Fish Magic, 1925, Paul Klee

It is said that a fish, even a really smart one, cannot really grasp the meaning of the concept “wet” because it is the only condition they know. There is no “dry” to compare it to.

Humans, too, have a tendency to imagine that the way things are today is the way they’ve always been, or the way things will be from now on. It’s hard to imagine that perhaps we are merely living in a transitional period where our worldview is under a temporary spell, soon to revert to the way things have always been.

It has been observed, for example, that representational art — paintings and sculptures intended to mirror what we see with our eyes — has, for most of human history, been the exception not the rule. Optical representationalism has only been the dominant art form for a few centuries, and only in a few limited places: in Greece and Rome in ancient times, and more recently in Europe from about 1500 to 1900. Outside of those periods and places, most of our art has been highly-stylized or completely abstract, from cave paintings to hieroglyphics, from Islamic mosaics to Kandinsky’s paintings.

Viewing modern abstract art as a kind of degeneration from representational art, as many still do, presumes that representation is somehow the “normal” way of doing things. But history shows that this is simply not true. Representational art was and still is a kind of fashion or style, a way of thinking about artmaking that utterly infatuated mankind for a long while, but which eventually receded into the general pool of possible artistic expressions.

The 20th Century Fishbowl

Looking back on the 20th century and the new forms of media and culture that it produced, I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon: Many of the fascinating social and cultural changes transforming the media right now, in the early years of the 21st century, are little more than reversions back to the ways things used to be before the 20th century. When we talk about “revolutions” in technology and media and how they impact our culture, we should remember that a revolution is a 360-degree trajectory, bringing you back where you started.

The 1900’s saw the emergence of a dozen new forms of media and communication, from mass-market publishing to television to online social networks. Each new media’s birth was followed by decades of adaptation to that media, both social (how new media changes our day to day lives) and economic (how these media have been “monetized”). And as each media reaches maturity and settles down, it’s surprising how many of the social and economic changes turned out to be less earth-shaking than we may have thought. In many cases, we’ve come full circle.

Adopt, then Adapt

The 20th century was a period of continuous infatuation with new technologies, particularly in the media, that felt so powerful that we sometimes thought that these technologies were fundamentally transforming, or even doing irreparable damage to, our culture and our world.

And the evidence for the latter is certainly compelling: Families don’t talk at dinner tables anymore, and instead gather around the TV to watch hours of game shows. We spend hours each day driving in cars by ourselves, polluting the atmosphere. Kids glued to mobile phones in schoolrooms. Reality TV. Internet porn. Britney Spears. Have technology and media really made our lives better?

I actually think we’re not doing so bad. Many of the 20th century’s most infamous technology-enabled cultural degradations may, in fact, merely be temporary effects which inevitably trend back to “normalcy”. In the early 20th century, for example, we invented the automobile and drove around with reckless abandon. But then, after countless accidents and horrific smog, we eventually licensed drivers and regulated the vehicles and roadways. Still later, we crashed our cars reading SMS messages on the freeway, but then we made driving while text messaging illegal. We adopted, then adapted. I hate to characterize this in dialectic terms, but much of it has a distinctive thesis/antithesis/sythesis feel to it.

Some examples of 20th-century phenomena whose transformation has, I think, been exaggerated:

