As the song goes, “More, more more. How do you like it, how do you like?”

Aparently, we only truly like it to a point–but we’re hooked, so we can’t stop even when it becomes bad for us.

As a follow up to my question about accelerating consumption verus enriching meaning, here’s a story from IHT about the negative side effects of an overly materialistic lifestyle. Apparently there are limits (who knew?).

So this raises the question for design again: how do we balance our client obligation to help them make more money with our obligation as good people to do no harm when these two obligations find themselves at odds?

Oh my god this must never gain traction folks. More insidious than the animated gif. More annoying than Netscape’s blink tag. More obnoxious than X-10s original pop-up and pop-under ads. And soon to be more ubiquitous than the animatronic Marissa Mayer conference bot.

Ladies and gentlement, i present to you …

the tiled background advert! (88k)

May God help us all.

I’m worried. I’m worried that experiences are becoming disposable. I’m worried that in our striving to make experiences simpler, easier, and faster, we’re also somehow stripping their soul, their meaning.

The subtext beneath this implies that we are supposed to use the time, money and attention that simpler, easier and faster frees up to consume even more experiences. But before we get a chance to really connect with any single given experience, before we can press beyond its surface, before it has a chance to naturally unfold and leave us changed, we’re off to the next one, and the one after that, and so on, and so on.

This raises an important question for designers: is it out job to merely accelerate experience consumption, or is it to deepen and enrich experience connection?

While our own individual answers likely strike some balance between these two extremes, the trend I’m afraid appears to be very much toward acceleration at the expense of connection.

Economically, this makes a lot of sense. Today’s experiences are off-the-shelf products, mass-produced, mass-marketed and mass-consumed. But an experience can only be monetized once, so superficial disposable experiences are much more economically attractive than deep lasting experiences because they can be monetized more frequently.

The economics of the matter then encourages the design of experiences that are standardized, that have extremely short self-lives, and that are disposable. These are to the human soul what McDonald’s is to the human body.

Enough with the abstraction, let’s get concrete.

I don’t listen to music the same way anymore. I don’t know many people who do. When I was a kid all my music was on tape and I didn’t have a lot of money to throw around. So getting new music and listening to it took a lot of time and effort. This time and effort meant listening carefully to each track, listening to whole albums at once, and listening to the same albums over and over again. It was like developing a relationship.

Today I have several gigs of music on my hard drive and I subscribe to Yahoo’s music service which puts several hundred more only click away. I keep some of it on my Zen on constant shuffle (not so sure about the shuffling since it seems to really be enjoying Goldfrapp these days). I have an incredible variety that crosses genres, decades, continents and even tastes, only a click away—and it has all started to blend into one relatively undifferentiated mass of sound with which I have absolutely no emotional connection.

If I don’t get a visceral jolt from a song, click and its on to the next one. Like a junkie I’m chasing that one great high, that one great hook. I can hardly listen to the same artist more than twice a day–and why should I with thousands of artists all clamouring for my ear and approving mouse click. I’m no sooner coming down from the sugar sweetness of Mint Royal than I’m twanging away with Niko Case or camping it up with the Sissor Sisters—it doesn’t really make a difference. It’s all sooo easy. And the medium’s inherent ease keeps me hungry for ever more music, keeps me hooked to the service, and helps ensure that I don’t get too attached to any one song, band or genre.

What originally seemed like such a blessing, is turning into a bit of a curse. Obviously I can still listen the way I used to–nothing is really preventing that. But the medium itself has evolved to tersely discourage close listening, to discourage connection. The medium wants you, it needs you to listen to more, more, more tracks by more artists, more superficially, more disposably. It needs you to consume not connect.

The entire business model of disposability is predicated on rapid, massive, non-reflective, superficial consumption. Fine for tissues, but for music? For experiences?

The effort involved in both production and consumption of music is evaporating. The individual song is fast becoming completely disposable, cheapening music into becoming mere background hippness for life as a Mitsubishi commercial (thanks for ruining T.Rex and the Wiseguys for me Mitsubishi). Its fast, its easy, its non-committal, its autonomic, and there’s plenty more more more where it came from, so no need to pay too much attention to what you’re hearing now.

