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A chess site by two Columbia students, called Masters and Hustlers focuses on chess in New York City. It’s a great, romantic, and powerful idea and a good watch (there’s lots of video).

During my first post-college job, at a Quaker peace group, I worked with a middle-aged black guy who did counter-recruitment (see note below). When chess came up, he said, “chess, it’s a bloody, bloody game.” I had no idea what he was talking about — this is the King’s Game, the ultimate contest of brain against brain, where is he getting this “blood” thing from? He told stories about playing chess on the hood of cars in Harlem when he was growing up, and when he and I finally played (with a clock, 5 minutes each side), he slammed, slapped, and pounded pieces, took my moves like a body blow, and brought the game to a whole new level of fun for me. (He didn’t trash talk . . . this wasn’t Laurence Fishburne in Searching for Bobby Fischer, but the postmortems were a blast.)

Chess in NYC has loomed large in my mind since I was a kid. Bobby Fischer, the brilliant, gawky, charming, mostly sane one of 1972, was one of my heroes, and during my first trip to New York, in 1979, when I was 14 I only wanted to visit two places: Tannen’s Magic Store, and the Manhattan Chess Club, home of Bobby Fischer. When I first moved to New York about 9 years later, I never went to the Village without stopping at the Village Chess Shop. It’s still one of the most New York spots I can think of: a mix of old and young, every ethnicity imaginable, ranges of competitive talk from Yiddish kvetching to rhyming to outright trash, bad coffee, absurdly worn down plastic pieces, inventory covered with dust and stacked to the ceilings, and the constant sound of ticking clocks and pounded pieces. I also played in Washington Square pretty regularly. The ritual was to win the first two games (hustlers were good enough to suss you out and let you think you won a tough fight) in order to set up the hustle and then fighting for my life on the subsequent moneyed games.

The energy that I discovered at the chess table with my chess-bloodied friend and learned to love in NYC, is what’s great about the site. It pays homage to both sides of the NY chess world: the elegant world of the Marshall Chess Club, which claimed Marcel Duchamp as one of its team members, and where Jose Raul Capablanca played his famous match (just saying the name fills you with old world chess romance . . . Pete Martell anyone?); and the gritty, hyper-competitive, hyper-passionate and very good chess of the city parks. They have a great interview on the site with a chess hustler showing pictures of his hustling days going back to the 1970s.

I hope that they keep adding stuff to it.

And I can’t talk about the “fight” in chess without noting one of the best chess articles ever, by Martin Amis. It’s findable in Finding Mrs Nabokov, and focuses on the second Kasparov-Karpov match (a weird time for chess, the peak moment of politics, bad Soviet-era forms of play, and wacky paranoia among its players. Kasparov winning this match would restore chess to an era of intelligence and class that it hadn’t had in years and hasn’t since, sadly.)  Amis knows his chess, being a skilled player and writing about it in each of its novels in all its forms — the pretentious game of kings played by swots, the gritty battle of smart yobs, and the beautiful fight. And it ends with a paragraph that I have to quote in full:

“Chess is like life” said Spassky. “Chess is life” said Fischer, who paid the penalty for his obvious mistake. Chess has been called an art, a science, a sport. it can’t be an art because every brilliancy depends on the fuddled collusion of the opponent: even “the Immortal Game” would have died the death if Black had had his wits about him. It can’t be a science, because, simply it has no content: the singularity of chess is not its readiness but its refusal to serve as a matrix for anything else. And it can’t be a sport, not quite because it is both infinite and precise; every game is recoverable; every game can be re-experienced through the markings on a page. “It’s definitely not an art”, says [GM] Nigel Short. “If I have the choice between a beautiful combination and mundane way of wrapping up the game, then I’ll wrap up the game. You must win. It’s not an art. It’s a fight. It’s a fight.”

And yet, even my limited chess mind can play over a game by Capablanca or Fischer and see something brilliant and elegant in the pummellings they gave their opponents.

