Eleganthack

Yesterday
	1:01am	Posted a tweet on Twitter. @amyjokim my sister's!

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I just updated my twitter one line bio. It used to say “I like food more than I like you.”  I assume it was at least occasionally true, since I don’t actually like everyone on the planet. But I like quite a lot of the human population.

But I like food, or rather, I care deeply about food. Food is more than a tasty treat, it’s a critical building block of who we are. What we eat makes us thin or fat, energized or lethargic, clever or slow. We build obese children or lively ones simply each time we put a plate in front of them. Each bite is an act toward a future self.

Even more, the food we eat is deeply tied into our politics and our ecology. Read Food, Inc or Omnivore’s Dilemma to better understand how much the food industry shapes our lives. I like food, because I like you, and I want you to be happy and and live forever.

So I realized I couldn’t really leave my silly little one line bio up, because it belittles my realtionship with the act of eating. I’m not a foodie, I’m not a gourmet; I am a human animal who eats to celebrate and shape life.

I also couldn’t leave it up because the last couple years have been hard, and I’ve been a bit misanthropic. I needed to back away a bit from people, and not let them too close.  But now I think I am ready to like you as much as I like food, and certainly I can care about you as much as I care about the food you and I eat.

I still like food quite a lot.

The new line is still a bit silly, it says “Taking over writing duties of the soap opera of my life.” All life is a soap opera, it goes on and on and on. It doesn’t have three acts; it has any number of acts until it gets cancelled, and until then the surprises never stop. But rather than letting life be something that happens to me, I’m ready to shape it. All things are possible, and I’m going make sure I take advantage of it.

When we think of robots, we usually envision something with wheels for feet, and arms spinning like the Lost and Space guy crying “Danger Will Robinson!”  The alternative is the robot many of us now live with, roomba, spinning and beeping like R2D2. Roomba is the only vacuum cleaner to whom I’ve said: “you are so stupid.” The robot is inscrutable. It does things according to its programming, and you can neither influence it (except with a nudge of the foot), command it nor educate it.   It has the appearance of free will, thus the appearance of a lack of good judgement when it gets stuck under a kitchen shelve or tangled in a throw rug.

The shuffle, of all the ipods, also appears to have a will of its own. When I’m on my bike and want a podcast, it seems determined to give me FatBoySlim. When I want to get motivated, it may obligate with Car Wash, or it may suddenly provide Howl (a poem, while inspiring, not really inspiring one to run any faster….)

I think the shuffle, unlike all other ipods, became a robot in persona if not by strict definition simply because it has no interface. Instead of me requesting things and getting them it uses randomness that resembles will. And thus I say, as I try to climb that last hill on Arestadero Road to William Carlos Williams “you are so stupid, shuffle.”

“Up in the Air” came out at a funny time for me. I had just taken a job with Myspace that required me to fly to LA every week. This didn’t really bother me at the time. I have always had a bizarre affection for hotel rooms, and an easy relationship with flying. It seemed to fit my new lifestyle (or at least, was no more weird.) I already had to drop my daughter off at school every Wednesday knowing I wouldn’t see her again until Sunday morning. Why mope around my Palo Alto house, sleeping with Felina and Little Fifi when I could be living the highlife on a travel stipend in Los Angeles?

So every Wednesday I wake up amidst love and squalor, enjoy a long snuggle on the couch, pack a lunchbox and suitcase, and drive to the school and the airport, in that order.  And somehow, as I take off my shoes and coat and remove my laptop, I also shed myself.

They say travel is dehumanizing. We are nesting creatures. Walk around the office. Do you see a cube that hasn’t been marked in some way? A few books, a diet coke can pyramid, a picture in crayon pinned to the low wall: all marking territory and making home.  But travel refuses you the ability to make home happen. Sure you can pack candles or a photo to put by the bedstead, but knowing a few days later you’ll have to put them back in the suitcase makes it almost worse.  Gestures of home are futile and uncomforting in the face of the housekeeper’s ability to wipe away every trace of you. I find human connections a better comfort.  I’ve squandered a lot of opportunity to explore in exchange for the pleasure of a waiter who knows I like my steak rare, or the chance to teach the parakeet in the lobby to whistle a sequence of notes. The desk clerk worries over my cough, the night watchman offers me tea.

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After an extensive search, I find I have not written this down (at least in a blog– I have referenced it in talks.)  Now, most of these points can be/have been addressed in one way or another. But one might ask yourself, what other deliverable is as criticized as wireframes, and could there be something better?

Firstly, wireframes emasculate the designer. Wireframes have often had a place in multi-disciplinary teams where the graphic designer had come from print, and didnt’ really understand interface design. The interaction designer came from software and was making ugly terminal-esque interfaces. So in order to make sure the end result was palettable, the interaction designer (or information architect; I’ll use this term interchangeably in this post) would make a pig, and then the graphic designer would put lipstick on it.  This was 1998.

