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Linkosophy

April 15, 2008 by Andrew | No comments

In 2008 I had the distinct honor to present the closing plenary for the IA Summit in Miami, FL. Here’s the talk in its entirety. Unfortunately the podcast version was lost, so there’s no audio version, but 99% of what I had to say is in the notes.

NOTE: To make sense of this, you’ll need to read the notes in full-screen mode. (Or download the 6 MB PDF version.)

Linkosophy

View more presentations from andrewhinton

(Thanks to David Fiorito for compressing it down from its formerly gigantic size!)

Giving this talk at the IA Summit was humbling and a blast; I’m so grateful for the positive response, and the patience with these still-forming ideas.

If you’re after some resources on Communities of Practice and the like, see the post about the previous year’s presentation which has lots of meaty links and references.

Personas and the Role of Design Docs up at B&A

February 27, 2008 by Andrew | Permalink

So, my article is up… thanks to all the excellent editors who pushed me to finish the dang thing over the last seven months. Procrastination is a fine art, my friends.

Personas and the Role of Design Documentation – Boxes and Arrows

Here’s a nugget:

A persona document can be very useful for design—and for some teams even essential. But it’s only an explicit, surface record of a shared understanding based on primary experience. It’s not the persona itself, and doesn’t come close to taking the place of the original experience that spawned it.

Without that understanding, the deliverables are just documents, empty husks. Taken alone, they may fulfill a deadline, but they don’t feed the imagination.

Edited to Add:

Already I’m getting some great feedback, and I’m realizing that I may not have made things quite clear enough in the article.

The article is meant as a corrective statement, to a degree. I focus so strongly on what I see as the *first* priority of methods and documentation in design work—shared artifacts for the design process, because I think this has gotten lost in the conventional wisdom of “documents for stakeholders.” So, I amped up my point in the other direction, trying to drag the pendulum more toward the center.

I was careful to point out that stakeholder communication is also, of course, a very important goal. But it is a SEPARATE goal. It may even require creating separate deliverables to achieve!

We too often get caught up in using documentation as a tool for convincing other people, rather than tools for collaborative design among the practitioners. I may have overstated my case, though, and, alas, obscured these caveats I scattered throughout.

In short: I wanted to emphasize that personas are first and foremost the act of empathetic imagination for design; and I wanted to emphasize that all design documentation is first and foremost an artifact/tool for collaborative reflection, shared understanding and iteration. As long as we remember these things, we can then go on to make all the persona descriptions and slick stakeholder deliverables we want and need to get the rest of the job done.

Maybe I should’ve used that “in short” statement in the article? But, I guess if I’d kept revising, it’d have taken me another six months!

Please do keep the feedback coming, though. Mostly, I’m wanting to spark conversations like these!

The Cultivation Equation for Social Design (Part 1)

February 25, 2008 by Andrew | No comments

Note: This is something I had embedded in a few very long presentations from last year, and I’m realizing it would probably be useful (to me if nobody else) to elaborate on it as its own topic. Here’s the first part.

social equation

There’s a lot of writing and thinking happening around the best approaches to designing platforms for social activity. I certainly haven’t read it all, and it keeps being added to every day. But from what I have read, and from the experiences I’ve had with social design factors, I distilled the basics down to a simple equation. “Cultivation equals Motivation divided by Moderation.” It sounds like a no-brainer, to those of us who’ve been thinking about this stuff for a while. For me, though, it helps keep focus on the three most important elements to consider with any social design undertaking.

Cultivation

Cultivation requires that we recalibrate the approaches we’ve inherited from traditional top-down ideas of social management & design. In other words, it’s cultivation rather than dictation. To ‘cultivate’ something implies that there is an existing culture — some organic, emergent, collective entity — that exists regardless of our intrusion, with its own natural rhythms and patterns.

Communities Happen

How do we help a community maintain its health, value and effectiveness for the individuals involved in it? We certainly don’t start re-defining it and prescribing (or pre-scripting) every process and action. Rather than dictating the content of the culture’s behavior, we create and manage the right conditions for the community to improve itself on its own terms. This is much more like gardening than managing in the traditional sense.

