Several years back, John Zapolski urged all the members of my design team to read Atul Gawnde's essay "Whose body is it anyway?", replacing the word doctor with designer and patient with client. His point was that, like doctors, we had a body of expertise on design, but like patients clients had a body of expertise on being themselves. And that design decisions should be, like health decisions, a collaborative process. The article is a terrific one and can be read in Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
I've just begun a third book, How Doctors Think
That's one place I think design could learn from medicine. Young doctors are overseen by more experienced ones during the early phase of their practice. But young designers are turned out of school expecting they have been given all the tools they need to be a great designer and the title alone demands all must gave way to their ownership of design decisions. But a senior product manager or engineer may have been instincts than they do without a day in art school from years of watching users and businesses do their mad dance together. Without the guidance of a senior practitioner, they may insist on dreadful design solutions that appear sensible but for experience's warning bell. Unlike doctors, no body will die from these poorly made choices (most of the time) but a fragile business might.
Design understanding should be understood to be a experience-based skill rather than taught, and it is often collectively held. Unlike mad photoshop skillz or writing java it doesn't come from a class (obviously getting really good at these things comes also from experience beyond the class, but competent can be straightforwardly taught.) Very often young designers ask me for career advice. I almost always send them to large groups who have senior designers to learn from. The in-house folks I send to consultancies, the consultants I send to companies like yahoo or ebay, because you learn different things at each. But I never say, join a start-up. Unfortunately, almost all startups who cannot afford to have a young turk as their sole resource are often stuck with them due to financial constraints. If they are lucky, they'll get fast learning curious designer who will get into every corner of the business and learn and correct on his own. In a worst case scenario they get a willful freshly titled designer who wrongfully applies whatever he was taught, and wastes time-to-market fighting with everyone.
Permalink | Comments (0)First draft of a chapter for the second edition... love to get some help as I warm up.
Background: we're trying to tighten up the book so it reads more quickly and can be accessible to more people. In doing so, we tried to collapse two chapters into one. I'm wondering if the section "those people" shoudl just be axed. Yes, it's useful information but is it really relevant to information architecture in particular and is it really necessary in this era in which there are so many good books on user research?
Please forgive dreadful formating madness... I exported pretty directly from Word, and we all know how well that works. But I'd rather spend time writing than formatting.
My daughter was born a week after my grandfather's second wife died. He said to me on the awkwardly joyful call, "One comes, another leaves."
My grandfather died this morning. And a close friend became a father for the first tiem. Is that how it always is? Maybe we should hope that it's true.
"A rich man asked a Zen master to write something down that could encourage the prosperity of his family for years to come. It would be something that the family could cherish for generations. On a large piece of paper, the master wrote, "Father dies, son dies, grandson dies."Permalink | Comments (0)The rich man became angry when he saw the master's work. "I asked you to write something down that could bring happiness and prosperity to my family. Why do you give me something depressing like this?"
"If your son should die before you," the master answered, "this would bring unbearable grief to your family. If your grandson should die before your son, this also would bring great sorrow. If your family, generation after generation, disappears in the order I have described, it will be the natural course of life. This is true happiness and prosperity.""
Sometimes your heart isn' t big enough to hold that much happiness, just like they say in all those bad movies.
