The graphic novel Persepolis, in addition to being a gripping emotional story and the only comic book to ever bring me to tears, is a masterpiece of comic art and a testimony to what you can accomplish through repetition of basic forms. What Persepolis writer/artist Marjane Satrapi can accomplish with a few simple pen strokes is simply astonishing. When the comic was made into an animated movie, Satrapi’s graphic virtuosity survived and indeed thrived in the translation.

Look at these nine faces of girls listening to a political speech from their schoolteacher in Iran, shortly after the 1979 revolution. All of these faces use exactly the same set of design elements: four curved lines (eyebrows, nose, mouth), a pair of football-shaped ovals and dots (eyes), and an amorphous black shape (hairline). And yet each of these girls doesn’t just look completely unique, each has a unique and distinctive personality — earnest, distracted, doubtful.

I was reminded of a book currently on my desk, Bruno Munari’s Design as Art.

In the book’s second section, Munari argues that images can and should have a deliberate “character” in order to be meaningful and memorable to viewers, and that that character is encapsulated in the subtle and not-so-subtle details of a design’s implementation. The design’s style, if you will. What’s more, it doesn’t take much to achieve this character.

To illustrate this, he includes almost 150 simple pen drawings of faces, each one radically different from the last, and each one clearly drawn in only a matter of a few seconds. The illustrator (or illustrators — it doesn’t matter, really) draws on many cultural drawing styles, but even when those seem exhausted new ideas seem to emerge between the stylizations.

It’s a remarkable illustration of the power of small multiples to help push the boundaries of how one thinks about even the simplest design challenge.

It doesn’t take much to make something unique and different. As Munari’s collection of faces shows, simply focusing on variety at the expense of detail and perfection can give rise to some small but powerful and unexpected new ideas.

This is the point of sketching, of course: ingenuity is an emergent property that is more easily produced by turning your attention away from perfecting a single vision.

Satrapi’s faces, of course, are not sketches — their uniqueness is carefully and tenderly crafted through economy of form and the subtlest lines. But they compellingly illustrate that both character and diversity can be found among things whose basic ingredients are essentially identical, whether by accident and spontaneity or through deliberate craft.

As designers, we should be inspired by Munari’s demonstration of how the same question has a thousand solutions, and Satrapi’s revelation that almost the same solution can solve a thousand different problems.

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Touch Sight, a fascinating “camera” for blind people.

For my entire design career,  my colleagues and I have wrestled with the terminology we use to segment and focus our work, both in our careers and in our critiques. Whether it’s the “information architecture vs. interaction design” debate or the “visual design vs. graphic design” debate, our neat little linguistic boxes don’t always seem to be able to contain the conversations we have about our work.

The term “look and feel” has been particularly troublesome. Too often it is used to simply mean “visual design” — that is, just the “look” part — with the “feel” part understood as simply a polite nod to the fact that visual design has an emotional aspect.

Andrew Crow at Adaptive Path suggests that, because of this kind of abuse, “look and feel” should be discarded.

I propose that we never use the phrase “look and feel” again. Ever.

Visual design is often subjective and can be difficult to describe or judge. Often, people lack the language or understanding of the work to accurately express their opinions. Consequently, we use simple terms of the way an object “looks” or how it “feels”.

Speaking in terms of these qualities does a disservice to the design. We cheapen the value of the work by paying attention only to the superficial aspects.

I think he’s being a little hasty. How is the term “visual design”, which Andrew uses here and repeatedly throughout his essay, any better than “look and feel”?

“Look and feel” at least suggests (indeed specifically acknowledges) that the surface-level user experience involves more senses than just the visual. In contrast, “visual design” often dramatically constrains the conversation about our work, and indeed might even constrain the scope of responsibility for a person working under that title.

I’ve always interpreted the “feel” part of look and feel to mean not just the emotional aspects that are usually associated with it, but also the tactile (or seemingly-tactile) effects of how a UI moves and transforms, how it sounds, the speed and pacing of the unfolding experience, its overall voice and personality, and countless other ineffable qualities of visceral experience. “Feel” can include words and language, transitions, motion, rhythm, haptic feedback, symbolism, melody, texture, temperature, and much more.

So while I agree that “look and feel” is often abused, it is precisely the conflation of (a) the vast potential of that term with (b) simply equating it with “visual design” that is the essence of the problem. Replacing “look and feel” with just “visual design”, as Andrew seems to perhaps unintentionally suggest, would only make matters worse. The scope of the term “visual design” simply cannot contain those aforementioned ineffable aspects of user experience, which is why we cling to “look and feel”.

