever at that table). The boundaries of the contexts online, however, are afforded by technology such that the practice dictates the boundaries, depending on the imagination of the individuals involved.

This new public can play a few roles. First, in contrast to the Emily-Postian public of the past, they help us define ourselves by the boundaries set forth by the context of the group in the moment. The dinner table this evening creates one set of boundaries, and the people present set the conditions for behavior in that moment. The new public of the table made it alright for no one to know names. Change the table, change the people, and the public changes.

Second, the new public helps us define ourselves in relation to the group. Because each group’s identity is both momentary and contextual, it is up to the group’s imagination to put boundaries on it. If everyone wishes to remain anonymous but only speak about his or her passion about something specific, it can be so. At the dinner table, one person cannot be a name-dropper; each person must image and abide by the same set of social conditions or the public will change.

Third, the new public helps us define ourselves in relation to society. Because each group helps define its context in relation to the context of the culture of a neighborhood or a city, it can do so. Therefore, if citizens wish to protest or to take action on any issue, they can do so. Their allegiance to the group remains strong and their patriotism to the society unchanged.

The new public allows. Context is forgiving. Context is the new public.

Knowing Something

At the intersection of people, technology, and context, we have an opportunity like never before to create new identities and shape new publics. Whether it’s user-generated context, the display of wealth by waste, or simply the exponential explosion of the name, we now have a new public for behaving.

In a 1963 What is Science? talk, physicist and educator Richard Feynman explained the difference between simply knowing the name of something and truly knowing something.⁵ We have come well past knowing only one another’s names. It seems we’re 300 colors richer in our understanding of knowing identities as explorers of the particulars of what and where they can be. And now in our new public, at the end of the dinner, we all can say we truly do know someone.

Emily Post, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home, (Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1922). ↩
Andrew Heyward, “Media Companies Need To Become Marketing, (Blog, Harvard Business, 2009). ↩
Judith Donath, “Signals, Cues, and Meaning,” (PDF draft for MIT Press, 2007). ↩
Danah boyd and Alice Markwick, “Social Steganography: Privacy in Networked Publics.” Paper presented at the International Communication Association Conference, Boston, MA, May 2011. ↩
Richard Feynman, “What is Science?” (The Physics Teacher, vol. 7, issue 6, 1969). ↩

Lesson

Dan Rubin — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It was 1 am. I was twelve.

I was at a weekend gathering of a few thousand men who stood in small groups, much closer to each other than many men would feel comfortable, making music with their voices. It was my first full experience of the fellowship and family atmosphere of the four-part a cappella style called barbershop harmony.

Most of the 35,000-plus members of the all-male Barbershop Harmony Society in the us—the largest singing organization in the world—sing for pure, personal enjoyment, but they can’t do any of it alone.

Ensemble singing is all about collaboration: each person plays an important role balancing and tuning, relative to the key and each chord. We form a bond when singing together, becoming one voice, one instrument, but that voice falls apart when even one person doesn’t do what he is supposed to. Understanding your place within the group, the role you play from first breath to last chord, as well as your responsibility to the other singers in your group and to the audience, is just as important as singing in tune.

I was up late that night singing tags, an aspect of the hobby to which only members are typically privy.

To fully grasp how thrilling tag-singing can feel, you need to experience it and be a participant. A tag is, to paraphrase the society’s oft-quoted historian David Wright, a short passage consisting of an arrangement’s ending, learned and sung in sessions of informal chord-ringing. Instead of requiring the foursome to learn an entire song, the tag allows the singers to quickly blend their voices in a few seconds of what he calls “blissful harmony.”

I’d been a member for a few months, singing with the local chorus in preparation for competition. We sang tags outside the rehearsal hall after each Thursday night meeting, so the process was familiar. As with any collaborative endeavor, tag-singing is replete with unspoken, unwritten rules we must understand in order to fit in, to be part of the group—rules that often take time to learn and understand. Many types of vocal harmony thrive throughout many genres of music; barbershop has especially strict rules and traditions.

Standing with me that night were four men who, including the director of my chorus, Ed Knight, were each old enough to be my grandfather. Ed must have been in his late fifties back then, graying and balding, and at well over six feet he towered over everyone, especially a twelve-year-old who hadn’t hit his growth spurt, but that didn’t bother me. I had been made to feel an equal in my few months as a member, and though I had only just met the other men in that room a few hours before, I didn’t feel out of place. I was deeply enjoying every minute, realizing that I had discovered something I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

My mistake was simple enough. As the other men were singing a tag Ed had just taught them, I too had learned the tenor part and was standing next to them singing along very quietly. Most of my experience as a barbershop singer had been with a chorus of a few dozen men, so singing along seemed perfectly normal to me.

I was, however, joyfully unaware that I was committing tag singing’s cardinal sin: adding my voice to the four parts already in play. By singing along, I was interrupting the delicate interplay of tuning, vowels, balance, and placement that contribute to the perfect alignment of each voice’s harmonics—the almost magical effect of physics that makes the sum of four voices sound greater than its parts.

The next week a postcard arrived from my chorus director thanking me for my participation in the weekend’s festivities. Ed explained what a joy it was for the chorus to have my younger brother and me on stage with them, that he hoped I enjoyed myself, and that he was proud of us. He then added, almost as a postscript, that singing along with a foursome’s tag is not appropriate and that he knew I’d not do it again.

That postcard also included five simple words I’ll never forget:

“Don’t be a fifth wheel.”

Teaching is about tone and timing as much as it is about the subject itself. Ed could have scolded, discouraged, or intimidated me. But though direct in his speech, he was kind, and this allowed me to feel comfortable enough to approach him at the next rehearsal to ask for more detail and to apologize for my misstep. By allowing me to enjoy the moment, he protected my positive association with the act of singing. My lesson arrived later: privately and when the time was right.

Teaching—or collaborating, as I have learned in my design career—with kindness and respect allows the other person to learn or act without fear. We can positively affect the behavior of others by building them up rather than tearing them down. We should be looking for more ways to work together and make each other stronger, even when pointing out a fault or mistake.

I still have this postcard tucked safely away in a box of my life’s most treasured memorabilia. Its tone still teaches me twenty-one years later as I interact with other people in my role of collaborator, teacher, designer, singer, friend, and perhaps one day, father.

Off the Page

Dan Rubin — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Consider for a moment the beautiful physical artifact you are holding. Caress its cover, marvel at its binding, its spine, the gutter, how the ink flirts with the texture of its paper.

These attributes we use to describe and define a printed book or periodical owe their existence to the physical form of the artifact itself—the constraints of the medium gave life to the solutions employed by the craftsmen responsible for turning desire into reality.

The book as we know it is the sum of its parts; it evolved to serve the needs of its physical form.

Similarly, mapping the concept of a page to the web has affected the way we design, create, and curate content. The term carries history and meaning in an unassuming manner, quietly imposing its will on our entire thought process.

By simply existing in our lexicon, the page has influenced our approach to design, layout, navigation, interaction, client communication, widths, heights, folds, advertising, and typography. As with the book, the web as we know it has evolved due to our perception of its form.

The web was never intended to be a replacement for print—an evolutionary step, perhaps, but certainly not a digitally-distributed clone with a few extra bells and whistles. Yet web design in its current state is often a strangely beautiful hybrid, inheriting its principles, typography, and language from decades of print, graphic, and information design, enhanced through layers of interaction, audio, and video yet clearly capable of so much more.

Writing about information design, Edward R. Tufte recognized the dissonance between our physical world and the way we attempt to represent it, explaining one of the conceptual problems we face when designing for the web:

Even though we navigate daily through a perceptual world of three spatial dimensions and reason occasionally about higher dimensional arenas with mathematical ease, the world portrayed on our information displays is caught up in the two-dimensionality of the endless flatlands of paper and video screen. All communication between the readers of an image and the makers of an image must now take place on a two-dimensional surface.¹

The year this was published, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.

The web has been document-centric from the beginning. When Berners-Lee proposed building a network atop the burgeoning internet to facilitate sharing of information, the format of that information was primarily text—more specifically, hypertext documents following the structure of research papers and scientific documentation. Berners-Lee’s first web browser—a window-based application for the NeXTSTEP platform; initially named “WorldWideWeb,” and later “Nexus”—even determined the size of its windows based on the Page Layout settings for printing viewed documents.

