I’m fascinated by the working style of successful teams and individuals, specifically in the creative realm. I think that’s what’s been drawing me to diaries and biographies lately. I’m not expecting to find some key to unlocking creativity, but I have been collecting guidelines that I can cling to in the limitless expanse. One of the guidelines is the Buddhist principle about learning to let go, so I should probably throw my whole list into the river right now. But let me indulge myself for a moment instead. The problem is, I’m sick of feeling both overbooked and underlimited, so I’m looking for ways to either accomplish more with less, or more with the same, or simply less. Less means stabbing my ambition and letting it bleed a little, and I’m not ready to stick the knife in yet.
So I’m stuck hunting for design principles and working styles that can help me make sense of my work. I’m attracted to them because they’re about understanding the medium—any medium. They are solely about process, but they are not Life’s Little Instruction Book entries about having a solid handshake. So in a way they are constrained: they contain no subject and no emotion, no social etiquette. They’re not supposed to make you happy in life; they’re simply there to boost creatively productivity. They aren’t too general; they’re just general enough to be useful. We all find inspiration but apply it differently.
how we work
March 14th, 2005Blink
March 10th, 2005Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink is about split-second decision making. Specifically, it’s about having loads of experience to draw from when making split-second decisions. It’s a roller-coaster ride—a fast read that hurls armchairs of psychology at you that are surprising enough to make you want to stand up and tell someone what you just read. Gladwell takes us through food tasting labs and military exercises and murder cases and lie detectors and improv comedy and numerous psych experiments that bring up a variety of questions about the workings of the subconscious. He shows us marriage councilors and car salesmen and art collectors whose success is based on the ability to make split-second decisions, or decisions about a split-second in time, by distilling their lifetime of experience quickly.
Gladwell also shows us places where quick judgments go wrong: novice cops, unable to handle their first high-pressure encounter smoothly, or politicians and businessmen who rise to power on dignified looks and stature alone, fooling everyone along the way. He shows us an ER where a finely-tuned and thoroughly researched decision tree, posted on the wall, replaces doctors’ judgment calls and improves the success rate in isolating heart attacks among patients with chest pain—traditionally very difficult to predict because it draws upon dozens of medical and emotional indicators.
There are many tangents on Gladwell’s path. The book feels like a series of New Yorker articles. But I like that about it—my easily distracted mind was fully engaged. My favorite chapter covers the Facial Action Coding System, an encyclopedia of facial expressions, photographed and numbered, by psychologists Paul Ekman and Silvan Tomkins. The FACS provides a vocabulary for the most common facial expressions, and once you have enough experience with it, you can improve your interpretation of facial expressions. Gladwell is quick to point out that we already interpret facial expressions continuously, subconsciously, but that we’re not always able to tap into our interpretation directly, so our detection of someone lying, for example, might bubble up to the conscious brain in the form of a vague feeling of discomfort or fear. Ekman and Tomkins can see things more clearly, though, because they’ve built a vocabulary and spent years studying and making faces.
That’s the real point here: The best art historians may be able to spot a fake from across the room, the best cops can quickly and accurately size up a tough situation, and the best food tasters can taste the difference between Oreo cookies that came from two different batches, but none of this is possible without vast experience placed in a well-developed context. So don’t expect to start mind-reading tomorrow.
This is Gladwell’s second book after The Tipping Point, and while I don’t think it’s quite as powerful in its conclusions, it’s still a lot of fun.
cheap frame fun
September 4th, 2004Half of the art is in the frame, right? That’s what a frame store will tell you, anyway. So will Brian Eno and most ad agencies. But I’m unwilling to spend $50 for a nice wooden frame with glass and a custom-cut, museum quality archival matt board to house an 8×10″ photograph I paid two bucks for. It doesn’t seem to fit the medium and it’s way too expensive. But I’m equally unwiling to buy one of these and add doubt to my already dubious credibility as a photographer. So I went out looking for alternatives—something cheap that looks good. If I could sell a framed 8×10″ print for less than the outrageous $150+ that local photographers demand and probably never collect, I’d have some “art for the masses,” right?
So here’s my approach. For an 8×10 photo, I went down to the frame store and bought a 12×14″ piece of Plexiglas, a can of white spraypaint that bonds to plastic, and a can of spray adhesive. Plexiglas comes with a backing stuck to both sides. I peeled the backing from one side, masking taped around the edges and spraypainted the showing side. Then I removed the tape and backing from the flip side, revealing a plate that has the sheen and color of the outside of an iBook. Then I centered and mounted the photograph there with the spray adhesive.
That’s the short story. It took a bit of work to get the tape on and off, to line the photo up, to adhere it straight onto the plastic without a dry mount press and without glue getting everywhere. I also had to sand down the sides of the Plexiglas to even out the rough edges left by the glass cutter. But I did manage, and I think with a little work (and a real dry mount press, a bigger cutting board, and some studio space to house it all) I could start making these frames pretty quickly.
