We’re tight. We talk about Beethoven, the glory of the 17th century novel, slivovitz, and women.
I’m still waiting for George Orwell to confirm details of how we know each other. I wonder if he’s read any of my stuff . . .
I just learned that Michelangelo spent of a total of four years of his life in the quarries of Carrara. (The smart move would be to do the pretentious white guy thing and say, “this morning I was reminded of a tidbit from art history”, but . . . I’d get caught.)
Anyway, biographers piecing together his pre-40 life have added up all his visits to the quarries and they total four years. During that time, he oversaw the cutting of pieces of marble he would use and just hung around in an area that he thought was beautiful talking to the stonecutters, observing marble in different lights throughout the day, learning different properties of the material.
This is working deep at the bottom of the T. Calling Michelangelo or Leonardo a t-shaped person seems awful. But, in an age where we are celebrating generalism, calling everyone a creative, and craving constant innovation, it seems important to remember how great artists stay great, Michelangelo at the quarries, Leonardo dissecting corpses for decades, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane doing hours or scales and long notes every day throughout their professional lives. In a different vein you have Picasso’s legendary examination of the African statue and the bracing effect of Matisse’s late in life return to exaggerated colors and shape.
Working deep in one’s craft re-opens old assumptions, turns accepted answers into invigorating questions and can lead to something new.
Photo credit: Zephyrbunny on Flickr.
In my first week at college, I picked up a great line from my micro-econ professor. This was in the 80s, a decade before Freakonomics, but at the beginning of the discipline’s awareness of it mathematicization. The professor said something like this:
You’ll learn theorems and laws in this class, and you’ll pick up some math. But, when you write your papers and take your exams, I want you to always always always tell me: “who is doing what to whom and why”. Economics that doesn’t do that is useless.
I was at a brainstorm a little while ago discussing strategies for a client. Some questions emerged about how we should think about the customer’s buying mode: are we looking to upsell within a store, competing with a brand that’s only available at another? are we trying to generate demand for the activity that requires our product or speak to people already committed to that activity? Pretty standard sets of questions.
What I noticed, though, was a rush to put labels on ideas and capture the dynamic within an existing, perhaps widely known concept (value chain, purchase cycle, influencer strategy). The words were all useful, but they seemed to dampen the energy of the conversation - they didn’t tell us who was doing what to whom (or, more importantly for marketers with whom) or offer theories of why.
I suggested that we should avoid putting conceptual labels on dynamics during a brainstorm. That we should stick to people dynamics — getting inside people’s heads would get us to better ideas. Being inside people’s heads would give us a better handle on whether the idea was good or not. One person, who had been dropping jargon on the conversation suggested he was doing so “to put a pin in the thinking.”
Aha! Putting pins in something, like a butterfly, kills the subject! Putting a pin in something makes it static, stops it from its natural movements, makes it less rich.
It doesn’t sound consult-y, but if our marketing models aren’t helping to explain who is doing what to whom (and with whom) and why, then they should be kept out of design discussions.
Two articles, once again from Todd Walker, highlight how research (or research-driven techniques) needs to be (re)-grounded in the needs of design.
The first, Design Meets Research from AIGA, has a useful survey of leading testing techniques and provides some pros and cons about each of them. In the middle of the piece is a paragraph that summarizes the key problem most designers have with research:
There is a group of brand consultants and cultural anthropologists alike that believe now that it is not the actual research itself that is the problem. It is rather about how research is often misused, what type of design concepts and stimulus are tested, and how data is analyzed that is most often at fault. When used correctly, research shouldn’t stifle creativity but rather offer designers stronger inspiration and focus.
They remind designers that there’s a critical interpretation phase that comes between research and design. No one would disagree with that statement, but where it gets tricky is how people define interpretation and who participates in it. In more than one work environment, interpretation meant a summary of major findings, was conducted by the strategy group or account lead, and somehow straight-lined to design recommendations. (”Only 49% of respondents viewed element x favorably -> Replace element x or remove it.”)
The article hits some other high points: know what you’re testing for; remember that testing is ultimately about better understanding a customer (heightening designer empathy with the audience) and not about having customers do design; ethnographic activities are still the best things for designers to do no matter what; research is an art not a science; interpretation is a joint activity between design and research.
The other article, Personas and the Role of Design Documentation has similar themes, but is more focused on personas. Specifically, it focuses on the way in which most people go through personas as a deliverable that needs to be done, not as a tool with a purpose and communication goal. Key point for the writer:
Personas are not documents, and they are not the result of a step-by-step method that automagically pops out convenient facsimiles of your users. Personas are actually the designer’s focused act of empathetic imagination, grounded in first-hand user knowledge.
The best part of the article is a distillation of lessons from Alan Cooper’s ‘origin of personas’ story (mythic in its grandeur, but true):
1. Cooper based his persona on a real person he’d actually met, talked with, and observed.
This was essential. He didn’t read about “Kathy” from a market survey, or from a persona document that a previous designer (or a separate “researcher” on a team) had written. He worked from primary experience, rather than re-using a some kind of user description from a different project.2. Cooper didn’t start with a “method”—or especially not a “methodology”!