So the web was conceived as a variation on the word processor—a distributed network of linear documents connected by a layer of hyperlinks. It stands to reason, then, that everything we have at our disposal today is somehow a result of this initial vision, that every site we design, every experience we create is an extension of the document-centric approach.

This is why text elements are the foundation of HTML and why everything else—tables, CSS for layout, video, plugins—are merely extensions in response to demand.

If we consider the web as it was initially envisioned, it’s not surprising that we’ve found it so easy to use page to unwittingly define our own boundaries.

Page
“sheet of paper,” 1580s (earlier pagne, 12c., directly from O.Fr.), from M.Fr. page, from O.Fr. pagine, from L. pagina “page, strip of papyrus fastened to others,” related to pagella “small page,” from pangere “to fasten,” from PIE base *pag- “to fix” (see pact).²

Exploring the origin of the word page, as applied to the web, leads us to an interesting discovery. Of all the carefully selected terminology Berners-Lee used when creating and defining the web, page appears to be used incidentally, appearing just once in the Hypertext Terms glossary as of 1992 (the earliest existing version) and even then only to assist in defining another term:

Card
An alternative term for a node in a system (e.g. HyperCard, Notecards) in which the node size is limited to a single page of a limited size.³

The use of page to help constrain the definition of a card to something of a limited or fixed size demonstrates that even for the inventor of the web, the word held all the restrictions of its physical form.

The lack of a specific definition for page is also an example of familiarity informing preference, though this time subconsciously. We all know what a page is—especially regarding documents in the scientific sense as used by Berners-Lee—and that’s where the problem lies. For on the web, the traditional definition falls woefully short.

In that same glossary, we find two other interesting terms, node and document, which seem to have been Berners-Lee’s preferred choices for defining individual units of information on the web. He even had users in mind when suggesting the use of document as the better of the two terms, as it was “the nearest term outside the hypertext world” and thus “the prefered[sic] term in W3 documentation.”

The frequency with which these synonyms appear within the original glossary is intriguing: node appears thirty-one times, document and card six each, all with clear purpose and intent.

Page, however, is only mentioned in passing, its definition secured four centuries earlier.

Trying to imagine a web without pages is like asking, “What if books had never been books?” While not strictly practical, this exercise in imagination leads us down an interesting path.

Let’s use books as our example: what if books never had pages? What if we were to separate the intellectual artifact (the document) from its physical format (the book)? We can follow this line of questioning to an age before pages and leaves, before individual sheets of paper were bound together to form a codex (precursor to the modern book). We find ourselves reading a scroll—still a document: linear, orderly, and structured, yet formed as one continuous physical unit. How did the change in physical format from scroll to book affect the medium? Covers, binding, pagination, indices, even the printing press, all owe their existence not to the document, but to the constraints and requirements of the physical format of the object we know as a book.

Now let’s apply this same line of questioning to the web. What if the web never had pages? What if documents on the web were simply abstract points on the network at specific addresses?

It’s likely the types of content (the intellectual artifact) would be similar; after all, the desire to share information led to the creation of the internet and the web. But much like the differences between a scroll and a book, the physical format—or in this case, the virtual—would lead us to a different set of solutions, perhaps avoiding some of our existing problems along the way.

If we never defined the web as a series of pages, would we have needed pagination? Would the debate over the fold have made the transition from the world of printed newspapers? Might the infinite canvas—Scott McCloud’s concept of the visible area of content on the screen as a window instead of a page—have been embraced as the natural approach to designing for our content?

McCloud also suggests that pages are optional, that “without such restrictions…every one of those choices can be made exclusively on behalf of the needs of the story.”⁴ This approach to designing without boundaries has led us to more responsive design practices, but we’re still just skimming the surface of what is actually possible.

We talk at length about experience, emotional design, content strategy, visual grammar, psychology, usability, and standards, but none of them really challenge the way we work, the way we think about the larger concept of what we’re actually capable of doing with this incredible network of wires, satellites, servers, ideas, and people. The conceptual dissonance between what we know we are capable of achieving and the perceived structure of the web has limited our ability to surpass the medium’s current constraints.

The resulting uncertainty has given rise to time-consuming arguments and discussions surrounding the validity of solutions to problems which, had we better understood our own medium, may not have needed solving in the first place.

Perhaps we would have been spared the oft-heated debates over fixed vs. liquid or fluid layouts, a topic directly related to the constant misinterpretation of how, exactly, we define the boundaries of a page on the web.

We might also have avoided clashes with clients born from simple misunderstandings over print industry terms such as bleed and fold and instead spent more time discussing interaction, content, and usability.

If the days, weeks, and years devoted to these and other discussions were reallocated, imagine the larger, more significant problems we might have addressed in that same amount of time.

Let’s revisit the idea of a web without pages. In this alternate history, print-related disciplines—traditional publishing, advertising, branding—would recognize the web as an entirely new medium, unrelated to their existing notions of plane or dimension. Perhaps, under such circumstances, repurposing language and concepts from those media would not result in the confusion we face when communicating with clients and interdisciplinary colleagues.

Much frustration has resulted from the misunderstanding of what, exactly, the web is supposed to be. Our ongoing identity crisis—epitomized by constant discussions of job titles, roles, labels, and lexicon—stems from our medium’s document-centric origin and our inability to limit ourselves to headings, paragraphs, and lists.

Yet this seemingly arbitrary constraint has led us to what we consider the modern web to be: images, video, JavaScript, animation, Ajax, apps—and, yes, even Flash. Without the inherent limitations of a system designed to share simple documents, we may never have realized its enormous potential.

Our approach to designing for the web can restrict us as easily as the misconceptions we, and others, have about how to define the medium. Discussing the advancement of abstract painting in the mid-1980s, artist Frank Stella recognized a similar dilemma:

It is not the problem of perspective, either linear or atmospheric; nor is it the problem of flatness that makes this space so different, although this often seems the best way to describe it. Rather, it appears to be something in the intention, in the acceptance of commissioned configurations, in the attitude toward covering a given surface that held painting back, that actually kept it from creating a surface that was capable of making figuration look real and free.⁵

Perhaps the approach we take, our intention, our attitude toward the medium and how we perceive and define it is what really prevents us from true advancement.

Our canvas is not the viewport, nor is it Photoshop®, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, video, mobile, native apps, or a screen or device of any dimension or capability. It is no longer simply the web; it is at the very least the internet, the people and devices connected to it, and the context of those connections.

Yet while we struggle to define our canvas within this virtual construct, we remain unable to manipulate aspects of layout and typography that the printed page has enjoyed—mechanically or otherwise—for centuries. How is it that we’ve inherited preconceptions but not application?

For years, web designers have been playing catch-up with traditional print designers; yes, webfonts are fantastic, but print designers have had their choice of typeface for decades, and besides, the web is not print. With so much of our energy focused on becoming more like an existing, static medium, how can we expect to evolve our discipline beyond the confines of the document-centric format?

The answer, for some, involves other media. Are video and audio—Flash, HTML5 or otherwise—the non-document-centric future of the web? This seems unlikely. Television and radio are already acceptable delivery mechanisms, and the web has little to do with the viability of those media on the internet. We already interact with remote content via our TV sets and mobile devices, and although certain APIs and protocols build on top of web technologies, it is naive to assume they would not have evolved of their own accord.

If a few layers of interaction and multimedia on top of previously static documents and content were all the web had to offer, we could have stopped at forms and plugins, and been perfectly content.

Thankfully, we are not content with the current shape of the web, though to evolve beyond the page—our flatland—we must try harder, imagine greater, invent more, and break rules. Tufte once again exhibits clairvoyance by explaining two decades ago the task which now lies before us:

Escaping this flatland is the essential task of envisioning information—for all the interesting worlds (physical, biological, imaginary, human) that we seek to understand are inevitably and happily multivariate in nature. Not flatlands.¹

Our responsibility is not to replace page in our unique vocabulary of web design but to acknowledge that our current understanding of what it means to design for the web is just a single blip in a universe of possibilities. The web is quickly evolving, and as its creators we must explore the myriad forms our medium offers without allowing our perceived constraints to limit its potential.