(* Counter-recruitment was and I think still is a mode of peace and justice activism in which people talk to kids about the realities of recruitment. In the 1980s, this meant debunking the myths of career training and post-military job opportunities, and talking about the brutal realities of service. My chess-playing friend Allen, was a Vietnam vet who did two tours, covered both sides of that story in schools, at churches, and community centers.)

My goodreads email has become my only must-read email from a social network site. I am always curious to see what people are reading, adding to their shelves, and eager for the moment when someone writes a comment. This morning, I got this:

Fun on so many levels. This seems to be the book to enjoy reading, at least among my little circle of reading friends, and finally someone who didn’t dig it. It also validates, the dirty little reading secret and rule that you shouldn’t kill yourself trying to finish a book that just isn’t working for you.

I missed this in January, but Nuts and Volts pointed it out to me in this month’s issue: contact lenses with circuits capable of superimposing visual data on the natural stream of light coming into your eye.

The press release displays an interesting journalistic emerging journalistic formula for announcing or describing new technologies: lead with a reference to a user benefit seen in a movie or TV show, say that someday is now that much closer, and talk about the project.

Movie characters from the Terminator to the Bionic Woman use bionic eyes to zoom in on far-off scenes, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs. Off the screen, virtual displays have been proposed for more practical purposes — visual aids to help vision-impaired people, holographic driving control panels and even as a way to surf the Web on the go.

Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

“Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside,” said Babak Parviz, a UW assistant professor of electrical engineering. “This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it’s extremely promising.”

Anyway, kinda cool.

Hilarious NYT article about how people use the bookshelves of others as gauges of: their intelligence, sex-worthiness, compatiability as friend or boy/girl-friend. Lots of really funny lines.  Initially dug the article because it contained a funny cut-up of Ayn Rand fans and a link to an Ayn Rand dating site (I wonder what the binaries.pictures-style fora have in them), but the whole article is a gas:

Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,� said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.� (Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged� and “The Fountainhead,� might disagree.)

Judy Heiblum, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, shudders at the memory of some attempted date-talk about Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,� beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,� Heiblum said, adding that “life-changing experiences� are a “tedious conversational topic at best.�

Great lines throughout: a woman who pretty much knows she’s not getting naked with a guy who reads life lessons from dog books, a “you knew what you were getting into” blow-off to an Alice Munro fun who dates a Da Vinci Code reader, the asymmetry of male and female reading habits, and, my favorite, the guy who fell for a woman who had Unbearable Lightness of Being on her nightstand — not because he loves Kundera, but because he had vague synaptic connections between the book, bowler hats, Lena Olin, and nudity. Fun read.

Richard Sennett’s new book on craft seems to challenge some of our assumptions about the virtues of generalism. I just started the book last night, and there’s a much bigger argument in the book: that by separating our minds from our hands, our homo faber life from our homo laborens life (he uses the Arendt construction, that’s not me being pretentious with the Latin), we are living diminished lives. Still, the passion for craft, for “doing one thing well”, seems an important voice to bring into the blogosphere’s current discussion of T’s, fuzzies, generalists, etc.

While I wait for the book to take shape in my mind (in addition to reading it of course), there’s a decent WAMU interview with Sennett. Some high points:

• they spend a little time on the 10,000 hours maxim, that it takes that many hours of studious attention to something before you do it really well. An interesting parallel to Nicholas Negroponte’s rule that important worthwhile projects occur across five year time-spans

• “learning to get skilled and committing to getting good at something . . . [is what] nurses, doctors, and scientists do … it’s not about manual labor”

• Capitalism does not necessarily create forces for “doing something well”, it has no inherent interest in building skills and might actually be a long-term force for the race to the bottom.

• Sennett has comments about how the educational system tends to make vocational training, shop, even engineering second class to more purely brain-focused work. (This is an interesting parallel to Omnivore’s Dilemma which points out that the US has done everything it can to turn agriculture into a machine or an activity for stupid people to do. Innovative farmers isn’t something we celebrate even though there are many.)

