Hugh Graham Creative

Jan Chipchase, who I’ve never met, has a small goal. He wants to understand everything. He also says that is impossible. For me, it is impossible. For him, I’m not so sure. At the very least he appears to have been everywhere, and documented her travels with an incredible zeal.

Jan works for Nokia, doing research on how people really use phones. Apparently, he also likes to see how people do a lot of other things. On his site, Future Perfect he expounds on all sorts of topics; some posts are simple observations, others more trenchant analysis of how we live our lives in the modern world.

My favorite? The Selfish Toothbrush.

John Battelle has posted ‘a brief interview’ with Michael Wesch, the guy who created the Web 2.0 video that all the kids are talking about (I linked to it last week). What’s interesting to me is that Professor Wesch is a cultural anthropologist. A trained observer, an ethnographer, as they say. And one with the right kind of politics.

So if there is a global village, it is not a very equitable one, and if there is a tragedy of our times, it may be that we are all interconnected but we fail to see it and take care of our relationships with others. For me, the ultimate promise of digital technology is that it might enable us to truly see one another once again and all the ways we are interconnected.

Sounds almost buddhist. Read the whole interview here

Michael Wesch, a professor at Kansas State University, posted this video on youtube. It’s a good introduction to what’s different about web 2.0.

In an article in today’s Denver Post entitled Pro-Libeskind forces fire back, Kyle MacMillan cites two influential critics coming to the defense of the new Hamilton wing of the Denver Art Museum. Most interesting is the assessment of Suzanne Stephens of Architectural Record:

Regardless of the controversy about the display of art within the canted gallery walls, the jagged building is a surprisingly successful tour de force on urbanistic grounds alone. It revitalizes an area of downtown Denver between Civic Center Park, the location of the Colorado State Capitol, and a dilapidated district to the south dubbed the Golden Triangle, now in the process of being gentrified with housing, art galleries, shops, and restaurants.

I’ve read a number of the previous reviews critical of the space and, although I’m somewhat critical of parts of the design, I felt the initial reaction was a bit harsh. The Hamilton building is very much a proof of the intellectual ideas expressed by Libeskind since his days at Cranbrooke, and, as Stephens points out in the Architectural Record, is a maturing of the ideas first tested on a large scale at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

From the outside, the fractured geometries of the space are visually arresting, and provide a worthy counterpoint to the crenellated fortress of the North tower designed by Gio Ponti. The configuration of the building and its muscular gestures create a magnificent public plaza that serves as a gateway to the Golden Triangle neighborhood.

The very strength of the design program ultimately prove to be one of the limitations; in particular, the galleries on the top floor of the building are not effective spaces and suffer from their position at the edge of the design metaphor. Much like Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao, some exhibition spaces lack flexibility. Fortunately, these are not temporary exhibition spaces, so there is the opportunity for the curators to address the limitations of the space over time (as Bilbao did by installing a Richard Serra into the leading prow of the titanium ship).

Other parts of the interior are more effective in creating a dialog with the art presented there. And while some may find the vertigo inducing central foyer of the building problematic, I enjoy the disorienting flavor of the complex geometries.

Architecture, like other human endeavors, goes through ebbs and flows; if the Libeskind building may be an example of how architecture, as art, limits the presentation of the very art it is charged to support, it also provides the grounding from which artistic creation can step forward. The Libeskind addition to the Denver Art Museum extends the conversation about the importance of art and culture in our lives and in our cities.

In 1990, Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich adapted a psychological principle, called Heuristics, to user-interface design. Nielsen, in particular, has promoted his ten recommended heuristics as a part of heuristic evaluation. But what is heuristic evaluation? According to Nielsen, “Heuristic evaluation is a discount usability engineering method for quick, cheap, and easy evaluation of a user interface design.”

So, if heuristic evaluation is a method, then what is a heuristic? Nothing more (or less) than a rule of thumb. Essentially, heuristic evaluation utilizes a set of established principles to analyze the usability of an interactive system (a website, an application, a kiosk, etc.). Nielsen has published his ten usability heuristics on the useit.com website, and they remain generally appropriate; the system should keep the user informed of what is going on, language should be natural and based on real-world conventions,navigation systems should be consistent, the system should be flexible and efficient.

All good ideas, in a general sense. But in a specific context, they can be (and often are) misused and misapplied. Most often, heuristic evaluation is conducted by design “experts,” which means that the experts bring their personal bias, history, and preferences into the game. Yes, the idea of this type of analysis is to remove personal preference from the process, but in real life this is easier said than done. A design solution appropriately utilized in one situation can be wrong in another.