Edward R. Tufte, Envisioning Information, (Graphics Press, 1990). ↩ ↩²
“Page,” Online Etymology Dictionary ↩
“Card,” Hypertext Terms, (W3C, 1992). ↩
Scott McCloud, Reinventing Comics, (Harper Paperback, 2000). ↩
Frank Stella, Working Space, (Harvard University Press, 1986). ↩

Lesson

Jon Tan — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It’s an age ago. I’m on a beach called Haad Rin Nok, on an island called Kho Pha Ngan in the Gulf of Thailand. The beach is deep, pale sand bounded by green steep headlands to the north and south, the sea in front, and wooden bars and bungalows behind.

There’s a Full Moon Party tonight.

It’s almost dark. Music is everywhere. The beaches and bars are scattered with backpackers. To the south is a small bar with a sand floor, tables running down the right, the bar to the left. It’s almost empty. That’s why I walked in.

Except it’s not quite empty. Four Thai men sit around a table. They’re slender and trim, slightly smaller than Europeans the way most Thai people are. Sweating bottles of Chang beer sit in front of them. One man has a long ponytail tied neatly back. His elbows rest on the table as he softly spits quick-fire whispers across it, punctuated with small emphatic gestures as tightly contained as the volume of his tirade. As he speaks he stares intently at the man opposite him, who hunches forward into this storm, arms tucked between his legs, leaving the table to the speaker in an unconscious act of submission. I notice all this in a glance and raise an eyebrow at the barman who returns the smallest of shrugs.

Thai people are renowned for their friendliness. Travel companies describe Thailand as a happy place, “the land of smiles.” That trite message completely misses the array of emotions a smile in Thailand can convey other than happiness. The barman doesn’t smile. Suddenly I’m very wary.

Into the bar bounds a Western guy just getting started on his backpacking adventure, to judge by his pasty skin. He’s leaking exuberance in anticipation of the night ahead. He’s massive. Six-and-a-half feet tall with shoulders like beer kegs, and full of friendly energy. He orders a handful of beers and with a broad grin notices the guys around the table as the barman reaches back for them. Just at that moment the speaker pokes a finger in the air as he snaps angrily at his counterpart. The backpacker’s grin doesn’t falter. “Hey guys, c’mon, don’t argue!” he shouts in response.

The guys at the table ignore him without a glance or breaking their conversation.

I try to catch his eye, but he’s already moving over to them. Not used to being ignored, and with an absolute confidence in his presence and the certainty that his good humor is infectious, he feels a sense of righteousness that carries him on in his intervention.

“Hey! C’mon, man” he scolds with a grin. “Quit arguing, dude. It’s the Full Moon Party!”

The table goes silent. The speaker looks up.

The backpacker pauses. Emboldened by finally managing to attract their attention, he throws his huge arms wide in a gesture of invitation. “Hey! C’mon, man, have a dr…”

In a flash, the speaker lunges out of his seat, smashes a bottle of Chang in hand, and pursues the backpacker onto the beach at top speed. The table empties as the other three guys and I follow.

The backpacker tears up the beach at breakneck speed, terror on his face as he casts frantic glances over his shoulder at the speaker flying a few strides behind, broken bottle pumping in his fist. Violent intent rolls off him in waves. The two disappear into the distance. The only indication of where they are is the herd of people craning their necks then stepping back as they run by. People are shouting now. The runners are heading back toward us. Some people laugh. There’s dark humor in the laughter. A tiny, murderous-looking Thai man is chasing one of the largest backpackers they’ve ever seen. The backpacker isn’t laughing. He’s running for his life, and on his face is the absolute certainty of knowing that the guy behind him isn’t laughing either.

They draw level with the bar; the backpacker is fading fast, and the speaker is closer. In a spray of sand, the backpacker sprawls to his knees, turns, and faces his pursuer. His mouth is open, chest sucking air, massive arms held in front of him, palms up. Eyes wide with fear.

“Sorry, man. Sorry! Please, I didn’t mean anything. Nothing. Sorry. Please!”

The speaker halts in front of him. He’s looking down, face twisted with rage, bottle loose in his fist, the jagged edges raw and dark. He glances at the group standing in front of the bar. Then he smiles.

The backpacker’s face rises from fear to relief.

But then the bottle is pressing against his neck. The speaker’s smile has gone. The backpacker freezes. People including me shout, “No!”

The speaker smiles again. He steps back, clips the backpacker around the ear and, still smiling, drops the bottle and walks back into the bar. His friends follow. I’m watching the backpacker, slumped on the sand, tears in his eyes. We help him up. He’s in shock, too ashamed to speak or look anyone in the eye, and mutters he’s fine as he stumbles away. I am shaking, too.

The sun went down fast. In the dark that night, as the music thumped and the SangSom flowed on the beach, my friends and I relived this most savage lesson. I couldn’t condone what the speaker did, but I understood him. He could not lose face in front of his peers. He wasn’t looking for trouble; it just walked up to his table. I also understood how a Westerner might expect a positive response to a friendly, good-humored scolding. The backpacker learned that in Thai society, some people will go to extraordinary lengths to save face. I learned that the world may seem small, but our cultural differences can be vast. Try to understand people, lest they surprise you with their smiles.

Taxidermista

Jon Tan — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Imagine: You’re in the Tate Modern. You enter one of the upper-floor galleries. The far wall is covered in pictures. People stand, hands clasped behind their backs, contemplating. Some pictures seem sparse, some muted, others rich with color. Some seem to be all text; others appear to have none. You walk closer and you realize they’re all pictures of websites. Frozen, in frames, on the wall.

You notice a sign set in VAG Rounded, from which the Tate logotype was derived, and you smile in recognition. But then your attention snaps back. Wait a second. Websites, in frames, on a wall.

The sign reads “Web Design Gallery.”

Unintended Consequences

Web design galleries have been with us for a long time. Hundreds of sites are added to them every day. They’re a common destination for many designers searching for inspiration. They aggregate our work, becoming the default archives of web design. When sites are changed or simply disappear, a gallery screenshot (or perhaps a screenshot in a portfolio) is often all that remains.

The best gallery was the CSS Zen Garden started by Dave Shea in 2003. Updates stopped in 2008. It had a specific purpose: A “demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design,” created in order to rebut a common misconception at the time that standards-based design was boring. It wasn’t just a set of static images. Each page was an exhibit, with identical HTML and text, but with CSS and images submitted by web designers. Only a few were selected to become official entries. The Zen Garden provided education and inspiration to prompt web designers to drop the familiar tables-based layouts and inline styles they were using—and it worked. In tandem with grassroots advocacy from all corners, increasing numbers of web designers embraced web standards. Web design reset itself to a simpler, more usable, more accessible mode.

Other galleries sprang up, mostly imitating the CSS Zen Garden with a requirement for table-less HTML and CSS, but with little or no curation. Then we started to be bludgeoned with blog posts full of so-called design inspiration with titles like “Thirty Awesome Minimalist Designs” and “Fifty Amazing Grunge Designs.” In contrast to the CSS Zen Garden, the web is now littered with galleries of all sizes that pay little more than lip service to web standards.

Command Shift 3 is an accidental parody of a web design gallery. It invites viewers to compare two randomly chosen sites at a time and decide which are hot or not. There’s something to be gleaned from our proclivities by viewing this gallery’s all-time best list. Sites with large format stock photography and rich illustrations feature heavily. The rediscovery and enthusiasm for typography is apparent. Votes motivated primarily by popularity, favoritism, or a sense of loyalty are manifest.

Today, the most common type of web design galleries are link farms and the web equivalent of trade magazines. They generate traffic by relying on designers who are looking for inspiration. The attention they attract is converted to advertising revenue. Most have almost no information about the work, just a screenshot, a credit to the designer, and a URL. We can visit the site if it still exists, but any celebration of the craft of web design is absent.

Galleries misrepresent web design as a state, not a process. They divorce what a site does from how it looks. They celebrate style and tone, not purpose.

By style I refer to genre. Web design is often a jumble of styles that unconsciously reference different movements and genres in art and design; they range from baroque to photorealistic, to modernist, postminimalist, and postmodern, and often give a nod to Americana.