Truth be told I can no longer stomach the Thievery Corporation because it is so disposable. Forget about the medium, the content itself doesn’t want you to connect with it. It’s mere auditory decoration, mere vapid paint by numbers West Elm lifestyle ‘hipness’ for your ears. There’s nothing to connect with. But I degress…

Of course your personal music experience may be quite different from mine–I’m sure it is at least a little different–and you may not really see it as disposable. That’s fine, because my point here hasn’t been to wax ludditic and moan about how things aren’t as good as they used to be (although I do wonder how Kate Bush would do if she was just starting out today).

My point (in case it got lost in all these words, words, words, dear Polonius) was simply to illustrate the disposability of experience by contrasting my music listening experience of today with yesterday’s, and ask the question of design how will we balance the tension between accelerating consumption and deepening connection without losing our souls or our jobs?

PS
Next time I’ll get into television and how advances in distribution are driving the experience of watching tv shows in the exact opposite direction from listening to music, in terms of experience and connection.

A while back on cph127 Adam Richardson of frog raised the issue of wicked problems. I’m really glad he brought it up because I’ve always felt they are central to design as a professional practice. Curiously though there isn’t much talk in design circles about them.

In “Making Use,” John Carroll offers one of the most lucid descriptions of wicked problems I‘ve seen. To oversimplify him for clarity’s sake, wicked problems are those whose end solution states are unknowable at the outset.

For example a jigsaw puzzle is not a wicked problem. The end state is printed right there on the box top. Achieving that end state is an entirely tactical matter. Rapid trail and error seems good way to learn the puzzle’s internal rules. Once the rules are learned the puzzle is easily and solved.

On the other hand, “we need a new tool to help improve our call center reps’ productivity” is a wicked problem because the end solution state, the real root problems and their causal connections are unknown at the beginning.

This suggests that to call design a problem solving endeavour (as I’m fond of doing) is actually quite inadequate. Much of human activity, after all, is problem solving. So to be meaningful, we need to get a lot more specific: professional design’s main value is in solving wicked problems.

In my mind there are three general strategies in dealing with wickedness: mitigation, improvisation, and shot gun (I’m not sure these are the best labels).

In my experience the most common product development strategy is a whole lotta shot gun (with surprisingly little shot), mixed with a heap of improvisation (with woefully inadequate talent) and just a smattering of mitigation (with the caveat that this cannot impact schedule or budget).

Richardson seems to agree with this approach to wickedness, saying “[t]he only way to really understand the problem is by devising solutions and seeing how they further knowledge about the problem.” In other words, a shotgun is your only weapon again wickedness. According to van der Heijden in Scenarios this is the product development version of a strategic planning evolutionary paradigm (p.31 in case you’re interested).

To me this isn’t quite right because neither improvisation nor shotgun are sufficiently sustainable or repeatable to form the basis of a solid product innovation method. Leading with mitigation strategies, however, followed closely by shotgun strategies and improvisation capabilities promises much more consistent returns.

Let’s walk through the logic (again, oversimplified to clarity) of this backwards.

How do we mitigate wickedness?
By developing an appropriate vision of an optimal solution end state.

How do we do that?
By clearly focusing on the actual root causes of the problems being experienced, and using them as a mirror to reflect what optimal solution end states could and should look like.

How do we do that?
By discovering the right questions to ask—clarity is easy once you’re armed with the right questions.

How do we do that?
By closely studying and modeling users and/or customers, the pain they experience, their coping activities and their varied contexts.

(After writing this I was struck by its similarity to the designer as physician diagram below. I didn’t do this intentionally… really)

Now let’s walk though it forwards. We start with a client’s painful negative experience. No one knows how to alleviate this pain; if someone did, this wouldn’t be a wicked problem, it would be a puzzle—and so you would need an engineer and not a designer.

We then begin to study the painful experience, who experiences it and how. This starts to reveal the right questions we need to ask and the right areas we need to dig into deeper. Asking the right questions in turn starts to reveal the root causes that are driving the symptomatic pains the client came to us to solve in the first place.

With a clearer picture of the root problems and their causal connections we can realistically start to envision appropriate solution end states. The wickedness isn’t gone, but we’ve mitigated it, its no longer quite to so wicked. Not only have we reduced the wickedness, but we’ve also dramatically improved the speed and effectiveness of our shotgun and improvisation strategies and tactics.

