tina's A.O.T.D.

Modern Medicine (Jonathan Harris)

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:04:00 -0400

In the tech blogosphere, there is very rarely a discussion of the ethics of what we produce. Jonathan Harris decided to do something about it with his essay, “Modern Medicine,” which posits that technologists are really “medicine men” for today’s society. The metaphor is apt, getting to the ability to harm or heal, as well as the outsized level of influence that these rare individuals have on society.

In it, he gives us some useful frameworks with which to think about our roles as designers, engineers, makers: what are the urges in people that we satisfy with what we make? (What do we medicate?) Do we create connection economies or attention economies? Are we dealers or healers?

The essay goes beyond just comparing addictive technological products (Angry Birds, Facebook) to drugs, which is appropriate if clichéd. It turns this on its head and proposes that tech also has the unique power to do good: to heal, to extend our faculties, to remove blockages—and in this respect it, too, is a lot like drugs.

The drug analogy is further appropriate, because it alludes prophetically to the extent of our dependency on technology in the future. Already we depend on blood pressure regulators, antidepressants, antihistamines, just to get us through each day. And one day, tech will become like that: a bionic part of ourselves, fused physiologically with our bodies. It has already begun the process of fusing with our minds.

When it gets there, there will be important ethical questions to grapple with, much like the medical community grapples with them today.

So why not start now?

Modern Medicine, by Jonathan Harris

Dabblers and Blowhards

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 21:59:20 -0500

Dabblers and Blowhards:

Maciej Ceglowski tears Paul Graham’s article Hackers and Painters to shreds, while managing to miss the entire point of the piece.

Way to focus on the irrelevant details in order to show off how knowledgeable you are.

Note to self: never write like this, no matter what my ego is telling me.

Hackers and Painters (Paul Graham)

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 21:54:31 -0500

Hackers and Painters (Paul Graham)

Network effect (Wikipedia)

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:13:00 -0500

Network effect (Wikipedia):

Since the advent of Web 2.0, everyone seems to be obsessing about network effects. It’s the idea that the value of a product increases as its user base increases. Robert Metcalfe even proposes that the value increase is equal to the square of the number of users. However there are limits to how beneficial a network effect can be. Too many users can result in congestion. We are all too aware of the headaches of rush-hour traffic, a negative network effect of everyone owning a car.

Another undesirable result can be a sense of getting lost in the crowd. I recently started using Path to keep in touch with friends, because 200 people dumping their goings-ons into your Facebook News Feed can diminish the sense of closeness it purportedly offers. Path does exhibit a network effect, but to with a limit. (The article calls this a local network effect.) It only works if my close friends and family join; as soon as distant acquaintances start hopping onto my Path network, the value is gone.

Indeed there seems to be a kind of backlash these days against the single-minded pursuit of infinite user acquisition. Yes, the network effect can be a powerful, world-shaking thing, but unbounded growth can also be dangerous to your business model and the experience of your existing users. There is a rising emphasis on curation, intimacy, and exclusivity (or at least perceived exclusivity). Examples are Fab.com, Fridge, and Vimeo. Seth Godin even wrote a book about it.

Network effects are undeniably a powerful tool in technology’s arsenal for impacting lives and affecting change, but I think it should be pursued carefully. Growth for the sake of growth is unhelpful, much in the same way that cancer is unhelpful, to say the least. It can feel good to dominate the market as Facebook has, but is Facebook still serving its users needs as well as it did in the old Harvard days? (This is a separate debate, so I’m going to leave it at that.) I think that market domination is a red herring; it distracts one from the real goal, which is to create as much value for your individual users as possible. In the long run, consistent value is the only thing that sustains a business.

As designers and entrepreneurs, we should be cognizant of when growth is actually beneficial, producing positive returns on value as the user base grows, and when it is detrimental to the user experience. And if the latter happens, we have to be clever and courageous enough to do whatever it takes keep our original value promise for each and every user.

George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 23:54:24 -0500

George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946:

George Orwell gives fashionably decadent writing styles a stern beating. Entertaining, incisive, and chock full of smart advice for aspiring writers.

A couple favorite quotes:

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.

Technology Accelerating Food’s Transformation to Services Economy

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:13:51 -0500

Technology Accelerating Food’s Transformation to Services Economy:

This article proposes reframing how we think of our food economy: not as a products-based economy, but a services-based one.

