I have been swamped lately between work, personal projects, and maintaining my most significant work thus far: Bliss Esme, my daughter. She was born 11/19/09 and has been quite an experience so far!
Here are some pics:
Who is this big person staring at me??
Daddy's trying to be an arteest
I'm sooo tiny
Specialty’s was one of the first places that I latched onto when we moved here. It was a great place to get work done when we weren’t apartment hunting. It also started to baptize me to The Bay vibe. I think their t-shirts express that vibe perfectly.
Specialty's geek chic
I took a real estate entrepreneurship class in graduate school. One of the classes was on international real estate investment and the instructor invited a guest entrepereneur to speak to us. During the discussion the guest lecturer asked us where the number one investment market was located for his german clients. This was around 2002 at the peak of the real estate speculation craze. Predictabily, the class threw out the markets a la mode at the time: Baltimore/DC, Chicago, Florida, Vegas, Portland, etc. We were all wrong and way off base. The winner…Manhatten. Manhatten?!?! That ridiculously overinflated real estate market?
So what was the deal? Why would presumably knowledgeable investors forgo the ###% profits that speculators were making in the hot markets for more bond like appreciation values in the Manhatten markets. The instructor went on to explain the idea of the societal influences on investor goals. In the United States, he shared, we are all about maximizing profit. We tend to be extremely optimal and efficient in our goal setting. His German investors prized stability over profits. He reminded us that they had lived through continental wars and witnessed the erosion of money and monetary value. The only real value in the post war societal upheaval were real estates. These experiences colored the perception of investors to pay for more stability in their investments portfolios.
Besides the fact that real estate profits generate loot and loot enables fun (of some varieties) what the heck does this have to do with fun, creativity, ideation, user experience, and life? Simple. Figure out what you want to optimize INDEPENDENT of the societal influences that we tend to ASSUME to be the only choice. An example: I drive to work everyday and the default route is the shortest route. All the time. Even on days when I have been couped up all day and would love to have some sun time I will choose the shortest route. However, on those sunny couped up days it is very likely that spending time in the sun would be more optimal (real optimal) than speeding home to….spend more time inside.
This is an integral strategy of game developers. The best games have stories that do a wonderful job of communicating the objective (i.e. what you need to optimize to score points/do well/win). The variety of games that a single person finds captivating illustrates the number of different types of goals that can motivate, encourage, and spark us to action. None of what I am saying is novel, I just think that we need to be more mindful of this aspect of fun making in everything that we do.
I love Portland, OR. The city has personal signifigance because it is a signpost in my formative adult years. I also love the aesthetics of the city and the vibe of the city. That city also has the absolute coolest shoe stores (for me) per capita in the United States. I have spent hundreds of dollars per visit to Portland at Oddball Shoes. And this morning I came across ExIT Shoes on Cool Hunting; Another option in my perpetual search for creative, comfortable, size 15 kicks.
Back in the day Mc Donald’s had this sandwich called the Mc DLT. The big marketing behind the Mc DLT was to emphasize that your veggies (lettuce and tomatoes ) would stay nice and crisp until it was time to eat your sandwich. They accomplished through unique packaging which kept the cold ingredients in a separate compartment from the hot ingredients.
This is the analogy that popped into my head as I recently encountered a problem with a client. I kept presenting data visualization concepts in a wireframe but I could not get the client to give me critiques at the level I wanted. They kept getting hung up by the graphical treatment. Most of their suggestions or comments are issues that I planned to address in visual comps. But nope, the conversation kept getting bogged down.
Finally it dawned on me: keep the hot side hot and the cool side cool. Or, find a better way to communicate the information architecture of the graphic separated from the visual metaphors of the graphic. This approach allowed me to even present the alternative information architectures that we considered as well as the framework that we are using to organize and design the suite of data visualization. Viola, what do you know, now we are having talks around the information models as it relates to the user’s goals and NOT talking about the visual presentation of the data.
Hopefully my success will last longer than the ill-fated Mc DLT. $100 in Big Macs to whoever can guess why the Mc DLT failed?
“When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, I used to think like a child, I used to reason like a child. When I became a man, I put an end to childish things.”
I Corinthians 13:11
Without properly building a theological critique of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians I would like to submit that the above embodies a large part of what I believe we are missing in so many facets of our lives. Children and their perspectives can be summarized by one word: fun. But what about us adults and our lives…Where is the fun? Where is the pursuit of fun? In life, work, play, family, dreams, art? I should begin by saying that I take an expansive view of fun. In my view fun does not imply a lack of discipline, responsibility, or even seriousness. It may however sometimes eschew the tried and true path for a path that may provide a little more sensory stimulation.