While I confess to using both terms every day, I do think they are often insufficient for effective design communication. But simply throwing away “look and feel” isn’t a solution. We either need a more powerful and understandable replacement for “look and feel”, or we need to do a better job investing the conversation around “look and feel” to include those ineffable qualities. We need to ensure that we can have broad critical conversations about what Christopher Alexander calls “The Quality Without a Name” (QWAN) and that we can have narrow and focused critical conversations around the technical nuances of visual and graphic design.

I’m conservatively inclined towards the second approach: evangelizing a new and broader understanding of what “look and feel” means in the universe of interaction design. But I’ll admit that, Alexander’s declaration of namelessness notwithstanding, I am quietly and subconciously thinking of new names.

[This post’s title is the a tribute to one of my favorite drone/dub bands, seefeel]

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A few months ago I heard a fascinating woman interviewed on the radio, Noreen Grice. Ms. Grice is a blind astronomer — something that, while initially surprising to me, actually makes perfect sense when you consider that most of today’s astronomy research is based on radio signals, mathematics, physics, and chemistry — and not at all on optics.

What’s more, she has published a series of books about astronomy specifically targeted at blind and visually-impaired children. When I heard this fact, I knew I had to see that book. Sure enough, Grice’s Touch the Universe is for sale on Amazon. Within days I was holding a copy.

Notice that I said “I had to see that book”. Because ultimately that is how I expected to experience it — with my eyes. Indeed, from the moment I opened the box and laid eyes on it I was drawn to the book’s beauty. But not just because the pictures are visually staggering, which of course almost all astronomic photography is. And not just because the internal design, typography, and layout have a simple grace to them, which they do.

What attracted me the most was the braille. The way the embossed patterns directly translated the images below them, the way there were two languages in play at the same time. This book goes beyond at least my traditional understanding of braille as a language or an alphabet — this is the syntax of touch used for illustration. I closed my eyes and explored the universe.

Here’s a typical spread from the book. Notice how the red spot of Jupiter is expressed as a spiral, and that the spiral is identified in the key below the image area.

Here is a spiral galaxy, NGC-4603, where the density of the raised dots expresses the density of the stars clustered around the galaxy’s core.

The book also features some of the technology used by astronomers, although ironically this is the Hubble Space Telescope, a purely optical instrument.

The funny thing is that this book could in theory have been produced with no ink at all. How unfair it seems that a book for blind people is so pleasant to the sighted, and yet products for the sighted generally proffer so little for the blind.

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As you might already know, The School of Visual Arts, one of New York’s leading art and design institutions, is gearing up for a brand new MFA in Interaction Design program beginning this September. SVA has for many years been highly regarded, especially for its vibrant and cutting edge MFA programs (for example in Design and Computer Art) so it’s not surprising that they’d be leading the way in the creation of this highly-relevant and much-needed program.

I’m honored to be part of the inaugural faculty for the program, charged with teaching the first-year “Fundamentals of Interaction Design” course. For humility’s sake please excuse me from the following statement, but the faculty roster is an amazing group of professionals and thinkers across a wide variety of disciplines in the interaction design universe. We on the teaching staff are constantly commenting to one another about how much we’d love to take this curriculum ourselves!

Thursday, January 15 (tomorrow!) is the suggested deadline for applications. (although applicants will be reviewed and admitted on a rolling basis after that). So if you’re interested in the program and in the process of applying, it’s time to pull one more all-nighter to put together the best portfolio you can. There are merit-based scholarships available for some 2009 students, based on your portfolio, so going the extra mile could be even more valuable.

The first year of this program promises to be especially exciting, both for the faculty and students, as we try to produce graduates who will make their mark on the interaction design scene both during and after the two-year program. We’re looking forward to a dynamic, cross-disciplinary group on both sides of the lectern, sharing ideas and helping create a new epicenter of cultural, academic, and professional invention.

Also, please note that tonight, January 14, is the latest in the MFA program’s series of public lectures, the Dot Dot Dot lectures, held each month at White Rabbit on New York’s Lower East Side. This month’s episode includes, as usual, a few of my very favorite people:

“The Urbanists,” January 14
Wed, January 14 | 6:30-8:30PM
Through an exploration of new definitions of urban environments, four lecturers will examine the time when public space is more personal, ubiquitous computing is allowing cities to have an impact on users’ experiences, and the design of services to truly be vibrant and meaningful. Speakers: Adam Greenfield, Soo-in Yang, Rachel Abrams, and Phil Kline.