Permalink | Comments (0)I'm taking a food writing course, so much of my writing energy that isn't taken up with LinkedIn is spent in that endeavor. If you are a food-oreinted person or you just miss my wacky take on existence, head over to foodtwit.com (or follow foodtwit on twitter) to keep up. For example:
My father was an Iowa native, child of a meat and potatoes culture more or less untouched by the canned-soup-casserole revolution, and set many of our food expectations. Vegetables were considered suspicious but necessary elements of the meal, and to be rendered safe by vigorous and long cooking. Meat was a gift to the table, and cooked with care. More importantly, somewhere along the line he'd tripped over the holy trinity of James Beard, Craig Claiborn and Julia Child, and had converted to francophilia. Perhaps it was in college, hotbed of all radical thought. I can imagine him flambéing crepes while others were setting fire to the ROTC building.read more on foodtwit.com Permalink | Comments (0)
They are discussing Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky in the inkwell:
I've actually come to regret the "organizing without organizations"Permalink | Comments (0)
line a bit.The phrase comes from an observation in the book that we use
variations on the same word to describe the state of being arranged or
coordinated (organized), and as a label for well-structured groups
(organizations). As a result, when we see organization in the world, we
often assume that there is an organization at work. And the changes
I'm pointing to are all the ways that is becoming less true.To take a recent example, when the Western press covered the upset in
the Chinese blogosphere about the Olympic torch protests, they covered
it as if the synchronization of the bloggers concerns must have been
orchestrated by the Chinese government. What they seemed unable (or
unwilling) to investigate was whether that synchronization was organic
-- whether there was organization without there being *an* organization
responsible, even though assuming that the bloggers actually feel that
way, and are synchronizing with one another, is the more parsimonious
explanation.So the basic observation is that order can arise without there being a
group of people paid to put things in order, and we're seeing this in
things like Meetup groups, Flickr and delicious tags, where sharing
precedes community formation rather than following it, and so on.The one thing I've reconsidered (too late, alas) is the way that
'organizing without organizations' sounds like on of those "...and the
State will wither away and we'll all live in a post-hierarchical
paradise' arguments. I'm so far from believing that that I didn't even
see the resonance til I started fielding questions from people who had
read the title but not the book.
I'm playing with Plurk, and while I find the UI heavy handed, they have many smart persuasive design elements...
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One of the things I've been thinking about and watching for is how Social Spaces change depending on the size of the community. For example, LinkedIn's news has the comment field at the top (it adds a second one at the bottom once there are three comments). This is fine when you have a small community leaving very few comments. However, if you had a slashdot sized community, this would encourage idiots to post before they read what other's said.
Too often we treat all practices as if the fit all communities, but the fact is size matters. For instance, Joshua's favorite example of the top diggers page, recently removed. What motivated folks at the beginning became a gamed liability once they got big. Much as we are reluctant to change UI's and remove features, there is a reasonable strategy for it....
A nice reminder of the wisdom of "You are not the user" at a product manager's blog: Eating Dog Food?
The real issue is that this is just another symptom of a big problem we have in our industry, but especially here in the valley. We tend to believe that our customers and users are much more like ourselves than they really are.
and even better, a reminder that there ar ea number of people you shouldn't consider your user either
Why Silicon Valley just won't shut up about FriendFeed
Has it ever occurred to Arrington that he is, in the argot of product managers, an "edge case"? Entrepreneurs desperate for coverage, and aware that he never reads email, are trying a new way to reach him -- and Arrington, in his compulsive neophilia, actually tries out the new medium, for a while. He then quickly tires of it, and throws a tantrum. Catering to such a person's whims is no way to run a company.
To that list I add Scoble and your CEO. And no, Steve Jobs is an exception, not the rule.
Permalink | Comments (0)As of late, I've been extremely focused on how we motivate behavior via our design choices; that theme is reflected in most of the talks I've been giving. Social spaces are particularly critical because of their complexity, subtle clues in interface make a big difference.
Often panels can be a bunch of folks sitting in the spotlight congratulating themselves for begin smart-- I prefer it when it's a chance for a series of lighting talks on a theme, then hopefully some discussion. Joshua's short talk from SXSW is a good guide to behavior in a compact form. I hope my panel form IASummit complements it.
No, that is not me. This definitely motivates me to put in a photo of myself. it's close to Vimeo's old cro-magnon man image.
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Out of Print in The New Yorker
Three centuries after the appearance of Franklin's Courant, it no longer requires a dystopic imagination to wonder who will have the dubious distinction of publishing America's last genuine newspaper. Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago. Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, said recently in a speech in London, "At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, 'How are you?,' in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce." Keller's speech appeared on the Web site of its sponsor, the Guardian, under the headline "NOT DEAD YET."MORE...
She climbs in my bed, demands getting under covers, steals my food and demands cartoons on the tv. And in exchange? Kisses owie.
worth it!
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Gleanings This is everything I've gleaned from the vast field of information we call the web. Not only all the IA, ID and any other "I" you can think of, but also odd articles, random thoughts, and so on and so on and so on....
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