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The most artistic thing about theatrical [and] advantage of the small theatre is that you are looking through a small window. Has not everyone noticed how sweet and startling any landscape looks when seen through an arch? This strong, square, this shutting off of everything else, is not only an assistance to beauty; it is the essential of beauty - GK Chesteron, 1909

My friends Tom and Donna take me to all sorts of lo-rez, lo-tech, junk-tech performances: puppet shows, performance art based on slide-shows (literal slideshows — with carousels, film-strip projectors, unsynched sounds, live music), and toy theater.

Last night, I went to St Anns Warehouse’s 8th toy theater festival, produced by Great Small Works. It consisted of four shows:

• a traditional Indian story told through one singer and a partner moving toys around various tableaux;
• an Isaac Babel short story performed in a toy theater with Chagall-like backgrounds with accompaniments on clarinet and fiddle;
• a Stalin-era Russian SF novel (in the traditions many of us know through Stanislaw Lem), performed by three voices and a narrator who was also operating an analog synthesizer. (The synthesizer with its weird beeOOOOOOs and staticy sounds was the perfect aural accompaniment to Cold War era, concrete apartment towers, and emerging realities after the bomb. Tom wryly noted that only people from MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies would consider an analog synthesizer to be as lo-tech as stick puppets)
• a story of the devil destroying the world and orgy that precedes it, done with amazing sound and a devil with cool led eyes and the dance moves to rival Terrence and Phillip in Uncle Fuckah

As a digital designer who tracks CG for improved hair and water effects, it’s fun to watch powerful stories emerge from <1 fps, 0-fidelity, 0 apology to artifice media and find them even more engaging than the adventures of Niko and Roman.

One of the cool things with St Anns is that they usually have theater and festival memorabilia on display around the warehouse. So I got a lot of (crappy iPhone) pics of small toy theaters, an art form unto themselves.

While it’s not a great movie, Walk Hard has some great moments that I can’t stop re-watching (the protest song phase, India, the Beatles(!), and the world music song in particular).  While obsessing about the movie’s attention to detail in spoofing 70s rocker career (the Dewey variety show interstitials are awesome), I found the Dewey Cox album covers below.  I love when movies put together these kind of artefacts (right down to the tortured punctuation):

I’m reading Rick Poyntor’s article in I.D., Down with Innovation, which David Armano twittered yesterday:

So, despite the advance billing, I’m actually digging the article. Poyntor, whose books I have enjoyed off and on over the years, has a really interesting point — that design has become so important, businesses feel they they have to wrest it from the hands of the designers and given it back to the suits:

But designers were right. By the 1990s, almost everyone was getting the message. Design had turned out to be as important as designers always insisted, and it was the force of their commitment, imagination, and creativity, as an expression of public need and desire—designers are people, not a breed apart—that had made it so. Design is now so important, it seems, that designers can no longer be trusted with it, and to make it absolutely clear that control has moved into someone else’s hands, design needs to be given a fancy new name. Call it design thinking. Call it innovation. “Everyone loves design but no one wants to call it design,” BusinessWeek’s Bruce Nussbaum informed the readers of Design Observer last year. “Top CEOs and managers want to call design something else—innovation. Innovation: that they are comfortable with. Design, well, it’s a little too wild and crazy for them.” Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, offers this prescription: “Businesspeople don’t just need to understand designers better—they need to become designers.”

These days, I’m hearing lots of designers talk about the blur between design decisions and strategic decisions. I know of at least a half dozen prominent agencies that are trying to figure out if ‘interaction design’ is a function of strategy or creative. (Interestingly, most of them don’t have the word design in their departments, they’re in the advertising space of ‘creatives’.) On many teams I’ve encountered, the strategist is often the last or first word on design decisions rather than the CD. The power is not in design, it’s in strategy or audience knowledge.

This is a problem. Having been largely successful in establishing design as an important part of the product and experience creation process, and having successfully established that design has empathetic concerns and principles independent of marketing strategies — shouldn’t we be concerned that it’s getting pulled away and entrusted with people who don’t focus on design?