I’ll be at the lecture tonight, so if you’re also there please say hi to me!

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We love sending video clips to each other. Links to YouTube videos of cute animals, spectacular accidents, inspiring speeches, nostalgic memories, and music videos fly back and forth through our email inboxes all day long. We gather around each others desks and call family members to our laptops to spend a few minutes watching a cool clip we just found.

It occurred to me that finding and sharing these videos is, or can be, an art form: creating curated mixes of many shorter video clips is, to me, analogous to the existing form of the DJ mix tape (or, in today’s digital terms, a playlist).

In fact, I love making mix tapes. And mix CDs. Making video mixes would be a natural fit for me.

I have friends who are video artists, combining original video work with found-video editing and collecting techniques. Some even use the term “VJ” to describe the curation and mixing of the videos together, more in the Christian Marclay or DJ Shadow sense than in the MTV sense.

Before digital video became as easy as it is today, and before YouTube made finding millions of source videos possible to anyone with a web browser, creating curating video mixes was solely the purview of these dedicated video artists, who had both expensive video editing equipment and mountains of space-consuming video tapes that they’d painstakingly collected over many years.

But now that the web has rendered both of those constraints moot, I’m surprised that I’ve not seen an easy way for web users to grab a bunch of video clips and create a single sharable curated playlist out of them. Sure you could download videos and use a desktop editor to string them together into a new piece (and, in fact, I’d love to see this sort of art form emerge, too), but a more democratic and reasonable way to do this would be for YouTube to allow users to create mixes on their own.

You would begin by filling out a form with a string of interesting video URLs. Click submit, and then YouTube collects those videos into a single page and a single video player, perhaps with credits or annotations appearing in a subtitle form between the clips. You could then send this new video mix as a single URL to your friends.

So here’s my first mix, minus the single unified player part. Ideally there would be single video player here, and all I would have done to create it was enter these six URLs into a form. For now, just play them one at a time, scrolling down the screen.

This space intentionally left blank!

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Using some clever detective work (about which I will say little except that Google was really all I needed), I think I’ve uncovered the master plan behind the Mad Men Alternate Twitterverse that I’ve been enjoying lately.

I could be wrong, but here’s my theory of how this all works:

First, there are a large number of participants in this operation — not a single, lone writer playing many different roles as many suspect. These people are writers, advertising professionals, bloggers, performers, and marketers. Basically clever people.

And few, if any, of them work for AMC. I suspect some mastermind (Deep Focus, it seems) was hired by AMC to manage this campaign. They subcontracted the work to a dozen or more Twitter “actors”, each playing a character from the show or from history. Some actors may be playing more than one role, but I suspect that most actors are assigned to play a single character.

These actors use Twitter in basically the same way normal Twitter users do — updating “what they are doing” every so often, responding to direct messages, having many side conversations. But always in character. The actors tweet each other and they tweet the “real world” people they’ve been following. Each actor has their own writing and Tweeting style — some stick firmly to the 1962 universe, others slip into occasional 2008 anachronisms.

They also socialize differently, with behavior that mirrors the broad range of real Twitter user behaviors. For example, @peggyolson follows nearly 1,800 people — basically following anybody who follows her. She even trolls through other characters’ follow-ees and starts following new people, just like many Twitter users do.

@David_Ogilvy, on the other hand, has over 200 followers but only follows 23 people — just as some Twitter celebrities often do, carefully controlling who they wish to interrupt them.

Lawyers and Money

So what happened last week when the project was briefly cancelled? Well, it seems that AMC’s right hand sometimes doesn’t know what it’s left hand is doing: the lawyers who hunt down copyright violators apparently didn’t know that AMC’s marketing department was behind these fake Twitter accounts. Once this was cleared up, however, Twitter was able to reactivate the accounts — pointing the way, perhaps, to Twitter founder Evan Williams’s projection that Twitter is going to try to monetize through corporate contracts.

Perhaps facilitating alternate universes will somday become Twitter’s bread and butter? Selling official account names for fictional characters across hundreds of fandoms? We shall see.

