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Steven Johnson is one of my favorite writers. With the exception of Interface Culture, I would gladly see every one of his books (Everything Bad is Good for You, EMERGENCE, Ghost Map, and even The Invention of Air) be made mandatory reading people in digital design, digital strategy, digital marketing. Johnson goes deep into cognitive patterns, longer arcs of human behaviors around entertainment, information-seeking, and learning and provides great frameworks for understanding the features and technologies that are usually the center of gravity in digital discussion.

His Time article on the iPad does a nice job of setting the right tone for discussion. Rather than being millenial (Apple fanboys) or crotchety (iPad haters), he grounds the conversation in the longer arc of how we’ve envisioned computing in the last ten or so years:

If you time-traveled back to 1995 and asked the leading futurists of that time where our machines were soon to take us, you might well have heard just as much rhapsodizing about document-centric interfaces as that about hypertext and the World Wide Web. The first generation of software interfaces forced the user to think too much about the tools, the story went, and too little about the task. …

The weird thing about the iPad is that it has landed us 180 degrees from where we thought we were heading. The iPad interface — like the iPhone’s — tries to do everything in its power to do away with documents and files. There is no Finder or root-level file navigation. It’s apps, apps, apps, as far as the eye can see. According to the demo last week, the main way to launch iWork documents is by an internal document-selection process after launch, where your files are presented to you in a gallery format.

I truly don’t know how I feel about this. It might be genius. Maybe most users are more confused by Finders and File Explorers than I’ve realized. But I can’t help thinking that if the iPad really wants to be a device that you might take on a business trip instead of the laptop, it’s going to need a little more document-centrism.

Couple things to love here:

- pointing out that there is a widget-centricity to the iPad. Hadn’t noticed it, but now that I think about it, it sounds like a bad way to make netbooks suck less.

- The comment that “most users . . . might be more confused than I realized”, highlights another weird dynamic in the discussion — just how bad do laptops and netbooks suck? Aren’t hundreds of millions of people living with these supposedly “fatally flawed” devices? A lot of the dialogue about the iPad as netbook talk about how unpleasant people find computing, but is the problem of OS stability and feature bloat so bad that we need a neutered appliance to replace it?

And what a great writer Steven Johnson is. I’ve been scribbling in my notebook, in evernote and two blog entries (this’n and this’n here) to get this idea across:

The iPhone revolutionized smartphones, but I think we all accept that smartphones were in our future. There is no equivalent consensus that tablets or couch computers or casual computers are inevitably on the road ahead. We don’t even agree on the aims here: Is the iPad replacing the laptop or supplementing it?

Anyway, a great article.

One of the smartest designers I know gave a typically compact and smart assessment of the iPad:

DOA. Apple does better (in the last 10 years or so) when it re-imagines categories, not when it invents them. I’m sure I will regret saying this, but that’s how I feel right now.

It does a nice job highlighting Apple’s strengths (re-invent what’s out there after drafting on others’ experience in the market and with an unwavering focus on user experience), but it also hints at the bigger problem: it’s trying to be several categories (reader, netbook, bigger media player, game platform, web browser), under one technology (shiny, thin, touch screen, with none of those nasty mechanics that collect crumbs from your lunch) without being any one thing that is clearly needed.

While Apple often wins by delivering better versions of stripped down, less function-laden things like the iPod, the iPad is doing this across too many categories and likely to fail in all but one:

Reader Steve Jobs infamously said he would never do a reader because people don’t read anymore. He’s actually onto something — some people are passionate readers, while most do it casually. This means the number of passionate readers is too small for an e-reader to be as big as the iPod. The iPad won’t serve either audience well. It will suck for passionate readers: the battery life is dubious, the finger smudges will be a drag, and most important, the backlighting will be prohibitive. Jane Jepson, the creator of the OLPC screen and founder of Qi technologies (LED displays) likened reading from a computer screen to putting a flashlight in your eyes, it’s unsustainable for passionate readers. Casual readers won’t read enough for it to be worth dropping a big chunk of change and things like beach reading, subway reading will be dicey with a fancy device that large. The math will look better than the Kindle’s — spending $400 on a Kindle vs buying books is a quick and obvious decision for many — but the all-in-one argument is pretty weak when it comes to the reading.