• Reading: Much has been said about how “nobody reads anymore”. Steve Jobs recetnly scoffed at the Amazon Kindle, saying “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore”. Despite the numbers, which I don’t doubt, I’ve always been suspicious of the claim that we are less literate than we’ve been historically or than we should be. How much people were reading, say, in 1500 or 500 BC. Or even in 1850 or 1900, before mass-market paperback books and magazines were invented. Ursula LeGuin wrote a fantastic deconstruction of this accusation in February’s Harpers magazine, in a piece called “Staying awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading” (print only –come on, Harpers!). Her gist is that most people never really read all that much anyway, and in that light people are actually reading quite a bit right now. I’ll also add that the supposed high-point of human literacy, which I gather to be the late 1800s and early 1900s, was also the point at which new information technologies exploded on the scene: telephone, phonograph, radio. If people are reading less but they are instead learning things via the spoken word in an electronic media, is that so bad? Were the books and periodicals of the fin-de-siecle any better than the electronic forms that replaced them?
• News: People complain about the increasing partisanship and corporate-bias of the news media. Most of us take for granted the idea that a news organization must be “impartial” or non-partisan. But when was this idea born? I’m not a news historian, but I’d guess that this emerged sometime around the middle of the 20th Century, in particular with the large American corporate news organizations who wanted to avoid favoritism and partisanship in order to maintain a consistent flow of advertising dollars. Before that, however, newspapers were completely dominated either by overt political interests or by their governments. Outside of the USA, too, this is still largely the case. But with the recent emergence in the US of deeply partisan mainstream news media (e.g., Fox news) and the global phenomenon of blogging and citizen/advocacy journalism, we are perhaps witnessing not the emergence of something new or unique, but rather the end of a strange and rather short (50 years?) period in the history of news and information.
• Music: I wrote about this in my last post, which is what inspired this one. Music was once something you could only enjoy as a live experience, in the presence of performing musicians. The 20th century brought us recorded music, which could be bought and sold. This gave everyone the idea that music itself could be bought and sold. With the emergence of digital file sharing, this model is being broken down again, leaving us in a place very similar to where we started, with music being un-ownable, but the experience of music enjoyment being entirely sellable.
• Food: Okay, this isn’t media, but it is definitely technology: From the 1920’s to the 1990’s, the American diet was infatuated with technologically-processed food. Michael Pollen calls this “nutritionism”, a dietary theory that values the chemical composition of food products over the integral food-ness of them, where a loaf of white bread with all the nutrients bleached out of it and then re-introduced through chemical “enrichment” is somehow better than eating a loaf of whole grain bread. The same adopt-then-adapt pattern is here: Humans become so enamored with food technologies — canning, preservatives, refrigeration, and nutritionism — that our diet turns away, for the first time in a million years, from real food. After a few generations of this, and witnessing the resulting horrific health effects, we eventually began to turn away from these foods. Supermarkets now have enormous fresh fruit and vegetable sections in them, incuding organic foods. But when I was a kid in the 1970’s, a trip to the supermarket was like going to a bomb shelter — canned, processed, and frozen foods were pretty much all you could get, because that’s what people wanted. The more the food was abstracted from nature into powders, spreads, flakes, and puffs, the more people desired it — because they perceived it as futuristic, healthy, and convenient. Once we started to realize that the old ways actually had value, when the novelty of snow-white bread and powdered milk wore off, we began to ask for regular food again.

Once I started seeing things this way, I’ve noticed the pattern everywhere: A 20th-century phenomenon is presumed to be eternal, and then its decline is lamented as if it were the end of civilization itself. I learned that nobody plays bridge anymore — but I learned, also, that contract bridge wasn’t even invented in 1925, and had a run of massive popularity for only a few decades before falling into decline by the late 1960s.

Same as it Ever Was?

My whole idea here is admittedly an optimistic argument (and a slightly conservative one, I confess) in which humanity learns valuable lessons by looking toward our past, and where the most troubling social and cultural trends of the 20th century turn out to be merely side-effects of our slow adaptation to rapidly-emerging technologies.

But the opposite is certainly possible: Humanity could continue trending towards technology-enabled illiteracy, junk food-induced decrepitude, social isolation, and retarded media completely controlled by corporate conglomerates. We could quite easily end up with Idiocracy. I could be completely wrong.