If no one else has has done so yet, I would like to be the first to cutesify the new iPod Hi-Fi by shortening it to just the i-Fi.

I think this is my lamest post ever–lamer even than my first Hello World introductory post. I need a vacation.

There’s been lots of talk about design, what it means, what value it can offer, etc. There’s plenty of both navel-gazing and striking insight. However, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of simplicity or clarity. I thought I take a stab at some clarity by making my perspective on design concrete with a couple metaphors for design as a professional activity.

The Designer as Physician
Ralph visits the emergency room because he feels a sharp pain in his side. He tells the attending physician about the pain and his suspicion that it might be appendicitis.

She asks Ralph a series of questions about his medical history, about the pain, about his diet and recent activities, and feels around to learn where the pain is most acute. Her diagnosis is that the pain is not from appendicitis but rather from gall stones, and she makes arrangement for the appropriate treatment to remove the stones and stop the pain.

With the gall stones removed Ralph feels no more pain, didn’t have to have surgery and gets to keep his appendix.

This is what professional design as a problem solving endeavour is all about. Understanding the problems or pains people experience, digging beneath the surface symptoms to reveal the underlying causes, and either creating or applying novel solutions to truly alleviate the original pain.

(This isn’t meant to present a design process, rather its just to show the designer as physician analogy)

In this metaphor the essence of design is not a collection of teachable methods; the essence of design is critical thinking. Critical thinking is what is needed to discover the underlying causes of the experienced problem, and recognize the actual causes from mere appearances (similar in a way to recognizing Platonic forms from the shadows). I claim this is the essence of design because as John Carroll says, “the worst misstep one can make in design is to address the wrong problem” (Making Use, 26).

This then suggests that design and style (a contrast I often return to) are not merely different in scale, but different in kind. While style is tactical application, design is strategic determination. The common conflation of design with style leads to many designers thinking that clever information presentation qualifies them as strategic planners on the one hand, and on the other gives business people the equally misguided idea that design is just about pretty pictures. I suppose the distinction between style and design is analogous to Aristotle’s distinction between form and substance–intimately related but markedly different in nature.

Next time, the designer as author.

This post by Black Sheep really struck a cord with me. The gist of this rant is that the IP policies of universities basically rob students of what rightfully belongs to them (their ideas, or at the very least credit for their ideas) sucking creativity out of students for the institutions benefit without doing much to push a little creativity back.

In other words, schools get to take both your money and your ideas, and in return given you a cheaply mounted piece of paper. That’s really a minor version of trading a handful of beads for Manhattan Island. How do they get away with this?

The problem is not that you’re going to come up with the next killer product idea that is worth millions–because you won’t. The problem is fairness, intellectual honesty, justice and sleaze.

When a professor takes one of your ideas, treats it as their own, gets a grant and some nice career boosting press for it, all without crediting you I think that’s unfair and dishonest. And I think the fact that institutions use obscure legal slight-of-hand to legally take advatage of unsuspecting and vulnerable students is both unjust and just plain sleazy. Hell even soulless corporations will put your name on thier patent if you contributed. Academia apparently berudges even this small token. That will be $50,000–thank you, come again!

So for all you potential design school students out there here’s some advice: check your school’s intellectual property policy before you give them any money.

And if you decide to attend d.school, here’s a suggestion: make friends with one or two professors (perhaps outside the design faculty) for both thier different perspectives and decent references. Otherwise do the absolute minimum amount of work for class–no one will ever check your grades. Save your best ideas for yourself and work on them on your own time, on your own computer, and off campus (if you use any school facilities, they own your idea). This way you get the piece of paper, and you keep the bastards from unjustly highjacking your creativity without giving you credit.

Better yet, say to hell with school. Just take 2 years off of work, keep all the money you would have spent on tuition, put a downpayment on a house, and do a pile of pro bono and self-expressive work. You will learn and grow more as a designer, and you’ll have a nice place to live in rather than an doomed marriage to sallie mae.

(Sorry about the recent tangents–I promise I’ll get back to design and innovation stuff now)

As a follow up to my list of things to avoid in your sales proposals, here’s a list of somethings you may want to avoid in your conference booth.

