My blogging will be available at Bits and Bikes.
Before everyone starts making comic books…
September 3, 2008I fell obligated to call as much attention to the weaknesses of the comic medium as the strengths. It’s more expensive. It’s more time-consuming to produce. It depends on employing scarce talent – Scott McCloud is among the best known comic artists. It does not display the product in action – often a primary motivation for screencasts. It has a lower information intensity than either a block of text with illustrations or a screencast with a voiceover. The novelty of the medium will quickly wear off – thousands of other people are gushing about it right now and planning their own comics.
At what tasks would this medium excel? That is not a rhetorical question with an implied answer of “nowhere”; I think it’s worth having a discussion about the merits of the medium and discussing where it may work well and where it would probably work poorly. Right tool for the job and all that.
On terminology
September 1, 2008As I was trying to remember – and Google for – the term used to describe Digg, Reddit, and other such web sites – social bookmarking? collaborative flltering? – I came across an ad for Crowdsourcing: the book, which took me to Crowdsourcing the web site. And I started thinking about crowdsourcing: the word.
In my last post I referred, directly or indirectly to cityscape, web sites, newspapers, magazines, and coffee shops as communities. I applied the same word to disparate things to call attention to their similarities. We live in a world that is constantly trying to find differences.
Jumping the shark. You may know what it means. You may think you know what it means. (A discussion of prescriptivism vs. descriptivism in lexicography is outside the scope of my patience.) It refers to the moment that a tv show becomes creatively exhausted and can find novelty only in acts of ridiculousness that make it impossible to willingly suspend disbelief in the show’s premise.
The fourth Indiana Jones movie recently came out, and we have a new term, “nuking the fridge”, which refers to a scene in the movie where Indiana survives an atomic blast and is hurtled countless yards in the shelter of a refrigerator. (If I just spoiled the movie for you, I’m sorry. I haven’t seen the movie myself. Raiders of the Lost Ark was the only better-than-OK movie in the series.)
Is nuking the fridge different from jumping the shark different from sharking the nuke? I do not know. But all this conversation about verbing the noun got me thinking. Many terms, phrases, concepts come into existence because people want to claim credit for coining a phrase or calling attention to something that others haven’t seen – and labeled.
This doesn’t simply happen in the world of popular culture. It happens in other dens of irrelevance. Like the humanities. I was helping a friend write an abstract for a presentation she was giving, and she showed me a few written by other presenters. They were filled with attempts to coin terms and thus kick-start careers.
There’s nothing new with seeking attention through finding new differences, but we need to do more than analyze things until we find every difference between them. This dynamic needs to be counteracted by one that finds similarities.
Love in the First Twelve Pages
August 20, 2008I was halfway through The Timeless Way of Building before I realized I was holding in my hands the most influential book on design that I would ever read. I deserved much of the blame – my head was firmly up my ass – but the book starts off sounding like a self-help book guaranteed to scare off the very people Christopher Alexander wants to persuade.
Jane Jacobs’s approach may be no less effective on the unconverted, but I no longer need to be convinced. The Death and Life of American Cities gets right to the point in the introduction. At least three people that whose opinions I respect have told me that they’ve been reading wanting to start reading, or thinking that I should be reading this book. Note to all of you: I am now reading it. Thank you!
I also picked up the Suburbanization of New York, a collection of essays that I found at the recently-moved AIA Bookstore on Arch Street in Philadelphia. I bought it because I had ridden to the bookstore last Friday morning and got knocked off my bike as I approached the shop, and I couldn’t find a copy of Jacobs’s book. I wanted to leave with something; when I have a brush with death, I want it to be for some purpose.
On the subject of American cities and New York and urban decay, I want to recommend a novel I recently read: Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet. It was the subject of a recent essay in City Journal that discussed the novel in the context of the apparently-common belief in the permanence of New York’s “second golden age.”
Names Matter
August 13, 2008In this morning’s TV Networks Rewrite the Definition of a News Bureau in the New York Times, we learn that ABC News has a class of “digital journalists.” What is a digital journalist? One who writes, shoots, edits, and uploads video without the assistance of a crew.