Yes, changes occur. Humanity’s greatest social and technological inventions — the wheel, writing, democracy and human rights, the printing press and the Internet — surely have fundamentally transformed the human experience. Some have even speculated that these technologies have brought about physiological changes to our brains, enabling us to use our minds in ways that our ancient ancestors simply could not (see Julian Jaynes and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind). This may be true (I am skeptical), but I think in the case of most of the 20th century’s most interesting transformations, despite the constant seemingly earth-shattering changes, we are what we are and we will tend to adapt the technology to us, not the other way around.

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I’m not going to say much about Kindle — as an iPhone owner, I find both the device and the service colossally dumb.

But the breathless excitement over the supposed “death of the book” is even more preposterous than Amazon’s little white elephant, especially to book lovers like my wife and me. For us, books, periodicals, and printed matter of all sorts comprise, quite literally, the very structure of both our intellectual and physical worlds. Books surround us. Our loft is subdivided into rooms using bookshelves. Every surface has a stack of hardbacks, paperbacks, and magazines on it. We both grew up surrounded by the printed word — looking at them, feeling them, smelling them — and we intend for our family to continue in that tradition.

Books are the building blocks of libraries, and our libraries reflect who we are. John Gruber’s critique of Kindle as a profound rip-off for true book lovers is spot on:

So the Kindle proposition is this: You pay for downloadable books that can’t be printed, can’t be shared, and can’t be displayed on any device other than Amazon’s own $400 reader — and whether they’re readable at all in the future is solely at Amazon’s discretion. That’s no way to build a library.

Here’s a far better idea, one that book lovers who also happen to be technophiles would love: Bundle print and digital copies of books together for the same price, perhaps as a very small cost increase (say 5%) to the basic print price. You can think of it as a free digital backup copy, or as a digital reference edition. Other advantages include:

• Scholars, journalists, and reviewers can use the digital copy for searches, citations, quotations, and literary analysis.
• References to external sources can be clickable URLs.
• Since so many digital book owners print them out, the bundling will inevitably save a few trees.
• Having a digital copy precludes the need to print an index in the physical book. There’s no need to even construct one in the first place — let users simply search it digitally.
• While I still think DRM is evil, it wouldn’t be quite so onerous as long as a physical copy was in my permanent posession.

John Gruber includes this fabulous Emerson quote in his review:

If you would know how a man treats his wife and his children, see how he treats his books.

Many of the core lifestyle and business ideas behind Kindle are, frankly, an affront to what I love about books. What is most surprising is seeing Amazon — of all companies! — treating book lovers in this way. This is not innovative thinking at all.

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One basic assumption of good experience design is that people fundamentally don’t like change. They can’t deal with it, it’s too risky, and changes will all too often lead to failures.

Indeed, when confronted with the prospect of change, both designers and users shy away, falling back to the tools and techniques they’re accustomed to and passing up on opportunities for improvement, progress, and innovation. But the human mind’s capacity to adapt to change, sometimes rapidly and seamlessly, can be astonishing.

In 1896, a scientist named George M. Stratton, showing an ingenuity that must have seemed like madness at the time, conducted a fascinating experiment in visual perception with himself as the subject. He constructed a pair of goggles with special lenses that inverted his view of the world by 180 degrees, causing him to see everything upside down, as if he were standing on his head, continuously. He wore the goggles for many days, never once opening his eyes without wearing them (he would shower with his eyes closed, for example).

The experiment has been repeated many times, and in every case the results are nearly the same (this description is from The Phenomenology of Space by Shannon Vallor):

Day 1: The subject who puts on inversion goggles initially reports the visual spectacle is inverted, and that the things she sees look ‘unreal’. Motor actions (such as reaching for objects) are disrupted and need to be consciously corrected to be successful.

Day 2: The subject begins to report that things are no longer looking inverted, but her body seems ‘upside down’.

Day 3-5: The body begins to ‘right itself’, particularly when the subject is active. Objects increasingly take on the ‘look of reality’. By the fifth day, motor actions are consistently successful without the need for conscious attention or correction. The time it takes for this process of ‘normalization’ to occur is highly variable, and varies inversely with the subject’s activity level in her environment. When the glasses are removed, objects do not suddenly look inverted, but they look ‘unreal’ again, and motor success is once again impeded.