Why This Matters

In any case, I am completely impressed with this work, if only for the fact that it radically refocuses where and how digital marketing dollars can be spent while still exploiting Web 2.0 social media in a profoundly savvy way.

Think of it this way: How much would you charge to spend a few minutes every few hours (even while working at your normal job) to write snarky, chatty Tweets in the voice of a character from a really good TV show? Even if they pay you as much as $2 per tweet, then the person playing, say, Don Draper would have earned around $500 in the first few weeks of this project (he’s posted about 250 tweets overall).

So let’s do this for all 20-30 characters for a few months, and let’s throw in a supervising editor and a project manager to keep the project humming along. It seems to me that the whole project’s budget couldn’t cost more than $75-100k — a fairly typical, even low, budget for many TV-show promotional mini-sites.

That’s $100k for a PR-generating, sophisticated, far-reaching digital marketing effort that requires no HTML skill, no information architecture work, no programming or server configurations, almost none of the normal digital marketing skills we normally think of as part of this kind of work. All they need is some good writers, a good idea, and an open-minded client.

Well done.

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I just found out that @benjamin_spock is following me on Twitter. I’m getting the feeling that I’m being sucked in to an Alternate Twitterverse generated by Mad Men.

About two dozen new Twitterers have followed me over the last couple of weeks, and the majority of them have been characters from Mad Men. At first it was just @don_draper, who I first started following based on only a real-world conversational recommendation from a friend. Then @peggyolson befriended me (and for a moment I thought she was a human). Soon I had a dozen Mad Men following me, both from the Sterling Cooper agency and, soon, from their clients and their families.

But that was just the beginning. Soon I had several early-60s Madison Avenue giants following me, too, including @David_Ogilvy and @billbernbach. Clearly the Alternate Twitterverse surrounding don_draper was bigger than I’d imagined.

But now I know what’s happening. The Alternate Twitterverse of 1962 is taking over the real Twittersphere of 2008. With the appearance of Benjamin Spock, it is only a matter of time before Buckminster Fuller appears. And James Baldwin. And Glenn Gould. And Doris Day. And Lenny Bruce, Jacques Tati, Sylvia Plath, Alan Shepard, Jackie Kennedy, Bill Paley, Vladimir Nabokov.

And now I’m name dropping, so I’ll stop.

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As promised, I’m going to begin featuring some of my favorite Mad Men scenes in which Don Draper practices exquisite creative communication. Today’s episode: Lucky Strike.

One of the most thrilling parts of my job is pitching our creative ideas to clients, whether it’s when we’re trying to win new business or during the actual development of a project. In either case, several creative communication challenges arise:

1. Getting the client to understand our ideas
2. Inspiring the client to give us productive feedback on our ideas
3. Convincing the client that our ideas are good

The first two cases are simply a matter of good two-way communication: every one of our presentations is a conversation between the creative team and the client, and our ideas can and should be shaped by that conversation.

But the third challenge kind of flies in the face of the first two. It’s a sales process, where we need to stand tall and back our ideas with confidence, selling the ideas, convincing the client that our idea is correct — sometimes even if the client’s feedback pokes a few holes in our concept. Of course the best way to keep a client happy is to simply have great ideas and great follow-through on those ideas. But without confidence in your ideas, you’re risking preventing great ideas from succeeding.

All creative people question their ideas — If I thought about it more, would I come up with something better? Has this idea been thought of before? Am I totally off base? But if you can’t stand up for your own ideas, then those ideas wont be given a chance to develop and get better. Ideas are like living things, weak when born but growing stronger as they overcome challenges, learning from failures and mistakes. Without confidence to drive it along and protect it, a perfectly good idea might be nipped in the bud before it becomes truly great.

Lucky Strike

This clip exemplifies all of these challenges. A little background: Don Draper, in typical Mad Men fashion, has been, shall we say, distracted from work and has arrived at this pitch meeting completely unprepared (I don’t advocate this, but hey, that’s Don Draper). The client is the maker of Lucky Strike cigarettes.

The year is 1960, and America is just starting to learn that cigarettes are actually dangerous to your health. Many people forget that cigarettes used to be marketed as great for your health, helping you stay slim, fighting infection, and all other manner of ludicrous medical claims.

First, let me say that I love watching the dramatics of Sterling Cooper’s pitch meetings, which happen in almost every other episode of Mad Men. As it is with Behavior’s pitches, the Mad Men agency team has a functional dynamic — one person focuses on the company’s credentials, handing off the creative proposal to another. Unlike at Behavior, however, Sterling Cooper’s creative team is embroiled in a cutthroat competition as Don Draper and the young Pete Campbell. I suppose that’s life at a large agency.

