kip/bot/blog

In a crowded subway, this was sitting on a seat. For forty minutes, a stream of people eagerly approached the empty seat, spotted the napkin, momentarily considered moving it/asking about it before deciding to stand.

I’ve been very pissy about the small town == real comments recently (I grew up in a small town, now I live in NYC, have a trailer upstate on five acres and they’re all real to me.) But this incident was just one in a stream of “I love my city” proof points.

Re-reading Ralph Ellison’s amazing Living with Music. The title essay is an excerpt from an article Ellison did for High Fidelity(!) magazine. The setting is his early days as a struggling writer living in a back-room, first floor apartment, surrounded by record players on the left, a singer above, and an airshaft/courtyard with variously entertaining, articulate, and annoying drunks (plus one very sad drunk who spent his last three days on earth yelling at the world to ’shut up’). Ellison, a once fervently devoted student of the trumpet, decides to take control of the noise and buys a sound system and records:

Between the hi-fi record and the ear, I learned, there was a new electronic world. In that realization our apartment was well on its way toward becoming an audio booby trap [his phrase for a place filled with wires, cables, boxes all in service of the ever-elusive perfect sound]. It was 1949 and I rushed to the Audio Fair. I have, I confess, as much gadget resistance as the next American of my age, weight and slight income, but little did I dream of the test to which it would be put. I had hardly en tered the fair before I heard David Sarser’s and Mel Sprinkle’s Musician’s Amplifier, took a look at its schematic and, recalling a boyhood acquiantance with such matters, decided that I could build one. I did — several times — before it measured within specifications. … I built a half dozen or more preamplifiers and record compensators before finding a commercial one that satisfied my ear. … There were wires and pieces of equipment all over the tiny apartment (I became a compulsive experimenter) and it was worth your life to move about without first taking careful bearings. Once we were almost crushed in our sleep by the tape machine, for which there was space only on a shelf at the head of our bed. But it was worth it.

Gotta love a guy, a literary genius no less, who professes to gadget aversion but who can consult schematics, revisit childhood tinkering memories, and then go on to build sound systems — just so he can listen to music and get back to his writing. The people at MAKE would love it . . .

I’m a little late to this . . . The NYT has been creating a developer network and slowly opening APIs. Last week, they opened an API to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) database.

When we first started talking about creating and releasing APIs for databases collected by The Times, campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission was a natural choice. The upcoming presidential election has seen record fund-raising by the candidates and a host of new donors. Now we want our users to be able to analyze and reuse some of the data we’ve been looking at while reporting on the campaign.

From today’s fivethirtyeight.com, an interesting insight into Obama, a surprising toughness, and leadership in long campaigns:

Indeed, Barack Obama himself hopped on a nationwide all-staff conference call Friday to emphasize this point to the troops. Pledging to “come down hard” on anyone getting “too cocky,” Obama specifically and pre-emptively called out any semblance of lack of focus. High-fiving, for example, is strictly verboten. Acknowledging everyone must be exhausted, he pointed out that he was pretty worn out too. “I’ve been doing this longer than you, and I’m older than all of you.” The message: if I can finish this off, so can you. Do not doubt that this is a man firmly in control of his campaign.

World of Warcraft’s newest “Echoes of Doom” patch was a big one sizewise. Getting ready for the “Lich King” expansion pack, probably. (This expansion pack will add a new world and the possibility of advancing ten more levels. In general, they’re a big deal, and almost always worth the fuss.) When I loaded this one, there was a new icon which, when clicked, shows a calendar:

Not only does it have a listing of fun events — the Brewfest, a Faire, the Halloween games — this calendar is available to your guild mates for scheduling things such as raids, guild meetings, and resource sharing. This game’s a gas.

I just got this email from St Annes, a favorite performance space in DUMBO:

Not only was the reminder about being on time helpful, but I had it in my calendar incorrectly. Takes nothing to remind people of tickets that they have, give out dinner recommendations, etc. Should have put directions or address in, though.

From Do you matter: How great design will make people love your company:

[iPod reference omitted cuz I just can’t stand it anymore] … you have to start with design that’s “designed in” not “added on”. It can’t be a veneer. Design is not an event or a process you apply to physical and mechanical reality . . . it’s not just a matter of getting together your executive staff and saying, “go design some good stuff” . . . You won’t accomplish this by holding an offsite meeting and saying “And remember design’s important these, so report back to me in six months and show me some really cool stuff.” You have to design an entire organizational system aligned top to bottom with being design driven. Any dissonance in the culture . . . will produce toxic waste … Trust us on this, the environment always wins.

So, now I’m in one of those places where it feels like the design utterances are truisms — obvious, uncontestable, but also useless. The statement like the above feels right, but sounds huge and inactionable.

One thing that might help is to take the phrase ‘being design-driven’ and figure out how it applies to everyone in the organization, not just designers. Is there a design ethos that allied field can embrace? Here’s a shot at some principles of that ethos:

it’s a craft — I liken all designers and digital creators to cabinetmakers. Every project requires the exercise of fundamental judgements — choice of materials, choice of tools, rounds of sketches, a process of making that requires adjustments and adaptations, and an installation process that requires further adaptation. I like woodworking as an analogy because it sets a better example for pace.

you iterate more than you solve — I simply adore that old business bromide of being solutions-oriented, just adore it. However, the notion that there is a single answer and you simply need to find it, is a bad approach to design. As Hemingway said, “you never finish manuscript, you abandon it”. I’m becoming convinced that looking for solutions is the wrong mindset. That kind of thinking is too binary, either you have THE solution or you have a failure. Nicholas Cage quotes Thomas Edison in that amazing film National Treasure, about how Edison recast his light bulb failures not as failures, but as “ways not to make a light bulb.” The more you iterate, the better you understand the space, the more elements of success you encounter. The more you think about iteration, the looser and more creative your mind is. Eventually, you iterate faster, and better, than you solve.