You can’t create a community by fiat. You can’t legislate or force participation — then all you get is a process, not social interaction. Social interaction may take place under the surface, but that’s in spite of your central planning, not because of it. Communities happen in an emergent way, on their own.

Mistaking the Ant-Hill for the Colony

It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking that the software for an online community actually is, in some way, the community itself — that the intentionally designed technology “network” is the social network. But these technological tools are a medium for the thing, not the thing itself. It’s like mistaking the ant hill for the ant colony. We often point at ant hills and say “there’s an ant colony” but the social behaviors of the ants exist whether they happen in that pile of earth or another.

Social software platforms tap into conversations that already exist in some form or another. At best they can enable and amplify those conversations and help them broaden outside of their original confines, even redefine themselves in some way. Of course, many of the connections people make on these platforms may never have happened without the software, but there had to be the propensity for those connections to happen to begin with.

Designing for social activity, then, is about creating infrastructure that helps communities and social patterns behave according to their own natures. Even the social character of the network isn’t created by the software. Rather, the platform’s architecture encourages only certain kinds of extant networking behaviors to thrive.

Take, for instance, LinkedIn vs MySpace. LinkedIn didn’t create the behavior of calm, professional networking interactions, introductions and linking between peers. That kind of behavior was going on long before LinkedIn launched. But its architecture is such that it allows and encourages only that kind of social interaction to take root. MySpace, on the other hand, is much more open architecturally; linking is much more informal, and self-expression is almost completely unfettered. The nature of the MySpace platform, however, essentially guarantees that few will want to use it for the sober, corporate-style networking that happens on LinkedIn. (Lots of professional work goes on in MySpace, of course, but mainly in the creative & performing arts space, where self-expression and unique identity cues are de facto requirements.)

So the character of the platform’s architecture — its rules and structures — determine the character of social behavior that your platform is most likely to attract and support. But once you’ve done that, then how do you cultivate it?

Authenticity

One important factor is something you can’t create artificially: the cultivators have to be invested in the community they’re cultivating. This cannot be faked. There are too many levels of tacit understanding — gut-level feel — necessary for understanding the nuances of a particular culture involved to do otherwise. You have to be willing to get your hands dirty, just like in a garden. Communities are fine with having decisions and rule-creation happening from some top-down component (which we’ll talk about in a minute) but only if they perceive the authority as having an authentic identity within the community, and that any design changes or “improvements” to the platform are coming from shared values.

Example: one reason for Facebook’s public-relations troubles of late is that a number of the design decisions its creator has made have come across as being less about cultivating the community than lining the pockets of investors. Privacy advocates and regular users revolted, and forced Facebook to adjust their course.

Another example: MySpace managed to give new users the impression that the people running the site were just “one of them” by creating the ubiquitous persona of “Tom.” Tom is a real person, one of the co-founders of the platform, who has a profile, and who “welcomes” you to the network when you join. He’s the voice for announcements and such that come from those who created and maintain MySpace. Tom is real, to a point — recently, it was discovered that Tom’s age and information have been tweaked to make him seem more in line with the service’s target demographic. It’s arguable that by the time this disillusioning revelation occurred, MySpace had grown to enough critical mass that it didn’t matter. I suspect, though, that the Tom avatar still serves its purpose for millions of users who either don’t know about the news, or think of him more as the Ronald McDonald of the brand — a friendly face that gives the brand some personality, even if they don’t care if it’s a real person.

If you’re cultivating from an authentic stance, and you understand that your role isn’t dictator, then it’s a matter of executing cultivation by striking the right balance between Motivation and Moderation.

Next up … Motivation & Moderation. Stay tuned.

A Quick Reminder about IA’s Role in Social Design

February 20, 2008 by Andrew | No comments

There’s been a lot of talk over the last couple of years about a collective Eureka moment where we’ve all come to realize that the Internet, the Web, and designing User Experiences for those platforms, is “really about People … not products and information.”

I think it’s great that more folks are coming to this realization.

But in the same breath, some of these folks will then say that Information Architecture is hopelessly out of touch with this reality … that IA is ‘dead’ or that there’s no such thing as an information architecture, since it’s all user-driven nowadays. I’m not going to point to specific instances, because I’m not posting this to start more flame wars … just to finally state something I wish I’d blogged over a year ago.

