kip/bot/blog

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.

A nice contrast to Clifford Stoll’s aversion to going deep, is a Freakonomics blog piece about, god help me, sports. The piece is about “expert performance” (no Wikipedia entry!) and the related concept of “deliberate practice” (still no Wikipedia entry!). From the blog post:

When Anders Ericsson and his colleagues in the “expert performance� movement — we’ve written about them before, and we’ll write about them again — try to explain what it is that makes someone very good at what he or she does, they focus on “deliberate practice.� This means that, your level of natural talent notwithstanding, excellence is accomplished mainly through the tenets of deliberate practice, which are roughly:

1. Focus on technique as opposed to outcome.
2. Set specific goals.
3. Get good, prompt feedback, and use it.

The piece goes on to cite an article about an early trainer who saw the young A-Rod practice, and practice hard, at his hitting and fielding, focusing on weaknesses and mixing things up.

This looks like a bottom-of-the-T approach (technique, incremental goals, incremental feedback, iteration) but it has resulted in a complete player (top-of-the-T?). It’s hard to generalize too much about anything applied to A-Rod, given the universal recognition of his inherent talent. (Reggie Jackson, in the second article cited comments on A-Rod’s seeming enjoyment of the training routines, said, “A lot of things are fun when you’re great.”) But Stoll’s rapid move to boredom with anything done more than two times, in contrast to this look at the development of greatness seemed too close together to not document.

Buckminster Fuller’s true identity and accomplishment is blurred by the halo of visionary put behind him by baby boomers. During my movement days, and hanging out with 50- and 60-something types, “Bucky� is invoked in vague, nearly mythic ways as being beyond industrial beyond design and brimming over with ideas. Beyond the geodesic dome, most people don’t know what he did and have a hard time describing his thinking. So, when I was reading From CounterCulture to Cyberculture, this was my first direct encounter with his thinking.

In Ideas and Integrities, Fuller describes the “Comprehensive Designerâ€? a designer who “would not be another specialist, but would instead stand outside the halls of industry and science, translating [their work] into tools for human happiness.” They would be

harvesters of the potentials of the realm . . . an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist . . . [they would change the world through a] comprehensive anticipatory design science.

David Armano talked about the new creative mind on his blog and at IxDA. His new creative mind fires on more general pistons: curious, analytical, expressive, and sensual. It’s also focused on marketing.

What I like about Fuller’s description (and this paragraph is as good as it gets in the essay, the rest is pretty rough going stylistically), is that is provides some guidance for sharpening one’s saw. It’s got gritty words like inventor and mechanic implying sweat, iteration, failure, and wonky behavior and interests. It leads with artist, though, so there’s a higher aesthetic calling (and without getting dragged into the narrative trap of advertising — does everything really have to be a narrative sensibility?).

Best, though, is “objective economist” and “evolutionary strategist”. They ground our work in serving some purpose — a desire realized in the marketplace or a basic need. It implies psychology and empathy and is “anticipatory” a closing call to experiment and go beyond the basic data of the here and how.

I get worried that a lot of the calls for generalism will dilute our respect for, understanding of, and ability to recognize expertise. This is frustrating for designers who must take opinions from everywhere and at a level marketing strategists and technologists rarely have to suffer. But, from designer side of the table, there’s a risk of losing our edge — what should we get good and stay good at? How do sharpen that new creative mind? Where do we go deep? The Fuller line feels like a good charge.

Two Jobs lines about the limits , or the limiting effects of, customer research:

It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we’d given customers what they said they wanted, we’d have built a computer they’d have been happy with a year after we spoke to them - not something they’d want now.

You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.

I just learned that Michelangelo spent of a total of four years of his life in the quarries of Carrara. (The smart move would be to do the pretentious white guy thing and say, “this morning I was reminded of a tidbit from art history”, but . . . I’d get caught.)

Anyway, biographers piecing together his pre-40 life have added up all his visits to the quarries and they total four years. During that time, he oversaw the cutting of pieces of marble he would use and just hung around in an area that he thought was beautiful talking to the stonecutters, observing marble in different lights throughout the day, learning different properties of the material.

This is working deep at the bottom of the T.  Calling Michelangelo or Leonardo a t-shaped person seems awful.  But, in an age where we are celebrating generalism, calling everyone a creative, and craving constant innovation, it seems important to remember how great artists stay great, Michelangelo at the quarries, Leonardo dissecting corpses for decades, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane doing hours or scales and long notes every day throughout their professional lives.  In a different vein you have Picasso’s legendary examination of the African statue and the bracing effect of Matisse’s late in life return to exaggerated colors and shape.

Working deep in one’s craft re-opens old assumptions, turns accepted answers into invigorating questions and can lead to something new.
Photo credit: Zephyrbunny on Flickr.

The people at MAKE Magazine and OReilly love to quote Robert Heinlein’s line that “specialization is for insects.” Being a generalist is very important, even trendy, these days.

However, when IDEO and other companies talk about T-shaped people, there’s a tendency to focus on the thick, generalist bar at the top, while overlooking the specialty represented by the base. While this kind of pendulum swing is natural — one point of the observation was to get us out our waterfall specialty-oriented processes — it’s important not to lose sight of the importance of superbly practiced craft.