His approach was an intuitive act of design. It wasn’t a scientific gathering of requirements and coolly transposing them into a grid of capabilities. It came from the passionate need of a designer to really understand the user—putting on the skin of another person.3. The persona wasn’t a document. Rather, it was the activity of empathetic role-play.
Cooper was telling himself a story, and embodying that story as he told it. The persona was in the designer, not on paper. If Cooper created a document, it would’ve been a description of the persona, not the persona itself. Most of us, however, tend to think of the document—the paper or slide with the smiling picture and smattering of personal detail—as the persona, as if creating the document is the whole point.4. Cooper was doing this in his “spare time,” away from the system, away from the cubicle.
His slow computer was serendipitous—it unwittingly gave him the excuse to wander, breathe and ruminate. Hardly the model of corporate efficiency. Getting away from the office and the computer screen were essential to arriving at his design insights. Yet, how often do you see design methods that tell you to get away from the office, walk around outside and talk to yourself?5. His persona gained clarity by focusing on a particular person—”Kathy”.
I wonder how much more effective our personas would be if we started with a single, actual person as the model, and were rigorous about adding other characteristics—sticking only to things we’d really observed from our users. Starting with a composite, it’s too easy to cherry-pick bits and pieces from them to make a Frankenstein Persona that better fits our preconceptions.
There are, of course, challenges embodied in these lessons. Grounding a persona in one person could lead to endless ratholes about which one person, and number wonks will immediately jump all over the “method”/”methodology” point. But the key point is that personas are ways of creating empathy with the user, of getting us (our team and clients and other stakeholders) out of our own heads and into someone else’s, of creating conversations with potential customers and users.
Terrific TNR article referred to me by Todd Walker describes how the Obama team uses data and wonky policy techniques in a way that seems relevant for many of us in an increasingly number-rich, -doused, -drenched, -dictated world.
The article starts with a description of the influence of neo-classical refiner Richard Thaler:
Behaviorists like Thaler believed that the perfectly rational, utterly self-interested maximizers of economists’ imaginations had little in common with actual human beings, who frequently err when making simple calculations, who have trouble with self-control, who often act out of altruism or spite.
But what’s really interesting is how Thaler and his fellow behaviorists responded to this fairly critical insight. Though rational self-interest was the central tenet of neoclassical (i.e., modern) economics, they didn’t take a wrecking ball to the field and replace it with some equally sweeping theory of human behavior. Instead, they labored to bring economics closer in line with how the world actually works, one small adjustment at a time. “‘Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly,’” Thaler wrote in the introduction to The Winner’s Curse, quoting the philosopher Thomas Kuhn. “I hope to accomplish that first step–awareness of anomaly. Perhaps at that point we can start to see the development of the new, improved version of economic theory.”
One of my biggest gripes with data and marketing models (funnels) is that people tend to approach them as rules to live by. When faced with an anomaly, there are two responses: 1) wave it off as an anomaly; or 2) try to force the anomaly into the ‘model’. It’s a bit like the retrograde motion of planets: when the observational data pointed to non-circular motion of the planets, retrenching astronomers created these weird circle-within-circle movements that had no plausible explanation, but preserved the pretty circles. A third approach would be to evolve the model, soften its hard edges, add some dynamics to it.
The divide in economics between numbers and working models is becoming a chasm. What’s great about Thaler’s approach is that it functions somewhere between the wrecking ball of a new model, but avoids retrograde techniques. The thinking embraces the anomaly and allows for a punctuated equilibrous burst in the development of the model. “Like their intellectual godfather Thaler, the Obama wonks aren’t particularly interested in tearing down existing paradigms, just adjusting and extending them when they become outdated. (Thaler urges his students to master the same traditional, mathematical models their colleagues do if they want to be taken seriously.)”
Another nice passage highlights that there is still something along the lines of expertise and judgement that can live well with numbers:
The second difference is that the Obama hands tend to feel less hemmed in by establishment opinion. As one Obama adviser puts it, “Democrats want to be just a little bit different from Republicans, but not so different that they get attacked for being weak.” Like Hamilton, the Obamanauts generally reject this calculus–not because they favor some radical alternative, but because clinging to received foreign policy wisdom can preclude highly practical courses of action.
Of course, here they’re talking about foreign policy, which is not numbers-based. But the idea of “practical courses of action” — things which just make sense or feel right, pass the sniff test, resonate with a highly trained neerve ending have a place in their discussions, agenda, and plans.
It also allows for leadership without ignoring the polls, or innovation without ignoring the data.
Digital agency folks have been talking about what to do with clients who are cutting back in a recession. One of the responses that digitals often have is: ‘invest more in our channel. We are accountable, we are measurable, we can prove hard business results.’ Hard business results usually means that we can transact and track on our channel in a way other channels can’t. Not a bad argument, but very limiting — does that mean we should forego brand-enhancing activities? stop trying to build awareness? avoid activities that can’t point to a cart?