Tone is emotional nuance. Emotions can be instantiated based on our prior conditioning but are often unconscious, automatic reactions. The emotional seat of our brain is the amygdala. It’s one of the oldest parts, known as the lizard brain. Instincts like fight or flight reside there. It can receive sensory input but the amygdala has no language. That means we can have an emotional reaction without words to something we see. So when we see a screenshot of a website, we can have an emotional reaction before we have words to describe it. We see this in our use of words and phrases such as lost for words, speechless, or dumbfounded. Sometimes, there are no words, just emotions—positive or negative.

By purpose I refer to the appropriateness of the style and tone. Do they fit the project? That question is rarely asked or answered by galleries. The only reaction galleries solicit is an emotional one. Like or don’t like. Hot or not.

And, We’re Live!

In this era of responsive, adaptive web design, APIs, and free-flowing data, websites are almost alive. We abandoned believing that they needed to look the same across all platforms when we realized that would be like expecting type to print identically on toilet roll and art paper. Websites now respond to the device and the viewport. They can be progressively enhanced. They are ripe with narrative possibility; they emerge and react as people use them to create content and interact with each other.

Websites are like places, not postcards. A postcard of Barcelona will never be the same as being in Barcelona’s Plaça Reial, hearing the noise, smelling the pungent odors of the Barri Gòtic, turning full circle by the fountain to catch glimpses between the palm trees of the clubs, bars, and restaurants under the arcades designed by Gaudí. Even a 360-degree interactive panoramic isn’t the same. Yet most design galleries don’t even give us that. They present us with postcards to be admired rather than places to be experienced. This leaves us dislocated from the atmosphere, the purpose, and the reality of what the designer created. We’re like people trying to hear a record by staring at its cover. The cover art may be beautiful in its own right, but it is not the music inside.

Client Misconceptions

Like designers, prospective clients also use galleries for inspiration and research. Some also delve into sites themselves and come up with preferred styles and features. However, in the same way that there used to be a misconception that standard-based methods made for boring websites, there’s a misconception among some clients that web design is like graphic design but with bits that move. The difference is, there is no CSS Zen Garden to help disabuse them of this belief.

It’s only natural that clients will do their own design research. They will make aesthetic judgments and have their own taste. However, it’s worth understanding the difference between the two: An aesthetic judgment is often inexplicable, like an emotional reaction; it’s instinctive and can defy explanation and resist attempts at persuasion. To the client, something is either beautiful or it is not. Taste is more rational and can evolve rationally based on an appreciation of what something is for, why it is designed in such a way, what the result will be, and even how it is made. In a good, collaborative client relationship, we should always be able to influence taste.

Sometimes, rather than asking us to provide solutions and answers, clients ask us to implement theirs instead. My Analog colleague, Chris Shiflett, likens it to clients who say they want a window in a wall when what they really want is to eat their breakfast in the sunshine.

The best designers educate clients and inform their tastes. They avoid clients who ask designers merely to implement the clients’ ideas, and they don’t promote the misconception that web design is graphic design with interactive bits. They reset the process to identify the audience, problems, questions, and opportunities of the project before researching or implementing solutions. They refuse to do spec work for free; this work is a costly and damaging legacy from advertising and print. For example, Edenspiekermann helps clients with their creative brief, but only proposes solutions after they’ve been engaged by the client. I work in the same way and believe we all should. Producing any material whatsoever that provides answers and solutions before engagement should not be part of what we do.

Galleries do not bear sole responsibility for how design is commissioned. However, they do encourage clients and designers to value style more than process. They do promote transient fashion over fit and make trends of movements such as minimalism or styles like grunge or the ubiquitous Apple®-inspired aesthetic. The answers to a project’s questions may have something to do with fashion, but not often. Good design does not have a shelf life. The best web designers gently disregard issues of style at the start. They rewind their clients back to asking the right questions, so they can rewrite the brief and understand the objectives before they propose solutions. After all, it’s impossible to design solutions that fit the job at hand if we don’t really know what the purpose or problem is.

Showing empathy for the audience is an essential part of what we do as a profession. The best designers advocate for users at every stage and realize the audience is the true client. However, there’s a flip side to empathy. By being empathic, designers are often informations sinks, absorbing influences from everywhere, and as a result they perhaps are even more susceptible to fashion. It means we all have to moderate, just a bit, our enthusiasm for the new. At the same time, we also must moderate our clients’ enthusiasm for solutions before process. By moderating both, we free ourselves to focus on process, to connect the dots between bits of inspiration, and to gain insight into how we might solve the problems at hand.

Designing Places Not Postcards

Galleries can offer us graphic design inspiration from colleagues. We aren’t graphic designers, though; we’re web designers. There is much more to what we do than combining typography, layout, photography, illustration, and color.

The images in galleries are like flat comps (comprehensive layouts). They encourage a feeling that comps have more value than they actually deserve. Comps are used in graphic design and advertising to present a proposed layout to clients.

Most web designers start by distilling their research and ideas with notes and sketches, either on paper or in pixels. Sketches often evolve into hi-resolution comps in applications such as Photoshop® or Fireworks®, or wireframes in OmniGraffle®, Keynote®, or Powerpoint®. They’re useful for mocking up a design while bearing the final medium in mind, but they aren’t the end of the story. At the most basic level, the two commonly used graphics applications I mentioned both use their own text rendering engine, so even the ability to preview type is not truly accurate.

Collaboration between designers and developers is crucial to the final product. Throwing a Photoshop comp over the fence into the arms of a front-end developer is not optimal, no matter how neatly annotated and layered it is. I call it a throw-over. It is the most likely point of failure. Substituting collaboration with a post-production review almost always means more revisions. Throw-overs rely heavily on web designers knowing the technical opportunities and limitations of the medium, and on front-end developers having as much skill in design as the designers themselves.

The same goes for wireframes thrown to a graphic designer or front-end developer. Wireframes are not a website. They could be considered hi-res interaction comps if annotated properly, but they still rely on graphic designers and front-end developers delivering the vision of the user experience designer, and the UX designer knowing the medium well.

The web designer’s role is to design a website that meets the objectives of the project. Though we are often not the ones configuring server environments, building server-side components, or even building the interface itself, as designers it’s our vision that will meet the objectives. If we assume that role of meeting project objectives, effectively we are product managers, and, as such, we have to see the project all the way through to becoming a product.

Whether we work within a team or independently, our understanding of the audience, context, and medium is critical in order to effectively design for them. Galleries don’t show objectives; they don’t show the context of the project or the cognitive, behavioral, and technical grammar of the web. Without those components, a website might as well be frozen pixels, in a browser chrome, on a screen.

Designers for the Web

In every respect, we have defined our own profession out of the many disciplines needed to make websites. In between making them, we are constantly augmenting and refining what we do and trying to find the language to explain it.

I call us web-taught because that’s what we are. In 1991, when I was experimenting with plate and press and musing with my brother on this new thing called web design, there were no degrees in web design. They may exist now in some form, but the vast majority of us are still self-taught. We are constantly asking why we do something in a certain way, not just what we should do, or how we should do it, and we freely share what we learn. We see the necessity of combining our creativity with pragmatism, realizing that we must make sites that work—for us, for the client, for the visitor—if we are to be paid. And yet, we’ve managed to imbue our practice with an abiding sense of responsibility for the universality of the web (as Tim Berners-Lee described it). That makes it even more important that the archives of our work contain more than just images.

The founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, described himself as an “80 percenter.” In 2007, Dan Cederholm suggested that, as a web designer, he was an 80 percenter, too. I think I am, and many web designers are. We throw ourselves at a discipline to reach an 80-percent proficiency in a variety of skills our work requires. By being 80-percent proficient in the subsets of web design, we can get very close to achieving 100-percent proficiency in web design itself.

More and more, the range of skills we need in order to make websites are distributed across the members of a team. To design interfaces that work in the best possible way, everyone needs at least a rudimentary understanding of what everyone else does and an abiding dedication to this medium we all work with. Molly Holzschlag referred to silos of thought at Web Essentials in 2005. Molly imagined our knowledge as a T shape: a broad familiarity across many disciplines but deep expertise in one. Molly nailed it. And by doing so, she neatly illustrated how a variety of effort goes into making every website.

Redux

Tucked away in the north corner of the Plaça Reial in the shadows of the arcade is a restaurant called Taxidermista. I remember it as a beautiful place to sit, eat, and watch the world go by on a balmy evening in one of Europe’s most iconic plazas. It’s changed a lot from the taxidermy workshop that used to be there. Except for the Wayback Project and still-functioning sites, the galleries serve as the primary archive of our work, and they are like taxidermists, preserving websites by stuffing them into screenshots. It’s time to realign or reinvent how we archive our work.