In other words, at some point things suddenly flip and everything works. Our brains are apparently able to thoroughly adapt to the absolutely bizarre predicament of having ones eyeballs spun upside-down, and apparently this adaptation occurs pretty quickly.

Switching (to Mac) is Flipping

I recently switched from Windows to Mac. And my experience is startlingly close to the visceral nature of the inversion-goggles flip. When I switched, I was immediately completely disoriented by the OS’s peculiar details. I would frequently move my mouse to the wrong part of the screen for the feature I wanted, or I’d stare at the screen for several seconds at a time wondering where I would find a feature that actually did not exist. And I would constantly type the wrong keyboard combinations for cutting and pasting.

But at some point within the first two weeks of using the Mac almost exclusively (I went cold turkey on Windows), suddenly everything just seemed to click. I was doing everything the Mac way. I flipped. In fact, the next time I found myself using Windows (on the Mac!) everything seemed weird again. I was still in my new flip mode, so now the old status quo was alien.

This phenomenon must be fairly common for any kind of highly-immersive user experience: the learning curve begins to rise very steeply slowly, but then has a sudden and radical flattening out ascent where mastery of the new paradigm occurs nearly instantly (and yes, I’ll argue that operating systems are immersive experiences to the extent that most of today’s white-collar professionals spend pretty much their entire days using them).

For me as a user, this means that I don’t need to fear major changes in my working environment. They might even be fun.

As a designer, however, I’m not sure what this means. Any guesses?

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This book, “The Manual: How to Have a Number One Hit the Easy Way” (The cover actually drops the word “Hit”, making an lovely double entendre), changed my life. It was written by Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty (aka The Timelords, aka The KLF) back in 1988, hot on the heels of their doing precisely what the title says: producing a number one hit in the UK, a cheeky little song called Doctorin’ the Tardis.

Before I go any further, if you are the person I lent this book to years ago, please return it to me!

There, that’s out of the way. Now, as for the book, it’s a sweeping and cynical look at the recording industry, and on the surface it’s quite literally exactly what the title says: a step-by-step guide to writing, producing, recording, and releasing a hit song that will reach Number One on the UK’s Top of the Pops. But beneath all of that, the book is a no-nonsense analysis of the nature of creativity itself in a world where almost everything creative is also in some way commercial. “The Manual” came to me today after reading Liz Danzico’s own hand-wringing over being inspired by the work of others.

My favorite parts deal directly with this question, with the origins of originality and the ethics of allowing yourself to be steeped in influence and inspiration.

Every Number One song ever written is only made up from bits from other songs. There is no lost chord. No changes untried. No extra notes to the scale or hidden beats to the bar. There is no point in searching for originality. In the past, most writers of songs spent months in their lonely rooms strumming their guitars or bands in rehearsals have ground their way through endless riffs before arriving at the song that takes them to the very top. Of course, most of them would be mortally upset to be told that all they were doing was leaving it to chance before they stumbled across the tried and tested. They have to believe it is through this sojourn they arrive at the grail; the great and original song that the world will be unable to resist.

So why don’t all songs sound the same? Why are some artists great, write dozens of classics that move you to tears, say it like it’s never been said before, make you laugh, dance, blow your mind, fall in love, take to the streets and riot? Well, it’s because although the chords, notes, harmonies, beats and words have all been used before their own soul shines through; their personality demands attention. This doesn’t just come via the great vocalist or virtuoso instrumentalist. The Techno sound of Detroit, the most totally linear programmed music ever, lacking any human musicianship in its execution reeks of sweat, sex and desire. The creators of that music just press a few buttons and out comes - a million years of pain and lust.