Imagine a world where you’re not paying for tomatoes, but instead for someone to take care of a plot of land so as to coax tomatoes out of it. In the end you are still getting tomatoes, but the former model is a product, and the latter is a service.

The distinction is so subtle yet so important. Rethinking food production as a service forces us to acknowledge certain important responsibilities: the responsibility that we have for our farmers, to support their important work, and the responsibility they have for the land, to sustain it and be its caretaker. These are responsibilities that we currently lack in our current industrialized food system…

As the article acknowledges, food will cost more this way. But the real costs of food are just that high. And perhaps one compelling way of getting people to accept the real costs is to shift our thinking from food-as-product to food-as-service.

Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, “Outliers”, and the 10,000 hour rule (Michael Nielsen)

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:36:25 -0500

Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, “Outliers”, and the 10,000 hour rule (Michael Nielsen):

I stumbled into this article because I was wondering whether I would have enough hours in one lifetime to get good at all the things I wanted to get good at. Turns out, if I do it methodically enough, I can get to “expert” level at exactly 21.9 things (50 years * 365 days * 12 hours per day). That’s a lot of things. That’s also hyper-unrealistic, though fun to think about.

Fortunately, Nielsen’s reminds us that isn’t purely the amount of time, but the quality of the time spent, that matters. And also that Gladwell is infamous for simplifying matters.

Basically, it isn’t that you should spend 10,000 hours practicing the same thing over and over, but that you try to spend every hour you can pushing the limits of your ability. And if you do, you’ll get somewhere amazing regardless of whether you’ve hit 10,000 or not. Maybe you’ll be the next Heisenberg or Chaitin. Maybe your next big triumph is but one hour-long struggle against the boundaries of your knowledge away.

The 10,000 hour rule is a nice heuristic. Embedded in it is a lesson of patience, perseverance and faith in oneself. But at the same time, one shouldn’t disregard the importance of quality over quantity. This is encouraging for those of us who want to play the guitar, program computers like a badass, AND be a Pokémon master all in one lifetime.

Well, I’m off to catch ‘em all. Laters.

The Tipping of Jefferson Avenue (New York Magazine)

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 22:35:00 -0500

The Tipping of Jefferson Avenue (New York Magazine):

I was curious about gentrification, specifically the consequences for original residents. This article manages to do some justice to what it’s like to get priced out of a neighborhood, while also giving some insight into how the character of neighborhoods change as new people move in.

Here’s a common stereotype reexamined, too: it turns out, lower income doesn’t always correlate with higher crime in inner city neighborhoods. Jefferson Avenue is a rare example of this in action, because the tight-knit neighbors have essentially formed their own rock-solid “moral police” force. But as more multi-generation residents are economically evicted, so to speak, what will happen to this moral fabric? The neighborhood may still be crime-resistent, but now it’s for a different reason.

It seems unfair that higher income usually means less crime. It’s often used as a justification for gentrification-inducing efforts. Ideally we should encourage the things that create livability in the first place: trust, neighbors you can count on, families staying in one place for generations… not necessarily money. But money also drives amenities, which we like. Besides, if the whole world is gradually becoming more mobile, will we still have these ideal neighborhoods anymore? Or will neighborhoods just be taxonomic demarcations used for convenience by realtors?

My own family consisting of my mom and me has moved 9 times since I was born, and in the past 5 years I’ve moved 3 times. This might be a bit on the high side, but it isn’t that unusual. I can’t imagine the likes of Jefferson Ave being the norm anymore. In this new age, it looks like the economy is the only thing you can count on now to make your neighborhood a safe and livable place. And this makes me a little sad, even though I’ve never even lived in a place like Jefferson Ave, because maybe I never will.

Design Criticism and the Creative Process (A List Apart)

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:56:34 -0500

Design Criticism and the Creative Process (A List Apart):

This is a very thorough and sensitive guide to making the most out of design criticism.

I personally have had my good days and my bad when taking criticism. Sometimes I can actually pull off acting like a mature adult and do the author of this article proud; other times I can really feel the egotistical 9-year old wailing inside me. Either way, it’s good to have this article in my arsenal. Next time she does that I’ll just roll it up and whap her upside the head with it. :P

Absolute Powerpoint (New Yorker)

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:56:05 -0500

Absolute Powerpoint (New Yorker):

“Can a software package edit our thoughts?” Turns out, it can.

