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I have a weird memory from a surfer movie. I can’t remember the title, and having never watched surfer movies aside from stopping briefly on the remote in between stops, I have no context for it. (Major exception to the previous sentences: Point Break, which, of course, transcends and resists genre classification.) So here’s the memory:

Some girl, wearing an old-fashioned, square cut bikini is talking to an older guy about her boyfriend-the-hero-of-this-movie’s chances at winning a surfing contest. The boyfriend is, of course, the underdog. He has been screwed by his wealthier, more practiced, less scrupulous, and prettier but less attractive opponents. The boyfriend is behind and his success depends on the next run. The girlfriend wonders what’s needed to pull off this surfing and life miracle.

The older guy is big, barrel-chested, chomping a cigar, wearing a tank top and hat and holding his binoculars. He looks pensive and says something like “well, he may have the skill, and he may catch a good wave, but he needs more than that . . . he needs a great, big chest full of character.” (Not sure how to spell chest full — chestful seems like treasure chest. Chest full feels too biological and ribcage focused.)

This kind of thinking is common to people and companies new to interactive work. There’s a belief that spirit and energy and character can overcome all obstacles, even the laws of physics or ignorance (or a bad wave). In the movies, we see repeatedly how someone can overcome absurd adversity with a pep talk, digging down and finding the fire, or coming up with a clever trick (that Karate Kid broken ankle thing). In the Olympics, many of the events give athletes three shots at getting it right, so that third attempt is a chance at making up for a suboptimal performance and bringing a lot of heart to win the gold. In distance events or timed sports, there’s always a hope that the runner can pour it on in the last five minutes, or the team can put together a series of scoring drives (touchdown!, on-sides kick!, touchdown!, interception!, gadget play! touchdown! ZOMG we won!).

But interactive isn’t like that. Notions of heart, digging deep, fishing something out of your bag of tricks doesn’t work. You’re usually up against laws of physics. As Fred Brooks reminds us, nine women in a month can’t make a baby — no matter how much character they have.

Interactive is like chess. It’s built on a foundation, there are virtually no clever tricks, no ways to surge and overcome a bad position. If you play a poor opening, your middlegame options are limited — you’re on the defensive. If your middlegame position is weak, you can’t go on the attack, even if you have a lot of heart for it. If your endgame is technically lost, all you can hope is that your opponent makes a mistake. But no pep talk or chirpy can-doism can change the fact that you have a lost position. You need to play to win from the beginning, you need to begin with a view of the end, you need to be in the now and be in the future calculating possible nows that may arise.

For my software surfer movie, some gems:

Measure twice, cut once.

Have a plan.

Explore the implications of your moves.

When you have a problem and hear someone say “oh, it’ll be fine, I’m not worried” a half tone higher than their usual voice, smack that person on the forehead until s/he starts worrying.

Track your projects early, not just two weeks out from launch.

In fact, don’t bother checking in two weeks out from launch, cuz if it’s broke it’s too late and you’re only gonna screw it up.

Don’t trust the happy optimists, fill your team with people who like solving puzzles and loathe inelegance and easy solutions.

Most important, keep your head in the game, look at the whole board, and calculate.

The celebration of failure has become a tired, counterproductive meme.

Sure, the tension involved in celebrating something normally thought to be bad gets your attention. It’s also a way to get people out of their comfort zone. So cheers for that.

But, really, we actually want to succeed and the more I read about failing forward, failing your way to success, and not being able to succeed without failing, the more I think the word does us a disservice on several levels. For starters, failure, it’s important to remember, is a broad umbrella. On the positive side, the one that’s worthy of fetishizing, it includes things that happened not to work. They didn’t fail so much as the client didn’t buy it, the market wasn’t ready for it, it was ahead of its time, or it was a good idea but not popular enough to be profitable. On the negative, however, failure also includes (and originally meant) screw-ups, incompetence, miscalculations, and arrogant dilettantism masquerading as expertise.

The problem is that the word failure doesn’t contain within it the means for evaluating good ones and bad ones. Failure doesn’t have an internal quality metric in its meaning that helps us identify the ones that actually advance the work and ones that should result in heads being knocked, going back to the drawing board, hitting the books, or putting together a new team.

Celebrating failure doesn’t help us increase our likelihood of doing quality work so much as it increases our chances of stumbling into it. By celebrating failure, we encourage peolpe and teams to try more, and more risky, ideas. But we don’t encourage people to focus on craft, execution, or a notion of quality. For some cultures, this might be good. If you’re in an environment that is so stale and idea-less that no one ever goes beyond the obvious, than you may need that jolt. But, in an environment that is already supposed to be about creativity, innovation, and design, you’re probably dumbing the place down. By talking about failure, rather than iteration and revving, we’re not advancing design thinking so much as inflating attitude. The word failure doesn’t have enough oomph in it to get people thinking.