What these (I’m sure well-meaning) people don’t seem to grasp is that the IA community has been focused on social infrastructures for a very long time. Some of the most successful writing and design has come from members of this practitioner community — witness Epinions, Slideshare, and PublicSquare just to name a few platforms. Members of this community have published books and blogs at the forefront of social design thinking.

In fact, in the much-maligned “Manifesto” the IAI posted back in 2002, there was this language:

* One goal of information architecture is to shape information into an environment that allows users to create, manage and share its very substance in a framework that provides semantic relevance.
* Another goal of information architecture is to shape the environment to enable users to better communicate, collaborate and experience one another.
* The latter goal is more fundamental than the former: information exists only in communities of meaning. Without other people, information no longer has context, and no longer informs.

I’ll take the blame for some of the corny language in that document — but hey, it was a manifesto for crying out loud … a bit of purple prose is par for the course.

The point is, this has always been part of our community’s focus. If people don’t realize that, they’ve not been paying attention.

There. It feels good to get things off one’s chest, no? :-) Ok… carry on.

Kelly – Bottum-Up Not Enough

February 20, 2008 by Andrew | Permalink

Kevin Kelly’s article Bottom Up is Not Enough is making the rounds, and rightly so. Here’s a snippet:

Here’s how I sum it up: The bottom-up hive mind will always take us much further than even seems possible. It keeps surprising us in this regard. Given enough time, dumb things can be smarter than we think.

At that same time, the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add design and top down control to get where we want to go.

He does speak to “how” we do that, but the word for me is “recalibrate” — we need to recalibrate the apparatuses we use for managing & governing collective behavior. It’s all about cultivation, not dictation.

Random thoughts on Space, Rules, Play & IA

January 29, 2008 by Andrew | No comments

I haven’t written here in many weeks, but it’s not because I’m not writing.

Lately, though, my thoughts have been too fractured to coalesce into anything that felt like a real blog post. I’m now realizing, however, that they never will unless I unclog the cognitive drain, as it were.

So, this post, in a sense, will be like a visit from Roto-Rooter ™.

– IA tends to be about how users experience information space through time; one space linking to the next, as opposed to how things are arranged and behave on a page or screen. Only way to do this is semantically (language); physical architecture can actually shape space with objects. IA is about the Z axis. I am here, and *THEN* I am here. Links are about time — they shape it, chop it into discrete experiences, even name it.

– Eno’s idea that all culture is a simulacrum, that it’s all invented bits of identity that we can play in, try out. Shopping, movies, fashion, art, music — all of it. (Also love his idea that “culture is everything you don’t have to do.”

– IA provides simulated places, directions to try. Playfulness encompasses this too — moving into, through, past various options — aggregating into something we retroactively experience as a narrative arc. (But that’s constructed by the user … any arc we try to create artificially just gets in the way of this act of meaning-making by the user. We don’t make meaning, we provide spaces for users to do that).

– Will Wright’s phrase: “Possibility Spaces” — great phrase for thinking about IA.

– Whole buildings have been redesigned to change the way people move through them, to get different effects — more conversations, more efficiency, whatever. Virtual spaces have similar effects. What makes MySpace, LinkedIn and Facebook different are just a few basic design choices, mainly around rules & permissions. It’s not their tab-structure that makes them different, it’s the rules — what I’m seeing as the truly architectural aspect of virtual space structures.

– Categories = walls; choosing one semantic structure over another, by default removes all others from play. You can add more, but you can’t add infinitely, or it becomes structureless. Every choice is to promote one thing over all other things (or all other things not also promoted). Just as putting a wall in a building means you can’t walk that way anymore. So categories function just like rules and permissions.

– Rules & permissions, then, are perhaps the bigger entity — and categories are a species of them? Thinking about that… but, at any rate, they’re definitely architectural in nature, and yet we don’t discuss them that much in IA circles. Others are all over it — Clay Shirky, game designers like Will Wright, Craig Newmark, Jimmy Wales, Zuckerberg, others…

– I think it’s IA even if they don’t call it that.

