kip/bot/blog

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.

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.

A little late to be posting this, but the Nicholson Baker piece on Wikipedia in the NY Review of Books is pretty interesting for its insights, what it says about the NYRB, and for the author.

First, the author. Nicholson Baker is a fascinating person, and an interesting choice for the NYRB piece. In the past he has:

• campaigned against libraries destroying books and card catalogs
• saved the Rochester Public Library Card catalog from destruction
• wrote an article about the books that appear as props in IKEA rooms after having read a large volume of them
• worte a lengthy but illuminating New Yorker about how he organizes the 6 * 6 bookshelves that he limits his book collection to at home
• unrelated, but interesting, he wrote an intimate confessional about his obsession with John Updike (U and I), in which he tortures himself by comparing his prose to Updike’s, obsesses about why Updike plays golf with some writers but not him, tries to remember his favorite passages from Updike’s work, only to be frustrated at the inaccuracy

There’s an obsessive self-reflectiveness to Baker which, coupled with his openness and honesty, makes him an ideal writer about user-generated content. The piece itself is ostensibly a review of Missing Manual for Wikipedia, by “cheery electronics expert David Pogue.” It’s a charming conceit of NYRB to throw a single title into the mix, force the writer to make a few comments about it, and then let them get on with the business of commentary.
Baker is the perfect blend of NYRB snob, but one who not only gets the internet, but gets into it. He’s not slumming, and he’s got enough literary juice and openness to unabashedly enjoy Wikipedia:

Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It’s fact-encirclingly huge, and it’s idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies—and it’s free, and it’s fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, “Diogenes of Sinope,” or “turnip,” or “Crazy Eddie,” or “Bagoas,” or “quadratic formula,” or “Bristol Beaufighter,” or “squeegee,” or “Sanford B. Dole,” and you’ll have knowledge you didn’t have before. It’s like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks.

He also looks at it as a literary/writing phenomenon, and manages to keep some level of snobby, bookish aloofness:

[Wikipedia] asked for help, and when it did, it used a particularly affecting word: “stub.” At the bottom of a short article about something, it would say, “This article about X is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.” And you’d think: That poor sad stub: I will help. Not right now, because I’m writing a book, but someday, yes, I will try to help.

And when people did help they were given a flattering name. They weren’t called “Wikipedia’s little helpers,” they were called “editors.” It was like a giant community leaf-raking project in which everyone was called a groundskeeper.

Despite the de rigeur snobbery in the preamble, Baker is genuinely enthusiastic about Wikipedia. In fact, Baker goes almost completely native in its culture. Not surprisingly, Baker, the man who preserved Ikea display books from obscurity (however briefly) and books and card catalogs from the shredder, became an active protector of articles slated for deletion. He put hours of time into making the case that an obscure beat personality, the Jitterbug telephone, unknown Russian poets, and the author of a ‘naps will change your life book’ deserved an entry in Wikipedia if someone was willing to write one. He followed them with the petty but real passions we’ve all experienced in bulletin boards, usenet groups, or any kind of forum that we know takes up too much headspace, but we allow it to anyway.

I stopped hearing what my family was saying to me—for about two weeks I all but disappeared into my screen, trying to salvage brief, sometimes overly promotional but nevertheless worthy biographies by recasting them in neutral language, and by hastily scouring newspaper databases and Google Books for references that would bulk up their notability quotient. I had become an “inclusionist.”

Baker is good-natured about his emotional attachment to these struggles: “When I managed to help save something I was quietly thrilled — I walked tall, like Henry Fonda in Twelve Angry Men.” He also observes that:

All big internet successes have a more or less addictive component — they hook you because they are solitary ways to be social: you keep checking in, peeking in, as you would to some noisy party going on downstairs in a house while you’re trying to sleep.

Not sure that all big internet successes rely on that hook, but he does highlight a powerful dynamic around safe ways to put one’s self out there, and his willingness to look at user-generation dynamics without condescension, especially a user-generated encyclopedia!, is refreshing as well as interesting.

The article has some nice higlights and Wiki-historical bits as well. He references over a dozen wars, vandalisms, deletions, hot-button entries. For my part, I did not know that Wikipedia was seeded with public domain content: the Encyclopedia Britannica 1911 edition, Dictoiary of Greek and Roman biography, two biography dictionaries, and a bible dictionary. Clever that.
Oh yeah, I think he recommends the Missing Manual: “this manual is enlightening, well organized, and full of good sense.”

An independent bookseller in Seattle shares some thoughts on book stealing, reminded me of my post about a Soho bookstore’s handling of highly steal-worthy books. He lists the top most stealable authors as:
1. Charles Bukowski

2. Jim Thompson

3. Philip K. Dick

4. William S. Burroughs

5. Any Graphic Novel

The list of popular books is surprisingly static, although newer artists have earned their place in the pantheon with Hunter S. Thompson and the Beats: Palahniuk, Murakami, and Danielewski have become hugely popular antisellers in the last five years. I’ve had hundreds of dollars of graphic novels—Sandman, Preacher, The Dark Knight Returns—lifted from right under my nose all at once. Science fiction and fantasy are high in demand, too: The coin of the realm is now, and has always been, the fiction that young white men read, and self-satisfied young white men, the kind who love to stick it to the man, are the majority of book shoplifters.

