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July 08 2011
The dinner guest test: on rejoining facebook
Just over a year ago, I blogged about why I was leaving facebook.
I’ve just rejoined. I thought I’d explain why and how I’ll be using facebook differently than before.
- My Mom keeps asking when I’m going to join again. She uses it all the time to keep in touch with my aunts, uncles and cousins. She’d very much like me to do this, too. I’m also making her (and a few other family members) upload photos twice — once to flickr and once to facebook. You can only be a jackass for so long.
- Close friends use it to organise events. I’m making them email me separately to invite me to these events. Again, you can only be a jackass for so long.
- As a UX Designer, I’m intensely curious about what facebook is up to. There are only so many blog posts you can read before you have to go see for yourself. I have immense respect for the designers and developers working there, even if I profoundly disagree with their stance on privacy.
I won’t be using facebook like I did before. I’m going to be fairly strict about who I friend. This is my current set of rules:
- Family
- Friends I’ve known for over five years
- Friends with whom I’ve had dinner (either at their house or mine)
This isn’t how everyone uses facebook. Because of this, I’m running the risk of being a jackass to a whole new group of people by turning down friend requests.
There are several spheres of my life, but they generally fall into private and public. I still feel that this distinction is important. I still value those conversations in the living room I talked about in my original post. And I still feel that they are richer and more meaningful when shared between close friends. I know this isn’t how facebook as a company sees it. Their position seems to be that a life that’s not lived completely in the open is somehow dishonest. I think that a life lived completely in the open is a fiction.
I’m using the dinner guest test to deal with this. I don’t get invited to dinner with everyone I work with or meet at event. And I don’t event everyone I meet to dinner, either. I’m treating facebook in the same way. At least for the moment. I hope I don’t offend too many people in doing so.
December 02 2010
Concentration not inspiration
It’s not inspiration. I think inspiration is nonsense, actually. Every so often I mean like one day in 20 or something, you will have a day when the work seems to just flow out of you and you feel lucky… Most of the time it’s… a lot slower and more exploratory and it’s more a process of discovering what you have to do than just simply have it arrive like a flame over your head. So I do think it’s to do with concentration, not inspiration. It’s to do with paying attention and I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.
Salman Rushdie on the writing process. I think we all hope that our jobs will provide us with that flash of inspiration, but that’s rare. Most often, it comes from thinking about something until you feel like you can’t possibly think about it any more.
Related posts
November 09 2010
Third places
[La Grand Orange] is a little L-shaped strip shopping center in Pheonix, Arizona. Really all the did is give it a fresh coat of bright paint, a gourmet grocery and they put a restaurant in the old post office. Never under estimate the power of food to turn a place around and make it a destination… [I]t provided its neighbourhood with what sociologists like call a “third place.” If home is the first place and work is the second place, the third place is where you go to hang out and build community.
Ellen Dunham-Jones gave a fantastic TEDx Atlanta talk on Retrofitting suburbia.
The idea of a “third place” appears to have been put forward originally by Ray Oldenburg in his book The Great Good Place. The Project for Public Spaces provides has some great quotes from Oldenburg on the subject.
Most needed are those ‘third places’ which lend a public balance to the increased privatization of home life. Third places are nothing more than informal public gathering places. The phrase ‘third places’ derives from considering our homes to be the ‘first’ places in our lives, and our work places the ‘second.’
The character of a third place is determined most of all by its regular clientele and is marked by a playful mood, which contrasts with people’s more serious involvement in other spheres. Though a radically different kind of setting for a home, the third place is remarkably similar to a good home in the psychological comfort and support that it extends…They are the heart of a community’s social vitality, the grassroots of democracy, but sadly, they constitute a diminishing aspect of the American social landscape.
Once again, I’m going to tie this to Steven Johnson’s recent work. His coffeehouses and salons are decidedly third places. I’m not sure if facebook or twitter are actually third places, but in today’s London, the various geek meetups serve the function of a third place.
Related posts
Narcissism of minor differences
I recently encountered this phrase twice in as many days. I can’t remember where I first encountered it (if only I could search my Instapaper history!), but the second place I encountered it was in a review of Peter Baldwin’s recent book that takes the phrase as its title. The book examines at the supposed differences between the United States and Europe, highlighting how minor those differences are through a series of charts and graphs. As an American who has lived in France and currently lives in the U.K., this is fascinating stuff.
