kip/bot/blog

Silly but part of the appeal of the game.  Creating humorous, clever, even downright creative moments with your character and the environs.

Just started Adaptive Path’s Subject to Change, and it’s shaping up to be an important read. Only about 30 pages in, but already have had some great insights:

Brand strategy can ruin experience strategy — creating a brand is like projecting a personality. “These are the words we want you to use when you think of us” is not a response to customer needs. No matter how well-grounded the personality is in a cultural trend or audience insight, brand strategies don’t point to experience design.

Products should be like magic — with Arthur C Clarke’s passing, people have been quoting his line “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. It’s a phrase that tends to highlight the alienating effects of a feeling of magic. But Subject to Change argues that magic is our goal:

No one wants to deliver a product that mystifies its audience. In fact, the inception of most new products is spurred by a need to address an experiential concern. [But] Customers have little appreciation for the technical workings of a product. Beyond the interface, everything else might as well be magic. Think about a light switch. You flip a swtich; a light turns on. How many of us care how it works? Or you put things in the refrigerator, and a day later, when you take them out, they’re cold. Magic. You pick up a handset, press seven or ten digits, and are talking to someone far away. Magic.

A tempered definition of magic helps us understand the long-sigh (which may be close to the long wow) of a good product. I also like the “inception of most new products is spurred by a need to address an experiential concern”. That’s the most sober, non-fetishized way of describing Apple’s non-innovative, second/third/fourth to market design-focused approach to product design, going all the way back to the Mac (”computers for the rest of us”).

In this spirit of energetic non-fetishized discource, the book also debunks the hype around being new, being different, and being innovative as virtues unto themselves. By grounding the conversation in experience, it provides focus (while at the same time making our design jobs harder to do, and richer in reward).

Diggin’ it.

After looking at the Obama brand, the NYT gets around to the McCain brand. Best comment about the use of Optima comes from Seymour Chwast of Pushpin Studio:

Optima is one of the worst pre-computer typefaces ever designed. It was created to satisfy everybody’s needs. A straightforward, no-nonsense, no-embellishment face, it comes in regular and bold but little character can be found in either weight.

Optima is not inappropriate for use by Senator McCain.

Reminds me of the voice-over at the beginning of the movie Helvetica that goes something like: “Helvetica is the McDonalds of typefaces. It’s what you have when you don’t care what you’re eating, so you just eat crap.”

Yesterday, I blogged about Al Gore’s trial run of the latest version of his climate crisis talk. Presentation Zen has an analysis, with additional links to Duarte Design.

In general, PZ found it warm and funny, but gave two pointers:

• never apologize for not being prepared — not sure if I buy this. While telling your audience that you “cobbled it together” the night before might not be the most flattering thing to say, there’s no point in pretending that an unpolished presentation is more than it is. In the age of conversation and blogging, where the sharing of an idea is more important than production value, this kind of transparency, phrased more elegantly, might be a necessity. In Gore’s case, his presentation is known for its impossibly high level of polish, such that he couldn’t escape people noticing the current version’s lack of polish. What he could have done is set it up as a sneak peek into a work-in-progress.
• never turn your back on an audience — this is interesting. I could swear that, in the movie, we frequently see Gore turning to look at the slide. I’m not sure if this should be characterized as turning your back on an audience or as joining your audience in looking at the slide. When pointing out particular sections of a slide (points on a map, inflection curves on a graph), it seems more engaging to face the slide with your audience and use hand gestures than to continue facing the audience and look down at a monitor as you move the cursor around. Also, the body language which communicates that the slide is the center of attention and not the speaker strikes me as management of the audience’s attention and is in keeping with Gore’s concerns about the state of our respect for science.

Small nits to pick. I love Presentation Zen and hope some day that someone returns one of the three copies of their book that I’ve bought and loaned out.

I blogged an HBR article a while back, questioning, among other things, how innovative Google really is.  Some news stories today, highlight some overlooked areas where Google is doing some interesting, potentially innovative things:

• App Engine — NYT article today talks about Google’s plans to move App Engine into the enterprise space by opening it up to 10,000 developers.  It’s a small launch, limited to apps written in python in the beginning, and it’s a late entrant to a field where SalesForce and Amazon have experience, if not dominance, but it’s a real move, based on another innovation:
• GFS — not news, not surprising, and I can’t tell if it’s good or not, but Google File System can fall under the umbrella of innovation, or innovation-friendly.  (Taking control of the infrastructure.)
• SalesForce alliance — NYT article briefly describes how Google is tying its Office apps into SalesForce’s suite of offerings to compete with MSFT.  Whether Google’s productivity apps on the web will win out over MSFT’s client or server based apps is the big question, but I have to acknowledge that the apps are lightweight, clean enough to hook into other software, and scalable.

I don’t think this makes the HBR article less silly, however.  The examples above are reminders that there are other things going on at Google beyond the usual gmail, Google Earth, ad serving, and blogger acquisition that most articles talk about.

Google’s ability to develop them and wait years to monetize them, however, still comes down to cash flow.  This still means we have little to learn from Google about innovation.