The potential for errors in heuristic evaluation was explored effectively in an article I read in The New Yorker last night; the article, entitled “What’s the Trouble? How Doctors Think” was written by Jerome Groopman, a Professor of Medicine at Harvard. To quote Dr. Groopman:

But research shows that most physicians already have in mind two or three possible diagnoses within minutes of meeting a patient, and that they tend to develop their hunches from very incomplete information. To make diagnoses, most doctors rely on shortcuts and rules of thumb—known in psychology as “heuristics.”

Heuristics are indispensable in medicine; physicians, particularly in emergency rooms, must often make quick judgments about how to treat a patient, on the basis of a few, potentially serious symptoms. A doctor is trained to assume, for example, that a patient suffering from a high fever and sharp pain in the lower right side of the abdomen could be suffering from appendicitis; he immediately sends the patient for X-rays and contacts the surgeon on call. But, just as heuristics can help doctors save lives, they can also lead them to make grave errors.

Dr. Groopman goes on to list several types of errors made in heuristic analysis, including “representativeness”, “availability”, and “affective” errors.

Representativeness errors are made by doctors when “their thinking is overly influenced by what is typically true; they fail to consider possibilities that contradict their mental templates”.

He describes availability errors in the following manner:

[...] the tendency to judge the likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant examples come to mind. This tendency was first described in 1973, in a paper by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, psychologists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For example, a businessman may estimate the likelihood that a given venture could fail by recalling difficulties that his associates had encountered in the marketplace, rather than by relying on all the data available to him about the venture; the experiences most familiar to him can bias his assessment of the chances for success. (Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, for his research on decision-making under conditions of uncertainty.)

If representativeness and availability are intellectual errors, affective errors are those caused by an emotional connection. As described by Dr. Groopman, affective errors are “errors that doctor make because of their feelings for a patient.”

All of these errors can be associated with work in interaction design as well as in medicine. To use heuristic evaluation effectively, we all must understand the way our minds work. Consider the following quote, and replace the doctor with the interaction design expert, and the starting point for addressing the limitations of heuristic evaluation is clear:

This approach produces confident and able physicians. Yet the ideal it implies, of the doctor as a dispassionate and rational actor, is misguided. As Tversky and Kahneman and other cognitive psychologists have shown, when people are confronted with uncertainty—the situation of every doctor attempting to diagnose a patient—they are susceptible to unconscious emotions and personal biases, and are more likely to make cognitive error. [...]the first step toward incorporating an awareness of heuristics and their liabilities into medical practice is to recognize that how doctors think can affect their success as much as how much they know, or how much experience they have.

It’s a challenge for all organizations, but socially engaged non-profit organizations are always looking for ways to build awareness and communicate with potential donors and volunteers. I’ve had the chance to work with Heifer International in the past, and they very effective in how they get the message out to the public.

If Web 1.0 was about commerce, then Heifer was one of the best in building an effective presence (of course, they still send me the paper catalog too, which doesn’t warm the cockles of my environmentalist heart). In particular, their online catalog is very compelling; Hadley and I have bought virtual animals as gifts for our nieces in the past (we also worked together on animations for the thank you cards). By personalizing the story (the bees you bought help this girl) they’ve made it easy to feel you are making a difference. Of course, I’m not actually buying bees or chickens, but that’s not really the point; what I give goes to a good cause, and I can connect something specific to my donation.

But Web 2.0 is about community, and Heifer seems to have gotten the message. Today, they sent a note mentioning their myspace site (and you thought myspace was all about music), and also pushing another web initiative:

A group of Heifer “lenses” is growing on Squidoo.com, the search and community platform created by marketing and web guru Seth Godin, that works to benefit philanthropic organizations. Anyone can build a lens - lens is Squidoo speak for a web page. Build a lens and support Heifer.

It turns out that about half of all Squidoo “Lensmasters” send their royalties to charity. But Squidoo is not a charitable enterprise; it just sometimes works out that they help charities in the process of posting ‘lenses’ on a wide variety of topics. What’s a Lens? Nothing but a simple webpage on a topic you are interested in.

When I checked, Gnarls Barkley, Suitcases, and Golden Retrievers were popular (aren’t they always?). Squidoo is myspace+about+wikipedia (or something like that). I found one that amused me: Frank Roche posted best presentations ever. Nothing new there, but some links to good resources, including my personal favorite, Powerpoint is Evil, by Edward Tufte.

Paul Polak of IDE talks about the ruthless pursuit of affordability in all of the design work that his organization takes on. Of course, the IDE $20 water pump is a great example of how we can bring the poorest of the agricultural poor up from $1/day to $2/day, thereby taking them out of destitute poverty.

