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People who don’t read fiction sometimes annoy me.  They can be so smug about how frivolous it is to read stories that aren’t factual.  While I can hardly argue that my genre binges are improving books, they’ll extend this argument to the good stuff even.

Most of them are fun and charming, though, and defending fiction is a source of fun with them.  So, as I started reading Germinal yesterday, I sent one such friend a tail to a note about some work-related stuff:

hope all is well.  you’ll love this:  I’m reading Germinal by Zola — 19th century fiction! You’d be amazed at the relevance my oh-so-intelligent friend.

To which, he replied:

19th century fiction? C’mon Kip…. with only time to consume just over 2000 books over an average life span you can certainly find some non-fiction to help prevent the brain rot.

That was depressing.  I’ve always been keenly aware that I will never read more than a fraction of the books I may want to.  That’s the reason I embrace the rule of “if I don’t love a book after 50 pages, I’m dumping it” (and I may just dump Germinal, which will be really weird — like turning my back on my labor past).

But only 2000 books???   That’s a bummer, especially when I think of all the books I’ve re-read four or five times or more.  Makes me wonder if I should stop with the books and just read magazines.

David Brooks doesn’t usually inspire me, or inspire me to even read him with the chance of getting inspired, but a piece that he did yesterday, describing the modern depletion of imagination, was terrific and made me want more, but now I’m adrift and have much too much work to do to get it.

The article centered on a piece about C S Lewis:

The essay, which appeared in Books & Culture, is called “C. S. Lewis and the Star of Bethlehem,” by Michael Ward, a chaplain at Peterhouse College at Cambridge. It points out that while we moderns see space as a black, cold, mostly empty vastness, with planets and stars propelled by gravitational and other forces, Europeans in the Middle Ages saw a more intimate and magical place. The heavens, to them, were a ceiling of moving spheres, rippling with signs and symbols, and moved by the love of God. The medieval universe, Lewis wrote, “was tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine.”

Lewis tried to recapture that medieval mind-set, Ward writes. He did it not because he wanted to renounce the Copernican revolution and modern science, but because he found something valuable in that different way of seeing our surroundings.

The modern view disenchants the universe, Lewis argued, and tends to make it “all fact and no meaning.” When we say that a star is a huge flaming ball of gas, he wrote, we are merely describing what it is made of. We are not describing what it is. Lewis also wanted to include the mythologies, symbols and stories that have been told about the heavenly actors, and which were so real to those who looked up into the sky hundreds of years ago. He wanted to strengthen the imaginative faculty that comes naturally to those who see the heavens as fundamentally spiritual and alive.

I’ve been trying to work through Bullfinch’s Mythology recently, in an effort at self-erudition. One of the disturbing things about reading the book is its rationale:

If no other knowledge deserves to be called useful but that which enlarges our possessions or to raise our station in society, then mythology has no that appellation. But if that which tends to make us happier and better can be called useful then we claim that epithet for our subject. For mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.

Without a knowledge of mythology, much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.

This is the constant sell of Bullfinch, that if you read the book, you can understand references in poems and decode their meaning. Not to unlock their magic, feel what it’s like for absurd but wonderful images to mean something deep and emotional, or tap into stories that tap into obscured parts of our psyche — but to understand poems and literature which are almost as removed from us as the mythic stories they reference.

On the rare occasions when I read Shakespeare, I am always struck by how alive the 16th century was with magically powered plants. References to properties of plants abound in Shakespeare, and I think how cool it would be to walk in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and to see flowers which are pretty, smell nice, and have medical/magical/(al)chemical properties. How much more alive and rich the place would be. But that’s gone to us.

So . . . When I see a passage about how night skies used to be magical and once inspired wonder, I want more. Brooks goes on to tantalize even further:

The medievals had a tremendous capacity for imagination and enchantment, and while nobody but the deepest romantic would want to go back to their way of thinking (let alone their way of life), it’s a tonic to visit from time to time. As many historians have written, Europeans in the Middle Ages lived with an almost childlike emotional intensity.

(Tantalize comes from the story of Tantalus, who as a punishment for stealing ambrosia, was put in a pool of water beneath the branches of a fruit tree. Whenever he bent to drink the water would recede away from him, whenever he reached up for fruit, the tree branches would move just out of his grasp. I knew that without looking it up, but I also know it because I learned a bunch of Greek myths in High School so I could be clever and witty in Extemporaneous Speaking.  I’m not sure if that’s good or not.)

At the beginning of Foucault’s Pendulum, the narrator tells of a couple who suffers from this post-medieval condition:

A moment later, the couple went off — he, trained on some textbook that had blunted his capacity for wonder, she inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite

Yeah, so I want more out of this Brooks column and there’s nowhere to go. He doesn’t provide a link for the Ward essay, which seems selfish for one who is lamenting the closing of our imaginations, “many historians” gives me nothing, and oh, how I wish there were some implicitly titled “If you like this or care about the night skies, you should check out…”

The internet’s best contribution to this dilettante’s life is “More…” and I have none.

Fun, spot-on, surprisingly techno-friendly take on the Kindle from a columnist at The Nation.

The Kindle displays only the text of publications, and I missed the pictures as well as the ability to read a whole article without clicking the next page bar every ten seconds. I realized I was accustomed to seeing headlines for articles on a variety of subjects all at once and then choosing which article to read first, something the Kindle makes difficult. I also missed the comforting rustle of the newspaper’s pages. As for books, even I am not inclined to pack more than one for something like a subway ride, so the difference in weight is negligible, and again, there’s a lot more text on one page of a paper book than one Kindle page-view. Like many people, the other place I tend to read is in bed. Bringing the Kindle there seemed, in all honesty, like a violation. No matter its pleasures, ultimately, unlike a paper book–especially a loved one battered and cherished over time–the Kindle is a piece of cold electronic circuitry that seems alien to intimate environments. It’s beautifully designed but unchanging, and thus represents nothing more than itself. By contrast, when I stand and look at my bookshelves, I see books I’ve had since I was a child mixed in with titles from high school, college and after, all of them nestled alongside my husband’s books.

In addition to being a charming discussion of books and electronic reading, her note about scanning text highlighted a design challenge we haven’t faced yet:  discoverability.  Scanning a newspaper to see what I want to read is a behavior that we don’t have a vocabulary for or have as goals in design yet.  We’re still caught in task completion and occasionally drift into findability (though we still don’t have enough people adopting that important phrase).  Supporting serendipitous discovery, allowing people to step outside of their checked boxes, providing the big scan of a front of a newspaper to see what’s there, what I need, what I’m glad to know in miniature.  We don’t do that yet.

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.

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.

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.

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.