1. Avoid numbing me with marketese. I’m surround by hunderds of other companies just like yours, filled with the same toothy Herb Tarleks, spouting the same pitch, with booths decorated with indistinguishably meaningless catch phrases and tag lines. “High Performance. Delivered.” None of this means anything. If this is what you’re putting out there, then you are wasting your money. If I asked everyone else on the floor if they deliver high performace, 100% of all answers would be “yes! of course we do! *grin*”.
2. Avoid empty words displayed large on slick posters for everyone to ignore. Don’t talk to me of “collaboration” or “interoperability” or other table stakes. I’m assuming you already have such things nailed, otherwise you wouldn’t be wasting millions to exhibit at this conference. Share an insight like “Its faster to edit than to type,” (not that I agree what that, but it tell me where you’re coming from) or tell me something exciting like “pays for itself in 2 month.” 2 months? I don’t care what that is, I’m interested. Of course please be sure its true as well as exciting.
3. Avoid sending too many androids to manage your booth. Nothing is less inviting to a conference goer than seeing a half dozen identically logo-dressed sales people standing about talking to each other. Its intimidaing. It looks like I’ll get pounced on. It looks like a staff meeting. I’m not going to ask my stupid question infront of a half dozen strangers who are friends with each other. Have a couple of your people dressed like regular folks. That way, when no customers are there, its still looks like there are always customers talking to your people. Thats more inviting. Oh, and when i get to speak with the VP who’s all casual in his rolled up sleeves and free from any logo tatooing, it makes me feel even more important, because he looks real, he looks like me and not like an android.
4. Avoid getting too clever with your booth stuff. I saw one both that featured an elevated level. This made the main floor level look dark and cramped, not exactly inviting. I saw another booth that was so clever with its animatronic rotating tagline display that is complete obscured the company’s name and logo for all but the birds who now live in the convention centre. I had to look hard to figure out whose booth it was.

Forget about the iPod giveaways, the automobile raffles, your claims of world-class performance, and the silicone booth decorations. Just be authentic. If you have a solution to my pain, I want to hear about it, really. Unlike most other times, I want to give you my attention–that is what I’m there for. So just be plain about your understanding of my pain, and how you can alleviate it, and you stand a pretty good chance of setting yourself up for a deal later on.

Is anyone truly surprised about the potential for privacy invasion that Google Desktop opens up? In case you don’t know, it’s a tool that indexes every peice of digital information and textual content on your computer and makes it all really easy to find.

And with the lastest version, it stores much of the information it collects on Google servers. The potential for abuse, by Google or other parties, should be painfully obvious (they’re giving you a very sophisticated data mangement tool for free people–they’re monetizing something to justify doing this, and that something is incredibly deep knowledge about you).

Have some mushy love letters on your hard drive? How about last years tax return? Have you mentioned over email anything about a desease you think you might have and that an insurance company might deny you coverage because of? Well with Google Desktop, your life is very potentially an open book up for bid (or subpeona, or a friendly “please” from law enforcement or private security firm).

I may just be having an tinfoil hat moment here and there could be no real problem here what so ever. But when armies of Greeks as standing outside my gates with a snazzy new gift they’d just love me to have, I perfer to err on the side of caution and decline their generosity. Beware of Greeks baring gifts folks.

(for my Greek readers I’m talking about metaphorical Greeks–I love Greece, so when I come to visit, can I stay with you? I’m kidding–unless the answer is yes, and in that case I prefer Egyptian cotton sheets, threadcount isn’t important as long as its Egyptian.)

PS.
And on the topic of privacy, if any of you frequent Yahoo! Groups, do check out thier privacy policy with special attention to what they call Web Beacons (cookies on steriods). The real kicker is Yahoo’s user-hostile policy of not only forcing you to opt out, but forcing you to opt out on each browser you use (that’s right, they don’t store your opt-out decision in your profile). And of course the opt-out form is buried neck-deep in meaningless textual obfuscation (I wonder if this tactic shows up in the newly published design patterns?).

In thier paper on pull as a new model for mobilzing resources “From Push to Pull – Emerging Models for Mobilizing Resources” John Brown and John Hagel quote William Gibson saying “the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.” Quite true. In terms of pull models the movie business has done it for decades since the old studio system fell apart. Professional sports teams (at least in North America) also loosely follow a pull model for assembling winning teams.