Why “digital journalist”? (I’m not the only one who seems to find this terminology questionable: The New York Times handles it with quotation marks whenever it is mentioned.) Are traditional crews analog journalists? No. Do these digital journalist’s’ reports get run in traditional news outlets, broadcast and cable TV? Yes. So what’s the deal?
The deal is that ABC News – or perhaps Marcus Wilford, “vice president for international digital” – is thinking about technology, not what you do with it. Why isn’t Marcus “vice president for getting stories wherever and whenever they’re happening without spending tons of money”?
The infatuation with technology qua technology in business is common. At CDNOW, right after the merger with N2K – the company that brought you web sites such as Music Boulevard – the guy from the N2K IT department, whose name is not worth remembering, decided to slow-motion bulldoze the Macs from our desks and replace them with Windows boxes. I tried to explain that different people performing different tasks need different tools but he saw every computer not as a tool but a piece of technology that he was required – entitled, really – to manage. I asked him why he didn’t expand his realm to encompass pens and notepads, given that such things are clearly writing technology, but he was inexplicably uninterested in managing office supplies.
(I need to mention at this point that pre-merger, about two hundred employees were valiantly – and fairly effectively – supported by one and a half people. Post-merger, the head IT droid had a staff of ten, a couple racks of Exchange servers, a custom PC manufacturing facility, and a poor record of making much of anything work well.)
All technology eventually ceases to be be considered technology. It becomes invisible. It becomes a means to an end. One of the goals of good design is to create a compelling feeling of thingness, to create things that have an existence that transcends their elements. Perversely, the higher the pedestal you place technology on, the harder it is to bake technology into everyday existence. (Is there some important difference between my term thingness and Christopher Alexander’s wholeness, previously known as qwan – quality without a name? Probably not.) If you’re walking around thinking about how special something is, you’re probably going to want to manage and control and strategize the life out of it. And you’re not going to want to bake it into things and make it invisible.
CNN calls its one-man bands “all-platform-journalists”, more clueful if hard on the ears. I’d call them nimble journalists. (Extreme Programming weenies may want to call them agile journalists, but only if they submit minimal, stream-of-consciousness reports that are constantly revised. Sounds like cable TV to me.)
Strategy: the Enemy of Human Progress
August 7, 2008To paraphrase Joseph Goebbels, whenever I hear the word strategy, I reach for my revolver.
There’s a synonym for strategy: central planning. Oh, the irony: Huge publicly traded corporations grinding to a halt while important people come up with answers to important questions. Directors and vice presidents acting more like Soviet commissars than capitalists.
Meanwhile, valuable time is lost, time that could have been used to try something. To do something. Progress thrives on data. Asking a bunch of experts to predict the future is pointless. Destructive. Because it wastes time.
To be sure, don’t act rashly: Fail safely and all that. But go out and do something!
At this time, please familiarize yourself with F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom if you haven’t previously done so. Managers: are you enslaving the people for whom you work? Everyone: are you a slave? Yes? Do something about it.
Is this related to design? Yes! How? Design to make things you didn’t plan for do-able. Don’t assume you know everything. Go look at the gallery of examples at 37signals’s Backpack. The down-side? People who want or need to be spoon-fed are going to need help figuring out to use tools sans rules.
Universal Design
August 7, 2008The books that have most influenced my thinking on web design…have nothing whatsoever to do with web design. Design transcends media. Behind any good design technique are principles that apply to any medium, whether it is the web, a book, human organizations, or the source code to software. Good design comes from understanding, and understanding requires stepping back from the bleeding edge and getting some perspective.
I told a friend of mine that I had figured out my calling: to write a book – no, the book – that lays out design as a universal discipline that harnesses dynamics that manifest themselves in disparate media, despite profound differences in the elements that make up each. He asked me, “Why a book? Why not a blog?” He went on to name a few examples of books that had started out – that had been written collaboratively with a community – as blogs.
While preparing for a talk to a group of start-ups at DreamIt Ventures, the first time I’ve done such anything like that, I realized that I was putting down in presentation form many of the ideas that I wanted to include in “the book” and that a blog seems like a great way to continue the process. So here I am.
I will be posting here bits and pieces of what I hope you consider wisdom, and opening myself and my ideas to criticism, in the hope that we can collectively advance the state of design.