Netbook Jobs’s digs at netbooks totally miss the value they have for people who like having a portable work device. The iPad doesn’t replace the processing power or precise mousing needed for real apps like word processing or spreadsheets with graphics, and it’s still unclear whether typing on glass for extended periods of time (like writing something longer than an email or entering numbers into a budget) works for people.

Bigger Media Player This one is tricky to guess, but I have a hard time picturing people dropping serious coin on a third screen that is bigger than their phone but smaller than their TV. Where would you use it? To watch something in bed before going to sleep? Is that worth the cost of getting a decent flat screen?

Game Player Again, a risky proposition. What’s the market for people wanting to play games bigger than the iPhone but smaller than their console? What do those games look like? They’ll lack the immersion of a TV or computer screen game because it’s too small, but will they add to the little games of the iPhone?

Web browser Right on! The video on apple.com references the superior web browsing experience of the iPad many many times, and they’re right. Having the iPad in the living room (with a remote built-in) so I can do quick simple email tasks (like writing “you’re very welcome” as in the video, or forwarding with “FYI”, or deleting what you don’t need) and look up baseball stats while watching the Yankees on an iPad is vastly superior to using overheated macbook or my crunched netbook keyboard. I do a lot of web stuff while I watch crap TV and baseball, and, as a reasonably affluent convenience-obsessed guy with some concerns about the aesthetics of my appliances, this might be enough to see my way clear to $500.

But that’s it. The iPad will be a high-end version of the web appliance that we all talked about several years ago. Only it will be too fancy to use while cooking (one of the standard scenarios we all gushed about), and much too fancy for us to call it an appliance.

Just finished reading Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs, a collection of essays about being a father, son, husband, former child, and writer. I read the book almost immediately and instantly, underlining lots of passages and phrases (wasn’t available in Kindle). Interestingly, it looks like guys on goodreads.com dug it less than women (might be more accurate to say several man trashed it while women gave it consistently high marks).

Beyond the observations about specifically male things, Chabon spends a great deal of time writing about how we flex our imaginations, and how we play and create as children and adults. He hits a lot of the same themes, through very different angles, as Gever Tully of the Tinkering School does in his various talks. While Tully talks about how we overprotect children and have lost the early male ritual of receiving a pocket knife, Chabon talks about the pointlessness of teaching his daughter how to ride a bike. When he rode a bike, he would disappear from his house for the entire day, exploring the neighborhood, visiting friends and just riding. Today, he feels like that has been supplanted through a fear of abductions and that kids have much less uncharted play time.

That theme of uncharted comes up throughout these essays, especially in “The Splendor of Crap”, an essay where he talks about the importance of junk culture in imagination, childhood and even adult play. I just love this passage about the old TV show The Planet of the Apes:

“There’s no doubt that the Planet of the Apes TV show was crap. Yes, the makeup was decent for its time, and the shows tried, in the dutiful manner of early seventies post-Star Trek, pre-Star Wars, TV SF to address weighty issues … But it remained a knockoff of a knockoff, the sequels to sequels, worked up by veteran TV hacks to fill up the spaces between Parkay margarine ads. What’s more, it was crap that flopped, canceled after only three months.

But it had, crucially to my theory of what makes great mass art, the powerful quality of being open-ended, vague at its borders. In its very incompleteness, born of lack of budget, the loose picaresque structure, even its cancellation . . . it hinted at things beyond its own borders. There was room for you and your imagination in the narrative map of the show.”

Along these lines, he is actually rather critical of Pixar films (the first voice I’ve come across doesn’t worship every aspect of Pixar and its work). Chabon describes today’s animated movies:

The new studio-made CGI products are like unctuous butlers of the imagination, ready to serve every need or desire as it arises; they don’t leave anything implied, unstated, incomplete. There is no room in them for children. And so they never form the basis for my own kids’ games.