– RS Wurman coined the term IA but it was about representations — maps — that helped us cognitively grok some external reality.

– Then the Web happened, and the map became the landscape — so now IA is about a thing that describes itself (it has to, because on the web, any attempt to effectively map the digital space becomes part of the digital space itself). It’s like one of his ACCESS guides, but one that you literally enter and walk around in — the city and the guide are the same.

– Maybe I love IA for the same reason I loved creating ‘dungeons’ as a kid playing D&D, and later making interactive structures in MUDs and MOOs? Making ‘possibility spaces’ and seeing what design tweaks result in what kinds of experiences?

– Shirky says “there’s no such thing as IA” because, to him, there can be no single authoritative structure anymore — but then points to examples of rules and labels in things like Delicious that, at least in my view, are definitely IA — they’re just not ‘categorization & organization’ IA — they’re the logic of the space that allows people to make sense of and use Delicious. Plus, even if there is no actual IA, it doesn’t mean we don’t experience or perceive it as such. Zen Buddhists say there is no actual “self” but they still name their kids.

– The idea that we organize around objects — network around them — is very powerful. We don’t even see them much of the time, because they’re so taken for granted — we think the relationship exists in and of itself, but it doesn’t. Or rather, it needs a medium to take hold, to instantiate itself — but the relationship likely wouldn’t have begun without that object to begin with. There’s no there there, without the object. (Teaches us something about IA, no? There’s no link without things to link … but those things don’t exist to one another without the link…)

– Conversations are the basis of all of this work, and have always been. Library Science is founded on centuries of Slow Conversations — so slow because they take place in books, over time, using physical spaces and media. One book or article answers another. It was the only way for people divided by space (and time) to have these conversations — later broadcasting, but that too took a lot of time and material for production. Think of it as a very slow chemical reaction — something that takes many years, like fine wines or something?

– The internet has essentially sped up that chemical reaction, put a burner under the test-tube, and made it so that the previous containers & processes are breaking down somewhat. Conversing, organizing, collaborating — all can take place with almost zero inertia. A sort of Cambrian Explosion.

Ok… that’ll do for now. There’s more in my notes, but this is getting to be crazy long.

Facebook Dystopia

January 29, 2008 by Andrew | Permalink

I’m sick of Facebook. The noise and annoyance, the confusing permissions, the beta-intrusions into privacy and the rest are bad enough.

But what really chafes me about it is the Facebook Apps framework. I’m in full agreement with this post about Facebook, except that I’m not going to blame the developers that much.

The developers of FB apps are just doing what developers are going to do when given a system that doesn’t encourage better behavior. Facebook could’ve made the framework much more responsible, so that it enforced some good-neighbor rules. A few tweaks that could’ve made all the difference.

What angers me most about it aren’t persnickety user-experience complaints, but the fact that it’s fouling up the ability to communicate and “play” with friends and colleagues, it’s crossing signals and screwing with expectations. I don’t know if I’m offending someone by declining to play a game with them, because I don’t know if the app tricked the user into accidentally inviting a hundred people to use the app and I’m just one more. I don’t know if I want to use an app or not because so many are so poorly designed, and the system gives me no way to know what users are saying about the app.

Unlike Linked-In, FB cheapens the ties that it helps me make socially, by allowing philistines to use them for these viral shenanigans. They drummed up the hype, led people to believe they’d be millionaires if they just got enough people to sign up for an app, and essentially got out of the way of the stampede.

Flourishing, Friending & the Evolution of “Social”

December 7, 2007 by Andrew | No comments

As networked social applications mature, they’re evolving more nuanced ways of constructing and maintaining an identity. Two of the major factors in online identity are How you present yourself, and Who you know.

How you present yourself: “Flourishing”

Flourishing is how we ornament ourselves and display ourselves to others. Think of peacocks flourishing their tail-feathers. It’s done to communicate something about oneself — to attract partners, distinguish oneself from the pack toward some end, or even dissuade the advances of enemies.

I don’t know if this behavior has another name, or if someone else has called it this yet. But it’s the best name I can think of for the technologically enhanced version of this behavior.