One day I’d like to walk into a gallery in the Tate Modern and see the improbable: A scattering of old devices running old browsers on old operating systems serving websites of a bygone era from antiquated server architectures to tiny screens at low resolution. The designers may cringe a little—in the way all of us do at some of our old work—but for me it would be a joy to see, touch, and experience. In much the same way we marvel at the achievements of game designers working with 8 kb of memory, I think we’d marvel at what our peers achieved with an early web browser and a 640 by 480 resolution display.

Until that rather optimistic imaginary exhibit exists, I’d settle for galleries that annotate, explain, and act as a guide to a place, even if the only visual artifact is a screenshot. Many designers already write about their work. I’d like us all to try to work out ways to tell the stories of websites, so that we honor the craft of everything we do. I’d like to know what a website is for, what went into making it, how it was built, who collaborated to make it so, but most of all why the design evolved to be as it is. In our offline lives, we can be mentally transported to a place by reading about it, and we can even enhance our physical visit to a place by reading about it. I’d like us to offer ourselves and our clients the same opportunity when visiting these websites, these places. We should start with our portfolios; after all, they should be the best galleries. Perhaps as we refine how we archive and exhibit web design, we will also foster a better understanding of our profession for aspiring web designers, our clients, and each other.

Lesson

Frank Chimero — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The smell of burnt coffee and copier toner saturated the small room off the computer lab on the fifth floor of the university’s alumni center. In the feast of creativity, this is where we broke our bread. The design department was a few blocks further downtown, ostracized from the main campus. We were shoved up to the top of the building like a team of astronauts in quarantine. We were excluded. Then we were forgotten. A harsh atmosphere for education? No. We quickly learned that if you’re forgotten, you can do whatever you wish. We were free; encouraged to be reckless and boisterous. We were treated as humans and co-designers by our teachers rather than as mere students.

I was waiting in the spare room outside his office hoping for one last opinion of my portfolio before heading out to present it to the design world. This was my coming-out party; my portfolio was going to be my master stroke to land the best internship I could between my junior and senior years of school. We’re all stupid at twenty-one, thinking that humanity is waiting with bated breath for our emergence into the world of commerce and responsibility. Truth be told, it doesn’t care. We think it will gasp. Instead, it yawns.

I peered through a gap in a window tiled with postcards from previous exhibitions of his work. He was on the phone but made eye contact and waved me in, motioning with his hand to sit. We had a long history: I had taken six classes with him, and in the next year I would take three more. Our communication had a shorthand—general gesticulations that meant tighten it up or loosen your marks, think harder or, at worst, “Start over, Frank, what the hell are you doing trying to play this off as work?” He was a stern practitioner and I thrived on it. This was the first teacher whose standards for my work were higher than my own. He pushed, and pushed hard. Other students broke, they cried, they dropped the classes. They villainized him. Not me. He wasn’t impossible to please, but he wasn’t happy until you forced yourself one step beyond what you were comfortable doing. No half-measures allowed. If you tried like hell, he mirrored your efforts. If you emptied yourself onto the page, he would empty himself out for you.

He motioned to the blank space in front of him on his desk and signaled me to place my portfolio there. He wedged the phone receiver between his shoulder and ear and uttered the occasional “Yes.” “Right.” “Uh-huh.” He started quickly flipping through the book. Most of the work he had seen before; I was especially interested to see his response to the projects he had not. He turned to one. “Yep. Oh, that’s great. Yes. Yah.” I pretended he was saying that about my project and not to the person on the other end of the call.

He finished going through my work, and said into the phone, “Janet, could you hold on for a moment?” He covered the receiver with his hand, and I leaned forward in my chair. “You know, Frank, after looking at this…” My eyes widened. Okay, here we go. Finally, some honest feedback. Something other than “looks great.”

“Needs more love,” he said to me. “Okay, Janet, I’m back. Sorry for that, just have a student in here.” He waved his hand to shoo me out of his office. He wished me well on my trip and said that he would see me next week in class. He smiled.

“Needs more love.” Best damn advice I’ve ever gotten. You can keep your practicality and your action items and your take-aways. You can have your instructional advice, your recipes, your prescribed steps to fulfillment, and your ladder-climbing. I’ve got this: this little gem of insight from a man who taught me so much. The only thing that matters is that we care more than we already do about the people and places and projects that we give our time and attention. We’ve got to believe in the stuff.

And, you know? I can forget everything else I ever learned from him and just keep this. I can lose my portfolio, I can lose my clients, my motivation for the work; I can lose my bluster, my attitude, my point of view, my aesthetic. I can lose a million dollars and every client I’ve ever had or could ever hope to get. I can quit design, I can never speak of typography again, I can never put words to another page. I can lose my memory, I can lose myself. All of it can disappear in the next second, and it won’t matter.

I’ve got this. “Needs more love.”

The Space Between You and Me

Frank Chimero — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process.

— Jaron Lanier¹

Specks. All of them, even from just seven stories up. We’re on the roof, and you can’t hear what they’re saying. You can’t see what they’re wearing, or the looks on their faces. You can’t see if someone is holding a shopping bag or what may be in it. A red dab follows closely behind a yellow dab. Seven stories up and I can’t tell the difference between a kid being dragged along by his arm and a woman being held at gunpoint for her purse. Distance makes the world blurry. There are no identities. There is no vocabulary. The only language is velocity. They are a school of fish swimming through pavement.

It takes seven stories to strip away the humanity of an individual, 143 steps, each one a degree of separation. No longer people, they are dots on a canvas. Remove a person’s humanity, and she is just a curiosity, a pinpoint on a map, a line in a list, an entry in a database. A person turns into a granular bit of information.

Information can be manipulated. Jesse drapes his head over the lip of the rooftop. He nods and pulls a quarter out of his pocket. He glances back and forth between me and the coin in his hand. He’s looking for permission, and he’s not going to get it from me. He knows that, but it doesn’t matter; he can do what he wants. It’s just information.

Jesse spies an empty parking space directly in front of the building. He presses his middle finger tightly against his thumb with the coin wedged between, and he snaps. The quarter leaps from his hand outward over the street scene, spinning on an invisible axis. Gravity eventually grabs the coin, and it finds its way into the empty parking spot with an assumed rattle and kerrang. Just silence from up here.

Information can be manipulated. Jesse looks at me and nods, this time not for permission, but rather in recognition of what is about to happen. We watch like kids at the aquarium when bait is dropped in the tank. We wait.

The specks on the ground stop. They rotate. The bits bump into one another. Some bits begin to oscillate around the coin’s final landing spot. A small blue dot accelerates toward the coin, then pauses, presumably to pick it up. Behavior has been modified. Jesse looks back at me pleased, as if he were a deity from above, observing how the world reacted when Zeus lazily lobbed his lightning bolt from the mountain top. I imagine the scene from the ground. The bits are looking toward the sky asking, “What the hell was that?”

But Jesse is wrong. We are no gods, and this rooftop is no Olympus. Faith isn’t necessary: they can see us perched on the roof. We are seven stories up; we are hazy specks to them. Jesse is a blue bit, I am red. To them, we are not human. Just information. It only takes seven stories.

A scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.

At the end of the lecture, an elderly woman at the back of the room said, “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really flat, supported on the back of a giant tortoise.”

The scientist smiled and replied, “What is the tortoise standing on?”

“You’re very clever, young man,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down.”

Annie is fidgeting in her office chair at a tiny desk with a monitor on top. We’re sitting in a haphazard home office that looks like it’s been converted from a spare bedroom. “You’ve got to hope there’s someone out there for you, as strange as you are,” she tells me as she pushes her hands through her hair. “And, I don’t know. So much has happened over the past year, and I just need something to go my way for once. I need something good to happen to me, otherwise I’m not sure I can keep going. And…” She looks down and smiles the smallest smile she can make, hoping I won’t notice. “I think this could be it.”