• “there’s a lot of work that we think of as simple work that is not simple, there’s real content to it . . . we’ve become very snobbish about what we think of as ordinary jobs, we think anyone can do it, but that’s not true. … the reasons that motivate people to become craftsmen is self respect.”

• labs are like “modern workshops” they have the values and approach to work that an artisan of the 19th century. At MIT, he asked scientists if they were craftsmen which they didn’t always like.  But at good labs, they would say “I’m very hands-on”. They use different tools, but the attitude is similar and there’s a respect for the importance of the ‘mechanical’ processes.

• mentor/master relationships need to be restored, people need mentors who say “that isn’t good enough”. The best thing you can say to a kid is “you can do better, it’s not a put-down”

I used to liken programmers to furniture makers. Programmers choose materials, techniques, tools and environments with the subtle care and attention to detail of a craftsman. They think simultaneously about how to make it work, and how to make it better (this is an important distinction for Sennett).  They think about their components with the texture and nuance that a furniture maker has for the properties of wood, finishes, joints, and the tools that will shape them.

That said, though, I’m pretty sure I’m bastardizing Sennett’s book by dragging it to this level. In the preface, he talks about bumping into his teacher Hannah Arendt in the weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis and sharing reactions. In a moment of self-loathing I was tempted to send the book back to Amazon.  I mean, surely, he has a much bigger project that I should respect (and this is the first of a thee book project). But hey, advertising and marketing is all about coopting important ideas, right?

Talking to Agile advocates, has been, in my experience almost like talking to Ron Paul supporters:  they never let go, can turn anything into an argument for Agile, will play any cheap rhetorical trick available to turn honest concerns into small-minded opposition, and point with fervor to companies you’ve never heard of as shining beacons of the self-apparent rightness of it all.  That might just be me, but I do often feel like the crazy person in the room when I say “agile’s not good for everything, and it might short-circuit good design thinking.”

I just started reading “Effective Prototyping for Software Makers” and they’ve got a nice little line:

An overachieving prototype artificially wows an audience by showing inppropriate high fidelity too early in the software creation process.  An artificial high fidelity, while it may impress, will often cause many design decisions to be made prematurely — a leading cause for finding yourself designed into a corner.

Coded prototypes have a dangerous effect akin to the picture superiority effect.  They imply that many things have been solved which aren’t, that the time-consuming back-end issues are worked out.  Worst of all, coded, agile prototypes are an implicit argument that time-to-market is more important than doing things right.

It’s nice to hear software people show some respect for design-time.

I want to know.  I used to have this silly habit of finding unusual, small things in larger product ecosystems and wondering how the person who makes them talks about himself at parties:  “My company makes the little metal slugs at the top subway handles that keep them from moving too far,” or “you know those little plastic hooks that you clip onto bread bags to keep it fresh?  yeah, that’s me.”

At some point, I may find the time to find out what these bread bag hooks are called and someone who makes them, but what intrigued me is the elaborate shape.  Why all the edges?  I can see the edges inside the hook area adding extra grip (though I kind of smile thinking of the meeting where that was decided), but the asymmetric indents out nubs on the outside?  Couldn’t be affordance, since you got the hole an the groove at the top.

So much to learn . . .

When people ask me for interaction design (IxD) book recommendations (one of the few things I believe I do exceedingly well is recommend books), I always steer them towards Steven Johnson’s Emergence, away from Jakob Nielsen, and sometimes toward Jane Jacob’s Death and Life of Great American Cities. I also show them a great photo/coffee table book about ants.

Yesterday, David Armano twittered a post of his from last year, where he described two architects creating a children’s playground. One architect has very firm ideas about the role of every element in the playground, and how it should function. The other designer is pretty open to creating an environment where things simply happen. (Amusing sidenote: the first is a man, the other a woman.) The first architect is bothered when kids use the playground their way rather than enjoying it in the way he had anticipated . . . Read the post, but the take-away is that designers shouldn’t necessarily be focused on control, and have clear outcomes in mind for the experience their designs create.

