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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.

It seems like everything I read or think about interactive eventually, but quickly, zooms into next steps: how can we use this for marketing? how will this help us talk to our customers better?

I’ve almost forgotten the fun stuff that made me think this was an amazing medium, so I put together a list of the top 5 interactive things I’ve experienced over the years. These were more like interactive epiphanies, things that made me think this was a new medium with power. There are millions of little moments I can get all Chris Farley “that was cool” about, but these are ones that showed new possibilities.
Beethoven’s 9th

An educational CD-ROM made in hypercard by Robert Winter. It presents the 9th as the fulcrum to the romantic era musically, culturally, philosophically, and within Beethoven’s career. Using clickable pieces of music, often synched with scores, as well as photos, sketches, and active maps, the CD-ROM explains sonata form, the classical style, and development of themes. It also has an interactive score which allows you to listen to the symphony, while watching the score, all the while displaying comments and which section (development, false cadence, recapitulation, etc.) of the symphony you’re in. (Interesting article about the title and its place in the history of books.)

Final Fantasy 7

I can’t say it’s the best FF (I have only played a few), but it is the best game I have ever played. The story was one I actually followed, I was genuinely sad when Aerith died (I mean, it’s f*’ed up how bummed I was, I think I gasped), the combat system was clever and required tactics and strategy which I was proud of, and I still remember the characters.

Journeyman Project Turbo

This is a strange choice since the game was kind of crap — from that era when interactive stories were getting full of themselves. It was a time travel game, where you have to go and retrieve things from different eras to prevent oh, I don’t know, an exponentially growing rift in the time-space continuum that would destroy this universe and maybe others as well. What was cool, and truly memorable about it, was that one of the time settings was Leonardo’s workshop. You could wander around it at night and it was absolutely gorgeous. It was one of the first games to do sound design with stereo headphones in mind, so the ambient sounds and the music added to the immersion.

Fantasy Baseball Draft

Real-time fantasy baseball drafts are amazing fun. (Real-time as opposed to the turn-based email drafts, which I’m doing this year). Sitting around waiting for the draft to begin and talking to people, watching bots pick players for people who haven’t shown up yet, scrambling to figure out your next pick (or next two picks if you’re at the end of the snake), back-channel chatter. The funnest thing I’ve done on the web. I stayed in a league for three years too many just to experience the fun of that draft.

I actually had to stop at 4, cuz I already had two games and all I could think of were other games. It also highlighted that I haven’t had any mind-blowing experiences in the last three years, which was kind of sad. Flickr comes close, but I was looking for things that I still talked about years later and remembered the epiphanous flash that said, “things are different.”

I can’t keep track of where I read anything anymore, but I’m pretty sure I’ve read some strong convictions against links called “Link” or “Here”. But the screenshot below, from Wikipedia’s “In the News” today highlights one of my frustrations with embedded links:

The links are pretty messy:

NASA == Wikipedia entry on NASA

rings (first time) == Rings_of_Rhea on Wikipedia

Saturnian moon == moons_of_Saturn on Wikipedia

Rhea == Wikipedia enty of the moon Rhea

rings == planetary_rings on Wikipedia

moon == moon on Wikipedia

Two links with the same name pointing to different things, no link that points to the announcement or the evidence, three words abutting which look like one link, but are in fact two. Bleh. And “(picture)” refers to a picture at the top of the module.

Now, part of the problem is, presumably, that Wikipedia doesn’t want to point to the actual news story. But this is a perfect example of why you can’t always embed links.

Interesting demo about Twitter on youTube:

Voice, stop-motion video, moving pieces of paper around (sometimes with the finger visible), chirpy male voice describing twitter.  Still not sure how I feel about twitter, but the demo is a nice example of sketching, prototyping, dynamic code-free demoing.

I hate exercise. It bores me. Exercise constitutes time which I am not consuming media or playing games. I am unmoved by the wind in my hair, the thrill of conquering a hill, or the sun on my face. Exercise is something to be gotten through.

To that end I have an exercise bike at home that I move in front of my iMac, where I watch crack TV (24, Alias) when I’m really out of shape. When I’m simply out of shape (== healthy for me), I watch “improving” things, like eBay-acquired lectures from The Teaching Company. Yesterday, my iMac was unable to read the Genius of MIchelangelo DVD and I had to use my Macbook Pro. The odd configuration and contortions needed to make this work struck me as falling neatly in my imadork category.