Humans have always used personal ornament to say something about themselves, from ancient tattoos and piercings, “war paint,” various kinds of dress, engagement and wedding rings, to larger things like their cars and homes. We’ve long used personal ornament to signal to others “I am X” in order to automatically set initial terms of any conversation or encounter.

It expands our context, and makes physical things about us that our bodies alone cannot communicate. Often these choices are controlled overtly or subtly by cultural norms. But in cultures where individual identity is given some play-room, these choices can become highly unique.

So, how has digital networked life changed this behavior? For a while, I’ve thought it’s fascinating how we can now decorate ourselves not only with things we’ve had to buy or make, but with a virtual version of almost anything we can think of, from any medium. My online identity as represented by one or more ‘avatars’ (whether that’s an avatar in an environment like Second Life, or a MySpace profile that serves a similar, though 2-D purpose) can be draped with all manner of cultural effluvia. I can express myself with songs, movie clips, pictures of products I love (even if I can’t afford them). Our ability to express ourselves with bits of our culture has increased to vertiginous heights.

Just as I started blogging about this thing that’s been on my mind for a while, I thought I’d look to see if anyone has done real work on it. I’m sure there’s a lot of it out there, but one piece I ran across was a paper from Hugo Liu at MIT, entitled “Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances,” which discusses this development at some length. From the introduction:

The materials of social identity have changed. Up through the 19th century in European society, identity was largely determined by a handful of circumstances such as profession, social class, and church membership (Simmel, 1908/1971a). With the rise of consumer culture in the late 20th century, possessions and consumptive choices were also brought into the fold of identity. One is what one eats; or rather, one is what one consumes—books, music, movies, and a plenitude of other cultural materials (McCracken, 2006).

… In the pseudonymous and text-heavy online world, there is even greater room for identity experimentation, as one does not fully exist online until one writes oneself into being through “textual performances” (Sundén, 2003).

One of the newest stages for online textual performance of self is the Social Network Profile (SNP). The virtual materials of this performance are cultural signs—a user’s self-described favorite books, music, movies, television interests, and so forth—composed together into a taste statement that is “performed” through the profile. By utilizing the medium of social network sites for taste performance, users can display their status and distinction to an audience comprised of friends, co-workers, potential love interests, and the Web public.

The article concerns itself mainly with users’ lists of “favorites” from things like music, movies and books, and how these clusters signal particular things about the individual.

What I mean by “flourishing” is this very activity, but expanded into all media. Thanks to ever-present broadband and the ability to digitize almost anything into a representative sample, users can decorate themselves with “quotes” of music, movies, posters, celebrity pictures, news feeds, etc. Virtual bling.

I think it was a major reason for MySpace’s popularity, especially the ability to not just *list* these things, but to bring them fully into the profile, as songs that play as soon as you load the profile page, or movie and music-video and YouTube clips.

This ability has been present for years in a more nascent form in physical life — the custom ring-tone. Evidently, announcing to all those around you something about yourself by the song or sound you use for your ring-tone is so important to people that it generates billions of US dollars in revenue.

Here’s what I’m thinking: are we far from the day when it’s not just ring-tones, but video-enabled fabric in our clothes, and sound-emitting handbags and sunglasses? What will the ability to “flourish” to others mean when we have all of this raw material to sample from, just like hip-hop artists have been doing for years?

For now, it’s only possible to any large extent online. But maybe that’s enough, and the cultural-quoting handbags won’t even be necessary? Eventually, the digital social network will become such a normal part of our lives that having a profile in the ether is as common and expected as phone numbers in the phone book used to be (in fact, people in their teens and 20s are already more likely to look for a Web profile than even consider looking in a giant paper phone-book).

As physical and digital spaces merge, and the distinction becomes less meaningful, that’s really all it’ll take.

Who you know: “Friending”

Alex Wright has a nice column in the NYT about Friending, Ancient or Otherwise, about research that’s showing common patterns between prehistoric human social behavior and the rise of social-network applications.

