I recently wrote a post that discusses the way in which the specialists that meet at the intersection of creativity and technology are often carping about how others “don’t get it,” and how the different specialists mean different things when they say it. Yesterday, my friend Skye sent me a link to a post on the St. Louis Egotist featuring Sang’s work. In the comments, this “you don’t get it” theme presented itself. (To be honest, some of the commentary is merely inside baseball soap opera stuff which is not a lot germane to my post, but it’s there to read if you’re into that kind of stuff.) The point is that this kind of intellectual siloing is rather a lot a common thing and you don’t have to go looking very far to find it.

Anyway, here’s John Nance in the comments:

“This is the very personification of clueless adverting people bastardizing the Web. They didn’t get it ten years ago, and they don’t get it now. Sang, you get an A in art, and an F in producing anything that anyone cares about.”

I don’t know John, so, let’s ignore the inflamed rhetorical manoeuvres because he’s also trying to make a point here. He’s saying Sang doesn’t “get it.” And to be fair, Sang wields the “you don’t get it” theme as well (he’s talking to a particular anonymous commenter, but it speaks to what would appear to be his bias regarding UX as well):

“you just gave up on being an art director cause you suck at design and now are preaching the ux; usability angle”

It turns out that in their social networks, people generally have high homophily bias. This is to say the people that most people know, all tend to know each other. This would appear to be especially strong among experts (or aspirants) within a given domain. What this creates are clusters of people that all know and regularly interact with one another. Generally, this also means that they’re not, for the most part, regularly interacting with people from other clusters. In this way, homophily also means that these people all tend to hold much of the same knowledge and presuppositions. Again, specialization (reductionism) would seem to encourage homophily.

There’s this rather a lot smart guy named Ronald Burt who is Professor of Sociology and Strategy at the University of Chicago. He wrote a book called “Brokerage and Closure” in which he points out that the people that make the most money, get most promotions, and have the best performance reviews, have the lowest homophily bias in their networks. Put another way, brokers create value.

One might think that only, well, brokers can be brokers. As in, the salespeople. But anyone can be a broker. At the ictus of creativity and technology, brokers are needed. As I said to Skye, everyone’s work is important. Sang is an exemplar of a set of understandings and abilities that comprise a significant potential value. This is equally true of the understandings that inform and attend the discipline of user experience.

There are important conversations to be had. There is knowledge to be brokered. The importance of this is derived from the fact that there are decisions to be made, some of which are rational, and some to which no formula can be applied. And in essence, the power to affect outcomes is a function of the willingness to be a broker. So, y’know, be powerful.

Update 11:13 AM, 5/21/10: The perspicacious Brad Nunnally has, as usual, a link that is apropos. This time it’s “The Psychologist’s View of UX Design” by Susan Weinschenk at UX Magazine. To wit:

“A visual designer approaches UX design from one point of view, the interaction designer from another, and the programmer from yet another. It can be helpful to understand and even experience the part of the elephant that others are experiencing.”

But yeah, go read the whole thing.

When I first saw it, I was first struck by its elegance and beauty. The whole green angle is clever as well. But right after that, I immediately wondered, “do these things put out enough light?” And that got me to wondering about the whole project. Did the green aims of the designer distract them from other more pragmatic concerns? Is there some visceral value to be derived from the aesthetic that makes up for its lack of usable light? Was significant illumination necessarily a part of the project requirements? Should it have been?

I don’t have satisfactory answers, but I think this kind of design can often bump up against some of the sensibilities of the more technically minded people I’ve known. I wonder how user experience designers might look at this question. I would imagine they might recommend some kind of anthropology be done. I imagine they would suggest best practices for adducing the knowledge needed to make decisions. But what is your gut reaction to this project, UX peeps? Does your gut tell you the outcome is satisfactory?

“He doesn’t get it. You can tell; he just doesn’t get it.”

It seems to me that there are basically two worldviews from which this kind of thing emanates. One is what Robert Pirsig would call the “classical” worldview. This view looks at how things work—what you might call underlying form—and the people that tend to hold it seem to have an intuitive understanding of systems, their workings, and their inputs and outputs. The other worldview is what Pirsig would call the “romantic” worldview. This view looks at experience—the esoteric—and the people that tend to hold it seem to have an intuitive understanding of people, relationships, and other organic structures.