Somehow, a piece of software designed, fifteen years ago, to meet a simple business need has become a way of organizing thought at kindergarten show-and-tells. “Oh, Lord,” one of the early developers said to me. “What have we done?”

I also love this:

AutoContent was added in the mid-nineties, when Microsoft learned that some would-be presenters were uncomfortable with a blank PowerPoint page—it was hard to get started. “We said, ‘What we need is some automatic content!’ ” a former Microsoft developer recalls, laughing. “ ‘Punch the button and you’ll have a presentation.’ ” The idea, he thought, was “crazy.” And the name was meant as a joke. But Microsoft took the idea and kept the name—a rare example of a product named in outright mockery of its target customers.

An Important Time for Design (A List Apart)

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:52:19 -0500

An Important Time for Design (A List Apart):

I thought I was going to hate this article because it would turn out to be a self-congratulatory article about how great designers are and the rest of the world doesn’t understand and whine whine whine. Well, it wasn’t. It’s a call to action. Nothing new, but still rather exciting. It reminds me a quote that came up in class the other night.

“Design is no longer some bastardized descendant of marketing. It is product design.” Or something to that effect. I think Jeffrey Zeldman said it.

A lot of things are being redefined in the process: what makes an ideal team, how products get built, how they get funded and released, what problems get tackled… redefining design shouldn’t be seen as a separate task from all that. In fact, it IS all of that. So let’s get to work!

How to start a movement (TED Talk)

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 10:54:46 -0500

How to start a movement (TED Talk):

Happy New Year! Let’s start movements and dance our butts off on 2012 :)

An Evolution Toward a Programmable Universe (NYTimes)

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 12:49:00 -0500

An Evolution Toward a Programmable Universe (NYTimes):

In this article, Larry Smarr argues that, with the increasing prevalence of networked sensors in today’s world, “the world gradually becomes programmable.” That is, instead of just having computational omniscience (knowing), we are actually moving towards computational omnipotence (controlling). What an idea, but not inconceivable.

I’m also drawn to this idea of “human sensors.” That is essentially what we’re doing when we report things on Twitter before the media does. The media used to be our sensors, because they were hooked up to the communication “cloud.” Now we all are. That’s just another fancy way of rephrasing “Web 2.0,” but it sounds so different in those words.

Finally, he ends with a really curious hypothesis. We can predict the weather fairly accurately because we have meticulous data on all the major factors affecting weather. Therefore, if we have enough data about human behavior (via networked devices, human sensors, etc.), would we be able to actually forecast human history? Put another way… will we one day be able to see into the future?

Time travel… it could happen yet.

Behavior modification (Wikipedia)

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 11:20:53 -0500

Behavior modification (Wikipedia):

Was curious about the scientific approach to “behavior change,” something that gets discussed a lot in ixd projects. This brought back memories of high school psych class and Ms. Lynn saying “But behaviorism has fallen from grace!”. Behavior change is not quite the same as behavior modification, which is founded on the empirical principles of behavioralism. I can understand why ixd doesn’t embrace its techniques (too reductivist, too focused on observable & repeatable patterns, presumes the ‘user’ is maladaptive and in need of ‘correction’, etc.) but still good to review some stuff from outside the ixd world once in a while.

Please consider WEIRD (Seth Godin)

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 01:14:35 -0500

Please consider WEIRD (Seth Godin):

Seth has a new book out, called We’re All Weird. The basic premise seems to be that the mass market is dying, there is no such thing as “normal” anymore, and to survive in this brave new world, marketers & product-makers have to treat people like the individuals they are.

Cool.

Makes sense.

That was completely non-controversial.

Next article!

A Newspaper For The Twitter Age: The Size Of A Sales Receipt, And Edited By You (Fast Company)

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 13:51:35 -0500

A Newspaper For The Twitter Age: The Size Of A Sales Receipt, And Edited By You (Fast Company):

Little Printer may seem like a throwback at first, but it’s actually a disruptive, weird, but undeniably innovative way to liberate digital content from its screen-based prison. It’s about making “the cloud” tangible and intimate again, by bringing it into the home in a physical way.

