Expertise vs Amateur, Craft vs Fun: UGC
The NYT had an article yesterday about the resurgence of the ‘group sing’, a gathering of people who just want to sing songs, and do it in a group. As indicators of the trend, the reporter looks to a growing number of regularly meeting, large-ish groups, and the success of books targeted at that kind of group. The article is filled with references to the emphasis on letting people sing, no matter the quality. I love this kind of stuff. As an adult taking piano lessons, an incurable dilettante, and one who is nostalgic for Edwardian England when smart people could make scientific discoveries, or do archeology and astronomy and make a contribution to the field, I miss the days when people used their time for activities in which they had varying degrees of expertise. As a classical music buff, I am also continually pleasantly surprised at the quality of the experiences ‘amateurs’ are able to create: Handel’s Messiah performances (and sing-alongs!), The Amato Opera House, or the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, often provide great performances, sometimes of neglected works, and always with interpretation (!).
I read this article at the same time folks at IxDA08 were tweeting and flickring Bill Buxton’s slide saying “Everybody is not a designer”. At my flickr remove, this activity seemed to be asserting that there is such a thing as interaction design discipline and such a thing as expertise that should be cultivated, honed, and respected within it.
Internet folks are at a tricky inflection point around the notion of human expertise. On the one hand, we celebrate the collective wisdom of crowds, revel in the occasional glories of user-generated content (”sometimes, ‘the people’ are really good!”), stress the importance of variously-shaped people, the need for thinking at the borders of a discipline. On the other hand, we know that not anyone can do our design jobs (or we want that to be true). And most vexing, we know that most people can’t understand our jobs. Not because they’re dumb, but because our design work contains within it, dozens, even hundreds of decisions and tradeoffs and judgement calls that are invisible to even our colleagues.
Next posts will be about the book Super Crunchers, which tells us that expertise isn’t giving way to amateurism, but to regressions and random testing.