But it’s the phrase, “the narcissism of minor differences” that really caught my attention. I brought it up in a conversation with Andrew, and he went off and did some research (he does this a lot). It comes from Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. The original German is Der Narzißmus der kleinen Differenzen, which I’m reliably informed is better translates as “the narcissism of small differences,” but I vastly prefer “the narcissism of minor differences.” Here’s Freud on the genesis of the idea:
I once discussed the phenomenon that is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other — like the Spaniards and Portuguese, for instance, the North Germans and South Germans, the English and Scotch, and so on. I gave this phenomenon the name of “the narcissism of minor differences”, a name which does not do much to explain it. We can now see that it is a convenient and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression, by means of which cohesion between the members of the community is made easier.
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Vygotsky’s thoughts
According to Vygotsky, this is the beginning of thinking, this kind of dialog, and at this point, it’s completely external. It’s all happening in that space between the child and her mother, and only over time does it become interalized. And how that happens, Vygotsky thought, is that as the child gets older she’ll start to take on the dialog herself; she’ll start to talk to herself. This is the stage we call “private speech.” We’ve all seen kids do this, right? Where they narrate every single thing they’re doing: “Put the ball in the box. Take the ball out of the box.”
Now what then happens is a few years further down the line, these kids who were narrating everything they were doing then go to school and the teachers tell them, “Shhh. Don’t talk out loud.” So they get the message that they need to start doing this internally. So, they start to whisper to themselves out loud, and then they whisper to themselves silently because the words are now in their head. And that, according to Vygotsky’s theory, that is thinking. Only then, he says, is a child having a thought.
The always-excellent Radiolab disccusses Lev Vygotsky’s theory of Thought and Language with Charles Fernyhough in the Voices in Your Head episode.
This fascinates me for two reasons.
The first is that I have a son who is in the process of learning to speak. This is exactly what we do with him: talk to him about solving problems. I’m not sure I’m 100% convinced by Vygotsky’s theory, though. It seems clear that George is thinking even when we’re not talking him through problem solving. At least I suppose that’s what he’s doing when he’s flipping through the pages of Byron Barton’s Planes, but perhaps this isn’t exactly what Vygotsky means by “thought.”
The second reason this is interesting is because of Steven Johnson’s recent book Where Good Ideas Come From argues that good ideas come about when diverse ideas collide, such as in the coffee houses of the Enlightenment and Modernist Parisian salons. If Vygotsky is right, this may be because thinking begins—and to some extent remains—a social act.
Related posts
November 08 2010
One pound weights
In terms of the challenges we were meeting for the physical design [of the original laptop], they were small things if you look at them as individual items. For example, we wanted to know what the right weight would be as a maximum for the specification. So I made everyone in the company—there were only seven people in the company—walk around with their briefcases containing what they normally had anyway, and I gave them one pound weights. And I said, “Carry as many of these one pound weights as you can, as well as your normal stuff. And then tell me when it gets unbearable.” We came out with what I thought was a pretty good number, which was eight pounds. So then we tried to design the thing to weigh eight pounds.
Bill Moggridge discussing the challenges he faced when designing the Grid Compass, arguably the first laptop. I love two things about this. The first is his description of each of the challenges as “small things.” The second is the simplicity with which he answered the weight question.
Related posts
November 07 2010
100 studies
I remember Eero [Saarinen] thought out the whole thing carefully, and then told us that the first thing to do would be to make 100 studies of each element that went into the building. We would then pick the best, and never let our standards fall below that. Then we would make 100 studies of the combinations of each element—the placing of the sinks in the ladies’ rooms, for instance. Then 100 studies of the combinations of the combinations. When the whole thing was finished, Eero was almost in tears, because it was so simple. And then, of course, he won the competition.
Charles Eames on Eero Saarinen’s approach to designing the entry for the Smithsonian Gallery of Art competition.
That’s an impressive amount of sketching. I’ve only been able to find an image of one sketch, which was included in the catalog for the exhibition Eero Saarinen: shaping the future. Sadly, the exhibition never came through London. I’d love to see more.