In a different essay, he makes a point that actually snapped my head out of the book. His biggest gripe about Pixar is the way they make Sid the villain in Toy Story. When Sid puts dresses on the cowboys and mixes parts and breaks the toys to see how they work, Chabon asks, isn’t he doing exactly what kids are supposed to do with toys? I had unquestioningly bought into the movie’s narrative, but after that comment, the good kid reminds me of a nerdy toy collector, keeping things MIB (mint in box), and suddenly I realize that leaving aside the ham-fisted presentation of Sid’s sadism, I actually relate much more to the dirt and grime and dark of Sid’s place than our hero kid’s room.

Not new, necessarily, to fans of Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture or Steven Johnson’s Emergence, but a nice twist.

Nifty little exercise where a group of designers turn a train station staircase into a piano keyboard (a la the classic scene from Big) in order to get people to engage in the healthier behavior of taking the stairs rather than the escalator. THey conclude:

“Fun can obviously change behavior for the better” and the slightly more difficult translation “Add fun changes common behavior”

I used to give interaction design candidates tests as part of the interview process. I would put a site on my computer screen, brief them against imaginary client requests and biases and then give them a half hour to analyze and respond to the brief.(*) Sometimes, I would pick a site that was related to their work or the client I was hiring for. But frequently, I would test them with the McMaster-Carr tool site.(**)

The virtue of the McMaster-Carr site was that is was almost perversely ASCII-Nielsen and, in many, many ways right to do so. The company has literally dozens and dozens of categories and subcategories of equipment and parts and the home page used to list them all in a spray of text with only titled line breaks to separate them into the highest level categories. And when I say sprayed, I mean that they weren’t even in table form. They were strings of links, like sentences without verbs.

It was right in many ways: it supported the CTRL-F behavior (which is faster than scanning any large list); the hierarchy and arrangement was familiar and unchanging; and it resembled the much more familiar tool catalog method of scanning. In short, text was efficient, and tables were unnecessary and even obstructive.

So yesterday, I’m talking to my boss about interaction design and described this test (as a way of illustrating taste and judgment in design). When I went to the site, I was shocked to find a new design!

Previously, the page would have had something like this:

Fastening & Joining Screws & Bolts, Threaded Rods & Studs, Eyebolts, U-Bolts, Nuts, Washers, Shims, Helical &Threaded Inserts, Spacers & Standoffs, Pins, Anchors, Nails, Nailers, Rivets, Rivet Tools, Staples, Staplers, Key Stock, Retaining Rings, Cable Ties, Lanyards, Magnets

But now they’ve added illustrations of the categories and pushed content lower. The illustrations still feel on-brand, as they have that grayscale line art feel of a big fat cheap paper catalog. But I’m not sure they’re adding any value. Does a seasoned contractor, craftsman, builder, etc. really need a picture of a lanyard? Isn’t he or she better served by that list that puts everything right in front of him and minimizes the need to scroll?

Part of the answer may come in a later, and very useful, screen:

Now when I say useful, I mean useful to me. Following my trip to MAKER Faire, I have gotten all middle-aged “Mister-Make-It-Fix-It-Tinker-I-Have-That-Tool-Guy” and am trying to fix anything that comes my way, including most recently, replacing a fastener on a new briefcase. During that repair effort, I got to use my Dremel(!) on a threaded rod(!!). I went to Home Depot with the fastener I needed to replace and the guy took me to a wall of drawers labeled threaded rod. I had no idea such things existed — a rod with threads! Not a screw, cuz that would have a cap. This was just a rod that was threaded. The picture above is a nifty guide for a reasonably intelligent, barely handy, person to solve problems, find products and get ideas.

So perhaps, this was a rebrand to help McMaster-Carr reach out to a new type of DIYer. That would make sense of the home page. Someone at my level or slightly higher might find it really useful to see a U-bolt labelled as such or the difference between an anchor, a pin, and a rivet.

