It’s hard to understate the pride I felt on behalf of my colleagues at Behavior when I read these words in Friday’s New York Times:

The Museum of Modern Art’s elegantly plain exhibition of Georges Seurat’s drawings begins with an unexpectedly extraordinary moment of computerized art viewing. Seurat’s four surviving notebooks have been converted to electronic versions that — with a touch of a finger — visitors can flip through, page by digital page, from cover to dog-eared cover. (The real notebooks can also be seen under glass nearby.)

Facsimiles they may be, but they instantly communicate the show’s intent, which is to clarify the way the silent, classical remove of Seurat’s impeccable, stylized paintings was distilled from an active, socially aware engagement with the world that registered most fully in his drawings.

If you haven’t guessed already, the touch-screen interfaces in question were designed and built by my studio mates at Behavior, both as kiosk installations in the MoMA exhibition gallery and viewable on the web as a gorgeous online exhibition.

Roberta Smith of the Times is one of the the most important art critics around. So when the opening sentence of Smith’s review of Georges Seurat: The Drawings focuses so enthusiastically on the interactive kiosk that my colleagues put together these past few months, it’s more than just praise for Georges Seurat and for the great curation and leadership by the team at MoMA. It’s also praise for Behavior.

Touch Screens in the Age of the iPhone

Most of the Behavior folks attended the exhibition’s lavish opening festivities last week, and we all got a chance to watch dozens of very fancy people interacting with the twin touch-screen kiosks. It was such a joy to watch the gallery-goers flip through the pages with looks of, I swear, genuine delight on their faces. No lie: I definitely heard “ooohs” and “aaahs”.

As with any usability test situation, of course, there were also the occasional moments where a user would try to do something we didn’t think of. Of particular interest was the fairly common attempt by users to treat the traditional touch screens as if they were iPhone-style multi-touch screens. People expected to be able to smoothly zoom in by spreading two fingers apart as they can on the iPhone. As with so much of what Apple does, the bar has apparently been raised in unexpected new places in the interactive landscape.

What About the Art?

Oh, and the show is absolutely luminous. I hope you check out the web site, of course, but if you enjoy art at all you must see the show in person. The sketchbooks are just a tiny piece of the exhibit. The rest of the show, and the online exhibition, includes drawings and paintings, historical conservation information, and of course the sketchbooks.

The exhibition is getting rave reviews from many other sources as well, and deservedly so. We’ve all seen Seurat’s famous pointillist paintings, especially the revolutionary A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. But Seurat’s drawings reveal the intense thinking and talent that went into his painterly work.

The drawings excel in two areas simultaneously: Form and light. In a vivid metaphorical image conjured up by my wife Peggy (seen above), some drawings suggest that 19th century Paris would be transparent or even invisible if not for the industrial-era soot filling the air and collecting on any and all solid objects and forms. The charcoal on the page reflects the density of the matter in the space.

And yet other drawings emphasize light itself, with the space articulated only by where the light exists and where it does not — where traditional drawing marks like contour lines are banished. The relationship between this thinking and the daguerrotype photography of the time is hard to dispute.

The best works attack form and light at the same time, and it’s easy to see how Seurat’s eschewing of contour and lines — and embrace of volume and light — leads directly to La Grande Jatte, even without the extraordinary discoveries in color he is most famous for.

La Grande Jatte was painted when Seurat was just 26. He would die five years later, at 31. It’s staggering to imagine what he would have gone on to accomplish had he lived into the age of Matisse (born the same year as Seurat), Kandinsky, and Picasso.

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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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Yours truly, art student at Cooper Union in 1993.

I’ve been in some interesting discussions lately about “design thinking“, in particular with respect to the question of education: How are business and design educations relevant to the management of a design-centric business?

One of my core objections to the “d-school” concept is that most of the curricula emphatically don’t teach design skills. Instead, they teach “design thinking”, which is said to be a way of approaching problem solving that is inherently different from, I suppose, business thinking.