Worst of all, I think, celebrating failure gives teams and people easy outs when something doesn’t go well. Since failure doesn’t contain a quality metric we have trouble describing what constitutes a useful failure. Most conversations about failure assume that everyone knows the actual complete screw-ups (do we really?) but don’t help identify the earnest, but ultimately wasteful, failures. As a result, when we fail, it’s easy to describe one’s self as taking a shot and missing but then celebrate the taking of the shot anyway. Rather than critique something to find out what the hell went wrong or, more productively, what do we do better, celebrating a failure implies that things were fine, it just didn’t work out.

To be clear, I think we should promote the taking of risks. I absolutely believe that the quality of an idea — its originality, elegance, or efficiency in solving a problem or doing something new and wonderful — should be celebrated even if the product ultimately doesn’t succeed in the marketplace or isn’t approved by the client. (I also think it would be an interesting exercise to see if celebrants of failure in the design world are willing to go so far as to call the Segway, Zune, and the XO successful failures.) But I think we should celebrate failure in a very different way: by calling it iteration, critique and refinement. Better yet, let’s call it experiment.

Experimentation is a much better word to use, though I already know it’s too wonky and beaker-y to catch on. Still, it’s worth talking about the difference if only to make the word we’ll be stuck with for the next year — FAILURE! — meaningful. Here’s the difference:

Let’s use a fresh example from an unexpected place: the iPhone. This is from the WIRED cover story:

It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple’s top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple’s boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn’t just buggy, it flat-out didn’t work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, “We don’t have a product yet.”

The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs’ trademark tantrums. When the Apple chief screamed at his staff, it was scary but familiar. This time, his relative calm was unnerving. “It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill,” says someone who was in the meeting

Jobs rather famously doesn’t celebrate failure. What he’s done in this moment is call something what it is — inadequate, not acceptable, deeply troubling. At the same time, however, he didn’t throw a tantrum. There was a critique in his assessment of the prototype/iteration/rev/version/experiment/failure — and it went beyond the bugs. Bugs can be solved and closed, the bigger issue was that it wasn’t coming together as a coherent product. That was a design moment, an experiment being evaluated — there was no celebration of failure.

As Nick Cage so memorably re-told the story in the immortal national treasure National Treasure: “When Thomas Edison was asked how it felt to fail 99 times trying to invent the light bulb, Edison said ‘I didn’t fail 99 times. I discovered 99 ways how NOT to make a light bulb.’”

Stop failing and patting yourself on the back for it. Start experimenting and stay focused on quality and success.

Oikos (οἴκος) meaning “House + Nemein (νέμω) meaning “To manage”

One of the things the iPad debate is missing is consideration of household and customer decision-making. Many of the conversations out there ask legitimate questions about whether the iPad meets real needs well. Other conversations have legitimate points about how it’s an important step in improving human computer interactions even if the need isn’t clear. What’s missing, and I think this is an interesting design discussion, is how people make high consideration purchases.

One of the biggest mistakes in the discussion is likening the iPad to the iPhone or iPod. Both the iPhone and the iPod were entries into well-established categories — mobile phones and portable music (I’m thinking Walkmans here, not MP3 players). Both categories had known pain points. For the phone there were crappy interfaces, the number pad as input device, and for me the miserable voice mail systems. For the music players there was the tradeoff between how many songs you had with you and how heavy/cluttered your bag would be (Walkman and Discman), or what a pain in the neck it was to get music onto your MP3 player. Apple walked into a known category which was serving known needs poorly and addressed pain points within it. For consumers already inclined to spend their money in this space, Apple’s premium price point wasn’t a problem — and millions gladly paid for the superior product.

The iPad purchase decision, however, happens in a different space - One in which people aren’t already spending money in the category to meet their need or where they are meeting their needs in other ways that don’t particularly suck. The not particularly sucking is important:

- books and eReaders work fairly well
- game consoles and portable game devices work extremely well (I’m gonna ignore the various rings of death on the XBox)
- people have TVs and iTouches for watching stuff and they work well

(Netbooks kind of suck and web browsing on a laptop often sucks, so Apple has an insight there, though it’s not clear that the iPad is really a tablet or netbook competitor.)