I couldn’t agree more. Sure it sounds incredibly cynical, but please also note the deep sense of hope and optimism in the artist’s ability to produce original work despite the fact that we are all drowning in influences. We do not need to suffer (and suffer is the right word) from Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence if we simply have faith in our own voices.
In fact, this anxiety about producing work free from the influence of other artists and styles actually suffocates creativity. “The Manual” goes on to say:

Creators of music who desperately search originality usually end up with music that has none because no room for their spirit has been left to get through. The complete history of the blues is based on one chord structure, hundreds of thousands of songs using the same three basic chords in the same pattern. Through this seemingly rigid formula has come some of the twentieth century’s greatest music.

I love this book (and I wish I had my copy back!). You should love it too. And since it’s no longer available in print, and since “KLF” stands for “Kopyright Liberation Front”, I have posted the full plaintext of the book below the jump for your reading enjoyment. Enjoy! MORE…

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I suppose it’s as good a time as any to admit that I’m never going to read any Harry Potter books.

I’ve got nothing against the series, actually. I’m sure they’re fine books and I’m glad so many kids, and many adults, enjoy reading them. It’s just that I can’t imagine actually sitting down to read all seven books when there are so many other books I’ve been kicking myself to read for years, books of all sorts ranging from fiction classics to history to current tech. My backlog of “must reads” is hundreds of books long — do I really want to bump 7 rather large children’s books to the top of that list? I don’t think so.

Even when I’m an old man, I am certain that I’ll still have hundreds of books to read that will be more important to me than Harry Potter. Comrade Greenfield is in the same boat, telling the world on NPR that he, too, will never be interested in Pottermania.

Same, by the way, goes for the Potter movies. I saw the first one on cable and thought it was pretty dumb and even rather poorly made. The broom-riding sequences were hamfisted and dull when compared to similar scenes in Miyazaki’s delightful Kiki’s Delivery Service, made over a decade earlier. Anyway, I’ve got plenty of other films to see, mostly old but the occasional new blockbuster — I will, for example, see The Golden Compass.

Otherwise I am fully content to miss the boat on the whole Potter thing, and occasionally feel smug that all I needed to do was randomly browse my way to Wikipedia’s “List of deaths in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” page to learn, generally, everything one needs to know to be au courant with Potter lore.

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The word “experience” comes from the Latin word “experīrī”, or to try.

It’s strange, then, that in modern English the two words, “experience” and “try”, have such different meanings: when we try something we tend to take a sip or a nibble, get our toes wet, or go for a test drive around the block. But when we experience something, we allow it to overtake and engulf us, we admit it fully into our spaces, our lives. A deeper and more lasting understanding is achieved, something fundamentally different than what we get from merely trying something.

The purpose of user experience design, or UXD, is to understand that user behavior can be seen as part of a holistic experiential model instead of as a shallow, temporary hit-and-run encounter. In the domain of user experience, then, we must not mistake trying something for experiencing it.

The most revolutionary products, the things you “never knew you wanted but can’t live without”, only catch on when people are able to move quickly from trying to experiencing.

Some of the ramifications of this distinction include:

Product Reviewing: When testing a new product to see what it’s all about, consider adopting it thoroughly instead of just tinkering around with it. As you explore the product, ask yourself if you are using it like someone who actually bought it with the intention of using it, or if you are merely sweeping through it for a quick overview. At a wine tasting you aren’t supposed to swallow the stuff, but sometimes if you want to understand what it’s really all about you simply have to drink the Kool Aid.

Restaurant reviewers will visit the same establishment five or six times, on different days of the week and at different times of the day. When exploring a new product, consider taking the same approach — how differently would you use it on a busy day versus a slow day, at home versus at work, in a good mood or in a bad mood?

Trying new Social Apps: This is particularly important with social apps, where this phenomenon is exponentially true. You cannot experience a social app unless you are part of a group of people who are all experiencing it together. You cannot, for example, understand what Twitter really is until 20+ people (people who you actually care about) are connected to you as friends and all 20+ of you are using Twitter in your own idiosyncratic ways. A social networking app does not even really exist until there are groups of users trying it out.