Still, I’m sad to have lost my old test. It was great fun working at a hip shop like R/GA and asking people to evaluate a site so obstinately retro, yet well-designed. (Even more sadly, wayback doesn’t seem to have the old version.)

(*) Disclaimer: I’ve had plenty of interviews where I was the candidate and was asked to give comments on the current site and the interviewer would site back and reject every idea: “done that” “users didn’t like it” “breaks a part of the site that is no longer there” “tech can’t do it”. A fairly obnoxious dynamic to my mind — if someone can do better than you with a site that you’ve been managing for years, you must be incompetent or not paying attention. Anyway, I’m always very clear with the candidate that there are no right answers, but that I just want to have a discussion, see the thinking, and watch the organization of the case he or she makes.

(**) Not my idea originally, and not an original idea. I know several people who use the site as a benchmark of various ID philosophies and ideas.

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.

I’m in the middle of several threads with friends, co-workers, former co-workers, and the voices in my head about what to do with the on-again off-again me-che (meme + cliche, pron me-SHAY) of design thinking. Having just read Designful Company with others, I felt that the book and the me-che of design thinking makes it far too easy to say we’re all deisgners, or that a couple articles will help us do design thinking. I can’t resist quoting Dr Malcolm in Jurassic Park:

I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility… for it.

So, I’m thinking, instead of thinking about design thinking, why not learn something about design? I’m not suggesting a career change, or even a massive effort to learn some new tools or software. Rather, read some books that help people understand the DNA, rhythm, and thought patterns of a design discipline. Dig deeper into a craft and see what makes it tick.

I just love 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School. It’s quite literally a whole series of things — grand and trivial, obvious and subtle — that one would learn in architecture school. And, like all great books that dive deep into a specific area of expertise, it finds universal truths or univerally useful ideas. Examples:

“Being process-oriented, not product-driven, is the most important and difficult skill for a designer to develop” — this emphasizes the importance of understanding the problem and putting the time into it, moving between concept- and detail-levels of the work, understanding the value of dead-ends and near-misses.

If you can’t explain your ideas to your grandmother in terms that she understands, you don’t know your subject well enough — emphasis mine. The ability to communicate simply and clearly is something we all praise (and that I’ve praised here) or at least give lip service to. What I love about this is that it places the onus on the person — if you can’t do it, you’re not that good at it.

A good building reveals different things about itself when viewed from different distances — much better than a big idea, how about having a rich idea?

Less is more
Less is a bore — yeah, yeah, not a news flash, but putting them on consecutive pages forces one to recognize that they are both truths and then think deeper about how and when to exercise them. Typically, we use the first to reflexively justify cutting something.

True architectural style does not come from a conscious effort to create a particular look. It results obliquely - even accidentally - out of a holistic process. — it results obliquely!

Roll your drawings for transport or storage with the image side facing bold — from the lofty to the mundane, but useful.

On the parti:

Some will argue that an ideal parti is wholly inclusive — that it informs every aspect of a building from its overall configuration and structural system to the shape of the doorknobs. others believe that a perfect parti is neither attainable nor desirable.

Music to the ears of a person who is sick of the nattering insistence on having a ‘big idea’ when designing a large, complex, rich experience.

Finally, my personal favorite, scanned directly:

Be careful of your design accents, or be careful of trying to create meaningful spaces where there aren’t any.

Love it.

For those who don’t remember the Dick Van Dyke Show (or Mary Tyler Moore before her show) or UHF:

We have the classic line from Picasso about artists being people who manage to hold on to their childhood curiosity, energy, and willingness to experiment. We sometimes connect them to toys and play (MAKE Magazine has the “Permission to Play” t-shirt). This ignite talk takes us into the ________ world of adult Lego fans or __________.

I’m leaving those words blank, cuz I’m not sure this talk demonstrates the value of re-connecting with toys. The speaker doesn’t talk about sparking lateral thinking, improving brain age, the wonders of a refreshed and open mind, or the chance to create. He just really digs it, and he’s amused about the mania that comes with playing with Legos.