Academic researchers are starting to examine that question by taking an unusual tack: exploring the parallels between online social networks and tribal societies. In the collective patter of profile-surfing, messaging and “friending,” they see the resurgence of ancient patterns of oral communication.
“Orality is the base of all human experience,” says Lance Strate, a communications professor at Fordham University and devoted MySpace user. He says he is convinced that the popularity of social networks stems from their appeal to deep-seated, prehistoric patterns of human communication. “We evolved with speech,” he says. “We didn’t evolve with writing.”

I’m fascinated with the idea that recent technology is actually tapping into ancient behavior patterns in the human animal. I like entertaining the idea that something inside us craves this kind of interaction, because it’s part of our DNA somehow, and so we’ve collectively created the Internet to get back to it.

It’s not terribly far-fetched. Most organisms that find their natural patterns challenged in some way manage to return to those patterns by adaptation. At least, in my very limited understanding of evolution, that’s what happens, right? And a big chunk of the human race has been relegated to non-tribal community structures for only a tiny fraction of its evolutionary history — makes sense that we’d find a way back.

Regardless of the causes (and my harebrained conjecture aside), who you have as friends is vital to your identity, both your internal sense of self and the character you present externally to the world. “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is an old adage, and there’s a lot of truth to it, even if you just admit that you can know a heck of a lot, but it won’t get you anywhere without social connection to make you relevant.

What digital networks have done is made “friendship” something literal, and somewhat binary, when in fact friendship is highly variable and messy business. Online, a “friend” could be just about anyone from a friend-of-a-friend, to someone you ran into once at a conference, to someone from high school you haven’t actually spoken to in 10 years but just for grins is on your Facebook list.

Systems are starting to become more sophisticated in this regard — we can now choose ‘top friends’ and organize friends into categories on some sites, but that still forces us to put people in categories that are oversimplified, and don’t reflect the variability over time that actually exist in these relationships. Someone you were friends with and saw weekly six months ago may have a new job or new interests, or joined a new church or gym, and now you’re still “people who keep up with each other” but not anything like you were. Or maybe you just have a fight with a friend and things have soured, but not completely split — and months later it’s all good again?

The more we use networks for sharing, communicating, complaining and commiserating, sharing and confessing to our social connections, the more vexing it’s going to be to keep all these distinctions in check. I doubt any software system can really reflect the actual emotional variety in our friendships — if for no other reason than no matter how amazing the system iis, it still depends on our consciously updating it.

So that makes me wonder: which is going to change most? The systems, or the way we conceive of friendship? I wonder how the activity of friendship itself will feel, look and behave in ten or fifteen years for people who grew up with social networks? Will they meet new friends and immediately be considering what “filter” that friend might be safe to see on a personal blog? Will people change the way they create and maintain relationships in order to adapt to the limitations of the systems or vice-versa (or both)?

Innovation: tinkering, failing & imagining

October 22, 2007 by Andrew | No comments

I like this column by Nicholas Taleb. I haven’t read his book (The Black Swan) but now I think I might.

I’m more and more convinced that this ineffable activity called “innovation” is merely the story we user after the fact, to help ourselves feel like we understand what happened to bring that innovation about. But, much like the faces we think we see in the chaos of clouds, these explanations are merely comfortable fictions that allow us to feel we’re in control of the outcome. When, in fact, success so often comes from trying and failing, even playing, until the law of averages and random inspiration collide to create something new. The trick is making sure the conditions are ideal for people to fail over and over, until imagination stumbles upon insight.

You Can’t Predict Who Will Change The World – Forbes.com

It is high time to recognize that we humans are far better at doing than understanding, and better at tinkering than inventing. But we don’t know it. We truly live under the illusion of order, believing that planning and forecasting are possible. We are scared of the random, yet we live from its fruits. We are so scared of the random that we create disciplines that try to make sense of the past–but we ultimately fail to understand it, just as we fail to see the future. … We need more tinkering: uninhibited, aggressive, proud tinkering. We need to make our own luck. We can be scared and worried about the future, or we can look at it as a collection of happy surprises that lie outside the path of our imagination.

He rails against the wrong-headed approach factory-style standardization for learning and doing. He doesn’t name them outright, but I suspect No Child Left Behind and Six Sigma are targets.

Caveat: the column does tend to oversimplify a few things, such as describing whole cultures as non-inventive instruction-following drones, but that may just be part of the polemic. There’s more good stuff than ill, though.