Lumiere and Company is a project where prominent directors and cinematographers were given models of the original Lumiere Bros. movie camera and 3 rolls of film. Participants were asked to shoot a film under the following conditions: 1) no editing, 2) no synchronized sound; 3) you have only 3 rolls to get it right. (Most directors did a straight shot of 52 seconds — the length of the roll — but a few turned the camera on and off to tell their stories.))

There are lots of really good ideas and approaches to this: David Lynch tells a small town murder story with cool light effects as transition, one cinematographer shoots water fountains to create a brilliant sepia animation. But my favorite is a very meta film by Francis Girod.

(extra space since a spoiler is below - so now’s a good time to watch it. sound helps)

The short summary: a man and woman approach each other, dance-like and seductive, with the famous Act I aria intro from Carmen (�L’Amour est un oiseau rebelle�). The woman swoons/faints/melts at the moment of embrace. The first take is clunky and the actors work out their moves. The second take works out some technical issues, shows improvement, and the third take is spot on.

I just love how meta it is — they had three rolls of film to shoot a scene of three takes, and the progression of the acting looks a bit like the progression of how actors learned to translate their skills from the stage to the big screen. Most important, though, it shows the importance of that last 20% of a craft. There aren’t many obvious differences between takes one and two and three, but the third take is electric. (And how cool is it that these actors could move through three different levels of quality within the one take?)

Creative shops always face the challenge of how much specialty talent they need. It’s not uncommon to see boutiques have the guy with the English accent or the woman who smokes do voice-overs, in the interest of speed or cost. Little to no harm done, it gets you to a good, solid, 80%, B-B+, performance. But at some points, with certain clients or at certain times in a company’s path, you need As and A+s.

Both parts of the T are important . . . and learning how to manage and leverage specialties and generalist approaches is a new management challenge for us all.

Fun set of comments attached to a blog post about Stephen Kosslyn’s psychological tips for Presentations highlights the tension around number-crunching and expertise.

For those that missed the twitter, there are some cog-sci principles reduced to four memorable (or at least re-memberable) principles: 1) Goldilocks — show the amount of information that is “just right”; 2) Rudolph — like the red nose, guide the user to the most salient point; 3) Rule of Four — people have cognitive difficulties dealing with more than four visual ideas; 4) Birds of a Feather — group similar things to smooth out the narrative. (This is 3rd or 4th hand, TED had something about it as did other blogs and this one.)

These are grounded in cog science and describe the kinds of things that are “brain compliant”. What’s funny, though, is the reaction of some designers:

So, wait….cognitive science is just figuring this stuff out? These are the sorts of things graphic designers and advertising students learn as freshmen.

I learned this stuff when I took graphic design, especially in typography class.

I don’t know this is kind of common sense. If you need a cognitive scientist to tell you to change a couple colors or stray from having 20 things on screen then I doubt you have anything worth bringing to a presentation.

Amen. Tufte explained much of this 6 years ago. Kosslyn does add valuable insight and data. PowerPoint keeps evolving. Presenters keep devolving.

Yeah this Design 101 (hello, hierarchy of information!), tarted up in science drag.

The NYT had an article yesterday about the resurgence of the ‘group sing’, a gathering of people who just want to sing songs, and do it in a group. As indicators of the trend, the reporter looks to a growing number of regularly meeting, large-ish groups, and the success of books targeted at that kind of group. The article is filled with references to the emphasis on letting people sing, no matter the quality. I love this kind of stuff. As an adult taking piano lessons, an incurable dilettante, and one who is nostalgic for Edwardian England when smart people could make scientific discoveries, or do archeology and astronomy and make a contribution to the field, I miss the days when people used their time for activities in which they had varying degrees of expertise. As a classical music buff, I am also continually pleasantly surprised at the quality of the experiences ‘amateurs’ are able to create: Handel’s Messiah performances (and sing-alongs!), The Amato Opera House, or the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, often provide great performances, sometimes of neglected works, and always with interpretation (!).

I read this article at the same time folks at IxDA08 were tweeting and flickring Bill Buxton’s slide saying “Everybody is not a designer”. At my flickr remove, this activity seemed to be asserting that there is such a thing as interaction design discipline and such a thing as expertise that should be cultivated, honed, and respected within it.

Internet folks are at a tricky inflection point around the notion of human expertise. On the one hand, we celebrate the collective wisdom of crowds, revel in the occasional glories of user-generated content (”sometimes, ‘the people’ are really good!”), stress the importance of variously-shaped people, the need for thinking at the borders of a discipline. On the other hand, we know that not anyone can do our design jobs (or we want that to be true). And most vexing, we know that most people can’t understand our jobs. Not because they’re dumb, but because our design work contains within it, dozens, even hundreds of decisions and tradeoffs and judgement calls that are invisible to even our colleagues.

Next posts will be about the book Super Crunchers, which tells us that expertise isn’t giving way to amateurism, but to regressions and random testing.