This is a pretty weak set of impulses to buy a high-price device. The urgency for the purchase of the iPad is much less than the iPod (I need to have my tunes in my bag! at the gym, in the car, at the office!) or the iPhone (I hate my phone; I don’t want to carry an iPod, a camera, and a phone). Lots of momentum and lots of day-to-day justification to drop some real coin in the phone and music player category . . . but where’s the energy for a mass audience on the iPad? I don’t see it — changing the way we compute is pretty tepid for something that’s more than half a thousand dollars — with which you can buy an XBox and best-selling titles, a good digital camera, a good netbook, a flat screen tv in the bedroom. It’s also a nice sum not to spend at all.

Put this decision in the context of a semi-affluent, or non-affluent household. Think of a family where money decisions of this size are made by two people and against larger issues like mortgages, tuition, college savings, car payments, etc. That person is spending $500 for . . . what?

Add to that, the number of devices already present in someone’s home:

- a flat screen TV
- a gaming console (that may be netflix-enabled)
- a desktop computer and/or a laptop
- a mobile phone and/or an iPod touch
- a DVD player that plays Hi-Def and may be netflix enabled

Hard to see how this conversation ends in a purchase: Honey, I want something for games that are bigger than my DS, but not as big as my TV. Darling, lets drop $500 so we can watch TV in bed on this thing (which I’ll need to buy a stand for) instead of the laptop or the TV. But sweetie, I need a bigger media screen for movies on the subway, my Touch doesn’t cut it.

In grad school, I loved when Robert Heilbroner would remind people of the origins of the word economics — household management. Managing the household is something we still do, but as marketers or product designers we tend to ignore the larger household in which a purchase decision is made (at least those marketers or product designers participating in the iPad frenzy). I think it’s an interesting design question and might make me feel less small-minded as I repeat that the iPad will sell well as a web appliance, but it won’t be much bigger than the Apple TV.

I continue to be crotchety about generalism and the speed with which people think they can learn to be something (see crotchety posts here, here, and here. Here too. Oh, and here. God, do I ever stop? Well, no, but this one here isn’t grumpy.). Listening to Studio 360’s podcast about Moby-Dick today (while I was engaged in the years-long journey of becoming a better cook — in this moment by trying to improve my chicken stock and mushroom barley soup), there was a surprisingly great interview with Ray Bradbury. Why surprising? First, because, despite my love of SF and other genre fiction, I tend not to expect profundity from SF writers. Second, having never read Bradbury, I assumed whatever acclaim he gets is because of the ideas behind and the clever titling of Fahrenheit 451, not for any skill as a writer. (I need to make that right and at least buy, if not actually read, something of his on my Kindle.) Third, it’s just such a nice way of putting something I and the voices in my head are often on about that my head snapped up and I almost cut off the tip of my left index finger when he said it.

Anyway, I spend lots of time trying to convince people to respect craft and the time it takes and the value behind going deep in subject areas. But I see lots of people assuming they’re experts in things after they’ve done something once, or read a couple articles and books about it, or memorized a couple catchy phrases. Malcolm Gladwell recently helped highlight the fallacy that conversancy == expertise or that once is enough to be a guru when he highlighted the thinking that indicates you need 10,000 hours to get really good at something. But that factoid alone doesn’t quite get it across, because it’s not 10,000 accretive hours only that get you there. It’s 10,000 accretive and repetitive hours, with an emphasis on repetitive — you don’t learn new things so much as you learn more about the richness of the things you know. Describing this process and helping people understand it is challenging.

So, Bradbury wrote the screenplay/adaptation for the Gregory Peck film version of Moby Dick. (I didn’t know that, so already I’m happily smarter as I chop my leeks — working on getting more rhythm and precision and speed with my 8″ knife.) He apparently rather famously talked about being Herman Melville for a day during the writing of the screenplay and the Studio 360 host asked him to explain the why and the how of that:

what you try to do is get it into your bloodstream, get it into your unconscious. You can’t intellectualize it, that won’t work. But if you read a book 80 or 90 times, which I did, some sections I read 120 times, and you put that all into your bloodstream . . . and then you ignore it and let it come to the surface, emotionally, passionately . . . then you become the chaser and chased.

I like the image of getting it into you bloodstream and waiting for it to surface. Even more, though, I like the idea of ignoring the material and letting it sit in your unconscious.

I’m starting to look for a piano teacher (my previous teacher has, alas, moved to the west coast. A moment’s homage to her: she was awesome, played my piano beautifully when she walked me through Mozart sonatas and had a fun mix of stern teacher (reflexively pushing my elbows up and straightening my back) and music lover (listening to any vague musical connection I made between a theory assignment and something I was listening to.