For several years I have worked to allow fun to play an important role in my personal and professional life. More formally (see fun can be formal too) I have tried to base my life decisions on options that were enriching, enjoyable, or at the very least account for these intangibles in the calculus of life. I have also been eager to learn how fun plays a role for others. These concepts have been at the forefront of my mind for so long I wanted to start documenting my findings and brainstorming about the role of fun in creativity, ideation, art, technology, and other areas of interest to me.
The first post in this series is about decision optimization and considering different decision criteria. I think that it is appropriate to write on this first because it was the first step in shifting my perspective. As I struggle to more clearly explain this I think that it can be easily summarized as: vet your goals and any that don’t pass muster should be thrown out and re-written.
More on this in part 1.
“I do believe that if you learn to place yourself in the shoes of the user, you can design “for yourself” and really be designing for the user. I call this approach “Method Design” because the mind set is similar to that of Stanislavsky’s “method acting”.”
I was chatting with a co-worker a couple of days ago and in the course of the conversation about perspectives and people he mentioned a new book that concluded women have sex for 237 reasons.
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(I should probably stop this post right now because I am still floored by this statistic. My reaction keeps wavering from a desire to make immature sex jokes to hopeless confusion and utter dismay at the prospect of ever understanding my wife. Notice that I did not say ‘please my wife’ but that is a post for a different site!
~insert link to new online sex therapy business~ )
So…as a designer, an artist, social observer, or just empathetic citizen how the heck can you ever claim to be able to view the world through your user’s eyes? By definition you are going to be way off-base. On a really really clairvoyant day I might be able to come up with 2 reasons for sex, but on average my explanation probably sounds more like a caveman’s grunt layered in a patina of over-education.
The key, to me, is to know and embrace this fact. To know that there is a whole world of opinions and thoughts and expectations and logic and heuristics out there that you don’t even know that you don’t know. Embrace that fact and employ mental models that are flexible enough to change and accommodate all of the wonderful discoveries you will make interacting with the world.
Second, don’t fall in love with yourself and hearing your opinions and thoughts reflected back to you. When you have a meeting with a room full of ethnically diverse middle-aged men remember that you have completely cut out at least half of the population. You can correct your oversight by inviting some women into the meeting. Now, however realize that the average income and education in that room probably far out paces that of the population at large.
In the end we can’t always get it right, but being vigilant, flexible, and receptive to the experiences of others is more fun than being omniscient and a perfect empathizer any day. (With the exception, of course, of being able to experience those 237 reasons)
…stay tuned for a ‘G’ Rated kinetic art piece that this article inspired…
I have been enamored for quite some time with the Digital Media Arts program at UCLA and even more so after my friend Casey Alt went through the program. Over the past couple of years as I have been exploring and nurturing my creative expression. During this process I have realized that I am interested in creative expression through a variety of media and not one particular form. This is despite the fact that my natural (given my background) specialty might be digital and new media art. I definitely would not want to be a Jack of all Trades, however, I would love to have familiarity with different expressive techniques in order to give the best timbre to an artistic expression.
A few weeks ago I was talking to Marta Sanchez-Vasquez and expressing my thoughts about MFA programs. Marta informed me that she had similar inter-disciplinary yearnings and as a result choose Installation Art as the specialty of her MFA.
So now I am doing some digging on installation art as a practice area, how it relates to new media art, and in general continuing to inform my knowledge of the art world. Who knows where it will lead but I have already met some very cool people - like Casey and Marta - who make life more brilliant.
Here are some preliminary links that I have collected:
cont3xt.net
crumbweb.org
sciarc.edu (the mediascape program)
At the risk of coming across as disingenuous to my friends I am going to disclose a little secret that I have used since high school. When I meet someone who I want to establish a relationship with I try to find excuses to get together with them; even if I have to make up an event to invite them to. I am pretty sure that this technique, or one similar to it, is in the Dale Carnegie classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Extending this relationship building technique to application users I like to build in “excuses” to converse with my users. In particular I find this helpful when I need to extract information from folks. I don’t always like to ask users a slew of questions upfront (i.e. during registration), or to present the user with ’system usage tips’ everytime that they log on - the ‘tip a day technique’. Instead I try to solicit information from users as they interact with different features and applications on the site.
In my current application I need to collect baseline health statistics from my user. Rather than doing all of the information collection at registration I am advocating that we collect the minimum data needed to display information for the basic applications on the site. Then as the user accesses more advanced applications I use that as an opportunity to collect information specific to that appliction. For example, if we have a weight tracking application I use the weight application’s splash screen as an opportunity to ask a few questions to: a) baseline the weight tracking application and b) provide some contextual responses to their eating habits. This serves two purposes:
Our ultimate goal is to have the user realize health benefits from every bit of information that they provide the system. Not just a win for them, but a win for us. In order to do this successfully we need quality (thorough and accurate) information from the user. This is an approach that we will be testing.
Well said…
(thanks to Bethany Fong for turning me onto XKCD)