Well, like a fish who doesn’t know that he is wet, I have no idea what it is like to not be a design thinker. And I suppose that, conversely, a lot of people who talk about design thinking have no idea what designers are actually taught. Are we really taught different skills than our MBA counterparts? Is there really something unique about what designers are taught, about how we think?

To answer those questions, I thought it would be useful to simply talk about what I learned in art school. I’m not talking about the specific skills and crafts — I learned how to cast acrylic resin, how to weld steel, how to do 3D modeling, how to paint in fresco, and how to etch a circuit board — although I do strongly believe that hands-on design experience is crucial to being a good design leader.

Instead, I am talking about the broader and more resonant skills I’ve learned that have helped me both as a designer and as a business person.

This is meant to be a dialogue. If you went to art school, did you learn these kind of things? More importantly, if you didn’t go to art school, did you not learn these things?

Without further ado: In art school, I learned:

• How to champion and defend my ideas.
• How to distinguish between personal and professional critique.
• How to respectfully and constructively critique my peers. How to attack the ideas of my colleagues and still have drinks with them that same night (and maybe even sleep with them — hey, it is art school)
• How to test drive a hundred different ideas through sketching, cobbling, and envisioning them, before finally settling on which one to go ahead and build.
• How to tell when I am done a project that could just as easily be improved endlessly.
• How to tell when an idea that is precious to me is actually holding me back. And then to feel good about throwing it away.
• How to have the confidence to present my ideas in public without fearing that they will be stolen. And how to take it in stride when they inevitably are.
• How to distinguish between taste, technical skill, and empirical efficiency.
• How to detect bullshit, and to avoid generating it myself (note that not all art school grads learn this).
• How to go the extra mile to make something high-quality.
• How to recognize talent in my peers.
• How to collaborate with my colleagues effectively to reach a common goal.
• How to be deeply competitive without being a dick.
• How to make something new just for the sake of being new.
• How to build off of, and give credit to, the ideas of my predecessors both contemporary and in history.
• How to save ideas that I’m not ready for and keep them for future use (usually in sketchbooks).
• How to start all over again from the beginning.
• How to teach all of the above.

I’m sure I could go on. Let’s just say that I definitely apply a lot of these lessons in my job every day, both in my own designs and in the way I work with my teams. Does this make me a design thinker?

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Al Gore and Iron Eyes Cody. Go check out the original TV ads: Canoe and Horseback

Whenever I am about to do something wasteful, like throwing a plastic bottle in the trash or turning the air conditioner on when it’s 74 degrees, my wife says these words to me: “Think of Al Gore.”

The phrase, like the Christian “WWJD?” (”What would Jesus do?”), makes you look at your own actions through the eyes of someone who is working tirelessly to make the world better. The perspective forces you to make a choice. Now I ask this question to myself, too. Al Gore has become a living reminder to us all that we should constantly think about the big picture, about how our actions and decisions contribute to climate change one way or the other.

In fact, in my own mind I take my wife’s advice a little further, making it into a more vivid and visual connection. You see, despite his 2007 triumphs (Oscar and Nobel), Al Gore is still, to me, a tragic figure, not just because of his 2000 election loss, but because of the sheer magnitude of the challenge he faces in fighting environmental catastrophe. Whenever I “think of Al Gore”, it’s hard for me not to imagine him shedding a tear for my careless or lazy behavior. It invariably makes me think of the classic 1970’s TV public service announcement featuring a Native American canoeing and riding his horse through a modern and thoroughly polluted America, having trash thrown at him from a speeding car, and ending with him shedding a single gut-wrenching tear at the sheer monstrosity and callousness of the American people.

Watching those ads in the 1970s, and seeing Al Gore today, I think about how being environmentally responsible isn’t difficult so much as it merely not being a lazy brutal bastard. You don’t have to spend every day on a soapbox spreading the word and rallying your neighbors to political action — Al Gore, and hundreds of thousands of others like him, are doing that for us already. Back in the 1970’s, it was barely even uncool to throw garbage out of your car window, much less illegal. But because of the pressure against such behavior, both social and legislative, tolerance for such barbarism is plummeting.