When my friend the IT pro tells me someone doesn’t get it, I’m pretty sure I know what he means. He means that person doesn’t understand the causal chain that holds the system together. He means that person doesn’t know how it is that they managed to turn that box into an open SMTP relay. He means they don’t understand what inputs to deliver to the system to get the desired outputs. He means they don’t understand some or all of what happens to the inputs once they’re inside the system.

When my friend the advertising creative director tells me someone doesn’t get it, I’m pretty sure I know what he means, too. He means that person isn’t grooving. He means that person isn’t able to perceive the subtle elegance of human desire. He means that person is uninitiated into the arcane college of the storyteller. He means they lack a sensitivity or familiarity with the archetypes and other patterns that speak to something that is profoundly constitutional about the human being.

This particular creative director I’m thinking of has said things to me before that expose his bias regarding the approaches taken by people like my IT friend. And the IT friend has said things that expose his bias regarding the approaches taken by people like my creative director friend. They don’t know each other, but I’m sure they’d like each other quite a lot. But when considering how to approach some problem, they would employ significantly different strategies. And they’d probably be, at minimum, skeptical about the other’s strategy.

What is interesting to me is that my creative director friend—and the understanding suggested by his approaches—has a value that is extremely difficult to quantify. It’s also difficult to demonstrate. There is a reason why Shakespeare resonates through the centuries in a way that his contemporaries do not.  This reason is accessible only to those that “get it.” But this getting of it is something that happens in an esoteric way. Systems aren’t like that. That you do or do not understand how a system works can be empirically demonstrated; that you do or do not understand Shakespeare’s endurance cannot.

I think that when a creative says, “they don’t get it,” there would seem to be a special significance. The creative is trying to address some tangible goal, but the tools she wields are subtle and arcane. These tools hold the power to affect many, including those who won’t or can’t acknowledge their value.

BUT HERE’S THE PROBLEM I THINK:

Creatives can’t go around bitching about this and act like that is tantamount to a solution. Creatives can and should learn about and create new tools for demonstrating their value. Creatives need to learn more about systems and earn some respect. But they also need to experiment with and champion new kinds of systems that are consonant with the creative worldview. They need to work to introduce creative approaches into the decision making processes that otherwise go generally unaddressed by creative firms.

Managers, engineers, executives and other systems thinkers can’t go around bitching about people not getting their systems and act like that’s tantamount to a solution either. They need to try to learn a little something about art and its relationship to volition. They need to mentally provide for the possibility that something they don’t understand and can’t quantify really can be powerful. And they need to reach out and collaborate with creatives around the question of where and what to measure.

I don’t think I’ve adduced some profound solution here. I think it’s really rather a bare minimum. Because for both parties, “they don’t get it,” can just be a big cop out. It gives rhetorical cover to a sense of superiority and most importantly, it justifies apathy in the face of creative challenge. If “they” are going to “get it,” it won’t be because “we” complained that they don’t.

Update 4/27/10 2:45pm CST:

Friend and smart person, Brad Nunnally, notes a far more compelling post than mine what seems to have some connection. It is written by a Mr. Andrew Hinton, and entitled, “Why We Just Don’t Get It.” This bit seemed particularly salient:

Recently I’ve had a number of conversations with colleagues about why certain industries or professions seem stuck in a particular mode, unable to see the world changing so drastically around them. For example, why don’t most advertising and marketing professionals get that a website isn’t about getting eyeballs, it’s about creating useful, usable, delightful interactive experiences? And even if they nod along with that sentiment in the beginning, they seem clueless once the work starts?

Or why do some or coworkers just not seem to get a point you’re making about a project? Why is it so hard to collaborate on strategy with an engineer or code developer? Why is it so hard for managers to get those they manage to understand the priorities of the organization?

And in these conversations, it’s tempting — and fun! — to somewhat demonize the other crowd, and get pretty negative about our complaints.