The picture above is my view of the lecture while I’m finding the balance between doing cardio and having a heart attack. The iMac is pushed back to make way for the Macbook. It is also powered down so that it doesn’t respond to my Apple remote. I have an extension for my earphones, and a velcro fastener so that the weight of the extension cord doesn’t pull the earbuds against my ear, and fastened at the top so I never lean on it. There is also a keyboard cover to protect against sweat and spills.

Behind the bike is an Austin air cleaner to deal with the gym room muskiness (or, as some have described it, homeless reek).

I haz UX design skillz.

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.

i <3

Yesterday there was a snowstorm and I needed to rent a car. When I went to Zipcar to pick up my CD-only car (why isn’t aux in standard yet?), my card was fried, so I couldn’t rent. They quickly and politely cancelled my order. I had an iPhone moment and Google-mapped an Enterprise rental about 3/4 mile away. I call to confirm that they were open and had cars available and then made the long, sloshy walk.

I don’t want to write a narrative . . . When I get there, everyone who speaks to me shakes my hand and quietly repeats my name. The woman who handles me asks a couple questions about what kind of car I need, walks me out to the lot and shows me what’s available. When I mention an aux in, she has me wait under the awning and finds two cars that have it. The manager comes out, apologizes for interrupting, shakes my hand, mentions that we spoke on the phone and quickly gets out of the way. I pick a car and we do the paperwork.

I consider people to be a painful neccesity of life, so I’m not big on the kind of counter chat she had for me. But I’ll give her this, the annoying stream of tips on saving money on the insurance and using the GPS was mitigated by the fact that it didn’t slow down the processing of the paperwork even a second. She even gave me a web-site like status: “only two more things to do before I take you to your car for the quick check.”

Once the paperwork was done, she showed me the clear clipboard with the ruler for measuring meaningful scratches and the circle for dents. We checked the car, shook hands again, and as I pulled out, the first woman at the counter, who was returning to the office with lunch, waved and told me to have a safe trip.

If you want to build a powerful brand experience that people will talk about, care about and remember, well, you should probably read Seth Godin or Lew Carbone. But if you crave loosely-argued, questionably connected irreleventia, or can’t get enough XO, stick around.

Great post at Adobe about a neglected area of design:  the holistic experience of getting to good content. I use soft-edged words in that description — “getting” rather than finding, “good” rather than right — to highlight that the experiences we craft need to allow for semi-directed, imperfectly-focused user behavior.  Too often, we’re looking for the right answers rather than the right systems, we discuss user needs when they’re actually wants, or tasks that need to be completed when maybe it’s the equivalent of window shopping they’re doing.

Browsing, searching, and asking might all take place within a single attempt to find information. Finding routes are often quite circuitous, iterative, and surprising. There certainly are simple, straightforward instances of finding—say, looking up a colleague’s phone number in a staff directory. But wandering through and learning about information—with pauses to search, browse, and ask along the way—is how many of us find information and learn about both the complex (for example, determining the most appropriate health plan our employer offers) and the seemingly simple (like choosing a plumber).

As a designer who works in agency environments, I often get caught between the marketing attempt to direct a behavior (applying funnels or merchandising logic to discovery scenarios).  The language of this post does a nice job of describing the user’s state(s) of mind and avoids putting too fine a point on what they’re doing.

With all of its twists and turns, finding can be lovely and life-changing. Even when we fail to find—and we often do—we still learn. Finding is arguably at the center of all user experiences. …  Unfortunately, most of the systems we design don’t really support finding. We might do a bang-up job with searching, browsing, or asking. But we’ve failed at integrating them well; therefore our designs fail at helping users to shift effortlessly between these different aspects of finding, and instead impose harsh interruptions on the process.

And then a topic near and dear to my heart:  the need for designers to broaden what they think of as in their purview:

But there is another, less-obvious form of complacency common to so many designers: they don’t design for holistic experiences—like integrated finding—because they don’t speak data. Designers haven’t paid much attention to the terabytes of user data being logged right under their noses. Fortunately, that’s changing.