Usability Testing: The purpose of usability testing is to simulate the planned user experience as closely as possible. By being conscious of the fact that some experiences involve long commitments and/or large numbers of participants, a usability test may need to be structured very differently than they are today. A prototype for testing may need to be pre-populated with legacy cruft and clutter, as if the test subject had been using it for years. And again, for social apps, this is even more pronounced: Public Betas are, in fact, the best way we currently have to test social apps, but maybe someone will devise a way of simulating the cruft and clutter by simulating real people in a network where few real people actually exist.

Product (or Website!) Design: Allow your users to rapidly transition from trying your product to experiencing it, by making the initial stages of the interaction with the product as seductive and addictive as possible. Apple’s “out of the box” seduction is the gold standard for this, but the tradition goes back to the simpler arts: James Bond movies always open with a high-voltage action sequence. And the most basic rule of journalism is to catch the reader’s attention in the first paragraph.

In Dont Make Me Think, Steve Krug posits that the first question a web site should answer for a user is “what is this?” It’s surprising how many sites fail utterly at this. If your web page cannot tell a user immediately what the hell it is, why it’s useful, etc., you’re already putting up a major obstacle between trying and experiencing. Krug’s book, in fact, can easily be seen as a concise manual on how to smooth the path from try to experience.

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My IA Summit presentation was an experiment in what is a new presentation style for me. I have long admired the rapid-fire presentation style of Lawrence Lessig (aka the “Lessig method“) and in particular the example of Dick Hardt’s keynote at Identity 2.0. Also, I’ve always wanted to achieve the same aesthetic and pedagogical dazzle that my freshman art history teacher managed to lay down every Friday morning at 9:30 to a room full of overworked and/or hung-over art students.

I knew from the start that I would have a lot of slides – that was part of my basic concept, to show style in action across a broad variety of professional disciplines, as a quick barrage of images to drive home the point. In most of my day-to-day business or academic presentations, “1-minute-per-slide” is a pretty good rule of thumb, but for this presentation I ended up with 239 slides to show in 40 minutes. That’s one slide every ten seconds!

I was shocked that it actually worked – quite frankly I was bracing myself for a train wreck. The biggest reason for my surprise is that although I worked extraordinarily hard on the talk, I didn’t manage to get even one chance to rehearse it to see if it even came remotely close to fitting in at under 40 minutes. But in the end, thanks only I suppose to my intuition about my speaking skills, I managed to get to the final slide with five minutes to spare and without losing too much momentum along the way, even as I had to disappointingly breeze through a couple of segments.

About the Topic

After doing all the research and all the thinking, after diving so deeply into the subject of style, I still feel there’s a LOT to say about it. In fact, I feel like my 239 slides barely scratched the surface. Due to time constraints, I glossed over my discussion of three fascinating topics:

Functionalist Modernism

The first was a more in-depth discussion – a refutation, in fact – of what I call “functionalist modernism”. I touched on it briefly with one example, showing that Charles and Ray Eames were not at all the form-follows-function minimalists contemporary design catalogues would have us believe, but that, rather, they loved ornament, kitsch, bric-a-brac, patterns, and all of the decorative crimes that the true modernist eschews. In other words, they were immersed in an ocean of style.

But my primary target was Le Corbusier, an icon of functionalist modernism whose posture as a scientifically-based designer was, in fact, a self-deceptive sham – in much the same way that I think that much of today’s “lab coat” information architecture (and indeed a certain subset of the broader design world) is, sadly, a self-deceptive sham in which style exists but is deliberately obscured.

I also wanted to heap more praise on Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness, a book that I think not only puts the lie to so-called functionalist modernism, but exposes the deeply poetic and humane nature of good architecture – a way of thinking about architecture that, I think, has yet to be explored adequately in the world of information architecture (a connection that, I think, Donald Norman attempted to make in his under-appreciated Emotional Design).