So, a teacher I’m looking at has all sorts of things to love, chief among them his professional/academic work around Mahler. But he has a section on his site called Why study music? which highlights some of the benefits of taking a craft seriously and going deep into something. His key reasons, paraphrased below:

Dealing with pressure — the site refers to children learning to deal with pressure, but there’s something impressive for adults to, on a weekly basis, confront a piece of music that doesn’t come easily to them. Knowing that a lesson is coming up is just enough pressure to force you to take a longer view, break the piece down and work on it. It’s also long enough to be rewarding when, by the end of the week, you being to master it.

Responding to Criticism — I’m surprised how many design focused places don’t ‘workshop’ things and how many times we hold back from really working over a piece of work. One of the key, but most frequently overlooked, tenets of design thinking should be/is iteration and revision. While anyone’s first rev should be excellent, it should be understood that further revs will only improve the final product. Even if you come back to the original design, you’ll have a stronger, more confident understanding of it.

Persistence — in my world of marketing and interactive, there’s a borderline obsessive interest in the next thing, newness, novelty and never seen before. Sitting with someone for a while, working on something for longer than a quarter, doing a truly better v2.0 that is continuous with the previous version is not only hard to do, but often scorned. That said, however, there are a lot of creative types in the field who know when to dig in and fight the good fight or keep on pushing to validate an idea.

Multi-leveled focus - inset Steve Jobs quote about zooming in and zooming out and the design trope of ‘rinse and repeat’.

Project management - taking a long view of mastering a craft or something within the craft requires some PM like thinking. For a piano piece, my instructors regularly tell me how to break it down: “start with the left hand until it feels smooth and you find some melody in it, then focus on the melody right hand only, and work on the middle section until it feels clean, then you can add the intro, do dynamics last.”

The bolded names of the benefit are his, the interpretation mine. His page about why we should study music is pretty nice read, highlighting brain age as well as craft/life lesson benefits . . . and, oh yeah, the joy of playing music you love!

Perhaps is because I’m getting old. Perhaps it’s because, having gone through 2.5 career changes and paid my dues/been schooled 2.5 times. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I found this Zen Habits article about
how to become amazingly great at something refreshing. I’ve been to so many places where people are going to “get digital” in 3 months, or pick up a new competency through a couple hires, or “spend a weekend” with something to plumb its depth and master its rhythms. I loved the setup to this article:

Very often you’ll see blog posts or books teaching you to “master” a skill in only 10 days, or 3 days … in fact, it used to be 30 days but the time frame to master something seems to be shrinking rapidly.

I’ve even seen tutorials claiming to teach a skill in just a few hours. Pretty soon we’ll be demanding to know how to do something in seconds.

Instant mastery of skills and knowledge! Hey presto!

Unfortunately, the reality is something a little less magical. Or maybe that’s a fortunate thing.

I love this Instructable and wish I could do it for me. The author, responding to that clear-but-squishy-edged school of thought that various stimuli are good for infants, created a remote-controlled pattern of fiber optic lights in his soon-to-be-born baby’s ceiling. He can remotely control the overall brightness, the rate of twinkling, and the phases of the moon (waxing and waning):

Full lesson at Instructables

I’m becoming a big fan of criticism, at times enjoying how people write about other people’s work even more than consuming the work directly.

From today’s NY Times, a review of DJ Tiesto’s show in NYC, with some background description of what means this trance:

Virtually unchanged since the 1990s, trance is basically a gargantuan boom-chicka-boom with a steady kick-drum on every beat, and it’s supremely adaptable: euphoric, martial, perky, ominous, indefatigable. A trance D.J. set cycles through stark beats, pushy synthesizer lines, pop vocals and song remixes, and passages in which the beat drops away and synthesizer chords hover for a reverential moment, awaiting the next round of thumping propulsion.

I’m still uncomfortable at the rush to make everyone designers when we mostly understand design as styling, but Brown makes some great points and highlights things missing from many design thinking talks:

- design has been, and should be again, about big things

- design has its routes in system, systemic, or integrative thinking (it’s pulling together threads in addition to polishing the stone)

- design should start with humans.

The last I would amend on two fronts. First, design can start with technology (”what can I do with this nifty thing?”) so long as it gets grounded in human needs. I’m hoping Brown doesn’t mean it as an either/or but is overmessaging this part as a pendulum swing. Second, I might say instead that design should map back to human needs and be inspired by them. Starting with humans could force us into a habit of asking people what they want when they don’t know the possibilities.

It’s got a look (or maybe it’s the music):