I believe it was Craig Venter whom first said that, “If the 20th century was the century of physics, 21st century will be the century of biology.” The direct read is clear enough; the discipline of biology is where the interesting stuff is happening. What I think may be even more interesting is the implication that perhaps the epistemic models that inform physics are giving way to epistemic models informed by biology.

Marshall McLuhan‘s renown aphorism that, “we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us,” would seem to have a related, but inverted principle. For our tools are shaped after us. How can they not be? The only models we have are ourselves and the biological systems that surround us. What is a wrench if not an abstract extention of the hand?

In this way, all design could be said to be necessarily user-centered. That said, the kind of models that inform the enlightenment paradigm, while powerful, are not the apotheosis of our ability to model the natural world. In other words, top-down hierarchies aren’t the most accurate recreations of the systems we encounter in the world. In other other words, machines don’t feel natural. I think it should be sacrosanct to the designer, that we should not be made to conform to our tools; our tools should be made to conform to us.

That’s why I love design like this packing tape thing. I think it’s maybe an important goal for designers to model organic systems. Their creations are the tools that thereafter shape us, and our models.

Actually, she may have said nothing like that at all, but I heard something like that and since I’m not divulging my source, I suppose it doesn’t really matter. The question is an interesting one I think. So much of the inquiry that informs the UX design process is designed to get at what the user expects based upon their previous experience. The goal then is to give those users what they expect. Now I realize the UX community is not a monolith, so I’d imagine there are many different explications of the “goal of UX design” floating around out there. That said, I haven’t really heard any what you might call “mainstream UX people” saying things what would radically depart from my above formulation.

Perhaps it is easy to see where I’m going with all this. In the pantheon of marketing theories, there is this thing what is known as positioning. In “The International Encyclopedia of Communication,” positioning is described, in part, as follows:

“Positioning is an essential concept in communication management, Public Relations, and Marketing communication. The process of positioning includes identifying, defining, and managing the perception relevant audiences have of a particular organization, product, person, or idea.”

The two men most responsible for the popularization of positioning are Jack Trout and Al Ries. They wrote a book what is generally regarded as a lot seminal, called “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.” In it, they define positioning as “an organized system for finding a window in the mind. It is based on the concept that communication can only take place at the right time and under the right circumstances”. As the wikipedia entry for positioning notes, in Mr. Trout’s initial considerations of positioning, he asserts that “the typical consumer is overwhelmed with unwanted advertising, and has a natural tendency to discard all information that does not immediately find a comfortable (and empty) slot in the consumers mind.”

Good positioning helps a brand to stand out so as to occupy an empty slot in the consumer’s mind. Good user experience helps a brand to comply with the consumer’s presuppositions and biases. At first glance, it would seem you could drive a truck through that one. Anyone who has used any of the 37signals tools, in all their usable glory, would probably be willing to cop to the similarity of the experience with that of Facebook, or the WordPress admin interface, or any of a number of other very usable tools. In many ways, my own experiences with these tools do seem to run together in my mind as it were.

So there’s the question: Does the practice of user experience undermine the practice of positioning? I don’t think the answer set is bivalent. I think there are nuanced answers, but I do think the question is worth asking. What do you think?

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?

Useful mailing + enticing imagery + connections + whydidntithinkofthisbefore = golden

“Twitter feels like the inside of a television,” he mused. “Buzzing, busy cathode and anode. But no story! Some clever chap needs to put the gizmotrons behind the set and make with the drama. You know, do a Lewis Carroll and get us to the other side of the glass.”

George’s lineage is U.S. going back ten generations or more. They came here from Bottrop in Westphalia. This is what he claims. Of course he also goes on about how Germany is fiction and that Westphalia is rightfully Prussia.

I tried to explain that televisions don’t use tubes so much anymore, patting his head; a patronizing gesture. He tried to bite my wrist. He cut me off, purring, “I’m in a Microsoft kind of mood. Do me a favor and Bing Loic Le Meur. I remember that night Loic and I got so bourré at that little restaurant in Paulilles, and he invited that crank Rupert Sheldrake to join us. The sop blathered on all night about morphogenic fields or some such twaddle. The only cogent thing he said was something about people having the same good idea at the same time all over the world. I want to see if Loic is surfing my morphogeny.”

That’s how I found Seesmic Look. I think I binged something like “Loic Languedoc Binge Drinking Morphogeny Twitter Looking Glass”. When the page loaded, George became quiet a moment and then looked at me again as if to say, “well?” I fumbled with the download button a bit too lazily and George began to tell me, yet again, that he most certainly is a long lost Hohenzollern and I should know more about the “Hohenzollern Diaspora” if the whole affair hadn’t been suppressed by the Bavarian Illuminati. I distracted him by pointing out that I had successfully downloaded the installer and was executing it.

While we waited for it to install, I asked George what he thought about the name, “Seesmic Look”. I like the whole active voice/give-a-command kind of thing it’s got going on and I thought perhaps George might agree. Of course George never agrees with anything I say, but I was preoccupied with forestalling any further disquisitions into European aristocratic pseudo-history.

“I don’t get it,” he mewed. “What is the ‘Seesmic’ part all about? Is Seesmic the overarching brand of a software company? Is Seesmic a Twitter client? Is Seesmic a site where people have threaded video conversations? I mean, I get it in practice, but not in theory. Can I just call it, ‘Look’? If I call it ‘Seesmic Look’, am I saying, ‘the product, called Look, made by Seesmic’, or am I saying, ‘the special flavor of the Seesmic Desktop program called Seesmic Look’? It’s the kind of lazy hermeneutic that comes of imbibing too much Pétrus.”