The view from above
I’ve spent a bit of time in and around San Francisco. I lived in Berkeley and worked in San Francisco for a summer. I’d visited a couple of times before that. When I moved over here, my Mom and sister moved to Santa Rosa, so I’ve been back to San Francisco more times than I’ve been back to Austin. But I never really understood the Bay Area until I went to Angel Island and climbed Mount Caroline Livermore. Suddenly, everything made sense. San Francisco, Golden Gate Bridge, Marin, the Richmond Bridge, Berkeley, the Bay Bridge and back again. I’d been in all those places. I’d seen them all on a map, but suddenly they all just clicked into place.
I’m not the only one who’s had this type of experience. This month’s Radiolab on the subject of Cities had this extraordinary account by Sxip Shirey of a very similar—and breathtakingly narrated—encounter with New York City from atop a rooftop in Brooklyn Heights.
There’s this intense fog, and the Twin Towers: the bottom of them are covered in the fog, but not the top, so it’s like they’re floating. There was a little cuticle sliver of moon in the sky, and the fog horns are going, and the boats are slowly moving. And there’s this breeze. And I had this brass penny whistle that my father had given me and I was playing it. And suddenly something clicked. I was like “Oh! That must… Those are all the bridges. That’s the Williamsberg Bridge. That’s the Manhatten Bridge. There’s the Brooklyn Bridge. That’s New York. It’s small now.”
This reminded me of Roland Barthes’ essay on The Eiffel Tower.
Take some view of Paris taken from the Eiffel Tower; here you make out the hill sloping down from Chai!lot, there the Bois de Boulogne; but where is the Arc de Triomphe? You don’t see it, and this absence compels you to inspect the panorama once again, to look for this point which is missing in your structure; your knowledge (the knowledge you may have of Parisian topography) struggles with your perception, and in a sense, that is what intelligence is: to reconstitute, to make memory and sensation cooperate so as to produce in your mind a simulacrum of Paris, of which the elements are in front of you, real, ancestral, but nonetheless disoriented by the total space in which they are given to you, for this space was unknown to you.
The above experiences all have two things in common that I think are important.
The first is that this is not the same as looking at a map. The city is laid out below, but the vantage point from which it is viewed is grounded in a specific place. It is at a fixed point, and this is fundamental to the experience. There is a relationship with the panorama that is missing entirely from the bird’s-eye view of a map.
The second is that the viewer already has first-hand knowledge of the city. She has traveled the streets, crossed the bridges, visited the monuments and buildings. It is only because of this knowledge that these various places—previously thought of a separate—can form a whole when viewed from above.
This leads me to two conclusions.
The first is that it is important to zoom out, to look at the next larger context. Whatever you’re working on—a web form, a web site, a pamphlet, a house—take a moment to climb to the highest vantage point and look at what you’re working on in the context of its surroundings.
The second is that a map or a “ten-thousand foot view” (you have my permission to roll your eyes) is useful. It’s a place to start, but it’s something very different from having a knowledge of the territory and taking in a panoramic view. It’s all too easy to confuse a map for this kind of holistic view from above.
Related posts
- Beautiful seams
- The next larger context
- A map is not the territory it represents
- All models are wrong
The next larger context
Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, environment in a city plan.
Eliel Saarinen, as quoted by his son Eero in The Maturing Modern.
I first encountered this quote in Russell Davies’ post on ruricomp. Since then, I keep returning to it again and again. It eloquently captures everything I strive for in my day-to-day work. It’s also far to easy for me to forget.
November 04 2010
Yes and
One of the things I’ve noticed when talking about this book, I’ve done a couple of conversations, and I’ve really enjoyed a bunch of these things because they aren’t debates. They are conversations where I’m kind of riffing with someone else who has a shared value… It’s that kind of “yes and” attitude instead of the “no but” attitude, which is a little bit hokey, but I think it’s a useful way to think about it. Where you’re talking to somebody and there’s this great willingness to build on somebody’s principle, not argue with it.
One final note from Steven Johnson’s Where do good ideas come from? talk I attended on Tuesday.
The idea of “yes and” comes from improvisational theater, where “yes and” is seen as the cornerstone of improvisational technique.
I very much like the idea of riffing with ideas, rather than arguing over a point. Anil Dash calls this “the yes and culture”:
That principle of collaborative and cumulative creation is a fundamental aspect of modern culture in general. Remixing, rebooting, remaking and re-imagining culture require a “Yes, and…” aesthetic.