Al Gore’s most recent TED talk, a trial-run, or beta if you will, of Inconvenient Truth 2.0, is a great study in the creation of a presentation. It’s got some great moments, but it also has some clunkers, some timing that isn’t quite worked out yet, a few emotional peaks that don’t pay off, some low-intensity moments that turn out to be quite good. For people who follow presentations, there’s a lot to chew on.

I’m not knocking Gore. I’ve been a moderate to big fan of his since his days in the Senate where youngsters spoke in hushed tones about how he writes his own speeches, not his staff . . . can you imagine a Reaganaut doing that?. The first Inconvenient Truth was complex, well-crafted in terms of its visuals and theater and highly evolved in its rhetoric.

Version 2.0 beta is focused on moving the needle from individual action (changing light bulbs to CFLs, buying hybrids) to citizen action (forcing politicians to take the big steps). Version 2.0 also addresses the state of the science, debunks the detractors, comes up with new visualizations of global warming in action today (the polar ice cap). All of it building up to a call to be the generation that history will remember for reversing the tide.

Seeing what works and what doesn’t, and seeing the iterative nature of the talk is a nice look into the craft of the presentation.

I’ve been seeing a lot of steampunk pics and references in my web trolling lately. Despite being a fan of the aesthetic, the not the fiction so much, I was stumped to see this one at Steampunk Workshop:

It’s a Mac Mini inside an old-fashioned (circa: steampunk) tin.  The picture below of modded headphones also comes from the Steampunk Workshop. But they strike me as pre-atomic-era SF, sitting more comfortably next to an oscilloscope than a brass input device.

Why are designers are getting such a kick out of steampunk mods of Apple stuff? The ultimate design objects being modded and retrofied to the place where there original design is not only lost, but are pushed in a distinctly mechanical direction?

The charm of steampunk for me is that it hearkens to the last great age of the renaissance person: late 19th century Europe, especially England. It’s a time when people could still dabble in many fields and make contributions in them: astronomy, electricity, biology, studies of the ether, psychology were all still open enough that, dare I say it, amateurs could still make discoveries or meaningful contributions in those fields while writing lame poems and playing the pianoforte after dinner for guests.

Or maybe it’s the time of the literary engineer — someone out of a Jules Verne novel who knew the classics, might quote Shakespeare, and still be able to improve on a thermal combustion engine and then house it in a mahogany case with brass fixtures. Sherlock Holmes is the quintessence of the literary scientist. Despite some embarassing gaps of ignorance, Holmes was a chemist, a historian, and a supremely gifted violinist who lived surrounded by those same brass-handled cabinets filled with news clippings, biological samples, ashes from cigars, shag tobacco, and sheet music.

This is the appeal of many adventure games, particularly Myst (all about the brass and amateur science), Jules Verne, the emerging adventure game sensibility in Dan Brown and other ‘manuscript’ genre novels. Even Bioshock with its emphasis on an aether-like technology and art deco setting, hearkens back to something more steampunk than cyberspace.

My enjoyment of steampunk is probably due to the demise of the literary engineer. There’s just too much to try and know and lifehackery has us focused on efficiency. I regularly see people on Facebook proclaiming that they don’t read, or don’t read fiction. I have friends who find literature inefficient and while they care about aesthetics, it feels like an efficient post-Swiss design nod to the finer things. The Mac Mini setup above has flourishes and embellishments — its charm is in its non-cleanness. Its celebration of artifice makes it tactile, places it in the realm of the craftsmen, implies the odors of wood and metal polishes, even celebrates its intricacy. By inviting us in to the mechanical intricacies of an object, steampunk acknowledges that we understand it and turns that understanding into something aesthetic.

Some time last year, I got sick of listening to people complain about the negative effects of technology.  It may have been when I got my Sony book reader, but I think it goes back earlier to when some ninny sent me a Thomas Friedman column, in which Friedman suggested that we had gone too far with technology.  The column was nauseating NY liberalism at its snooty self-important worst:

I arrived at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport the other night and was met by a driver sent by a French friend. The driver was carrying a sign with my name on it, but as I approached him I noticed that he was talking to himself, very animatedly. As I got closer, I realized he had one of those Bluetooth wireless phones clipped to his ear and was deep in conversation. I pointed at myself as the person he was supposed to meet. He nodded and went on talking to whomever was on the other end of his phone.

When my luggage arrived, I grabbed it off the belt; he pointed toward the exit and I followed, as he kept talking on his phone. When we got into the car, I said, “Do you know my hotel?” He said, “No.” I showed him the address, and he went back to talking on the phone.

After the car started to roll, I saw he had a movie playing on the screen in the dashboard — on the flat panel that usually displays the G.P.S. road map. I noticed this because between his talking on the phone and the movie, I could barely concentrate. I, alas, was in the back seat trying to finish a column on my laptop. When I wrote all that I could, I got out my iPod and listened to a Stevie Nicks album, while he went on talking, driving and watching the movie.