I should point out that George can drink you under the table. I don’t know Loic personally, but I strongly suspect George’s attempts to paint Loic as a drunk amount to some heavy duty projection. As if to prove my point, George then puked on my shoes.

When things settled down a bit, I tried to run the freshly installed program. We saw the Seesmic Look splash screen, and then, crash. We were using George’s workstation. He built it himself. It has a quad-core processor, 8 gigs of ram, and it’s running 64-bit Windows 7. Up came the helpful Windows 7 error dialog about how this program did something naughty and Windows is just gonna shield your eyes while it puts a sheet or something over the offending bits. “Don’t worry,” says Windows. “I’m gonna check with Redmond real quick and see if there’s anything we can do about this. One sec.” A few seconds later and Windows let me know that, no, it’s never even heard about this program and then it kinda looked expectantly down its nose at me. You know, its rhetorical nose.

After a restart, during which George dozed off and began to drool, I was able to get Look (can I call it that?) running. I nudged George and he woke with a start, shaking his head an showering nearby objects in flecks of spittle. Evidently he thought I was Loic because he began berating me about how, “Arrington was right, you know. You’re one of the smart ones Loic and yet you remain obstinately French!” In his pique, he missed my eye roll (thankfully) and I was able to get him focused on the Seesmic Look interface now visible on the third of George’s four monitors.

“Sacrebleu,” was all he managed for several seconds. I navigated through the menus and used the scroll wheel to cycle through the tweets. Finally George said, “No wonder he’s focused on Windows first. I was ready to complain that I couldn’t run this on my hackintosh, but the plebes will love this! Le Meur! You magnificent bastard! You disgust me with your brilliance!”

He turned to me, wide eyed and said, “This is what I was talking about. This is the outside of the television. It’s as though someone took cable news graphics (without the infernally imbecilic talking heads) and made them interactive. It’s create your own news network! And talk to your soccer mom friends while you’re at it! A shrill hallelujah chorus of mommy bloggers that pull away from the screen only to toss molotov cocktails through the windows at Motrin corporate headquarters!”

I told him to ix-nay on the trashing the Motrin moms. I reminded him that he spent time in a Baby Bjorn and should take a larger view. He called me a Bolshevik.

The upshot is that I think this Seesmic Look is grasping at something important. It makes the Twitter experience something that feels less noisy, more manageable, and more channel-oriented. While the columnar layouts in TweetDeck, Seesmic for Windows, and other clients are powerful, they are also messy and overwhelming. Seesmic Look is Zen for Twitter. One column. Heavy visual weight on the focused tweet. Predefined channels of content. Clean and aesthetically thoughtful integration of things like user’s background images. It is a decidedly new vision for the Twitter client user experience.

After using it for a few days, George noticed some bugs. He pointed out that tweets which weren’t addressed to him were appearing in his “mentions”. He also pointed out that it seemed to be in conflict with some other program he’s running—he’s not sure which—because occasionally, Look (can I call it that?) won’t start without restarting Windows. Beyond that, he says he thinks there is much still that needs to be explored within this new vision for the Twitter experience. As he fell asleep in his chair, George muttered, “Loic is puant l’ivress, but this Look thing is lovely.”

For my part, I just want to apologize to Loic for George’s recalcitrance. If he weren’t so damn insightful, I’d let him go in the woods somewhere to fend for himself. But he led me to Seesmic Look, and he usually has the big insights, so I feel the need to keep him around. But Loic, if you’re reading, I beg you to forgive his rudeness. He says he loves you like a brother and to tell you he’s bringing the foie gras next time.

Is computerized food production the final frontier for futuristic home design? Mass production has transformed virtually every modern domicile-related industry, from house building to furniture construction – and now, innovative technologies are promising use the finest gourmet culinary delights straight from a household machine we can keep right in our kitchens.

Read more: Try a Byte: 3 Futuristic Food Printers to Produce Fine Cuisine | Designs & Ideas on Dornob

So as I always say, ‘Buy cheap, buy twice’. Buy originality and experience, buy a story that has intelligence founded on solid research, it’ll serve you longer and pay for itself, why wouldn’t you want to shine?

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.

Well it does to me anyway.

I happen to believe that fundamentally, design is vision. Designers are necessarily visionaries. A designer was somewhere in the process that brought a helmet to Pat White. A designer will be involved in the process of creating a better helmet, one that right now, simply does not exist. The endless parade of info-graphics we’ll be seeing as the NFL Playoffs approach will satisfy, or not, in large part depending upon the scope of the vision of their designers. What is the Burj Dubai if not a testament to vision.

Increasingly, design is married to technology. Perhaps it has always been thus. Technology provides the platform, implements, and canvas. Technology is the currency of design; the currency of vision.

But there is a terrible pain here. These two worlds, technology and design, each carry their own preconceptions, language, and posture. The people that populate these domains of knowledge and practice have great difficulty getting it together. Yet, somehow, they do. There is an alchemy in that connection.

Which, that is where Orphic enters. This blog is an exploration of the whole Venn diagram of design and technology. Orphic is very fortunate to have as authors, a collection of very thoughtful, skilled, and talented people. We’re still preparing their bios and providing them the ability to begin posting, but the diversity of their knowledge and insight will soon be apparent.

We appreciate your visit and patience as we get everything in working order.