Abductive Reasoning

The second topic I had to skip over was my discussion of “adbductive reasononing”, a type of semi-logical thinking that envisions not what is (as with inductive and deductive reasoning) but what might be or what could be, a type of thinking more common among artists and designers. I wanted to connect this with the concept of “design thinking”, a methodology that is the inverse of the business-based risk-averse process of building products to precisely fill carefully-measured needs… but after reading Dan Saffer’s lament on the topic, I’m reluctant to use that term any more (a post on this is to come) so in a way I’m glad I didn’t go into it too much.

Christopher Alexander’s Design Patterns

Finally, I sadly had to skip over my take on Christopher Alexander’s concept of design patterns. Alexander’s name is dropped frequently these days, especially in the interaction design field, but I see his work very differently than I think most people are currently interpreting it. I consider Alexander’s design patterns to be highly idiosyncratric, deeply creative, overtly political, a wee bit spiritual, and ultimately poetic in nature – which is to say that they are not at all the scientifically-based proven best practices they are too-often presented as. I would even say that Alexander was advocating a certain style of architectural theory.

For Future Development

After all the research and writing, my appetite for this topic is only just beginning. I’m not even entirely sure if the concept of “style” covers the full breadth of what I am seeing here – perhaps it’s more about aesthetics or the re-emergence of the formal and decorative, even the idiosyncratic and poetic, as key drivers of good design.

I have uncovered surprising connections between truly fascinating subjects. I’ve found remarkable authors and designers whose work I was previously unfamiliar with (who on earth is Mr. Keedy and how did he get to be so clever?). It’s clear to me that there is an incredible amount of additional material here, and a lot more for me to think about and say. I would love a chance to continue developing this topic, whether as a longer presentation, more formal articles, or even, heavens, a book.

In the Sausage Factory

If you can stomach it, I wanted to share a little insight into the development of my presentation (or, if you will, the magnitude of my procrastination).

I was working on the speech and the slideshow all night right up to my Friday morning flight, on the plane, off and on throughout the conference, and all night long leading right into my Monday morning session. While in Vegas, however, I did manage to squeeze in a stunning dinner at Bouchon, a drive-in showing of 300 with a few six packs and some excellent soul food, and, on the final night before speaking, a rapid-series of thematic drinks at Quark’s Bar at the Star Trek Experience (including a massive “Warp Core Breach”).

Yes, that’s right, I had too many drinks and absolutely no sleep in the 24 hours before speaking. While the drinking didn’t help any, I do kind of thrive in no-sleep circumstances, actually, as long as a quart of coffee is consumed immediately prior to the moment when top-performance is required (this does not, however, apply to athletic performance, however).

Lou Dorfsman, the great advertising and design luminary, once told my partner Jeff Piazza that his secret to giving a great presentation was to gulp down a shot of Scotch immediately before speaking. I have immense respect for that, I really do, but I guess I’m just made of somewhat different stuff than Mr. Dorfsman.

My work process can be divided into five very distinct phases:

