kip/bot/blog

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.

it’s weird that I like goodreads as much as I do but never raved about it. I’ve been using it regularly — partly as a reading journal, partly as a recommendation engine (one superior to Amazon’s in many ways) — but I don’t grab my friends by the arm and say “you have to try it out” the same way I do other things. And yet, it has insinuated itself into my weekly reading habits, my purchases, and has gotten me into some interesting debates. (I also learn a lot about friends since everyone on the web rates Ayn Rand a 1 or 5 and they tend to put her on their shelves.)

I’m not sure why, but the reviews are always coherent, even when harsh or sarcastic. People are putting some thought into the reviews and for the most part care about books. The whole idea of browsing other people’s to-read, read, reading shelves is personal, engaging, and extremely valuable. My friend Todd is my business literature sherpa and I follow his reading habits closely.

The funny part, though, are the reminders that you haven’t finished a book.
This is a great, useful, engaging experience . . . but a quiet one. Like the act of reading which it supports.

I’m blogging about the XO because it feels like most interactive professionals are rushing to judgement (positive and negative) and missing an opportunity to dig into a rich design case study.

When I say “most interactive professionals”, I’m referring to the voices I’ve come across on blogs, twitter, and some searches. It’s not a scientific sample, by any means. However, the rush to harsh judgement, and the lack of any real in-depth looks, makes me suspicious. In our daily work, we spend hours and hours watching users look at slightly varying shades of color, or small pixel level adjustments to improve the performance of a page by .5%. We spend hours and hours speculating about what features the next OSX release might have, and then many more hours evaluating them. But, for the XO, it seems like we have it all worked out in 20 minutes or from the press coverage.

I wish there were people out there who were explicitly evaluating the XO against: 1) the educational approach driving the project; and 2) research addressing how kids approach computers for the first time.
The first point refers to constructivism, an educational theory which can be summarized crudely (to the point of coarse vulgarity) as kids grow cognitively by doing things rather than simply being taught. There’s too much to cover in a blog post, but even Papert’s summary is better than nothing:

The word constructionism is a mnemonic for two aspects of the theory of science education… From constructivist theories of psychology we take a view of learning as a reconstruction rather than as a transmission of knowledge. Then we extend the idea of manipulative materials to the idea that learning is most effective when part of an activity the learner experiences as [the construction of] a meaningful product. [italics mine]

The constructivist point of an XO, and there are other points (such as providing digital textbooks via the internet), is to get kids building and making things with a computer. I haven’t dug deep into the literature, but there are some places that look at the tools underlying this approach and how well they work: Life-Long Kindergarten, the Maine Laptop Initiative, and the robotics-in-school wave sparked by LEGO’s Mindstorms. Experiments like this are, by nature, hard to conduct. The lab is usually restricted to a single classroom, maybe a school district, or, at best, one state. I would love to hear designers and others talk about this.

(Interesting) sidenote: an individual’s early experience with computers seems to be a strong factor in whether people are inclined to like or put the hate on XO. As a kid, I took an 8th grade programming course on a TRS-80 and it created a lifelong fascination with math, science, generative design, computation, digital creativity. When I was eight or nine, I played with a lunar lander program (your craft is falling to earth and you can use direct or rotational thrust to land safely). It was a painfully slow computer (a phone handset was placed in large rubber holders to talk to the mainframe at CMU), but I spent an entire afternoon plugging numbers in, waiting three minutes for a response, recording the results, and backing into the rules driving the game (to say I was backing into the math would be an exaggeration, it wasn’t as formal as that). I was, in effect, “reverse engineering” and learning a complex system.

Slightly younger friends of mine had Commodore 64s with Turtle Art (the epitome of a constructivist software app, shown below) as kids. They also seem to be predisposed to liking the XO. For all of us, there is a sense that these constructivist moments were as valuable in forming our clearly fabulous minds and inspiring us to learn as any formal schooling we had.

Understanding, and actually looking at, the constructivist underpinnings and implementation of the XO seems to be missing from most design discussions of the tool.

The second point, how kids approach computers especially when they are largely undirected, is another area where I think western designers are missing an opportunity (or being sloppy). We’re all very well versed in how comparatively affluent consumers approach websites and other interactive experiences. We also have an idea of how supervised kids approach the web, but do we know anything about how kids learn them for the first time and alone? When we “laugh our asses” off at the operating system, what is it based on? How do we know that the OS is inappropriate?

Again, I don’t personally have a lot of data points, but one project that is repeatedly referenced is the Hole in the Wall, a program where unattended computers are made available to kids in India. From PBS:

From the slums of New Delhi to the coastal roads of Banda, hundreds of poor kids in India go online every day at free, outdoor computer kiosks installed in slums and rural villages to read news headlines, befriend cartoon figures, draw with digital paintbrushes and explore the possibilities of cyberspace.

There are no manuals, no adults to guide the kids, and it’s a Windows machine (originally an English version). The kids (who appear to skew older than the OLPC target by three years), teach it to themselves and each other.

There are a lot of design challenges against new assumptions in the XO, so the question for me is: why aren’t designers trying to learn from the XO or at least do a more informed critique of its design?

Reading Gabby Hon’s CM blog post “Less Talking, More Doing“, I went to IxDA to look at the conversation threads to see if they are as messy as described. (I subscribe to the digest, but it’s kind of work to find the stuff that’s good.  My new approach is to ignore the mail and hope that anything that’s good gets blogged about on a blog that I’m following or that someone bothers to twitter.
Anyway, at the site, I saw “What is Interaction Design”:

I’m sure that works out to be technically right (there is a well thought-out tree of UXD with mutually exclusive, precisely defined branches, and products and services covers everything as does structure and behavior), but WTF (W == who) wants that job? Where’s the creative spark, the passion for design?
I’m very lame at defining the field, I’m happy with ‘making technology fun and easy’, or ‘crafting interactive experiences so that they are emotionally engaging, enjoyable, or at the least don’t suck’. So I guess, in fairness, my definitions don’t work. But surely there’s room for passion in there?