Commonplace books
Darwin kept these amazing notebooks. In the Enlightenment, they were often called “commonplace” books. A commonplace book was a great engine of innovation in the period. People would transcribe, very dutifully, quotes from books that they found influential. They would also intersperse it with their oun notes, their own ideas, and sketches and rhymes. And they would go back and reread these books stitched together from all these different perspectives, all these different voices interspersed with their own voice. And it was this process of borrowing and remixing and revisiting, they created their own kind of intellectual presence. John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin, Priestly, Darwin, all these people kept these very elaborate commonplace books. It was a bit like a private version of blogging something. The important thing is they were rereading their own work. That revisiting of their own ideas and those influential quotes was crucial to the exercise.
This is the second idea I wanted to capture from Steven Johnson’s talk on Where do good ideas come from?.
As he points out, commonplace books have a lot in common blogging. This blog started out as a personal blog with the intention of keeping in touch with my family, but over time it’s become different. About a year ago, I talked about the direction the blog was taking. On Tuesday, I realized what I’ve been doing for the last year: commonplacing.
In this I was guided by other blogs that I find useful, that point me to ideas, articles and podcasts that often wind up on otrops.com. Blogs such as bobulate, Marginal Revolution, 3 Quarks Daily and kottke.org. All of whom are effectively commonplacing.
Elsewhere, Steven Johnson, has discussed commonplacing at length. He also addresses two potential futures of online content:
The contrast here suggests to me that we have two potential futures ahead of us, where digital text is concerned, or that the future is going to involve a battle between two contradictory impulses. We can try to put a protective layer of glass of the words, or we can embrace the idea that we are all better off when words are allowed to network with each other. What’s the point of going to all this trouble to build machines capable of displaying digital text if we can’t exploit the basic interactivity of that text? People don’t want to read on a screen just for the thrill of it; even with the iPad’s beautiful display, reading on paper is still a higher-resolution experience, and much easier on the eyes. Yes, the iPad makes it easier to carry around a dozen books and magazines, but that’s not the only promise of the technology. The promise also lies in doing things with the words, forging new links of association, remixing them. We have all the tools at our disposal to create commonplace books that would astound Locke and Jefferson. And yet we are, deliberately, trying to crawl back into the glass box.
Having identified my own beliefs in civic republanism, I’m obviously not a huge fan of Johnson’s glass box. I need to get better at running everything I’ve read through this blog, though. As it stands, much of what I read and my responses to it are scattered across multiple services. This is fine. I want to spread what inspires me as widely as I possibly can. I look forward to the conversations that result from that. But I want to document anything that has me thinking here. Not so I can control it, but so I can review it. Reviewing delicious, twitter, goodreads, and the several other services I’ve used is too difficult, and never really happens. However, I find that I come back to what I’ve written here again and again. So this is where anything interesting should be captured, even if it also appears on other services.
OK. That’s it. Navel gazing over.
Related posts
The slow hunch
For some reason we have this overwhelming desire to tell stories of breakthrough ideas and innovation as eureka moments… But in fact when you go back and look at the historical record, it turns out that the stories are often much longer, much slower, much more nuanced and much more collaborative than we give them credit for.
I went to go see Steven Johnson speak at the RSA on Tuesday, where he attempted to answer the question Where do good ideas come from?.
This has largely been my experience: any epiphanies I’ve ever had have been the result of thinking about a topic for a long time. I can’t think of anything that has come to me “out of the blue.” However, as Andrew pointed when we were discussing the event afterwards, having the ideas is actually the easy part; it’s acting on them that is difficult.
Related posts
October 28 2010
The ice cream fallacy
[C]onsider that ice cream consumption is correlated with the temperature outside. We can certainly inspire you to eat more ice cream, but that won’t change the weather.
This is from the second in superb series of posts from Daniel Simons on the problems with sciencey marketing (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4).
I don’t think I’ve heard a better way of explaining that correlation isn’t cause.
October 27 2010
All models are wrong
Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.
From George Box and Norman Draper’s Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces pp. (p. 424). I came across the quote during a discussion of the merits and weaknesses of personas on the AnthroDesign mailing list.
Yes, it’s obvious, but I constantly need reminding; I fall all too easy into the trap of confusing the models I’ve created to understand a problem for the problem itself.