In this pitch, the client is given a chance to explain their situation to the agency first. Don Draper listens intently, but when he steps up to bat he immediately strikes out. Okay, so far Draper’s lack of professionalism here is unforgivable. Pete Campbell has a backup idea. But his idea is even worse, and doesn’t take into account the client’s profound belief that cigarettes are wholesome.

Draper, however, has been mulling over his client’s concerns. His initial thinking, when he finally unleashes it, is inspired completely from what his clients told him about their product — that they are really no different from their competitors. But that’s just the start. He immediately engages the client in a conversation about his concept, looking for something meaningful to latch on to, to complete his idea.

After a rapid brainstorming exercise with the client, the idea crystallizes: It’s Toasted!

Then, critically, Draper stands behind this idea 100%. He’s even willing to argue with the client over the idea. “They’re all toasted,” says the client. Draper’s argument makes no logical sense. But he believes in it, and will argue passionately for it, because the idea is a quintessential Don Draper idea, one based on emotion instead of logic. He has transferred the conversation from one about medical health to one about happiness and assurance.

Hopefully I’ll be able to keep these copyrighted — but used here under journalistic fair-use — videos posted here. And please stay tuned for more!

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Upon a friend’s recommendation, a couple of weeks ago I started following don_draper on Twitter. More precisely, I’m following whoever is Twittering and playing the role of Don Draper, the main character and fictional creative director of a 1960’s Madison Avenue advertising agency on AMC’s critically-acclaimed series Mad Men, now in its second season.

What’s more, over the last two weeks Twitter has notified me that I am now being followed by peggyolson, bertram_cooper, and several other personages from Mad Men’s fictional advertising agency, Sterling Cooper. I assume this is all part of an AMC-blessed ARG-style internet marketing campaign, and because of that I feel a little bit snookered.

You see, I at first assumed that don_draper was some kind of individual fan’s Twitter-based writing project. Also, don_draper the Tweeter is, unfortunately, not nearly as interesting as Don Draper the character. Sucks to learn that I was pwned by marketers.

I do feel better about the fact that this campaign is limited to Twitter, however, where the characters’ chatty tweets feel like time-warped, ghostly, telepathic musings from the past, voices from characters long gone. Thankfully, too, http://www.sterlingcooperadvertising.com simply redirects to AMC’s Mad Men site instead of presenting us with some kind of anachronistic web site from 1962 (although a non-anachronistic, modern 2008 ad agency site, complete with a contemporary client roster and profiles of Sterling Cooper executives past and present would be a fun promo).

Why did I follow don_draper in the first place? Because as a creative professional — even though I work in a (slightly) different industry and even though it’s 45 years later — I find his character absolutely inspiring and thought provoking. And a good deal of my fascination revolves around his professional skills and talents.

So what is it about Don Draper? In the first episode of season 2, Draper’s boss Roger Sterling tries to explain to a colleague, “Duck” Phillips, what Don Draper is all about. Sterling tells Duck, “Imagine he knows everything you do about this business but thinks like a child.”

Indeed, Don Draper the philandering husband is certainly childish in his tendency to always indulge his immediate desires. But Sterling was talking about Draper’s ability to see advertising as an emotional appeal, based on our most basic childlike emotions of love, safety, desire, and fear. Draper’s gift is his ability to understand these emotions while being a cunning businessman and a strong leader. He finds people’s emotional buttons and presses them, whether it’s understanding the hearts of his client’s customers, tapping into his own clients’ fears, coaching (or disciplining) his team, or drawing on his own pain and heartache — or all of these at the same time — he is able to devise, over and over again, advertising creative strategies that are simultaneously calculated and heartfelt.

I’ve got a few more blog posts lined up to talk about some of Don Draper’s specific speeches and how they resonate for me as an interactive user experience designer. Stay tuned.

(UPDATE 8/26: Turns out the whole Twitter thing was an unauthorized project after all. And what’s worse, AMC stupidly shut it down. Duh. I hope they don’t shut me down after my next posts!)

(UPDATE 8/29: Looks like all the Sterling Cooper Twitterers are back up again. Yay AMC!)

UPDATE: Part 2 is now posted. Enjoy!

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