Soft Eyes, Hard Eyes, Design Thought from The Wire
As with every TV show hit, I’m to-DVD months late on The Wire, the fourth season of which I’m watching now. Episode 4, written by emerging fave author Dennis Lehane, has a great scene with design wisdom in it. Bunk is walking with Kima to her first crime scene as a homicide detective, giving her some real advice (in the middle of a lot of pranks on the newb.)
Bunk (putting on the latex gloves): “You know what you need at a crime scene?”
Kima: “Rubber gloves?”
“Soft eyes.”
“Like I’m supposed to be crying and shit?”
“You got soft eyes, you can see the whole thing. You got hard eyes, you’re staring at the same tree, missing the forest.”
“Ah, Zen Shit”
“Soft eyes, grasshopper.”
I love this. It captures the way some people can’t get their heads out of the immediate details or who can’t stop rigorously applying the same design principle without nuance. In a lot of meetings, I talk about soft and hard edges — on issues, on design elements, taxonomies, how we frame a problem. Seeing with soft eyes, eyes that go beyond the immediate detail, eyes that entertain and apprehend nuance — that’s cool.
It’s also a nice alternative for people who are sick of quoting Steve Jobs’s rap about zooming in zooming out.
glad you posted this - i was looking for the quote -
i’ve been thinking how ‘Soft eyes’ in (information/ interaction design) also speaks of designs that support the scanning and deciding - as well as the reading, absorbing - the overview before the drill-down etc
- it’s a totally cool phrase from bunk no doubt - thanks again
[…] This does a nice job of highlighting that Varian’s charge is a mix of skills for managers, practitioners, and interpreters alike. Some of the steps are naive or described in a way that invites unhealthy simplisticism (simplicity == good, simplisticism, the thing we often get instead of simple is reductive, which is always bad). MINEing and REPRESENTing are the steps where numbers emerge into something living and actionable. MINE, as defined by Fry, is focused on software, rather than cognitive styles and elastic minds, for the generation of insights and pattern recognition. Certainly software is needed, but the hypotheses and candidate patterns you validate with the software come from soft eyes, something I blogged about a while ago. Similarly, REPRESENT is posed as choosing from a list of standard data tropes. But hey, it’s a software book and we all know Fry is more visual than that. […]