During IxDA 08, there was a great twitter sigh of relief when Bill Buxton put his slide up saying “that not everyone is a designer.” I didn’t read that as an elitist proclamation of the guild, but as a recognition that design needs to be taken seriously on its own terms, developed as an expertise, and respected as having rhythms and sensibilities of its own. Those sensibilities, which are still in development (in the interactive space(s) at least), still need cultivation and craftsman’s focus on details and precision. It’s much too early to start generalizing the participation.

Anyway, the thing that prompted the post, was the screen I saw when I tagged the article for del.icio.us:

Bummer for Poyntor. Because of a twitter, his article is tagged through the lens of an Armano reco.  Without even thinking about it, I used that tag also, presumably for the same reasons others did: I would come back to the long article, with the memory hook of who recommended it to me.

NYT article today about the last pinball machine manufacturer. One of those articles that makes me love living in NY and love the Times. The article is a reporter’s dream: a small world of pinball fanatics (including a “historian of the sport”), a 62-year old owner who yells at his employees for not playing enough pinball and bruised a rib snowboarding in December, really cool pictures of the craft and the mass of the enterprise, and fun quotes like a bug list which includes the comment “flipper feels soft.”

This article also highlights how well the Times has evolved into its digital presentation of itself. I’ve been getting caught up on my podcasts and just listened to a conversation about Eric Alterman’s New Yorker article on the death of newspapers. Articles like this show that, on the content side at least, that some papers are finding ways to embrace the medium: interactive slideshows that highlight photography and have a slightly different narrative arc, the nice incorporation of sound files into an otherwise conventionally formatted article, the use of thumbnails on the top page to pull people in (the two pics above are intriguing at thumbnail size).

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.

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.

Nuts and Volts is one of the few magazines I subscribe to that I go through cover to cover each month. This is odd, cuz I don’t really understand it and read very little of it. It’s one of those magazines, like certain books I own, that I aspire to read and which I benefit from looking through.

For the uninitiated (or well-adjusted), Nuts and Volts is an electronics hobbyist magazine. It’s got product reviews, news (including the circuited contact lens), projects each month, loads of advertisements (which is a big part of the charm - electronics geeks writing copy and figuring out images that sell), tutorials, circuit walk-throughs.

My knowledge of electronics came from a month between jobs where I mucked around with the Arduino and some solderless breadboards. I’m better than a beginner, but the intermediate stuff in Nuts and Volts is beyond me right now. So, each month I browse it looking for content that helps me past my current plateau of understanding and, more importantly, I revel in the making culture that I admire.

The April 2008 issue (cover above) had particular charms for me. The cover story is “High Voltage Power Supply”(!) featuring a nixie display board and the line: “It’s fun to collect and experiment with forgotten technology! But, you will need a stable high voltage power supply to get started.” This might be the equivalent of the swimsuit issue for Nuts and Volts readers . . . I really can’t tell.

I loved this piece, a project for a timed/self-monitoring bird feeder, requested by a reader:

Retired, limited income, limited mobility guy . . . and they do a project for him to build a bird feeder. love Love LUV it.

And, lastly, you gotta love the advertisements:

In the midst of many many posts and talks about generalism, it was interesting to see this post about feature creep reminding us of the UNIX credo “to do one thing and do it well.”

I seem to spend a lot of time reveling in craft, worrying about the loss of expertise and specialty, and wondering if we’re not going too far in our talk about generalism. I came across the feature creep post above, by way of this sparse post by Jon Howard:

I found both these posts bafflingly intriguing. The one above was so fast and minimal as to be koan-like, and who writes about feature creep anymore? That seemed so old school. But some pattern recognition module in the brain kept me focused on these two posts, struggling for meaning. And then!: feature creep is a way of describing how generalists and agencies accrete skills! And maybe it works . . .

Feature creep, traditionally understood, is problematic to the maker and the user of the product. The maker, by being spread thin, misses deadlines, goes over budget, dilutes the initial impact of the final product, and makes that final product hard to maintain, service, or evolve. To the user, feature creep results in confusion: the subtle differences between choices waste users’ time parsing meanings; the number of choices can be paralyzing and unsatisfying; finding things is difficult; and the cruft underneath somehow rises to become the experience of the product.