Related posts:
October 26 2010
Never the twain shall meet
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
This is attributed to Mark Twain. I’ve encountered it twice in as many days: once in an article on the recent spending cut in the UK by Johann Hari, then again while reading Search Patterns (p. 23).
According to Wikiquote, this quote doesn’t appear in any of Twain’s works. Apparently, it appeared in the 1960s and have been gaining currency since then. Although quotes usually attach themselves to famous people in order to survive, this one seemed weird to me. It doesn’t feel like Mark Twain at all. At best, it’s clever; at worst, bland. And Mark Twain is almost always several notches better than clever.
For the record, here’s something Mark Twain did say:
The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
Now, that sounds like Mark Twain.
October 25 2010
Crabbing
You won’t believe it. Grey hair, my age, I started taking flying lessons recently. Do you know what my flying instructor told me? If you are starting here, and you wish to get here, say east… and you have a crosswind, you will drift… So you have to do what we pilots call crabbing… You have to head for north of this airfield, and you have to fly that way… If you are heading here above this airfield, then you will actually land [on the airfield]… This holds also for man, I would say. If we take man as he really is, we make him worse, but if we overestimate him… we promote him to what he really can be. So we have to be idealists because then we wind up as the true realists.
A recent email conversation with Tom reminded me of this fantastic outtake from a lecture Viktor Frankl gave in Toronto.
Between two languages
According to Wittgenstein, there are two kinds of languages: objective language, which is logically and easily communicable by anyone who reads it, and private language, which is difficult to explain via language. Earlier in my career, I thought that a novelist is someone who had both his feet in the realm of private language, that he would just withdraw messages from private language/thought to create his stories. But since when, I don’t know, I realized that the language in a novel gains a special strength if I skillfully mix and alternate private language with objective language; the story itself becomes more dimensional through this process, as well.
Haruki Murakami, discussing his new three volume novel 1Q84. This tension between private language and and objective language drives Murakami’s novels, and it’s largely what sets Murakami’s work apart from that of other writers. His characters are so compelling because they travel uneasily between these two languages.
English-speakers like me will have to wait until September 2011 for the first two volumes of 1Q84. That’s almost a year. I might just have to reread Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World to get me through.
Like the novel itself, the interview is divided into three parts:
Related posts
October 22 2010
The flickering flame of civilization
The bronze age is a connected world. But it can’t sustain itself; it’s too rigid, elitist and top-heavy – and civilisation is a bit like a flickering flame. It almost goes out, but in certain places it keeps going and it will spread out again.
In the concept of civilisation, there is an inherent notion that things are always going to get better. I quite clearly break with that; I think of it being more like a heart monitor, zig-zagging up and down. The interesting thing about civilisation is our need to try to develop the perfect community for ourselves, and how we fail, but also how we come back to try again.
Richard Miles discusses the ebb and flow of human civilization. He’s presenting a six-part series called Ancient Worlds on BBC Two starting in November. My inner history and archeology geek is definitely excited about this one.
Related posts
October 21 2010
Handrails
…Frank Gehry’s buildings, which from the outside look like they might not have windows, but in fact, he’s very careful to put in what he calls “handrails” so that wherever you are in the building you get a sight of view of the outside so you can orient yourself, and you can navigate more easily.
On ABC National Radio’s All in the Mind podcast, Ester Sternberg discusses the science of stress, place and wellbeing. The whole interview is fascinating, but her description of Gehry’s idea of handrails jumped out at me.
I haven’t come across Gehry’s concept of handrails before, but it appeals to me. It turns out that it’s a broader concept than Sternberg implies in her interview. The best definition I’ve found is in Karl E. Weick’s essay Designing for Thrownness:
Handrails are familiar details in an otherwise strange setting that give people a feeling of safety and heighten their willingness to wade into someone else’s preinterpreted world and try to become more attuned to what is already underway in it.
In the articles and interview I’ve found online, Gehry refers to handrails as the reason for the the symmetry of Walt Disney Concert Hall and his use of brick in The Strata Center.
Handrails. What a fantastic metaphor for providing people with a familiar guide in unfamiliar territory.
October 20 2010
In defense of descriptivism
There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but… [d]o they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe.
A couple of years ago, Stephen Fry put together a glorious defense of descriptivism (audio). More recently, Matt Rogers rendered it as kinetic typography. The results are inspiring.
(via Laughing Squid)
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