I’m just now starting How to talk about books you haven’t read, and I’m reminded of a powerful conversation I had with my senior thesis advisor . . . a conversation which startles friends today.

I was doing my thesis on rank-and-file worker movements in towns that voted for the Nazis. I had a 40 book bibliography and I was falling massively behind in my reading. My advisor had been frustrated until a thought hit him, and he asked: “Kip, are you trying to read these books in their entirety?” “Well . . . yeah.”

“Let me explain something: there are maybe ten books in the whole wide world that deserve to be read the whole way through.”

Lots of people carry lots of guilt about that one . . . how many of us in the design/web/media professions read all of Blink after all?

The other dirty little reading secret is that not only do I selectively read (non-fiction) books, but I regularly bail on fiction books after 50 pages or so. I learned this from Steve Leveen’s The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life, which argues that there are so many great books you’ll never live long enough to read anyway, there’s no point in forcing yourself to complete ones you’re not digging. The rule: if a book doesn’t have you totally enthralled by 50 pages, dump it, move on, next.

The author of that book is the CEO of Levenger, a nifty store with tools ‘for the serious reader’. In addition to great lap desks (B&N ripped it off from Levenger and the Levenger ones are infinitely better), they have a bunch of tips about keeping reading journals, the virtues of marking up books (and a system for your marks!), and I just discovered that they’ve added a reading site.

So, yeah. I have a problem. I buy a lot of books and things from Amazon. I’m one of those people that cringes at meetings when people say “who could spend enough at Amazon to actually find Amazon prime worthwhile?” Uh . . .

So Alex says he’s hearing good things about Proust and the Neuroscientist from the “art meets science is” cool crowd. I always listen to Alex: Add to Cart. Shew tells me to get understanding exposure and learn something already about light and photography. I always listen to Shew: Add to Cart. I need a replacement copy of Convergence Culture, cuz mine went missing (along with all my brilliant marginalia) some weeks ago. Shirky, well duh. Classics for Pleasure is a romantic love of mine . . . I’m a guy who was so busy with politics and economics at college that I never stopped to smell the classics. (I am alarmed, though that “classics” includes Agatha Christie, PKD, Arthur Conan Doyle as well as Ezra Pound, Sappho and Zora Neal Hurston).

And, finally, the irony purchase of all time: How to talk about books without reading them. I am such a doosh.

=====

The DS games look tasty: Advance Wars is a turn-based strategy game with an minimally intrusive anime kids save the world story; and Curious Village is a puzzle game . . . I miss MYST, Monkey Island, Tex Murphy, Gabriel Knight and Journeyman Project.

The upside of my experiment to read only what is available on the eReader is the amazing amount of amazingly cheap public domain, canonical, books which are available.

Here is the mixed page of my Reader’s contents:

I call it “Slippery Slope to Mouth Breather”

But, for the cost of a new bestseller like The Da Vinci Code, you can buy Shakespeare’s major tragedies, late romances, 4 most popular comedies, the sonnets, and still have money for a mix of Roman and English histories. For the cost of Freakonomics, you can have the Divine Comedy, 4 Jane Austen novels, Great Expectations, Bleak House, Heart of Darkness, Leaves of Grass, Gulliver’s Travels, The Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, the Selected Essays of Emerson, Huck Finn, and a decent translation of Faust (this is what I grabbed).

If I stuck to my reader’s offerings and had classics installed on them, I would be a great books reader . . . that could be quite a bit better for my soul than some of the other things I have installed.

The major flaw in that plan is that, while most French and German translations are passable, the Russian translations are the horrible ones we had in high school, with its Britishisms (Marmeladov’s wife actually tells him to “leave off!” in her translation of Crime and Punishment) and loss of any Russian feel. So I have to lug around books for the Russians, but everything else is pretty good.

(More on translation from a blog I did three years ago. Covers Kundera’s savaging of Kafka translations, and the beginning of the new wave of Russian translations begun with Notes from Underground)

I’ve been re-united with my Reader Digital Book, which had lain dormant for a while. I’ve decided to try and stick with this and read only what’s available or that I already have on my Reader.

Using just my reader would save me money, save trees, allow me to use my man-purse more frequently, travel lighter, and hopefully read more. It could also put me on a path of brain rot.