Doing the right thing is quite often simply a matter of not doing the wrong thing. Or to put it more simply, it usually simply means “Don’t be a dick.”

(I also suspect that many people have a visceral negative reaction to Al Gore specifically because he makes them feel like dicks for their irresponsible behavior.)

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This is the least humiliating frame from my whole clip.

I’ve recently started a swimming training program so I can competently complete my weakest part of the trifecta: Running, biking, and swimming. Hopefully by next summer I will be ready for my goal, to compete in the New York City Triathlon.

An interesting aspect of this swim class is the use of technology. In our very first meeting, the coach shot underwater videos of each student crossing the pool, capturing all of our flailing arms and gasping breaths. He then wrote up a critique of each student’s swimming technique and gave a CD with all of the videos and critiques to each of us, giving us all a powerful insight into what we are doing right and wrong in the water. It’s astonishing how many things I can instantly see that I need to improve, especially when I watch my own video next to that of, say, Olympian Ian Thorpe.

What’s great about this is how incredibly low-fi and accessible the whole deal was. You would think that underwater cameras as a training tool would be reserved only for competitive swimmers at the top of their game. But there I am! The video camera looked like a regular consumer model attached to a long pole with some kind of jerry-rigged periscope involved, and immersed in the water. The coach shot by simply walking along the edge of the pool and following each of us as we swam across. And because it’s digital, it was easy for him to bring 20 copies of the videos on CD-ROM to the next class a week later.

He’ll be recording us a few more times over the 12-week course, so we can track our improvement. I can’t tell you how much I look forward to the next taping. I swear, I dream about swimming now.

This blog post has been brought to you by “Our Swimmer”, by Wire:

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I’ve always wanted to believe that rational scientific thought and creative/artistic thinking are not just incompatible, but that they are in fact closely linked. Both in my personal art projects and in my professional work as an interaction designer, artistry and science have always gone hand in hand. My peers and friends generally share this view, too, with most of the people I know having a nearly-equal level of interest in and understanding of both the sciences and the arts.

As a result of my prejudice, I typically think of designers and artists as people who are also deeply interested in science and technology. And I generally assume that artists and designers are naturally resistant to irrational or faith-based thinking.

So in reading about the recently-opened Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky — where visitors are shown absurd dioramas illustrating dinosaurs living side-by-side with humans in the Garden of Eden 6,000 years ago — I was struck by the New York Times’ gallery of photographs of the people who actually built the exhibits.

Cast your eyes over to the right and you will see earnest young women and men who appear to be painting, sculpting, and architecting scientific displays. They look like the kinds of researchers you might see working on a university-sponsored archaeological dig, or like paleontologists assembling fossils in a Natural History museum exhibit. They look like smart and talented people. Which they almost certainly are when it comes to their artistic skills.

There’s just one problem: They are all idiot creationists.

It’s painful to be reminded in such a stark way that designers and artists — and creative people in general — have long been perceived by the general public as irrational fuzzy-thinkers with a deep-rooted hostility towards science and technology. This is, in fact, the dominant stereotype, and it sucks to be reminded how much the stereotype is rooted in truth. Much like the stereotypical hippies protesting modernity by sculpting and painting at a 1960’s artist colony, these fresh-faced young creationist artisans combine genuine artistic talent with a profound level of ignorance or even hostility when it comes to science.

My last post discussed the intersection of fascism and artistic skill. While I am not equating Christian fundamentalism with fascism, they do share a devotion to irrational cultish thinking even as they attract creative talent to their ranks. The paradox is similar — how is it that artistic talent can co-exist with such irrational thinking?