Despite my knee-jerk dislike of creating physical waste, I’ve found myself longing for physical artifacts lately. I want to print out a copy of every photo I’ve liked in the past few years. I want to use sticky notes in abundance and write one big fat word on each one, then rearrange them on a wall. (Lucky for me I get to do this in my grad program.) So I like the idea of this “little printer” converting the most ephemeral media of all—digital media—into momentarily precious tangibles that can be shared, swapped, collected, taped up on a fridge, and scribbled on. Digital media has gotten me feeling rather uncomfortably “light of being” lately. Maybe this is one way we can anchor ourselves back to earth?

Incidental Media video by BERG and Dentsu explores the idea of...

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 13:43:44 -0500

Incidental Media video by BERG and Dentsu explores the idea of media surfaces that don’t aim to grab your attention, but exist kind of ‘ambiently’ like a clock.

Ethan Zuckerman wants you to eat your (news) vegetables — or at least have better information (Nieman Journalism Lab)

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 11:56:51 -0500

Ethan Zuckerman wants you to eat your (news) vegetables — or at least have better information (Nieman Journalism Lab):

Interesting idea: if we can show people the “nutritiousness” of the media that they consume, would they change their consumption patterns for the better? He’s betting that they would, and points to the quantified self movement as a source of inspiration.

The big problem right now is that it’s hard for computers to tell what you’re reading/watching, so it can’t assign a nutritional value. I’m fairly confident in a few years we’ll have this all figured out, though. And when that happens, imagine all the other things we can quantify based on what we read online: maybe emotions or personality? Step aside, personality quizzes of the 90s! :O

Don't Call Yourself a Programmer (Patrick McKenzie)

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 13:17:57 -0500

Don't Call Yourself a Programmer (Patrick McKenzie):

Here is this article, written by a jaded but rich and successful programmer, trying to eradicate all the feel-good delusions we young people have about what it means to be a successful skilled professional. As an Audacious Young Person, I’m always inclined to roll my eyes a bit, especially at sentences like:

You’re in the business of unemploying people. If you think that is unfair, go back to school and study something that doesn’t matter.

But instead of reading it as putting limitations on what I can/cannot do in my future career, what if I read it as trying to inspire creativity? Maybe the thing I should be learning isn’t “Stop daydreaming now and face up to cold hard reality.” Instead, it should be “Here are the known constraints you must design your career around, now go crazy and have fun.”

For instance:

[Skilled professionals] are hired to create business value, not to [practice their skilled trade].

At first this sounds horrible. Designers aren’t hired to design beautiful things! They’re hired to make clients happy, which generates more revenue.

But read another way, a bit of fun could be had: say you were hired to create Boring Wireframes all day for Famous Multinational Digital Agency (because that is how HR determined you will best provide value to the business) but you figured out a way to make FMDA more money by staging fantastic lion dances in the boardroom during critical meetings. If above advice were indeed true, this means you could spend the rest of your enviably fun career designing the most glorious lion dances for boardroom meetings, and make a ton of money while at it.

And I think I’m okay with that.

More and more, I’m realizing just how different my understanding of “career” is from my mom’s generation. It’s no longer about diligently training in a skill and then sharpening it down to a fine point over a lifetime. It’s about taking a toolkit of skills and choosing how to apply it to ever-shifting contexts. it’s about learning, adapting, and being flexible, broadening rather than narrowing. If this sounds less secure and more frightening, it is. But we’re humans, we’re good at doing just those things.

The Case for Girls (Fast Company)

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 11:48:00 -0500

The Case for Girls (Fast Company):

This article illuminates the fact that the world still prefers baby boys over girls (despite even governmental efforts to intervene). This is worrisome not only because it’s bad for women’s rights now, but it’s bad for everyone in the long term—all the frustrated men who can’t start families, businesses who won’t benefit from the leadership style of women, etc.

Love the idea of doing ad campaigns (slideshow at the end of the article) to “recast girls as the No. 1 choice for consumers from China to the U.S..” The language is facetious, but the intent is serious. The ads submitted for this article range from heartbreaking to borderline silly. I like that even on such a serious topic there is room for both humor and drama. But I wish more of the campaigns were real, and not just a fun mental exercise to entertain well-to-do liberals reading an English-language business magazine in the US.