The Sony Connect store for the Reader is not the kind of material which, like education, “makes man fit company for himself.” The catalog is loaded with junk: the secondary titles of science fiction writers, lots and lots of mysteries and other genre fiction, and TV and movie series (Star Wars and Star Trek) novels. In the non-fiction realm, there’s a lot of light business books like Wikinomics, Management According to ________ (fill in historical figure). Below is a screenshot of the last bestsellers email I received from Sony:

The Einstein, Bible and Hosseini certainly aren’t junk, but this is pretty representative of the catalog: lots of James Patterson, Baldacci, Michael Connelly, Ludlum and the like — middle-aged male suspense fiction (which I love, but the intake of which needs to be controlled). The list from 8 months ago is pretty much the same:

We got Cormac McCarthy and people don’t seem to be able to get enough of the Einstein pop-bio, but it’s still genre stuff.

This isn’t purely be design. Digital catalogs are being built around three streams: 1) new stuff coming out where the digital rights are clear and the digital version is part of the production process; 2) old catalog stuff that has been in digital form for a while; 3) old catalog stuff that has enough appeal to the gadget- and fan-boys to be worth converting. Hopefully the catalog will improve. I’ve been tracking the Kindle catalog, wondering if I should switch when they’re back in stock. They seem to be in the same situation.

Buyers of the Kindle report having a buying binge similar to what most of us experienced with iTunes: in the first day, they bought a TON of material just to load up and cuz it was so fun. I did the same with my reader and it now has a lot of low- to middle-brow stuff in it: Heinlein, the Foundation Trilogy, Walter Furst, William Gibson, some post-trilogy Dune novels (!?!?), histories of the world as seen through a spice, drink, hammer or nail, two person lens histories (The Professor and the Madman, The Courtier and the Heretic). Essentially, it’s loaded with the reading equivalent of comfort food: it nourishes me a little, but isn’t really a diet.

The catalog reinforces this. Nearly every time I tried to find some ’serious’ reading, like a favorite Philip Roth novel, I was either unable to find the author, or only able to find the most recent work by that person. It’s so spotty (and the Sony Connect software is such crap) that I give up after five or six searches.
So, sticking to the Reader for all my reading could well rot my brain.

Worthwhile piece in the NY Times blog section, taking up readers’ arms against Jobs’s statement that no one reads anymore. Starts out wispy, romantic reader:

The Mac, Pixar, the iPhone, the iPod, iTunes. This stuff is cool. Lighter than air. iGetit. But it’s just product, dude.

Reading is something else, an engagement of the imagination with life experience. It’s fad-resistant, precisely because human beings are hard-wired for story, and intrinsically curious. Reading is not about product.

This is a view I’m sympathetic to, but being a designer for marketing groups, I’ve learned the hard way to let go of even my most strongly held opinions (not to mention beliefs, principles and ethics ). But it doesn’t take on the figure cited by Jobs: “the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.â€?
Towards the end of the piece, the author takes on this argument. He notes that Jobs got the number from a report that has many question marks over it. Then he cites some other data, with the snobby aplomb of a serious reader:

Last year, a survey for the Associated Press found that a much smaller number — 27 percent — had not read a book lately, which means nearly three-in-four have read a book. Steve Jobs may be many things – maestro, visionary, demi-god – but he apparently isn’t a careful reader of certain market reports.

The more compelling statistic was rarely mentioned in news accounts of the A.P. story: the survey found that another 27 percent of Americans had read 15 or more books a year. That report documents a national celebration.

Most companies would kill for a market like that – more than one-fourth of the world’s biggest consumer market buying 15 or more of its items a year. And half the population bought nearly 6 books a year. If only Apple were so lucky. The latest Harry Potter book sold 9 million copies in its first 24 hours – in English. “The DaVinci Code,� a story of ideas even with its wooden characters and absurd plotting, has sold more than 60 million copies.

I’m not sure that puts the point to rest, though. The blog also acknowledges that publishing isn’t growing briskly, that some companies are merging to survive, and the industry had a puny 1% growth last year.

(Re: the picture. We still have a ways to go on search. Finding this picture took quite a bit of work: “Captain Kirk” + reading, “Captain Kirk” + eyeglasses + book, etc. Didn’t yield anything. It wasn’t until I remembered that it was Tale of Two Cities he was reading that I had any luck. Even then, I had to switch out of images and troll sites for it, and even THEN I had to settle for a picture that looks like he’s on the toilet.)

it’s weird that I like goodreads as much as I do but never raved about it. I’ve been using it regularly — partly as a reading journal, partly as a recommendation engine (one superior to Amazon’s in many ways) — but I don’t grab my friends by the arm and say “you have to try it out” the same way I do other things. And yet, it has insinuated itself into my weekly reading habits, my purchases, and has gotten me into some interesting debates. (I also learn a lot about friends since everyone on the web rates Ayn Rand a 1 or 5 and they tend to put her on their shelves.)

I’m not sure why, but the reviews are always coherent, even when harsh or sarcastic. People are putting some thought into the reviews and for the most part care about books. The whole idea of browsing other people’s to-read, read, reading shelves is personal, engaging, and extremely valuable. My friend Todd is my business literature sherpa and I follow his reading habits closely.

The funny part, though, are the reminders that you haven’t finished a book.
This is a great, useful, engaging experience . . . but a quiet one. Like the act of reading which it supports.