I would love to see digital agencies get bold with clients and make a different argument: give us 2% of your above-the-line ad dollars and let us invest it in an influencer strategy. Let us take that small amount (which might buy one weekend spot) and find influencer blogs, do AdSense words, create feeds that distribute content, and put a staff person on participating in these areas of conversation. Let’s measure and track and see if we don’t do for more for your brand - at a deeper level - than if you had blown your budget on traditional ads.
Conversations in these channels are fewer in number, but more intimate, more memorable, and more likely to spread and have a lasting impact.
As TED quickly becomes an establishment kind of thing, it now seems inevitable (I think I’ve used an inevitable construction twice today and I’ve only been awake for 1.5 hours!), that there would be a response.
BIL loves TED. TED is a great place to sit and listen to interesting ideas. Many of those ideas make it online, and millions get to experience them.
The catch for many of us is that TED is $6,000, which is too expensive for most people, including a great number with good ideas worth spreading. BIL has been created as a free space for people with ideas to come together and share them.
Our event is self-organizing, emergent, and anarchic. Nobody is in charge. If you want to come just show up
I’m not enough of a fan of crowds to find the ‘just show up’ part of it appealing, but I like the Salon-Salon des Refuses dynamic appealing. As an emerging business with sponsors, TED has accountabilities that can drive the mix and tenor of the speakers. But it’s still a wonderful thing to be celebrating the art of speaking, the theater of presentation and the generalist/renaissance reach for new ideas. Which is why BIL bills itself as a “perfect match to TED.” (I wonder how much time went into that: it could have been a perfect match for TED, or a counterpart to TED, or a foil, but they went with the slightly clumsier “match to”.)
Not sure I completely understand this, but Rock, Paper, Shotgun is reporting an MMORPG which is being created by one developer (Eskil Steenburg) who is using generative design techniques to create his world. The idea of a single programmer/artist creating anything game-like is exciting in the age of 30 person EA teams being needed for everything. But to have it be a generatively designed world, and one that looks like the screenshots here, is amazing. RPS is also gaga:
Since Steenberg is a one man show, he’s relying on clever maths to build the world for him and then clever gamers to come in and help him figure out where to take it, and what to do with it.So far he’s already populated it with weird animals and wondrous, gaseous visuals, and he intends to build the world into a kind of communal adventure, where gamers work together to furnish a central village, defend it from enemy attack, and explore the surround world and its many dungeons. Players will be able to do things like deform elements of terrain, allowing them to build tunnel networks or walls to defend their property. Items will also be intended for the good of all as Steenberg creates them and drops them into the world. You won’t be picking up rifles in your adventures, but more likely the plans for the rifle-building machine, that can then be utilised by everyone in your village. Part Zelda, part Tale In The Desert, part adventure shooter, and wholly abstract and beautiful, Love looks the kind of amalgam of art, programming and internet savvy that we’ve desired without even being able to imagine. It has the potential, and Steenberg has the huge intellect, for this to be one of the most precious events in PC gaming.
The glowing passage above arose from seeing Steenberg (the programmer) at GDC. (i’m not sure I’m all that excited about ‘gaseous visuals’, but the rest sounds nifty.) The site for the game is a cryptic mix of vision language for the game (love is . . .) and techno-speak describing the engine and tools for creating within it. Probably wisely, there is no place to sign up. Steenburg is saying he only needs a couple hundred players to validate and build the world.
Konigi has a post today about Blind Text Generator, shown below:
It’s got the traditional greek more accurately labelled with the Latin Cicero, it’s got some Kafka text (from Metamorphosis) and does a nice job chopping it up into paragraphs, and character counts.
The Konigi post has some comments about the laziness of using greek:
I prefer not to use dummy text, because creating wireframes and comps that reflect how they will really look and function is what people pay me for, and is a sign of a lazy IA/IXD. Plus it can be really enjoyable to write real fake copy.
Real fake copy, however enjoyable to write, can also be messy, so I don’t buy the notion that it’s laziness (especially when one is creating systems for content delivery — article templates and the like). But, if one wants something that feels more real, and is actually kind of eerie, I recommend Hexatron’s wisdom generator. (Scroll to the bottom of the page and look for “Endless Wisdom”.) It’s based on an algorithm from Kernighan & Pike that chops up a real piece of text and reparses it into something that feels like the real thing . . . until you try to parse it. Check out an old testament passage generated by the algorithm:
The Bush speak one is also fun.
Fun site, called Indexed, spoofs business graphs and charts for laughs and sometimes insight with charts done on 3×5 index cards. Found this one reproed on Presentation Zen:
It was used in reference to the describe the way in which Obama was originally praised for his oratorical skills and is now being criticized as more style than substance. But it’s a fun little chart to whiteboard at that critical stage when you start making progress, but might lose your nerve, cuz you’re getting more critical attention.