1. Topic Generation (two weeks of occasional work): The topic and the presentation format came to me in the most clichéd of contexts – in the shower. I was a last-minute addition to the Summit schedule after another speaker had to withdraw, so I was already a month or two behind when I was asked to participate (and the fact that I was permitted to skip the judging process only put more pressure on me to do a kick-ass presentation). It took about two weeks from having the initial ten-word concept before I got to the point where I could write a coherent three paragraphs about the topic, and by that point it was too late to get my description into any of the printed materials for the conference.
2. Idea Collection/Research (four weeks of occasional work): Idly and intermittently thumbing through my bookshelf, browsing the web, bookmarking links, jotting down random thoughts in my sketchbook, and writing jumbled blog drafts. At no point in this timeframe did I have an overall outline of the final presentation – I was letting the research and my own unpredictable inspirations shape my thinking.
3. Formal Preparation (five semi-intense evenings): This is where I picked up a few new books and consumed them rapidly, and where I formed the bulk of the overarching concept. During this time I mostly focused on switching back and forth between gathering raw materials (copying or transcribing text snippets into my outline, structuring the outline, and collecting/scanning/photographing images for use in the PowerPoint show) and actually writing my original commentary. I had the final outline 50% done in this timeframe, and had probably written down about 30% of the actual words I wanted to say, but only about 10 slides were actually in the PowerPoint deck at this point. It’s three days before showtime.
4. Frenzy! (four intense days and nights): This was the most schizophrenic part. I was quite literally doing a little of everything during the final four days. I would spend an hour fine-tuning individual slides, aligning images and normalizing fonts, only to spend the next hour completely re-ordering the thematic flow of the whole presentation and writing the final script. Intense and completely random alternation between micro and macro.
5. Purge! (2-3 hours): Only in the final hours before showtime did I actually throw in the towel on some sections of the presentation that I knew I would not be able to discuss adequately. I deleted about 10 pages of what would ultimately be a 33-page script, and maybe 50 slides to bring the total PowerPoint page count to 239. I’ve saved all the deleted material, so they’ll probably come up again in a longer-format version of this topic.

I’m very happy to note that my process was entirely consistent with the basic premise of my talk: I had my final delivery style decided very early on, my fundamental outline was never really final until nearly the last minute, and in any event it didn’t completely dictate the content anyway but rather the concept was as much influenced by the content itself – in the same way, I think, that a product’s style shapes that product’s basic premise as much as the premise sets the framework for the product’s ultimate style.

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It’s been a little less than a week since my IA Summit presentation. To my great surprise, it went really well. I mean really well. In the next day or so I will be posting a summary of my experiences preparing and discussing my topic, which was, in a word, style.

Many people came to me after my presentation asking me not only to post the slides themselves, but also to post the reading list since I did discuss a lot of books and sites that deeply influenced my thinking. So here’s all the stuff:

Slideshow

• Slideshow as PDF (19mb PDF)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 1 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 2 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 3 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 4 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 5 of 5)

Reading List

These readings are in roughly the same pedagogical sequence that the concepts appeared in my presentation. Note that not all of these were actually cited in the talk, but I did have all of them either at hand or in mind as I wrote.

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The cover of Bill Moggridge’s excellent Designing Interactions features a sketch/diagram that looks intriguing at first glance. But then when you actually try to figure out what it means, you’re stumped. I tried, but I couldn’t even scratch the surface.

Inside the book itself, we learn that the diagram is based on sketches that Bill Verplank drew while simultaneously discussing some of his thoughts about interaction design — it is what I call a “performative diagram”, a diagram that is created as an integral part of a real-time performance or presentation. After reading the chapter, we learn that the inner circle’s three icons represent three different basic ideas about what a computer is (an intelligent person, a useful tool, a expressive medium) while the other icons (life, vehicle, fashion) are metaphors or examples for how each notion manifests itself in an interaction design.

These are interesting concepts, to be sure. But that diagram really doesn’t “say” what the words say at all, especially when viewed all by itself and out of the context of Verplank’s voice, his gestures, and his actual words.

Diagrams are usually intended to take difficult concepts and make them easier to understand, but this diagram doesn’t exactly do that. Instead, it is an artifact of an explanatory process, the fossilized remains of a performative pedagogical technique combining spoken words and real-time performative gesturing and drawing. MORE…

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Today (amazingly the 410th anniversary of the deaths of both Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare) I’ve finished reading the classic Don Quixote Parts I and II. What an unforgettable journey, and what an eye-opener!

A four hundred year old book (Parts I and II were published in 1605 and 1615) that in many ways paints a character — two characters, in fact — every bit as lifelike and nuanced as anything by novelists who would come hundreds of years later. Insights into the human psyche that presage our modern understanding of the mind. Historical perspectives on Europe, Spain, and even North Africa in the century after the expulsion of the Moors from Europe. And storytelling techniques that seem nearly postmodern. MORE…

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