After I arrived at my hotel, I reflected on our trip: The driver and I had been together for an hour, and between the two of us we had been doing six different things. He was driving, talking on his phone and watching a video. I was riding, working on my laptop and listening to my iPod.

There was only one thing we never did: Talk to each other.

It’s a pity. He was a young, French-speaking African, who probably had a lot to tell me. When I related all this to my friend Alain Frachon, an editor at Le Monde, he quipped: “I guess the era of foreign correspondents quoting taxi drivers is over. The taxi driver is now too busy to give you a quote!”

I found this infuriating.  The assumption that a cab driver is just dying to be a reporter’s ‘vox populi’, or that he shouldn’t be allowed to entertain himself on the job (presumably Friedman doesn’t listen to music while he writes or watch TV while doing email at night), or cabbies choosing not to talk to a passenger who means nothing to him was somehow wrong, clearly, as indicated by the incoherence of the sentence, bugged me.

What bugged me most, though, was the way Friedman was judging another person’s use of technology through his own lens.  So the Jan Chipchase article in today’s NYT, has a great, liberating moment:

This is when I voiced a careless thought about whether there might be something negative about the lightning spread of technology, whether its convenience was somehow supplanting traditional values or practices. Chipchase raised his eyebrows and laid down his spoon. He sighed, making it clear that responding to me was going to require patience. “People can think, yeah, monks with cellphones, and tsk, tsk, and what is the world coming to?” he said. “But if you wanted to take phones away from anybody in this world who has them, they’d probably say: ‘You’re going to have to fight me for it. Are you going to take my sewer and water away too?’ And maybe you can’t put communication on the same level as running water, but some people would. And I think in some contexts, it’s quite viable as a fundamental right.” He paused a beat to let this sink in, then added, with just a touch of edge, “People once believed that people in other cultures might not benefit from having books either.”

Finally.

Lots of people will be sharing the link to NYT Sunday Magazine article about Nokia’s anthropological researcher Jan Chipchase and his studies of how the rest of the world can use cellphones to spark economic activity.  The article finally helped me understand a dynamic described in Design for the Other 90% which I haven’t fully grokked until now:

It is tempting to design devices for the poor that will save them time and labor — after all, we pay dearly for such devices.  However, time and labor are two things that poor people have in abundance.  Unless the a way to make money with the saved time or labor, they are unlikely to invest much in such devices.  For example, as long as they can get water from a free source, very few poor families will dig a well on their plot (which will cost them money) just to get drinking water [in less time] — even if that source is many miles away.

Devices which turn available time or labor into value — either through immediate use or trade — are the ones that count. Using the XO at night as a lamp that allows someone to do work at home repairing tools, preparing food, making clothes, when before they couldn’t, has immediate use.  But, when you think about all the cooperatives we urban liberals love to buy from (50 women in Ecuador make these sweaters!), there’s a bigger problem:  how do markets for trading value get created?
Cell phones facilitate or spark the creation of tradeable value.  Cell phones can create circuits of economic activity.  Connecting people — which is Nokia’s tagline - includes connecting buyers and sellers, and buyers and sellers in very small transactions.  Muhammad Yunus of Grammeen bank is financing phones for women who are becoming “phone centers” for neighborhoods in Bangladesh.   These phone centers can provide connections which are valuable in and of themselves — relatives who will pay to talk to each other.  But they can also allow for the creation of markets where none had existed before:

“Poor countries are poor because they are wasting their resources,” says [the Director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT. “One resource is time, the other is opportunity.  Let’s say you can walk over to five people who live in your immediate vicinity, that’s onteh thing.  But if you’re connected to one million people, the possibilities are endless.”

One of the things most of us struggle with in designing multi-channel experiences or, more frequently, the interactive portion of a multi-channel experience, is the notion of consistency. An experience needs some unifying threads or common elements to pull it together. For many, this boils down to a frequently constraining, sometimes maddening use of the word consistency. A colleague once framed it as the “wall test”: put it all up on a wall and if it looks identical, bingo, you’ve got consistency and that’s your goal, other design sensibilities be damned.

Every so often, someone trots out the Emerson quote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” (This line is a wonderful leitmotif in the Next Stop Wonderland.) But consistency as a creative principle is frequently a hindrance to good work usually because it is some form of foolish consistency. So, how to define foolish?

This whole thread bubbled back up to me yesterday, as I started my quad- or tri-ennial re-read of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium. The memos are actually planned notes for a series of lectures about writing and creativity. Calvino died before giving the lectures and we are left with completed drafts of the first five:

1. Lightness
2. Quickness
3. Exactitude
4. Visibility
5. Multiplicity
6. Consistency

Consistency was supposed to be the 6th, but he never completed it (or perhaps it was never found!).

Six Memos is a text that many design school students carry in their heart of hearts throughout their career. I’ve seen many designers reference it and have a brief transformation when they see that their lives are still connected to this text that once inspired them.

So as I’m reading it, I start wondering, how would we handle the consistency conversation if Calvino had finished that final lecture? Like the mythical manuscript for Aristotle’s Comedies in The Name of the Rose, would we be having very different discussions about design and creativity today?