Still, he has a great line at the beginning, “the dark ages are the time between you stop playing with Legos as a child and decide as an adult that it’s OK to play with a kid’s toy again.” (One other great moment is when he’s having dinner with a woman from Lego and he describes all “these marketing people who keep asking (in a whiny voice)’aren’t you afraid it will hurt your brand? how do you control your brand?”

A more interesting, or more immediately useful, look at Legos come from the editor of Nuts & Volts and a class he teaches at Harvard Medical School.

Posting two vids, the first of an IxD talk in London using stop-motion animation to explain wireframes, the second of balsamiq’s demo of its paper meets dreamweaver tool. The first one, the stop-motion, is supposed to be faster than digital wireframing (in Visio, Illustrator, InDesign, etc.). It looks cool, has some personality, but it seems that chopping up bits of paper, setting them on other bits of paper, shooting the moments with a camera and then putting it in a movie, takes a lot more time than a well-designed, quickly executed digital frame. Anyway, it’s cool to see iMovie used in conjunction with other tools.

UX London redux video: Jane Austin & Chris Neale on sketching from Martin Belam on Vimeo.

And balsamiq, which doesn’t embed:

Just re-read Martin Neuimeier’s A Designful Company along with a bunch of my co-workers. Reading a book at the same time as other people is a fantastic thing to do — it sets of neuronic chain reactions and builds common language — and the book itself was pretty good. However, it highlights one of the things that continues to bother me about our collective obsession with innovation.

Neumeier has a passage where he describes his “good/different” chart. It’s not rendered as a quad graph in the Kindle version of the book, but given that it involves two variables with 2 possible values, it practically screams for one:

Like any good quad graph, “up and to the right” is the sweet spot, or, as Neumeier put it “as you might have guessed, ‘good and different’ is the combination that produces home runs.” This bugs me. While I know marketing is all about the whitespace, the onlyness, the thing that no one else does, it seems like a distraction from the real issue: quality and betterness. Good and different could translate into Netflix and the Prius (examples Neumeier cites). But it could also translate into another rev of Microsoft Word that has yet another feature which not only doesn’t make it better, it actually makes it marginally worse because of the clutter and confusion. This would still be “good but different” (making it worse didn’t make it bad).

“Good but different”, as a construct misprioritizes and muddies people’s thinking. Good can very easily become good enough (the Microsoft example) and can cause people to rush to novelty or newness as the goal. Rather than focusing on being better/best, we pick the most obvious and lowest possible standard (who would actually argue on behalf of not good?).

Netflix is much better understood not as different (they used the mail), but as better than the current space. Yes, they used mail, but they did so in order to address the flaws of the video store model: availability of films, locational convenience, and perhaps most important, late fees. Prius is still actually a car, but it’s a better car, not a different one: it burns fuels more efficiently, it runs quieter. The point wasn’t to be as good as the past, with a difference, the goal was to solve problems with fossial fuels and internal combustion engines.

We should really throw out the notion of being different and focus on being good, better, then best. Not only does it avoid the rush to novelty, but it forces product creators (marketers, designers, engineers) to get customer- and user-centric in their thinking. It forces us to step back and ask first questions: what is good/ what would be better? is our belief that the status quo is good really accurate? is our understanding of the category (video distribution) correct?

Scott Berkun has a great post about why we should stop saying innovation, with the great line, which to me says it all: “Just be good. That’s hard enough. Most things made in the world suck. They really do.” This is a big cultural change for most places because an understanding of quality, of what is actually good is usually missing (or not shared or driven by individual tastes) and a conversation to understand what’s good requires time. Much easier to assume that what’s in front of you is plenty good and look for something that makes it stand out. But that’s the real lesson of the above examples, a focus on doing something better, on solving the pain points.

Stop talking about innovation, stop looking for points of differentiation, build a better ________ and people will beat the proverbial cliche to your hackneyed portal and you’ll be all win-win in the sweet spot of whatever quad graph you have.