But as designers got savvy to interface, they started resenting the restrictions on their ability to creating compelling and useful designers. After all, a designers toolkit is essentially font, color and layout. The webbrowser stole the first, if the IxD steals the third they are relegated to the sorry position of kid with crayons handed a coloring book. Think hard of the last wireframe you saw. Didn’t it look a lot like a paint-by-number, with only the numbers missing?

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A few days ago, I read an article with the same title as this post.  Oh, maybe it was How to Hire a User Experience Professional, or Interaction Designer or Information Architect, or whatever. I don’t recall. There isn’t so much difference anyhow.  I do remember it said look at their presentation skills, see if their personas are based on research and something about their wireframes. I tweeted that’s why I wouldn’t hire a designer, which caused some kerfluffle with my followers.  And it’s hard to clarify in 140 characters what teed me off about the original article.

Here’s why I wouldn’t hire someone based on wireframes, powerpoint and persons:  it’s not because these are necessarily bad (well, except the wireframes, which are so 2001 that they are the mullet of deliverables, and like the mullet I cannot wait until they are finally gone and I’m not asked to stare at them any longer.) I was bummed because these are merely artifacts and not necessarily necessary critical skills you need to find in a decent designer. I really don’t care if you never do personas, or if you make them up from a guy you talked to in the grocery story.  I don’t care if you use keynote, powerpoint or illustrator. And honestly, I would hire someone if they did wireframes even though I hate the darn things. So how do I vet designers, if not by their paperwork?

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For the last five-some years, I’ve given up making New Year’s Resolutions. Instead I have what I call the New Year’s Project. Each year I pick a large topic, and spend my time on and off throughout the year teaching myself about it. One year it was futurism (an obvious topic, consider how many New Year’s predictions articles always get run). I read up on who were the leading futurists, joined a futurist group and went to their meetings, and worked on making predictions myself. I learned useful concepts like cone of uncertainty, and how to take the long view, and how to do scenario planning. But most importantly I learned we cannot know the future, and as we try to plan we must be always ready to shift. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying to plan; it just means maintaining a yogi-level flexibility.

This last year I decided beauty would be my project. Not art and architecture, which I have always appreciated, but traditional feminine beauty. I have always had an uneasy relationship with the ideals of feminine beauty– having been raised a feminist I suspected makeup and infrastructure garments were a tool of patriarchy to hobble us by taking away two hours of our life every morning. But hey, why not question my assumptions? Read the rest of this entry »

In 1923, Frank Lloyd Wright completed the Imperial Hotel, a building commissioned in Japan.  In 1923, there was a 8.3 magnitude earthquake. The hotel survived.

Wright was a midwesterner like myself, and had no experience with Earthquakes.  When he arrived in Japan, that lack of familiarity was his strength; he passionately researched earthquake damage, and designed his hotel with multiple safeguards. Read the rest of this entry »

A term of art is a word when used in a professional context has a very precise meaning. I’ve been reading a lot about game mechanics and theory, inspired by Amy Jo Kim’s terrific talk given recently at Linkedin. Right now I’m half-way through A Theory of Fun by Raph Kosterner. It’s an odd, rambling book, and most it is familiar to anyone who’s been doing interaction design for awhile. But I do notice that game designers talk about emotion much more than we do, and they are crafting new terms of art and taxonomies that could be useful to anyone doing interactive (and particularly social) design. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to a new and simple eleganthack design, finally live. The old eleganthack I’m moved to archives.eleganthack.com, and this lifestream blog I made my main interface. I kept thinking I’d do some fine tuning then starting writing here again. Six months later I realize the important thing is not to fuss around with it endlessly, but to get to writing again (and fussing endlessly will come when I’m procrastinating on writing.) You will have to resubscribe to the RSS, sorry.

So you’ve been wondering, what have you been up to, wodtke? Well, reading a lot about architecture, which is a passion I pickup after I wrote the chapter on social for my book. The result (so far) has been some insights on how the classic understanding of space can be applied online. I’ve presented this at IDEA, and I hope to further develop and extend these ideas at Interactions 10 Here are the slides from IDEA. Read the rest of this entry »

My blog gets varying levels of love. Sometimes I’m posting all the time, sometimes a month or two goes by with nothing.  Let’s be honest; the siren call of twitter, not to mention the dozen other places on the web to post, means the blog is often the last stop.

So to keep this home alive to my activity, which never wanes, merely relocates, I’ve move to a lifestream theme. I’ve also taken this opportunity to move to wordpress, which I find more manageable. This part kinda breaks my heart, as I helped Ben and Mena shape an early cut of MT. However, it’s gone one direction, and is just too hard for me to manage with my limited time. The point of blogs is, after all, to focus on the writing, not the upkeep. After all, this is the fourth CMS I’ve used for eleganthack. One can’t be too sentimental.  And who knows, maybe we’ll do a blog version of PublicSquare and I’ll have a fifth.

So hopefully this ushers in a new era, of less spam, working comments and most of all lots more content.