They’re cheap and they look great. My total cost for the 8×10″ is a little over $15 for everything. I think people would be happy to pay $40+ for these prints (not Steve Keene cheap, but still cheap), and I get to cover at least the printing and framing expenses right away (the cam0era would take years to pay off at this rate, though).
Here’s a photo of the photos I’ve framed so far: a 16×20″ on the left and an 8×10″ on the right. I have placed a pen in the upper right so you can get a sense of the scale.
I’m still experimenting with different aspect ratios. I kind of like the “HDTV look” on the left, but maybe with a bit more margin on top and bottom. Meanwhile, the biggest challenge is the hanger on the back: I still haven’t figured out how to hang these things. Hot glue doesn’t stick, epoxy doesn’t stick, and I can’t see how I could drill a hole in the Plexiglas without screwing up the photo. I’ll let you know how it goes…
usability
July 19th, 2004Open source usability is indeed a major problem—I think it’s the biggest thing that has kept the Linux desktop out of most hands. With so many coders switching to Mac OS X, we know that even people in the software industry avoid it. It’s a shame that the Linux desktop is not so easy to use, because the community has put so many hours into the development of projects like KDE (which describes itself first as easy to use, right on its front page). I often feel that the community has made a bed which it is now avoiding.
One problem is that open source is largely about cloning commercial software and then adding features. Many developers add one or two features they want for their own use, incorporate their changes back into the source without a thought to the utility of, or excise created by what they’ve done (Luis Buñuel: “Every object conceals another.”).
We don’t need more features. No one wants a system with 34 buttons in the administrative part of its file brower, or 28 options on its main menu, 16 of them being submenus that beg questions like, “What’s the difference between Office and OpenOffice.org?” or “To change my desktop background, do I go to Settings, System, or Utilities?”
People typically have a pretty small set of tasks they ever want to perform with a computer program, and the variety from person to person isn’t that great, so what we need is fewer options. You might propose that we just remove some features, sculpt the software into perfection, and we’ll be all set, right? This is what Frans Englich proposes in a recent article on NewsForge. I think this approach would help, but I don’t think it’s the answer. We can incorporate a lot of options if they’re presented in an organized, hierarchical (some options more strongly emphasized than others, many options hidden away for only the most advanced power-hungry users to find), and intuitively obvious way that is consistent and cuts across the entire system.
Usability starts broad and goes down to the core, within and between software; it is not just the fine patina at the surface. Though sculpting current software down to a simpler form that addresses 90% of the typical user’s goals may help, I think great usability is thoughtfully considered throughout the development cycle.
This is how Apple has been so successful when it comes to usability: they’ve chosen to design and control every level of the experience, not even stopping at the edge of your desk. Apple is practically designing a lifestyle. Their individual compontents are easy to use and consistent with each other, and the interaction between components is clear and consistent. Usability considerations aren’t constrained to one program. Apple’s approach doesn’t just go to the core of software, it goes to the core of all software and hardware in their system and to the global APIs that are available in all software. A thorough style guide means that keyboard shortcuts in one program that are consistent with keyboard shortcuts in another, and so on. So while you may look at a small change in source code and say “this makes my program more (or less) usable”, this is not a strategy for great usability in my opinion.
I do think we can have usability in the open source community. Making incremental changes to individual pieces of software won’t cut it, however. I believe that (yet again) a new Linux desktop/distribution should be formed, with usability as its purpose, and with the following goals:
- Maintain interface consistency within and between all components. No software should be allowed in without meeting these criteria, and no more than one program of any kind is allowed (unlike today where there are five options for MP3 players, etc.). This kind of consistency is best achieved, in my opinion, by an auteur—someone who provides the central vision, and acts as gatekeeper and high-level decision maker, just as Linus Torvalds has done so successfully with the Linux kernel.
- Severely limit or reëmphasize the options available to the user. We’ve already got way too many choices in this world. Lets reduce interface excise, hide or remove the least-used options, give greater emphasis to the most-used options.
- Require all programs to use consistent keyboard shortcuts, preferences, operating system functions (like cut and paste), the same file browser, and so on. Make overarching OS-level decisions about the direct manipulation of data, so that this is consistent across all programs. This isn’t just about drag and drop, it’s also about spell checking, renaming things, etc.
- Waste no pixels, leave as many as possible for content, use as few as are needed for interface.
- Prevent crashes by allowing only mature, low-bug software (the Debian approach)
- Make it comfortable for my grandmother or the hacker next door. Comfort requires the OS to become a part of the person using it, to take on the user’s personality. A new user should be able to quickly settle into the system and feel good using it. After all, the goal is to make the user feel productive doing whatever it is they’re doing, and productivity is just as much an emotion as it is an internal measurement.
There are more items on this list; I don’t know them all. A usable Linux desktop will need a lot of thought before it gets off the ground. I think it will need a clearer statement of the goals, a thorough style guide, and so on. This project could be greatly informed by other style guides and usability books, but it also needs to be tailored to the nature of open source development.
If executed properly, I think the final desktop environment will be far and away more usable than the mess we have today. Now, who wants to write up a vision statement? 