This calls to mind a classic story from Jane Jacobs about the fountain in Washington Square Park. City planners wanted the fountain to function as a fountain, with water jets, gently overflowing and tiered bowls, inward spraying outer rings — a lovely bit of the old world here in the Village. Before the fountain was operational, though, residents had turned it into a lunch spot, an additional set of benches, and even a performance space/amphitheater. When the water was turned on, residents had lost a gathering space and lobbied to have it turned off. City planners and parks people kept turning the fountain on, putting their sense of what the space should be used for over what had been working quite well for the residents. Eventually, people turned to sabotage to keep the water off, going so far as to put laundry detergent in the water system so that the fountain would bubble and foam rather than spray.

The residents won out, and the fountain has for years been dry. It is a place for skating, eating, stand-up comedy, the occasional performance troupe, some theater, and whatever other clever things people come up with for their reclaimed space.

That was an important design moment for me, and the book is an important design book for interactive designers. It highlighted to me a key principle: sometimes the best experiences are the ones where users can surprise you with what they add to it or do with it.

This isn’t terribly new today. There is a notion of emergent gameplay that has been around for years. Real-time strategy games like Age of Empires are loaded with emergent gameplay — even players doing the same matchup of civilizations on the same map over and over again try different styles and strategies and sometimes just do humorous stunts. In World of Warcraft, I have seen same sex weddings (Stormwind Cathedral), naked dancing guild meetings, impromptu fireworks shows (at the fountain in the Mage Quarter of Ironforge — Jacobs would have loved it!) and Intel sponsors screenshot contests.

When I was a game designer, I used to think of this as hard-coded experiences versus open ones. A hard-coded experience is a series of gates, funnels, obstacles: Pitfall Harry sidescrolling from point a to point b, solving all of the puzzles in Myst. Open games would include WoW, AoE, Sims, Electroplankton . . .

As we move from web sites to web services, this kind of emergent design thinking — the ability to create systems that users interact with in creative, dynamic, surprising, and useful or entertaining ways — is a new skill we have to come into.

at least in the last 25 years . . .

When I was trying to think of things that really jazzed me in interactive, I had trouble coming up with recent items.

My problem was predicted by User InfoTechnoDemo, an interesting little book, or MEDIAWORKBOOK, by MIT Press. It has an early passage that we’re kind of creatively stalled on two visual concepts. The passage is good, arguably arguable, and worth tussling with:

Our visual culture remains trapped in a relentless present idly circling itself as if waiting for inspiration it doesn’t expect to come. For good or ill, the high-modern period offered a succession of startling visions of what was to come, indeed, the future seemed assured precisely because the scenarios themselves were so hetergenous. … I lay blame for our 21st century inability to imagine anything beyond the moment on two, almost perfect visual systems, both moving into their third decade. …

The two concepts are Blade Runner and the GUI metaphor. Fun to try and think about things that aren’t in that vein: Minority Report is still a GUI, Battlestar Galactica is pre-Runner in its SF book cover planets.  Are we stuck, as the book says, in a “permanent present”?  Is that why I have such trouble finding things that are crazy cool?

For some sad reason, I was thinking about software design and development this morning.  Then I stumbled into doing some GoodReads reviews, ranking, and shelving. During this session, I noted that The Mythical Man Month is pretty much spent (we’ve absorbed it all several times over, and those who haven’t won’t be able to get past the IBM acronyms to make sense of the book). I also expressed my worries that a book about prototyping is going to be wonk-city, focusing on flows and block diagrams with sharp, deadening analytic edges.  Then I wrote up a bit about Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters, whose title I loved and which is a pretty good read on a wide range of subjects (craftsmanship, HR, inspiration and innovation). Then I got this screen:

How cool is that. My non-fiction interests in a more creative side of software, points me to John Irving, McCarthy, an interesting choice of Camus. Compare to Amazon:

Yes, the titles are all relevant, but the GoodReads recos are serendipitous, surprising, tasty. I also like the name of GoodReads reco engine: richRelevance. Something worth shooting for.