At its core, feature creep is worrisome, because it spreads out talent across a wide number of things, at the expense of doing any one thing well or in an elegantly integrated fashion.  The accretion of skills when one becomes a generalist runs that same risk:  “I’ll learn to do this and then this and then this.” We mistake conversancy in a skill with competency as we move from skill to skill, discipline to discipline and then what do we have?
When I look at resumes or talk to designers in the generalist vein, I find myself struggling with the long list or big concept. Long lists of skills and competencies have my pattern recognition module seeking what’s missing so I can understand what unique value that person could bring to the work. The big concept (”it’s all design” “it’s all advertising in the end”) leaves me suspicious.
Perhaps the tools we have for managing feature creep (does it add inherent value to the product/person, does it add noticeable increased value to the perception of the product/person (will it help me sell myself) could help with the balance.

Gever Tully of the the Tinkering School has a great TED University talk (I think these are the people who don’t get the big stage . . . they should publish more of these) about 5 dangerous things parents should let their kids do. Most of them, in their straight form or adapted, are pretty useful for adult designers, especially those of us who manage more than do these days, as ways to keep us fresh.

One of the downsides of blogging about video or audio is that it’s hard to transcribe the key points, so I’m going on memory, here:

Play with fire — for kids, this covers everything from actually learning how to build a fire (stones and sparks, fireplace arrangements) to working with kilns and fire ovens. Kids not only learn about the physics of fire and respect for powerful forces, but they also learn about the creative power of subjecting things to heat. For adults, I think there’s an analog to playing with electricity, electronics, and code . . . things that are powerful and promethean, but where even a bit of familiarity can be massively empowering.

Throw a spear – it’s physical physics, problem solving, optimization of body mechanics and trajectories, and deeply Savannah evolution primal (I’m going with the secondary -h spelling to see how many people think IxDA08 rather than Africa.) For adults, I think it’s guns. There’s a woman in my office who goes shooting once a month at a Manhattan-based gun club with a Ladies night. My first game design title was a hunting game (Trophy Buck, it’s still on some clearance shelves) and I was fascinated all the things about bullet trajectories, winds, shot, timing and the calculation goes into guns. Bows are good too, but they lack the chemistry, and oiled metal of guns. Shooting in general has a good hunter-gatherer feel, worthy of throwing spears.

Own a pocketknife — this one was a little nostalgic for me.  Tully leads with the point that getting a pocketknife used to be a rite of passage for a young boy.  It was a tool, but it was dangerous and there were safety lessons and responsibilities somberly passed on to me when I got a knife.  This one may be a literal translation for adults:  get a pocket-knife, and not just one with a USB drive, but one that has some tools.  Remember not to take it to the airport, but see how useful it is to carry around, see if you find yourself tinkering more. Then there are some adult tools to potentially play with:  routers, soldering irons, a decent tool box.  Or upgrade to a DeWalt tool and read the last chapter of Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning there was the Command Line

Take apart appliances — I’m doing this one tonight or tomorrow. I just replaced a clock radio (with an iHome!) and I’m going to dissect it tonight.  I may try to connect parts to a power supply and play with contact points to see what I can do.  But it’s a sad reminder of how many things I throw out without looking at them.  Gamers:  take apart a rumble-pack or haptic empowered controller to see how they do it before you chuck it!  Very cool!
That’s four, but I think my enthusiasm wanes here anyway, cuz I think the remaining ones are drive a car (let your kid drive a car) and break some DRM.  I didn’t find those so compelling and the adult analog of driving a car — sailing or gliding or flying — seem expensive and outdoors.

Watching Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire last night, I had some musical moments that brought me much joy. They involve Patrick Doyle, a wonderful and rarely trumpeted movie music composer.