Annie lives at home with her mother, Mary. Mary was a fourth-grade teacher, but her students used to call her Mrs. Blankenship. Some days Mrs. Blankenship can’t remember her own name because she has Alzheimer’s disease. A year and a half ago, Annie’s father died, and her mother’s Alzheimer’s became progressively worse. Annie now lives with her mother in the house she grew up in, tending to the cat and walking the hallways like she’s there by herself. “It’s like living with a ghost,” she says. She is choking up, because she knows that saying that is cruel. Her mother is still here and yet, somehow, not. Earlier, Annie showed me a photo of herself in high school. “It’s embarrassing, really,” she said. “That’s how she sees me.”

Mrs. Blankenship believes that Annie is still sixteen rather than thirty-one. “The situation is really fragile, so I play along. The worst thing would be to make Mom upset.” Annie the thirty-one-year-old has a curfew of nine pm and isn’t allowed to date boys. And that is why we’re sitting at her desk staring at her monitor waiting for something good to happen.

A window pops up on her screen with a ringing sound. Someone is calling Annie. “This could be it,” I say to myself. It’s Brandon and I excuse myself from the room to wander the halls as Mrs. Blankenship sleeps in the next room. The cat rubs against my leg.

Later that night, Annie introduces me to Brandon over the computer, and he and I make plans to get together for coffee at his place the next day. Brandon has an apartment in the city thirty minutes away and a job working as a legal assistant. He tells me he met Annie on a dating website eight weeks ago. “There’s a certain guilt browsing a dating website because for it to be useful you just have to say no over and over.” I nod but don’t say anything in the hope that he’ll add more. An awkward silence.

“Under 5′2″? No. Blonde? No. No college degree? No. There’s a ticker at the bottom of the page that shows how many results come back after the filter. Mine said about 2,000. Two thousand people I could love. Probably 14,000 more that it didn’t even show me. And yet still, these are all people. They are all looking back, and they want the same thing I do.” He looks down at his black coffee and I notice that he can see himself in it.

“What do they want, Brandon?”

He pauses a moment to think. “To be understood.”

Brandon scrolls through the webpage for me, and it is overwhelming: a cascade of smiles, an immense tide of humanity that goes on forever. The distance makes you forget that these are real people, not just pictures. They secretly love something they can’t tell anyone about. They live for the moment they hold their breath and submerge their head in a warm bath. They are human. On the site, each and every person in the grid of faces has a smile that admits, “I am not yet done.”

I have to shut myself off. My heart is not big enough to hold them all.

“Have you heard the joke about the astronomer’s lecture and the turtle?” Brandon asks.

“Yeah, turtles all the way down, right?” I reply.

“Yes. Scrolling through this page, I never realized it before, but the web. It’s just people all the way down, isn’t it?”

I hadn’t thought of it. The best sorts of insights are like that. When you hear them, they seem so obvious, but until someone says them out loud, they are almost unthinkable.

Let’s just try to have a marvelous time this weekend. I mean not try to analyze everything to death for once, if possible. Especially me. I love you.

— Franny²

A network is a connection of nodes. The history of our network has been a study in how the edges have pushed further out. First our network was for small bits of data transmission. It was for correspondence: short, awkward messages of text sent mostly to people you didn’t know. They were the only people out there; the only nodes who could signal us back, who could answer. Then, the edges pushed out, and the network could share images, and then it crept into other media.

Every shared item became replicated. A full and perfect copy of the content was produced every time it changed hands. All of the copies filled up the room and made waves of content that could be surfed. Then, the network became social. The nodes started talking to one another in much the same way they did outside of the network, and we created a world parallel to that of the real fabric that joined the nodes in physical space.

The nodes are not technology. The web is not an interlinking of servers and scripts. Each node is a person. Tanya checks her email on her phone and gets a message from her sister. Brad is the systems admin guy who turns on the oscillating fans in the server room. Qian assembles an iPhone at the Foxconn plant in Shenzen. Shannon writes something for her employer’s website. Tim curses because he can’t find what Shannon wrote. Larry and Sergey make a website so people like Tim can find the things that people like Shannon make. Every little bit that gets pushed through the network passes through a person. The web is technology, but more importantly, it is people, all the way down. People constitute and maintain the network. It is widespread and distributed, but it is very delicate. Like a real web, it needs constant maintenance to keep from tearing.

Technology is a mirror and a crystal ball. The web is a reflection of our desires because it addresses our needs en masse. It is a documentation of how we try to fix ourselves, a study in our self-medication. The web is also a crystal ball because it presents what is to come. Technology is produced to fill our needs, but we are sympathetic creatures. Frequently, we will reduce our needs to feel that the technology is properly serving us, in spite of the inadequacies of the solutions. A half answer is better than nothing at all, and we wish to be satisfied with the solutions at hand, so we shallow our problems, losing sight of their original depth. We shape technology, and it shapes us.

And so our relationship with the social web has gone thus far. It seems silly to say that a network of people may induce person-blindness, but it can and does each day. If the web is a representation of the fabric of humanity, it is a thin veil draped over all of us. The way the web is currently wired accidentally strips the nodes of their personhood because of distance and turns them into odd, person-like entities. Jesse flings his coin from the rooftop.

It is a struggle to stay human online: avatars of logos (or the very term avatar); the phrase personal brand; descriptions of the whole of your existence in a little flashing, empty box labeled About Me. The social networks that connect us as people accidentally reduce us. Odd that the totality of a person’s profile need be described through a list of favorite books, movies, and quotes. Is what I like more important than what I think or what I make or who I love? Is it that people aren’t willing to describe themselves as people online. Or is it that we aren’t providing a suitable framework for them to do so? We perceive the situation to be technology mirroring our disposition, but it is more a shallowing of ourselves via the crystal ball.

When the nodes cease to be human, we respond differently. A person with reasons becomes a detached opinion that is wrong; actions become annoyances to lash out against; the personality of an individual becomes a brand without context. Can providing the human element to the web alleviate these problems? The web documents and doesn’t forget, but if users turn into people, can we forgive? Forgiveness is a term I’ve never heard in relation to the web. Let’s not try to analyze everything to death for once. Especially me. I love you.

The connections we make in the course of a life—maybe that’s what heaven is, Tom. We make so many connections here on earth. Look at us—I’ve just met you, but I’m investing in who you are and who you will be, and I can’t help it.

— Fred Rogers (Mr. Rogers)³

When the network became social, it was dumb. It lacked nuance. The social network was based on our idea of ourselves and technology. When we think of ourselves, we picture our complex inner monologues: we believe that we are not simple but rather complex, romantic, self-contradicting—beautiful messes. We say this is what makes us human. But what if we’re wrong? What if we pull back the veil to discover that perhaps we are not so complex, but instead we are the opposite?

Technology runs counter to our personhood; technology is complicated and shallow, but people are simple and deep. Our true needs are not complex. I remembered asking Brandon what everyone needed. His answer was profound and human: “To be understood.”

The most exceptional inventions forecast our needs and allow us to realize our full potential. They bring us joy and a sense of brilliance; they make us feel skilled, competent, and more able. Good technology makes us feel like we are inching closer to who we truly want to be. The web has done much to improve our lives, and now it turns its head toward our emotional needs. If it does its job, it can help us to get to Brandon’s idea of being understood: that cyclical process of empathy where one may feel seen, known, and accepted by others, then able to feel the same for them.

Art is the first man-made conduit to this cycle of understanding. The measure of an artist is his ability to place his finger on the face of a feeling; a masterpiece acts as a lens whose focus crystallizes our selves, one another, the world. Can our social network achieve the same? Are our tools adequate for a true art of conversation? Most importantly, have we produced a proper representation of humanity for these conversations or a simplified facsimile?

Anything good we may do with this network must be built in a way that utilizes the fabric that binds us, that brings us closer so that our humanness may snap back into focus by eliminating distance. We are all swaddled in the same blanket. By recognizing that, we inch closer to being understood.

We might forget too easily that these nodes, these usernames, are in fact people. People deserve more than the term username; they’ve earned a richer biography than a series of labels or a list of favorite movies. We must not allow interactions online to be perpetually stuck in the conversational depth of a first date. We can shun complex and shallow and embrace simple and deep.

We are not there, and yet, I have hope. We can make conduits for meaningful relationships, like the one Annie and Brandon might have. We can feel understood. Jesse and I can come down from the roof. We may empathize and be closer. We, the makers and form-givers of these new technologies, can look someone in the eye and ask “How can I make things that help you to be who you truly want to be?”