But what about the stylish poor, the destitute who want to smell good? According to this article in The Onion, Chanel has finally taken this into account and developed a “cost-efficient fragrance for the Third World, one specifically designed for the rigors of dry, dusty, less glamorous environments in the Southern Hemisphere.” Called Chanel 3rd, “it can go from hut to field to fire circle without losing its potency or charm.”

About time, I say.

The truth is that I usually get pretty bored with business books. Even books that offer helpful ideas (for instance, Good to Great and The Experience Economy) get tedious pretty quickly. I read the first chapter voraciously and then struggle to make it the rest of the way through. Maybe it’s just my own impatience, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of additional information past the ‘big idea’.

So, it’s with some trepidation that I approach “Made To Stick“, the latest in the long list of biz-help books. The authors, brothers Chip and Dan Heath, start wih a good idea (take the idea of stickiness as described in “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell), and turn it into a how-to manual. Can they really make it worth my time to spend the money and read the whole book? Honestly, I haven’t decided yet; even the Tipping Point (which I enjoyed) read better as a New Yorker feature than a standalone book.

I first encountered the book through Neil Takemoto at Cool Town Studios, who have been taking the six fundamental principles of “Made to Stick” and applying them to building cool places. It works pretty well, and of course I like it because it correlates well with my ideas on the use of story in the iterative design process.

Okay, so here are the six principles, excerpted from the “Made to Stick” website.

PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY
We must create ideas that are both simple and profound.

PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS
For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity.

PRINCIPLE 3: CONCRETENESS
Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.

PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY
We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves — a “try before you buy” philosophy for the world of ideas.

PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS
We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions.

PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES
How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories.

Of course, I’m particularly interested in the sixth principle, and I believe that storytelling is really the core of how to make all these principles work together. Hey, maybe I’ll write a book. I wonder if anyone would read it? I wonder if even I would read more than the first chapter?

One of my obsessions is non-linear storytelling.

I enjoy the apparent contradictions contained in the idea. Stories have a beginning, middle, and end. They are built on plot, theme, and character. All put together more or less carefully by the author. Non-linear storytelling pulls the rug out from under this idea. Or at least it apparently does.

But more importantly, non-linear (is there a better word for this?) storytelling is useful in “designing for use“. In ‘real’ life, the plot, the meaning, the entry and exit points, and even the value of a particular experience vary widely based on the history of the individual experiencing it. Designing with characters in mind helps explore the idiosyncrasies that give depth and potential to the experience being created.

I often conduct this design process based on the finding of ethnographic research; engaging people in real-life situations offers insights that provide more clarity to the purpose and desired outcomes of the project. But I’ve also done successful work based on creating personas from the imagination and then building the interactions from there.

Variations of story-centered design are becoming more and more common, I believe. For instance, at the Image, Space, Object conference put on by Mike and Kathy McCoy and Fred Murrell at RMCAD we have used story-centered design for the past three years, with surprising results (and a lot of fun).

At the AIGA Aspen Design Summit last summer, the participants divided into teams to do prototype design for applied solutions to real societal problems. My team was included some superior designers (for instance, Margeigh Novatny of Smart Design, Robert Fabricant of Frog, and Adam French from the d school at Stanford), and we worked for Paul Polak and his company, IDE. The process wasn’t without its struggles, and we may have worked out teams a little hard (OK, really hard), but we did show that it worked.

In the past couple of years I’ve done story-centered prototyping for a number of clients, especially in the travel industry. For instance, I recently completed a project for the National Trust for Historic Preservation (through PhoCusWright) that included both research and design. It was strategically valuable to explore the specific opportunities for interaction between various characters who have (probably) never met.

Experience design is the practice of creating structure and developing content in a manner that will allow the one experiencing the design to create their own meaning. Control the experience too closely, and you risk imposing a reductive linearity on your audience. And, in our wiki world, you also take away the opportunity for the audience to become a partner.

On the other hand, designing for use doesn’t mean not creating content; the quality of the ultimate experience relies on the quality of the prototypical experience. Quality results require vision put into practice, and storytelling is a great way to express vision in an engaging manner.

I think there might be something to this blog thing.

Last night, I put up a blog for our local buddhist group at zendenver.org – I am pretty happy with the way it turned out. Ms. Jill Hadley Hooper did the intro animation and the backgrounds, and we worked together on the layout and design.

I am pretty impressed with Wordpress, the blogging, or “semantic personal publishing platform” as they call it, I am using for the Zen Denver site (and this one); there is a remarkable amount of flexibility and scalability; from a design perspective, it is a pretty powerful tool.

It doesn’t get rid of the need to understand html, css, stylesheets, and the like, but it does abstract the content layer from the presentation layer. And it does it for free.

It is certainly a welcome addition to the toolchest for someone interested in contextual (device independent) display of content.