Creativity is for Dummies

Futurist thinker Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and author of the excellent book “How Buildings Learn” has for many years been collaborating with Danny Hillis on a project called The Clock of the Long Now, which is described as “a monument scale, multi-millennial, all mechanical clock as an icon to long term thinking”. When I had a chance to ask Brand if he thought that the clock was “art”, he emphatically denied it, expressing a palpable disgust for the very idea. I got the feeling that, to Brand, the term “art” degraded his project by equating it with what many perceive to be emotional/spiritual/expressive/touchy-feely things like sculpture, drawing, and painting. He sees himself as a rationalist, opposed to artsy-fartsy thinking.

I was disappointed that Brand would think this way. To me it’s just as bad when artists disavow the sciences as it is when scientific thinkers disavow the arts. To my thinking, Brand is an artist to the bone and I wish he would admit it instead of dumbly reinforcing the artificial wall between art and science.

There is a divide in this world, but it is between irrational and rational thinking, not between art and science.

Commercial Creativity

Interestingly, conservatives who work in creative fields or who have an interest in the arts have long resented this stereotype. I’ve personally known Christian fundamentalist commercial artists who felt completely alienated from their professional peers because of their beliefs. Religious conservatives resent Hollywood for its pervasive secular and atheist thought, and they have in recent years been producing show-business multimedia productions that rival Hollywood’s in size, artistry, and technical skill (see Alexandra Pelosi’s HBO documentary Friends of God for an overview of the evangelical entertainment industry. Here’s a nice YouTube clip about Creationism from the movie).

The artisans working at the Creation Museum are, in fact, not on loan from the Museum of Natural History or from the National Geographic Society at all. No, the Creation Museum’s exhibit director used to work at Universal Studios creating replicas of the fictional worlds in the movies.

So maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh on these nice young people. Maybe they’re not dumb, but merely mercenary. Perhaps, to these craftspeople, the Creationist Museum is simply another kind of science fiction movie set. Another day, another fantasy to depict.

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Going through my server logs the other day, I discovered that my series of articles from last summer, User Research Smoke & Mirrors, was a required reading assignment for a User Experience Design class at the National University of Singapore, taught by Mr. Raghavendra Reddy.

In browsing the official site for the course, I was struck by the comprehensiveness of the reading lists and the depth of the course itself. Reddy’s students are required to create their own blogs, and all class assignments are to be submitted as blog posts. It is in the student blogs where I found these students to be remarkably thoughtful and insightful about interaction design and the power of good user research.

I know almost nothing about Singapore, but if this course and these students are representative of their education system, I’m duly impressed. Here’s a list of the students who reviewed my articles (the first five are my favorites): MORE…

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Hi! I’m Christopher Fahey and I’m a user experience designer. I live in Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York with my lovely wife Peggy (aka tinydiva) and two nearly-identical looking cats, Nike and Perseus. I was born and raised in Philadelphia and Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, where I built model castles, airplanes, and rockets, wrote my own Commodore 64 computer games, played Dungeons & Dragons, cycled 300 miles a week, sported a mohawk and other punk rock regalia, ate soft pretzels and cheesesteaks, and neglected to learn how to drive. I moved to New York City in 1989 to go to college, and I never left. I still never learned how to drive.

Professional Biography

Since 2001 I have been a founding partner at Behavior, an award-winning New York user experience and interaction design studio. In addition to helping define Behavior’s UX methodologies and processes, I have led the user experience design strategies for clients and projects in many industries, including The National Geographic Channel, Cablevision, BusinessWeek, HBO, UNICEF, The Smithsonian Institution, McGraw-Hill, JPMorgan Chase, XM Satellite Radio, AARP, the AIGA, and The Onion.

In my 16 years as a professional interaction designer and manager, my projects have covered everything from social media web sites, securities compliance software, and sci-fi adventure games. My UX design sensibility combines the high usability standards of business-critical web applications, the branding and creative concerns of interactive marketing, and the experimental approach of computer art and game design.

Before starting Behavior with my partners, I worked at a huge but now defunct web consultancy called Rare Medium as the New York director of information architecture. Before that I had two dream jobs working as a game designer and producer at two pioneer interactive media studios, Music Pen and Wanderlust Interactive, where I was the lead game designer for several award winning CD-ROM games.