For decades now most movies have been produced as individual projects centered on a script that temporarily pulls various independent talents together for a time and then releases them back into the pool. In terms of product development this is a highly efficient and successful model. But please don’t forget that the old studio system did give us films like Metropolis, Double Indeminity and Casablanca.

While I have always agreed that a pull approach can harness creativity and sheer brain power in ways that more command-and-control push approaches cannot, I simply couldn’t get passed page 14 of Brown and Hagel’s paper. They exhibit exactly the kind of vague, intellectually vacuous, pompom-waving fluffiness that just plain makes me angry. Perhaps you can see what I mean in some of the examples they offer to help readers understand the power of pull.

• Li & Fung: This is a Chinese textile manufacturer and distributor. They demonstrate the power of pull by having 7500 business partners that help them satisfy their customers. Okay… they have lots of partners…
• Then there is ODM, a Taiwanese… uh… manufacture? (I think) of… uh… well I really don’t know. Clarity is irrelevant—all you need to know is that Brown and Hagel say they are another “compelling example of the application of pull models in distributed product innovation and commercialization processes.” Be sure to put that in your PowerPoints. Apparently ODM “creatively pull[s] together highly specialized component and sub-system suppliers to generate ideas for delivering higher performance at lower costs” Whatever that means. I’ll bet they help leverage synergies across the enterprise to reveal win-win scenarios for all stakeholders too.
• Cisco offers yet another compelling story of pull’s power. They “[pull] together appropriate capabilities from thousands of specialized channel partners to address individual customer needs.” You know, like pretty much every other business in existence. Perhaps Manhattan Pizza down the road is another example of the power of pull. Doesn’t Manhattan pull together the appropriate capabilities of its pepperoni partners to address my Tuesday night meat lover’s pizza needs?
• Cisco also uses e-training. They force their employees “pull” mass-produced yet “personalized” training presentations and watching them at their desks. Now that’s power! That’s pull!
• University of Phoenix is another pull success story, because they standardize their e-training material for a really really big number of students who have to “pull” the stuff across the internet with their browsers. This apparently serves students more effectively. Pull rulez!

To be a bit more serious, let me pick apart the U of Phoenix example to demonstrate just how fluffy this waste of 49 pages, toner and the power to run the printer, really is.

Hagel and Brown say “To serve its students more effectively, [The University of Phoenix] became one of the pioneers in using the Internet to help students pull educational resources to them when and where they wanted to participate in the learning process.”

To begin with what do they mean by “effective?” And effective for whom? The situation they describe (hyper-efficient delivery of hyper-standardized curriculum) strikes me as effective tool for accumulating content, but what does this have to do with the educational quality (presumably what the studen’t are interested in pulling, and how they would measure “effective”). So, is education about growth or content accumulation?

According to Brown’s own theories such a method of necessarily sequestered learning is striped of all potential social, environmental and serendipitous learning—which together provide dramatically more educational value and growth potential than plain old curricular training. Indeed Brown has already made a convincing case for the social life of information. Surely he is not now taking that back?

If we then to assume he is in fact not taking it back, then “effectiveness” cannot refer to the quality of the educational experience, nor can it be from the student’s perspective. “Effectiveness” must then be from the producer’s perspective, and refer to the economies of scale they can realize through hyper-efficiency of their distribution mechanisms and production standardizations.

But this is the language of push. This is the language of 19th industrial mass production. This isn’t the language of pull. This isn’t the language of an innovative new approach. Do Hagel and Brown even know what they’re saying? Or is this perhaps a computer generated paper that takes a theme as input and then scours blogs for related fashionable info-biscuits to assemble? Is this perhaps the result of a Chinese box, indifferent to the ultimate sematics and coherence of its output?

Hagel and Brown then go on to say “[w]hile the timing and delivery of these educational materials is customized, the materials themselves are still highly standardized.” Notice how it’s the timing and delivery that are standardized–how on earth can you standardize timing and delivery in a pull environment, since by definition you as the producer of content have absolutely no control over how and when your content is being pulled?!?!

I could go on and on, but I think I’ve made my point here: intellectually, this paper is gibberish. Perhaps it really improves in later chapters. I wouldn’t know because I reached my tolerance for nonsense by page 14. I just couldn’t persevere though the ambiguity, muddled thinking, intellectual curly-queues, contradictions, lazy rhetoric, etc. How can two people so highly regarded publish this kind of work?