See, I’ve just met you, but I am invested in who you are. We are part of a human network. Maybe that’s heaven.

Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, (Vintage Books, 2011). ↩
JD Salinger, Franny and Zooey, (Little, Brown and Company, 1961). ↩
Tom Junod, “Can You Say…Hero?” (Esquire, November, 1998). ↩

Lesson

Simon Collison — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The university’s Faculty of Art and Design wasn’t known as the premier art school, and I certainly hadn’t intended to study there. But my first and second choice institutions had refused me, so north I sped, up the A1 to capture my final chance at a fine art degree.

I’d been a studious yet directionless artist, but just recently I’d begun to flirt with abstract painting, which I’d eventually practice with proficiency. Two weeks before my interview, I’d managed to produce three canvases successful enough to ensure my acceptance. I sailed through the inquisition and was offered a place immediately. The following autumn, I left home to study in the North East of England.

My problem at art school, alongside the fact that student hedonism had become for the most part much more important to me than education, was that I drew artistic inspiration from the landscape. The tutors considered this thread of the grand art narrative uncool, imbued with romanticism, and at odds with the trends of the time.

These tutors were an aloof and passionless bunch, clearly more interested in their own flatlining art careers than in molding forty or so dilettantes into worthy professionals. They taught me very little and were dubious and unsupportive of my line of inquiry. One once told me, “You do realize that you’ll never have an exhibition, don’t you?”

Illumination commonly came from the visiting lecturers, many of whom were truly successful in their fields, something I always felt the regular tutors resented. For me, these one-on-one meetings were a rare opportunity to sit with an inspirational figure and dreamily imagine how successful I myself could be in years to come.

One day, a world-renowned, widely respected artist walked into my studio space. At fifty-one years of age, gray and bearded, with a kind yet rugged face, he looked wise and thoughtful and made an instant impression on the twenty-one-year-old me.

This man was Ian Breakwell: diarist, painter, collagist, filmmaker, performer, broadcaster, and writer. He was in the North East fulfilling the prestigious role of artist-in-residence at Durham Cathedral. He was the most accomplished person I’d ever met.

Breakwell was born in Derbyshire, four miles across the county border from where I grew up in Nottinghamshire. He pulled up a chair and sat with me for half an hour, and I recall that we bonded over our similar accent and mild disregard for the insignificant small towns where we each grew up. He then asked me to talk about my work, specifically my direction and motivation.

Initially speaking only occasionally to encourage me, he listened intently, all the while making notes on a scrap of paper.

Breakwell understood that I wasn’t trying to create a romanticized view of the landscape and that my interest was more about journeys, geology, and what we learn about ourselves by immersion in the wilderness.

“What you’re doing is interesting,” he said, as I remember it. “And you should enjoy the fact that it’s at odds with what everyone else in this building is doing.”

This was a significant breakthrough for me. I listened intently as he began to throw more ideas and suggestions my way. Leaning forward as the feedback became increasingly focused, he proffered logical and enlightening suggestions for where I should take my work and how I could draw upon specific influences to better understand my own intentions.

At the end of our meeting, Breakwell passed me the handwritten notes he’d scribbled down. The result was a list of artists whose approaches continue to inspire me today, along with specific references to books and exhibition catalogs. This marked a turning point in my methods of inquiry and thought processes; I learned to narrow my research and to delve deeper into the minds of creative people in order to better understand their own motivations and ways of thinking.

Fast forward to 2003, and after several years of exhibitions and reasonable success, I’d all but abandoned making art as my web career began to flourish. Despite the change of discipline, the way I approach creative output still has its foundations in that meeting almost a decade earlier. In 2005, when I read that Breakwell had died, his passing affected me deeply.

I was, however, delighted to see him receive deserved acknowledgment in the broadsheets. In a thorough obituary for the Independent newspaper, Jeremy Lewison describes Breakwell as a man who “saw the extraordinary in the ordinary.” This was surely meant as a reflection on the artist’s own work, but I like to think this was also something Breakwell hoped to find in the people he encountered. That’s not to say that he considered me extraordinary, but in one short meeting this great man had looked beyond that which others saw and recognized value and potential in what I wanted to achieve.

When I think of such pivotal meetings, they are often serendipitous encounters that continue to resonate with me regardless of where life takes me. They give me guidance that I take everywhere, informing my values and subliminally shaping my choices. Without this collection of lessons, I’d probably be bereft of the motivation and purpose that I hope make me a worthwhile designer at this stage in my life.

Maturity and the Weight of Learning

Simon Collison — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Beneath the streets of a characterful city, we gathered in a characterless basement. No windows, faulty air conditioning, barely enough space to hold the assembled designers, developers, and client team, yet this was an opportunity to work alongside a number of respected practitioners on a once-in-a-lifetime project.

Following lengthy client presentations, the first opportunity to respond was a short breakout session for personal brainstorming—an exercise to help us each explore how we might approach the complex task ahead.

Most of us remained seated with notepads and laptops. The exception was a designer who stood up from his chair and plastered the wall with large sheets of paper. Armed with colored markers and an acute sense of purpose, he spent thirty minutes sketching his way along the wall, identifying patterns and starting points, never hesitating, always drawing.

The sheets held no written words, just lines, shapes, forms, colors. Initially, this almost frenetic scribbling appeared idiosyncratic, erratic, perhaps even arrogant. In fact, as proven by his eloquent explanation as we reconvened, it was structured, considered, and methodical. The entire room seemed in awe. To watch someone on top of his game is thrilling. You understand just why some people are regarded so highly by their peers and why their output is so consistently strong.

Here was a designer tackling the problem with a dizzyingly impressive combination of knowledge, confidence, and instinct. Now, confidence and instinct (whether born of experience or natural talent) are all very well, but I was fascinated by the obvious depth of knowledge that informed this designer’s response.

Strengths And Values

As part of this epiphany, I considered what distinguishes the great from the good, or what makes some designers more equipped than others. I concluded that they often inquire beyond the necessary to explore other areas, look at things differently, and bring these findings back into their work.

To progress and to create work of substance or even greatness, we each must start by knowing our values, our strengths, and the level of expertise we seek. Understanding this helps us navigate the choppy seas of that glut of information found out there on the web and to sharply define our course through it. The great designers have found a way to continue to learn, yet focus on what they love.

The Weight of Learning

In her wonderful article, “The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything,” Linda Holmes looks at how we manage the weight of information and possibilities available to us through what she calls culling and surrendering. By culling, we decide that certain things are not worth our time, so we rule them out. When surrendering, however, we acknowledge that it isn’t possible to study most of what we’d like to learn, so we choose which lovely subjects to give up.

I choose not to care about things like fine wines, obscure programming languages, and fiction about elves and goblins, so I cull those topics. But I also surrender things that fascinate me, like technology. As someone who still marvels at the concept of radio, I’m not versed in the complete history of the microchip. Likewise, if I try to think about the scale of the universe, it breaks my brain. The upside of this is that technology and the universe are boiled down into a simple concept: they are made of magic. That’s all I need for now.

Our industry is growing so quickly and splintering into so many fragments that we increasingly find a need to specialize and reduce the number of areas in which we might be considered experts or even competent. Knowing our strengths and values helps us cull, surrender, and then understand where we should focus. To attempt mastery of everything inevitably makes us mediocre in many areas. I’m not interested in being a mediocre Rails programmer, just as I don’t seek to have a mediocre understanding of the universe.

As a designer often working in collaborative situations, I need a little knowledge of what other members of the team can contribute. But that’s all I need: a basic understanding. I might want more, but what I need is enough. I cull and surrender; then I focus on my strengths, mastering my core skills and studying other fields and subjects that will enrich and deepen my work and give me insight. This defines my path as a designer and fulfills my desire to develop my craft in a meaningful way.

The Value of Craftsmanship

In his book The Craftsman, Richard Sennett proposes that craftsmanship is a basic human impulse: the desire to do a job well for its own sake. Sennett sees this as a core value, one available to every person working on the web. So the question is: Do I want to simply make a living and move from project to project building websites and getting things done, or do I want to imbue my every process with the skill, integrity, and value of a true craftsman?