Art and Design

I went to art school at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, where students don’t have to choose majors but are instead encouraged to create work that crosses whatever disciplines their inspiration takes them. My focus was on interactive sculptures and installations. I also studied as an exchange student at the Gerritt Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. My favorite work of art from college is my map of the world from memory.

I have long called myself a designer, although my art education wasn’t focused specifically on design. I don’t know when in the last 15 years my preferred title changed from “artist” to “designer”. I have works of interactive art in the online collections of the Whitney Museum and The New Museum/Rhizome, but most of my work lately has been in the commercial/design sphere. The way I think and feel about my practice, however, hasn’t changed much: I like to build things that people enjoy using.

Speaking and Publications

I am an active speaker on designing user experiences. Recent and upcoming speaking engagements include:

• UX Lisbon (2011)
• SXSW Interactive (2007, 2010, 2011)
• The Web and Beyond, Amsterdam (2010)
• Web Visions Seattle (2010)
• IXDA Interaction 10 (2010)
• O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo New York (2008, 2009)
• ASIS&T IA Summit (2003, 2007, 2008, 2009)
• STC Summit (2009)
• IxDA Washington DC (2009)
• An Event Apart Boston (2008)
• SVA DOT DOT DOT Lectures (2008)
• EuroIA Summit (2008)
• OMMA Publish (2008)
• IxDA New York (2007)

I have written for A List Apart, and have been interviewed for and quoted in articles in the New York Times, BusinessWeek, New York Magazine, UK Design Council Magazine, Communication Arts, and Mashable.com.

Teaching

I am honored to be a member of the faculty of the School of Visual Arts MFA program in Interaction Design, since its inception in 2009. I teach a course in Interaction Design Fundamentals, for which I developed the curriculum.

I have also taught interaction design at FIT, Flash design and development at Brooklyn College, and I have guest lectured at the City College of New York.

Other Interests

I come from a family chock full of endurance athletes, so it was inevitable that I’d take up the family business. I like biking and running, and in 2007 I decided to learn to swim properly. In 2008 I finished the New York Triathlon, my first triathlon ever, and I did the Philadelphia Triathlon in 2009, 2010, and 2011. I look forward to doing many more. In 2011 I ran my first marathon, in 3:44, and in 2012 I’ll be running in the New York Marathon.

I’m a news and politics junkie, too. I spend far more time than I probably should following the drama in Washington, DC. Politically, I am a pragmatic liberal.

About Graphpaper.com

I’ve always been a huge fan of graphpaper. Almost all of my hobbies and interests throughout my life have required the use of graphpaper, from artwork to pixel-based computer design, to role-playing games.

I’ve owned this awesome domain name since 1998, when I thought of it on the subway on the way to work and learned later that morning that it could, in fact, be mine for $35. At first, Graphpaper.com was an art site showing off scans of my sketchbook and other internet art projects I was working on. In 2006, I finally got around to redesigning and relaunching Graphpaper.com as a blog, thanks to the convenience of WordPress and the technical help of Pau Santesmasses.

Editorially, the site is about anything that’s important to me. Usually, this means user experience design topics — design, technology, social media, games and gadgets. But my primary goal is not professional. Graphpaper.com is a personal site, so I talk about politics, family, music and art, history, pet peeves, and all the other things most bloggers talk about.
Future plans include integrating delicious links, twitter posts, a blogroll, and other things that normal blogs have.

Out and About

Besides here at Graphpaper.com, I’ve been leaving footprints all over the web since 1994:

• Follow me on Twitter. I tweet on average around five times a day.
• See my snapshots and photos on Flickr.
• Network with me on LinkedIn.

I am also active in hundreds of other places, usually under my real name but sometimes using the nom-de-web “askrom“, my online identity from way back in the 1990s when having an alter ego was somehow more normal than it is now. In case you didn’t know, ROM is a toy from the 1980s that I never owned but always coveted.

[Photo credits: Naz Hamid, Whitney Hess, brightroom.com, and me]

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