Design

Business / Culture / Design / Relationships / Technology — 1 Comment
28
Jun 08

I think ICANN

ICANN is loosening the rules around domain suffix at the detriment of having any meaning and comprehension embodied in a hostname. URLs need more thought, not freedom. Even ICANN’s CEO brings the move down to vanity plate level contribution. Apparently, the Internet was running out of space.

The potential here is huge. It represents a whole new way for people to express themselves on the Net,” said Dr Twomey. “It’s a massive increase in the ‘real estate’ of the Internet.

We have numerous examples of shooting ourselves.

Nine kids under 19 years of age will be killed with a gun today. 30% will have intentionally taken their own life. Even if we want to dispute the fact, suicide by handgun exists and people are not managing their relationship with firearms well. Consider the recent Supreme Court ruling objecting to a Washington D.C. ban on hand guns. Sustaining laws like this one does not actually make things safer, it just makes them illegal. We have speed limits and many of us do not follow those. Yet cars kill just fine at a rate of five to six thousand teenagers per year.

Some schools in some states attempt to teach safe sex. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation reports that children have sex at around age 17. Include other forms of sex and those polled report almost 50% of males having received oral sex and 39% gave. So kids are sexually active and there is a movement to focus on not having sex, not how to do it safely or how to be smart about it. An NPR story reported…

…Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government finds that only 7 percent of Americans say sex education should not be taught in schools.

If we are in such agreement, we should start measuring how many of our children’s decisions around sex are well informed. Remove the issue of if their decision is something we personally agree with and simply ask if they felt they were informed.

No one disputes, though, that many were delighted to discover they were pregnant. “Sweet!” one of them shouted in the school nurse’s office. The school superintendent admitted: “They were not trying very hard not to get pregnant.”

From Financial Times, The ideology of teen pregnancy (Gloucester High School Pregnancy Pact) by Christopher Caldwell

Prescription drugs seem to be all the rage. Some might naively interpret that the war on drugs must be almost over if kids are turning to medicine cabinets. Or we could simply be inspired by Dr. Twomey and say that we have a massive increase in the ‘real estate’ of drug market.

Structured naming lets us work and communicate meaning. Our world works in abstractions. We cannot possibly consider the totality of our own lives, the community, the nation or the world without coming to a screeching halt. Abstractions allow us to consider just enough of reality to work with it. Loosely regulated naming is not a good thing. One lesson we can apply from corporate life is that things done by committee often fail or are fraught with issues. It lacks leadership and puts the idiocracy into the lead.

A recent article in the Atlantic, Is Google Making us Stoopid? by Nicholas Carr, talks about our increasing reliance on the intelligent Internet and our own asymptotic tendency away from our rich, educated and thoughtful past. One can only hope that Internet naming is just a fluke, that this is not just another data point of stupidity.

Design / Relationships / Technology — 1 Comment
10
Feb 08

Messin’ with the iPhone

People are sensitive about technology they bond with and the iPhone is a recent example. Infoesthetics picked up Edward Tufte’s comments and critique of the iPhone and the reaction of Christopher Fahey, the information architecture practice lead at Behavior. You need not imagine the cat hiss of the commentary that follows either blog post, a quick glance reveals the emotional charge often experienced when pointing at people wearing t-shirts that read, “Don’t mess with Texas.”

Tufte drops some gems at the end of his video commentary:

To clarify add detail.

Clutter and overload are not an attribute of information they are failures of design.

If the information is in chaos don’t start throwing out information, instead fix the design.

Something he credits the iPhone for doing while critiquing that some applications leave the user in what I think of as a Jelly Bean Land. Things look great, smooth, glossy and colorful, just like the high polish of Jelly Bellys. In a wonderful call back to the ways of academics, Tufte pulls together some readily available visuals to illustrate his point – quite likely the work of his protégés. Messin’ with the iPhone is dangerous and exactly why someone needs to do it.

The two examples are the market view and the weather application. In short, each could offer higher data density, leveraging the characteristics of the high-res screen of the device, consistently reinforcing the uniqueness of the iPhone, not just relying on the improved touch screen, which will eventually be everywhere. However, people like Jelly Bellys and that is a tough argument. Many people like high fat, high-cholesterol, high sugar foods, but then are upset at their obese kids. Just because we like it, or that no one is complaining, is not a valid argument that it is right. In fact, there are plenty that agree, Tufte’s points are worthy, but his visuals leave too much and too little to the imagination.

His stock example is illustrated with a printed page (possible a portion of a printed page). The point is, see how much information could be displayed? Visually, it was awful. Everyone reveres the point, his text on sparklines and data density is biblical.

Lesson 1: When messin’ with the iPhone, offer visuals that are as esthetically pleasing as the ones in which you refer. It reduces the need to overcome the dissonance.

Tufte’s weather example actually draws upon lesson 1 (good job to whomever mocked up the improved weather experience). While not perfect, it demonstrates the added data density while maintaining some of the luscious visuals of the original weather experience. He adds a high-resolution weather animation below. It is a bit too large and reminds the viewer of low-def TV signals on a high-def, high-res TV. Conceptually fine, dangerously too real and hence offensive to those understanding it less as a direction and more as the solution.