While that may feel good (and while my typing this will probably not keep me from sometimes indulging in such a bitch-and-moan session), it doesn’t help us solve the problem. Because what’s at work here is a fundamental difference in how our brains process the world around us. Doing a certain kind of work in a particular culture of others that work creates a particular architecture in our brains, and continually reinforces it. If your brain grows a hammer, everything looks like a nail; if it grows a set of jumper cables, everything looks like a car battery.

You should, y’know, read the whole thing.

Useful mailing + enticing imagery + connections + whydidntithinkofthisbefore = golden

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1. CONCEPT
2. CHARACTER

Concept is, as it sounds, a theme unifying around an idea. Concept has been the main, primary driving force in design and advertising since at least the creative revolution of the ’60s. The entire notion of postmodernism is just the idea of a piece of work becoming more important than the execution of the work.

Concept was really effective in the print-driven advertising world, where we had only one page to convey so much information against so much competition for attention. Compared to, say, a 10,000 word essay on Zbigniew Brzezinski, an ad had to be incredibly impactful and in contrast to its surroundings to stand out and get read.

In the past few years, however, familiar media have become much more idea driven. Maxim magazine, to use an extreme example, is 150 pages of pure concept. Even the editorial content is chunked down, optimized, streamlined, and simplified down to just the idea. Just the tidbit, none of the context.

Complicating that further is the web, a billion pages of ideas with no unifying theme, raw information with little relationship to any of the content on the page. A 100 word news blurb is set next to “phrases” representing navigation, ideas totally isolated in meaning connected only through the context of the interface. This is concept taken to it’s absolute extreme. The web itself is a concept, unviewable, unimaginable in any concrete way. It doesn’t even exist in any physical, relatable form. And it changes form in real-time, updating, shifting, transforming with every click. It’s nothing but concept.

So how does one stand out in this wash of nothing but pure concept? By standing in contrast to the surroundings.

The ideal web campaign is one filled with character.

More frankly, it’s a crutch. A design project involves hundreds if not thousands of decisions. Space, color, scale, typography, heirarchy, tone. All of these decisions can be absolutely overwhelming.

Until you find a theme. The theme turns all of those decisions into just one simple question: Does this fit? It lets us use our brain in that lateral, complex, quantum way. We can immediately test any decision against that “feeling” of fit. It provides a compass, a grounding, a center from which everything can radiate.

In all of my experience, whenever I’ve been stuck or someone I’m working with is stuck, the missing ingredient is theme.

All of the upfront work in planning and consumer research and input briefs and brands statements are all about one thing: providing that theme.

His recent post, The Largest Show on Earth, is what brought me to him. I’ve been trying to reconstruct how I found it but, sadly, I cannot. It’s a simple and clever little post about Bauhaus and MoMA’s Bauhaus exhibit. Part of what struck me about the post was a quote from Michael J. Lewis (whom I assume to be THIS Dr. Lewis).

“The same Cartesian coordinates that are so stimulating when applied to textiles or chess sets take on a rather different aspect when the grid grows larger than the individual, who shrinks into a speck.”

There is a disturbing egoism which, in part, animates modernism (and its progeny, or deconstructions, or whatever). We are creative. Add humility and you have a moving aspiration. Add ego and you have the will to power. I remember riding a tour bus through Moscow in 1990 and looking at austere apartment building after austere apartment building and feeling a profound sense of loss. Milliner also notes in his post, that in the early 20th century, “They knew it as … Volkswohnung (people’s apartments) that would mercifully provide affordable design for the masses. We know it as Ikea.” This overweening drive to bestow beauty on the hoi polloi is merely annoying but acceptable when applied to teapots, but becomes inhuman when the scale is grand.

It is fitting that Mr. Milliner should have occasioned these thoughts for me, given his putative Christianity. I say that because I’ve often thought that what was meant by the suggestion that we were created in God’s image is that we, too, are creative. When the wu wei of the creativity forms its impetus, I think we’re most authentically realizing this divine origin. When the impetus is framed by the notion that you have the answers the world needs, I think the result is something less dignified.