it’s additive, except when it’s subtractive, except when it’s additive — this is a play on Jobs’s line about zooming in and out, and it’s about interactive design. It’s also an avoidance of design cliches around taking everything out until you can’t take out any more. Most important, it’s a statement about the need for different modes of thinking and getting fast at it. Design thinking needs to recognize both the moments when you want to enrich an experience (with more features and options or an emotional accent) and when you want to reduce and focus.

grok quality — I have Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in my Amazon cart right now. The book talks about an internalized, nearly instinctive sense of quality and suggests a lot of time, thinking, and meditation on what quality is. It’s an interesting metric to put on work. Stronger than ‘is it good’, more powerful than will users like it, and it invokes a broader set of principles about durability, well-craftedness, how it feels in the hand (or wherever it is encountered. It also helps set up its presentation.

New skills, new values, LOTS of conversation and debate, and guidelines that only make things harder.

. . . but this one has promise. Called Do you matter? How great design will make people love your company. I grabbed it at the airport last week and read most of it on the flight out.

It’s got a lot of the usual examples (BMW, Apple, contrast to Dell), but it focuses a good deal on how hard it is to do this, and the importance of building a design culture — as opposed to a one-day workshop, or hiring a visual designer to make sure every page has a ‘hero moment’. I’ll have more posts later, but one of the high level lines that kind of good:

Well, you have a nicely designed object. Is it an iPod still? No, it’s not, because an iPod is a portal to a kaleidoscope of an experience. An iPod is not just an object. The object is an icon that is a portal to an experience.
So this is a huge distinction that develops thematically thought this book. Successful business people in all fields endeavor to understand that they are in the business of designing a total customer experience. We call this the customer experience supply chain.

A little wispy — an icon to a portal to a kaleidoscope of a gate to a dimension . . . — but it does move the conversation effectively from treating design as a gloss to a product to a fundamentally different approach to your offering. Then, it does the even more important work of recognizing how hard and long a task that is.

I love biking along Ocean Parkway, which is almost the entire route from our apartment to Coney Island. It’s a wild mix of people and architecture and I love watching the old guys watching other old guys play chess and backgammon, sometimes with the boards on their knees.

Today’s NYT had a nice article about this strange stretch of European boulevard.

Elegant and sketchy, welcoming and insular, the striated band of roadway, trees and people called Ocean Parkway both reflects Brooklyn and divides it with a thick green line. It was designed about a century and a half ago as a place to promenade, to socialize, to pleasure-drive or to settle, on a street that looks like a park. The architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were inspired by the grand tree-lined boulevards of Europe, like Avenue Foch in Paris and Unter den Linden in Berlin.

In an 1867 report to the Brooklyn Parks Commission, the architects talked about the kind of person who might live on the parkway, a country boy of “superior caliber” drawn to the city by an “irresistible magnetic force.” But the metropolis and success would not be enough for such a man. “Day by day,” they wrote, “his life needs a suggestion of the old country flavor to make it palatable as well as profitable.”

This is nice story about how urban planning has paid off and resulted in the kind of urban life Jane Jacobs wrote about. At first blush, the city planners seem to be almost every bit as arrogant and social engineery as those of the Robert Moses era, referring to people of ’superior caliber’ and assuming that everyone is drawn to a city. But maybe they succeeded where others have failed because there was a real human insight there: that people living in cities, recently transplanted in particular but maybe all of them, have a need for open spaces and places to walk and mingle.

as a person . . . and I think that’s a healthy thing . . . really.

Not long after the Republican convention, there was a Facebook group called “Intelligent Women Against Palin.” At the time I remember twittering something like “[kipbot] thinks intelligent ______ against anything republican kind of proves their point.” Leaving aside that it’s completely stupid to think that insulting people’s intelligence will do anything more than serve one’s own ego and galvanize the people on the other side, there was a bigger dynamic. Why are we soooooo unsympathetic to people who vote for candidates we can’t stand?

Watching With God on Our Side, a documentary about George W Bush’s relationship to evangelical America, I saw a Bush that I had been blind to: a devout Christian, likeable guy, with a simple worldview that could be seen as, and maybe, is hard-won wisdom.

A few clips showed Bush talking about his drinking, dissipated lifestyle and how he pulled things together through his faith. He joked, but was humble and quiet and confident, about how he went from not so good guy to someone with something to offer. During those clips, especially one where he joked about giving his mother all those white hairs, I liked and respected the guy. Thhe audience was clearly connecting with him as well.

Then they got to the famous moment where a Republican debate moderator asked who the most important political thinker in their lives was and Bush gave the simple, direct answer of Jesus. Many people, no doubt mysefl included, guffawed and wailed on the moron for the next week. “What a lightweight!” “No inner resources.” “Tool.”

After being softened by earlier clips, I had a hard time being pissed at his answer when I saw it. (And to be honest, I’m not sure I ever actually SAW him say it, I probably only encountered it in text.) I watched the clip three times and I’m pretty sure I didn’t see any defiance in his voice (”come on liberals and fellow Republicans on stage, I dare you to mock me.”) Had this been a character in a show, like say Leo McGarrey saying something like “I have a sickness and I can’t drink again”, or a black junkie turned community worker in The Wire, we would have shed a tear, but when R’s talk like this . . .

Anyway, I’m tired of hating the people who like the people we hate. Intellectually, it’s dishonest, politically, it’s useless, and now I’m starting to feel mean.