Joi Ito on Content vs. Conversation

September 5, 2007 by Andrew | Permalink

Joi Ito, back in March, posted from the Game Developers Conference, where he is going to be doing a talk on the topic of “More than MMOs: Let Them Build It. How user-created content has transformed online games into a new web platform.” (Wish I could hear that talk! It’s one of my favorite things-to-obsess-upon, as evidenced in my article for ASIST Bulletin last year.)

Joi arrives at the conference assuming it’ll be attended by people like him — old-school hacker types who cut their teeth on early game code and the community of coding — and finds it’s mostly old-school entertainment-business types who simply don’t get it.

… while there are certain companies and individuals who are bridging the gap between the gaming industry and the Internet, the gaming industry is making the same mistakes that the content guys have been making since the beginning of networked computers. They ALWAYS over-estimate the importance of the content and vastly underestimate the desire of users/people to communicate with each other and share. … The professional content is important and will never go away, but it is becoming more of a platform or substrate on which the users build their own communities, interaction and play.

I wonder if it has something to do with the illusion of control, that as a producer of content one has the power to direct others’ attention, to provide meaning? It’s very hard to make the shift (or leap) from the image of oneself as central to peripheral. It makes the re-framing that everyone’s experiencing around “Web 2.0” feel downright Copernican.

Where’s my Graffiti?

August 8, 2007 by Andrew | No comments

There’s been a bit thread on the IxDA list about patents in design, and Apple’s Gesture system, and whether or not it’s good or bad that Apple is patenting something that seems like it may fare better as an open standard.

I have mixed feelings about it, and it touches on some things that I’ve been thinking about for a while.

An interesting example is the Palm writing system called Graffiti. There’s a decent Wikipedia entry about it, and its history.

As I’ve said before, I loved my Palm Pilot, Palm III and Palm V. After that, they started going to hell. Mainly because of these lawsuits.

Graffiti was a single-stroke shorthand method, that kept you from having to remember which letters had more than one stroke, and also kept you from having to match up a ‘cross stroke’ (since you can’t see the character as you draw it). It was easy to learn, and once learned it worked great. Granted, not everyone liked it, but I and many I knew were much more accurate and efficient with Graffiti than we are with these god-awful smaller-than-chiclet-keyboards.

Evidently, Xerox had a single-stroke character shorthand they’d invented around the same time, and Palm folks had seen it at PARC (you gotta wonder why PARC was still showing stuff to outsiders at all, but whatever). To what degree this inspired or shaped Hawkins’ Graffiti, I don’t know and really don’t care.

All I know is that at a certain point, Palm had to ditch Graffiti and buy the far inferior technology from Jot (which they called Graffiti II…). It’s also in Windows handhelds as the ‘block recognizer.’ It’s inferior because the elegance (in function) is gone — some of the letters require cross strokes. I can never remember which ones. The punctuation works differently, and not as well. It’s not just because it’s different — I’ve learned LOTS of new systems that have changed, and after a month or two done just fine. There’s a fundamental difference between them.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this except to say that I’m not sure what good the patent law did in this case. I understand patents and their importance to commerce. But my question to Xerox is — where is Graffiti? Why can’t I use it now? If you’re going to sue for it, why don’t you put it in products I can use or at least license it out?

This all reminds me of an excellent essay by Jonathan Lethem, “The Ecstasy of Influence.”

He does a great job of explaining how the arts simply couldn’t exist without a *lot* of borrowing of ideas, building and riffing on others’ work. He then has footnotes showing how even his own essay is full of such borrowings that would normally go unnoted.

I recognize that industrial design is a different animal from the ‘arts’ — but I think they share a lot of DNA. Seems to me that, as many other activists in this area have said, the more encompassing patent law becomes, the less innovation and good for the public can result. Of course, we don’t want a free-for-all of theft, since it ruins economic incentive. So some kind of balance needs to be struck.

I honestly have no idea what that balance is. I just want my Graffiti back.

DJ K-Dub Nails It

August 3, 2007 by Andrew | No comments

A lovingly eviscerating graphic design parody. From Kyle Webster. (Based in Winston-Salem, NC)

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