The first moment came during the scene in Goblet of Fire in which Harry enters the ballroom. The fanfare sounded really, really familiar to me. I listened to it twice more until it hit me: it’s like Claudius’s entrance fanfare in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet! (This is one of my all-time favorite movies, like top ten, and blah blah blah about his lips and the spittle, just go away.) I looked it up on IMDB and sure enough Patrick Doyle did the music for Goblet of Fire. I take great pride in little catches like that, I drive people nuts when I obsess over where I’ve seen bit actors before (and those that love me have learned to pretend they find it useful).

One of the things that’s interesting about Claudius’s march is Doyle’s thinking behind it. In an interview on NPR, Doyle said he wrote the fanfare to indicate a time of hopefulness: there was a new king following the death of a beloved one, and people’s support for this new one was a sign of great hope and averted crisis. This plays right into the strength of the Branagh Hamlet: the recognition that killing a king is a dangerous and difficult thing to do, that it is, in fact, treason and potentially disastrous for a country. The Oedipal, ennui-ridden interpretations of Hamlet’s difficulty in acting is a recent thing in the play’s history — going back to Freud mostly, and somewhat to Nietzche. Branagh’s Hamlet is set in a 19th century court and in a castle court lined with mirrors and filled with false panels, secret passages and a two way-mirror, highlighting the danger and duplicity of court politics and taking us out of the realm of the psyche and placing Hamlet’s dilemma in a very real world of court politics. While most movies introduce Claudius as a villain and an incompetent, Branagh introduces him as a sign of hope, and shows him forcefully negotiating with Fortinbras (the dramatic tearing of the letter causes great patriotic cheering in the hall). So, when the king enters the court, and confetti falls, people cheer, and the fanfare is buoyantly optimistic. Hamlet’s darkness and isolation are immediate and palpably felt. (The black clothes in a well-lit room helps too.) In that same interview, Doyle noted that he paid special attention to Hamlet-Ophelia music and worked hard to make it a love theme for a couple that could have been quite happy and would have been wonderful to see - not the doomed lovers in Hamlet’s angst-ridden world.

But where Doyle’s music really shines is in support of the the spoken word. Possibly because Doyle has been an actor (he has some lines in Branagh movies), or because his first gigs were for Shakespeare movies, there’s a wonderful connection between the words and the music that I’ve never experienced anywhere else. So much so, that I will sometimes play the music just so I can read along (out loud or silently) with it.

The best moments for me are from Henry V and Hamlet not surprisingly — Shakespeare comedy is even harder to hold onto than most Shakespeare.  So, a call-out to best word and music moments in Patrick Doyle’s work:

• Crispian Day — duh, but seriously, reading along with the music and doing so to support the transition to the rush to battle that abruptly cuts off the speech adds depth to my appreciation of the movie, the play and the music.
• “I loved you once” The last moment of tenderness between Hamlet and Ophelia. (* extra tidbit below)
• “Oh what a Noble Mind” Immediately following the scene above, Kate Winslet is on the floor weeping not only for Hamlet’s rejection of her, but for the loss of Hamlet and all that he was.

The “Now could I drink hot blood . . . my thoughts be bloody” music is pretty rousing, too. I expect someday soldiers and football players will use that to get pumped up instead of “Ride of the Valkyries”, but the three above are just killer.

(*) This scene has a favorite, non-verbal, acting moment that always amazes me for its power and acting genius. When Ophelia attempts to return Hamlet’s letters (or tokens), Hamlet’s line is “Ha, ha! Are you honest?” Branagh does a beautiful thing here. He slaps the letters away and holds her arm, the eyes tear up, and for the line “Ha, ha!”, he makes a quiet noise, twice, questioning her, asking what she’s doing. It’s not an attack on her, it’s not anger, it’s the bitter sadness of having his happiness betrayed, and not even necessarily by her, but by the court and the world that he lives in. It’s the most heartbreaking line/noise ever.
I like to compare that moment to one in Emma Thompson’s Sense & Sensibility when Edward (Hugh Grant) bumbles through his “my heart is and always yours” explanation and Elinor (Emma Thompson) waits a beat and then goes into a glorious release of sub-lingual sobbing and exhiliration. For some reason, I always fantasize that Thompson and Branagh, as young RSC fast-trackers, thought about trying this.

Damn. All this from my least favorite Harry Potter movie.