Lesson 2: When messin’ with the iPhone, stay consistent in your accordance or violation with lesson 1. Again, it reduces the dissonance that the viewer has in understanding the presentation – consistency is highly explanatory.

Humans are fascinating creatures forming meaningful relationships with inanimate objects, often the ones that are soon perceived to be extensions of the self. Apple’s contribution to society is some of the best experience and industrial design ever, exactly what they are selling. Technically, it is all the same and yet they invest where people’s hearts are. A deeper reflection on Buddism and materialism reveals that there is no requirement to shed physically all material objects, but it is your ability to enjoy and simultaneously be indifferent of an object’s presence. Our appreciation for our present situation and detachment from it being so very necessary leaves a healthy mental balance. Many people will be buried with iPhones, but none of them will need them.

Design — No Comments
20
Oct 07

Feeling organic with Masahiro Mori

Riding the subway home from Manhattan, I was thinking about visual images that might suggest “clean.” In my mind’s eye, the work of Masahiro Mori came to view – I have a collection of his porcelain mugs. Mori is a great industrial designer, known for his beautiful modern work. The image below offers you access to selected images from my makeshift kitchen studio.

Screen shot of Hakusan Interpretation gallery.

Design / Technology — No Comments
14
Oct 07

Who is colorblind now?

Adobe Lightroom was one of my last purchases in support of my relationship with photography. It has literally transformed how I approach managing my photos. While it is not a replacement for Photoshop, it is its best compliment.

Last week I hopped over to B&H after work and picked up a GretagMacbeth, now xrite, i1Display2 monitor calibrator. I have been on the fence about color calibration – especially since to do it right requires a substantial investment. Monitor calibration is a first step to a commitment to color. If you have never experienced the difference of a color calibrated display you will be in for a treat. Once you are calibrated, you might think that the only pleasure you get is when you recalibrate, but as you work with images, you constantly remember that the color you see is consistent with what the color data in your files and that is amazingly satisfying.

Just after you calibrate you are sure to open up a recent photograph that you spent time adjusting – setting the white balance, highlight recovery and color – and you notice that what you have is markedly different than you remember. I was not disappointed by what I found, the shadows revealed richer transitions from light to dark and variations of color that were there but unseen. While I am not unhappy with the photo, it is different from my original intention, which is exactly why calibration is important. If you spend any time investing in the post processing of your photographs, then display calibration is the minimal investment required to avoid wasting your energy in getting things just right. Unfortunately, only color corrected systems get to see what I see, but that is okay because what you cannot see is your unknown problem. Web browsers are in general color limited, but when I make a print it will be closer to what I know to be true.

Color swatches and profile from laptop

Business / Culture / Design / Innovation — No Comments
18
Sep 07

Agreeing on experience design

Back in May, Adam Greenfield contributed a great article for Adobe’s Design Center Think Tank space called On the ground running: Lessons from experience design. He begins with an insightful – on hindsight obvious – observation that the distinctions between products and services is blurring. Adam introduces the roll of experience design as the agent helping blur these lines, highlighting three examples of XD gone awry: Nike+, Acela and Puma’s Trainaway. He ends with a resonating statement about conversations and not control, suggesting that while very often, tight experience design requires a greater level of control, but opening solutions up to user modification, the ultimate in end-user collaborative design.

While Adam’s examples illustrate his points well, there is another side of the conversation worth consideration. Obviously the three examples all result in some level of failure, which might lead to the conclusion that each was not worth doing. The thing about failure is that if the vision is grand enough, any action toward achieving that goal sets the stage for tomorrow’s experience. Nike+ (the iPod nano, Nike bio telemetric transponder shoes and the online data visualization) might not have been the hit people were hoping for – I actually did not know they lacked popularity – but the offering shows that someone over at Nike is thinking about how we reinvent the running shoe, a completely commoditized product with endless air pockets, gels and spring. Even if it fails, then notion that your shoes might have some electronics in them has come to pass in popular culture. It is no longer limited to the shock activated flashing LED. A recent post by Jonah Lehrer jokes about your iPod being made of biological flesh and yet continues on reviewing some research where scientists have shown circuits can be constructed out of biological material. It is all fantasy until someone tries to commercialize it and then the world gets to add it, flop or not, into the accepted realm of possibilities. This approach is probably not the best way to run a business, but its wonderful at winning the hearts and minds of people.

One of the areas Adam shines focus is the challenge in trying to control the end-to-end solution to deliver great experience design with a quote from Nokia’s Chris Heathcote. It might be the case that designing for one person is not practical; however, I also think we tend to try to make a single solution apply to too many. Narrowing the target audience may limit overall breadth of success, but it ensures at least one population is thrilled. For those early-adopters, runners and techi types, the Nike+ might have been a great geeky trip. Is this not just the long tail of XD?

Seth Godin posted on his obsession with improving alarm clocks, ending with the fact that products could be better if we tried to make them better. If the distinctions between products and services are blurring – a very sophisticated undertaking – then maybe the reason some have failed in the past has less to do with experience design and more to do with people agreeing its worth trying to make things better. As Adam explored, it only takes failure in any one of many things to challenge the overall experience.

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