Think of the meticulous and careful pushing of individual pixels, or the process of hand-coding. I often consider how automation is robbing us of the knowledge that craftsmanship requires. If I choose, I can load a web-based generator and animate every conceivable CSS3 trick with some dirty copy/paste code. But by doing so, I fail to understand exactly what is happening in that process and how I can apply craftsmanship to manipulate the details and in turn create something more thoughtful, nuanced, or even extraordinary.

Craftsmen and craftswomen discover through doing: honing their skills over a significant period of time with substantial commitment. They understand the importance of mistakes, and while they are prepared to throw away perhaps 70 percent of what they do in pursuit of the magical 30 percent, they still see that the entire 100 percent is important. Our hope, as we work, is that peers, clients, and audiences will appreciate good craftsmanship amidst the vastness of indifference and thoughtless production by numbers. Craftsmanship makes our work more meaningful to us. It also spreads the perception that our profession is valuable and even irreplaceable.

The Immature View of Tools

One of the biggest mistakes we make is to lean on the tools of our trade or make our work about these tools. What we do is not about tools—whether programming languages, software, browsers, or mobile devices. Tools are the scaffold for what we produce, the enablers; they help us bring our ideas to fruition. But robbed of our favorite tools, we’d still manage to achieve our design goals. Did the designer in that basement limit himself in that session by worrying if the CMS could do X or Y? Of course not. His physical tools were markers and sheets of paper.

Tools are secondary. As Oliver Reichenstein tweeted, “The tool doesn’t make the craftsman. Choosing the right tool for the right purpose is a technical and personal choice.” What designers do is solve problems and enhance communication—whether to the largest possible audience or to a specific audience—and seek emotive responses and actions. To reduce the impact of communication because we feel constrained by our tools or, conversely, to throw in a dozen clever CSS3 tricks just because we can is to lose sight of our responsibility as designers. Fluency with some tools can mask, at least in the short term, deficiencies in our design education, process, or talent.

It is a human instinct to want to investigate, to know why, and to create something significant or lasting; we learn, we grow, and we transcend the mundanity and limitations of tools.

The Creative Need For Inquiry

Truly creative people have an unswerving need to inquire into their craft more deeply. Simply performing the core tasks admirably day by day is rarely satisfaction enough. They desire to broaden their influences, draw upon wider fields of knowledge, make connections and discoveries, and find new outcomes.

The subject matter will vary, but often this inquiry is a single vision and an ongoing fascination with a core subject that informs personal side projects, frameworks, books, and presentations. To proceed without such inquiry is to be a drone unlikely to advance to more meaningful and rewarding work. These individual lines of inquiry are what will, more than anything else, drive us to develop greater maturity in the discipline of web design.

My Own Line of Inquiry

Since watching that designer draw all over those walls, I revisited much of what I’d learned at art school and immersed myself in the theories behind the creative process. I rediscovered my passion for the analytical, the process of informed decision-making, the importance of patterns, and the beauty of visual grammar.

We can learn a great deal from the visual grammar found in virtually all successful creative work, whether art, architecture, film, furniture design, industrial or graphic design—the list goes on. To best understand why this visual grammar matters, we can look at our close cousins, graphic and product design, and what they tell us about distribution, form, pattern, texture, repetition, color, white space, and typography.

Informing design of all kinds is a rich alphabet of components such as line and point, structure, color, shapes, rhythm, and movement. These elements form a visual language rather than a verbal one, and we use it to shape our messages. The grammar of this vocabulary assists us in finding balance, forming effective composition, understanding interactions, identifying patterns, discovering starting points, and deciding how to approach problems. The graphic designer uses the syntax of this language to communicate.

This grammatical scaffold matters because of the way we humans communicate—how we receive and interpret information. Understanding more about how we perceive meaning can help web designers make smarter decisions. Design is certainly not a science, but coupling visual grammar with the science behind semiotics, mental models, human senses, and emotional response provides us with a far stronger approach to our work than making choices because they just feel right. Making arbitrary decisions can lead to wonderful outcomes, but why rely entirely upon chance? What happens when you hit a wall and need to make informed decisions?

We all agree that the web is not print. Yet, despite working with an interactive canvas, we’d be foolish to abandon solid ways of thinking without good reason. These days, I think more analytically about symmetries, depth, affordance, juxtaposition, balance, economy, and reduction. I now pay greater attention to the principles of structure in order to be more efficient with wireframes, layouts, composition. Over time and with experience, the study (whether self-directed or formal) of these principles can become second nature. We can learn these principles and then forget them because they’ve become a muscle memory of a sort; they seamlessly merge with our creative process. There’s a massive chasm between that type of forgetting and never learning these principles in the first place.

Building the Lexicon of the Web

Though I value what we have appropriated from graphic design—and the parallels are many—I would never advocate the wholesale adoption of terminology from another discipline. There is that which we can and should use. Yet, we are also tasked with moving beyond what is available in graphic design’s vocabulary, refining and redefining it, and also creating terminology of our own so that our vocabulary applies to the uniqueness of what we do on the web and the challenges and changes we encounter or invent there.

The maturity of our lexicon matters if we want to do more effective work, communicate clearly with one another and with clients, and build respect for our profession. We rely heavily on our instincts or sensibilities when evaluating our work. That works well for some, but usually best for those who’ve studied why some things work and some don’t and have the vocabulary to think it through. We’ve made great progress moving our industry forward, but we’ve been a bit neglectful of the vocabulary that would enable us to be better at helping, teaching, and critiquing each other—or explaining our choices to those outside our field. A mature lexicon is also a hallmark of a mature profession. Immaturity is glaring; it attracts disrespectful, dismissive, or demanding clients; a life of compromise; lower pay; and the honor of being first to be fired when a company goes through economic hard times.

I believe we share this responsibility to expand our existing lexicon. The task begins with earnestly studying our roots in graphic design and related fields. It then requires taking stock of the unique elements of designing for interaction so we can better articulate what is ours.

For example, Ethan Marcotte’s term responsive web design is a successful addition to our vocabulary. It elegantly describes the unique interactions within what we create and successfully defines the parameters of a specific way of working that can evolve regardless of the tools or devices we use many years from now. The responsive approach to design and architecture is nothing new, yet Ethan has looked back at existing principles, understood how these apply to what we do on the web, and applied the all-important name. When we have the right words, we can begin to say the right things.

The terms responsive and adaptive are distinct yet related and have evolved naturally from outdated web-based layout terminology (such as liquid and elastic) as we redefine what web design is and how it is viewed across a myriad of devices.

Later in The Manual, Dan Rubin will explore and uproot the concept of the page and how the use of this word affects our work. This is a craftsman following his line of inquiry to better understand a problem. He helps us refine our working vocabulary; we can then have sharper conversations about our practice and be inspired to turn other assumptions on their heads.

Cull, Surrender, But Always Learn

We can each strengthen our work by revisiting these foundations. If we are designers, we should each know the principles of graphic design inside out. Beyond that, we cull and surrender and—despite this sifting process—we will still find much to study that will bring intelligence and insight to our work. We might expand our education about the history, art, and craft of type design and typography. We could explore disciplines which are one step away: architecture, photography, painting, book design, and other fields with solid vocabularies, both visual and verbal. We each have the energy and time (yes, we really do) to pursue our own related passions, share our findings, and help the discipline of web design reach full maturity.

Some argue that this investigation into traditional and modern visual grammar and knowledge of terminology is unnecessary, saying that for many designers courage of conviction—essentially, winging it—is enough. But, aside from a sort of defensive resentment of education, which rarely makes for a strong argument, they’ve forgotten that design and art are two different things. All design has a job to do; so too does web design.

Education (self-directed or formal) will inevitably enhance any natural talent and help us do our jobs more effectively as will learning to be critical thinkers. Just as earlier voices advocated web standards and called for order amidst the chaos, we, too, should take the next step, calling for the definition and backbone of the design in web design that will continue the maturation of our profession.

I no longer consider the web to be young or markedly immature—it is established and is integral to a modern, functioning society. Communication between real people is our reason for being here. Basically, we are the web. We are the makers, the explorers, the end users. Let’s be smart about our decisions and directions, let’s work communally to gain respect in the world (the very world we’re changing), and let’s stand on the shoulders of those who came before us or who work alongside us to shape a discipline that helps us all work with confidence, intelligent experimentation, and, at times, even brilliance.