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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Last.fm’s announcement that they will be allowing their users to listen to full-length versions of millions of music tracks is one of the final nails in the coffin of the traditional recorded-music industry. Owning music is dead. The new business model for making money in the music industry is simple: Design a better music distribution system. Or, simply put, build a better user experience for music listening.

Which, interstingly, is how the enjoyment of music has always been throughout the centuries, with the singular exception of the century recently passed. Live musical concerts and performances have always been about more than the sounds in your ears: It’s also the experience of the venue, the culture or subculture of the audience, the smells and tastes. This also applies to live radio, including satellite and internet radio. Both live performance and live radio focus on putting value on (i.e., charging money for) the experience around the music — on the curation, the immediacy, the communal feeling of listening to the same music as dozens or even millions of other listeners — not on the ownership of the recording itself.

In fact, the ownership of recorded music will someday be seen as a weird historical anomaly, born during a decades-long spasm of corporate enthusiam about — and complete control over — the production and distribution of recorded music… a phenomenon in its death throes now that, finally, the ability to record, copy, and distribute music has trickled down into the hands of everyday people.

The era in which one could buy and sell recorded music lasted only about a century, from the early days of the phonograph in the late 1800s to the emergence in the 1990’s of illegal file sharing and now, in this decade, completely legal free distribution of recorded music. We are back where we started: paying for experiences, not for artifacts.

Today’s digital music scene is about experiences. iTunes, for example, is not so much a tool for organizing your music collection as it is a complete media experience platform: It’s the tool to listen to and organize your music, of course, but with the store integration, partnership with your portable player, accessibility to other users on your network, sharing with your TV and home stereo system, it’s become far more than a simple media player.

Last.fm takes it further: Are you listening to something you really like, and you want more? Well, right there on the page, the page that is playing the music, are a dozen different ways of exploring that music further: Talk to other fans, read about the band’s history, view recommendations based on your own listening habits, listen to artists that are intimately related to the band you’re hearing, find out about new music that came out just today.

Valuing Media

Kevin Kelly recently wrote a really insightful and thought-provoking piece about how the value of copied media can be measured:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.

When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

In the case of music, the “stuff which can’t be copied” is (among other things) live, performed music. Kelly’s piece explores a few other ways that stuff can be valuable without being copyable — it’s a great read, please check it out.

Last.fm actually hits several of Kelly’s values dead-on, including Accessibility (the ability to tune in from any browser and not be tied to your own hard drive), Patronage (the artist is getting paid by Last.fm, something that many listeners want to know is happening), and Personalization and Findability (Last.fm was literally founded on the idea of making new music findable through personalized recommendations).

Rhapsody was on the right track, but their catalog lacks the kind of Web 2.0 community-generated depth and recommendation tools to make listening to and discovering new music such a delightful experience. On Rhapsody, AFAIK, you are renting access to a database that allows basic browsing by artist, genre, etc. That’s it. It’s fundamentally still about paying for temporary ownership of music.

But as I said, it’s not about owning the music any more. It’s about providing easy and fluid access to the music, exposing you to new music you will like, immersing you in a music community, and making the listening experience as entertaining and interesting as possible. Ownership is no longer an issue. Today you pay for the experience of a product which, in the peer-to-peer era, you can always get in raw form for free or nearly free.

In the future competition in the music industry, such as it is, will consist of better and better ways of competing, essentially, with old-fashioned radio, nightclubs, and concert halls. Last.fm gets this.

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A quick thought for this fine Friday: Something about the term “Getting Things Done” always bugged me. Now I know what it is. It’s the passive voice.

Instead of the indirect phrasing using the verb “to get”, maybe we really should simply say “Doing Things“. GTD isn’t about getting other people to do things — it’s about you doing things. Even delegation is something you have to actively do.

Or, as Nike said, “Just Do It” (an expression that adman Dan Weiden now says he thought up after reading Gary Gilmore’s last words as he faced a firing squad).

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At the Speak Up graphic design blog, Armin Vit laments the lack of “landmark” or canonical web designs. After giving several examples of iconic designs that are truly landmarks in the history of graphic design, from Paul Rand’s IBM logo in the 1950s to Paula Scher’s Public Theater posters in the 1990s, he writes:

Myself, I could list projects in every category from logos, to annual reports, to magazine covers, to packaging, to typefaces, to opening titles that could be considered landmark projects… But when it comes to web sites, I can’t think of a single www that could be comparable — in gravitas, praise, or memorability — as any of the few projects I just mentioned.

Joshua Porter, however, thinks that Armin is barking up the wrong tree, arguing at his own blog that Armin’s singular focus on graphic design is misguided:

But, frankly, I think Armin has missed his own point. He wants to know what web designers see as canonical, but he’s dismissing the obvious answer because it doesn’t fit into his canonical mold of graphic design. In other words, he’s looking at Google from a graphic design perspective, when web designers necessarily have to look at it from an interaction design perspective.

If Armin were to ask web designers and web development teams what the canonical web designs are, he would get very clear answers.

Joshua then goes on to cite Google and Amazon as canonical web designs because they do what they do exceptionally well — and that doing things is what web design is all about. He continues:

So while Armin doesn’t want this to be about graphic vs. web design, it has to be at some level because web designers necessarily approach design from a different perspective than graphic designers.

That’s where he loses me. This is, at least to Joshua, just another turf war between interaction design and graphic design, an unfortunate debate that I had hoped had been put to rest in the last decade.

Joshua is buying into the idea that “graphic design” on the web is at best a lesser practice than some other, bigger thing called “web design” (which he says is really “interaction design”, but whose purview also apparently encompasses programming, strategy, content, information architecture, interaction design, and presumably even graphic design itself).

It’s certainly a good thing to talk about web design holistically and to see all of these things as interconnected, but must such discussion be at the expense of graphic design? Is discussing graphic design off limits? It’s clear that Armin was talking specifically about graphic design, but Joshua sees this not as a professional focus but, rather, as a fundamental shortcoming.

Perhaps Armin brought it on himself by using the phrase “web design” when it seems he really means “graphic design on the web”. Given that Speak Up is a *graphic design* site, I would have thought this focus would have been presumed by most readers. But when Joshua compares Google to Armin’s historical graphic design examples, and then claims Google’s iconic stroke of genius lies in its functionality, he is doing the equivalent of claiming that:

• Milton Glaser’s Dylan poster’s “design” includes Bob Dylan’s lyrics
• Vignelli’s subway map “design” includes the engineering of the trains and tunnels of the NYC transit system
• William Golden’s CBS logo’s “design” includes the groundbreaking journalism of Edward R. Murrow.

Joshua is casting too broad a net by claiming that web design is everything when clearly Armin is focusing deliberately and precisely on the profession of graphic design.

Armin is not talking about functionality, and that’s okay! He is talking about the color, typography, shape, layout and all the other formal elements that make up a site’s graphic design. Hell, Armin would probably be quite happy to see just one truly great logo for a web-based product, a logo whose design has the same timeless gravity as the logos from the history of graphic design. Instead we get endless swooshes and reflections.

Is it wrong of Armin to ask for this?

Well, only if it is wrong to want excellence in graphic design. On the web.

Back to the 90s

Why is it that when we talk about web design, “graphic design” is often treated as the red headed stepchild? In other media, and in older times, we can talk about the genius of a particular product’s graphic design independently of the larger system that that design represents or serves. We can talk about the graphic design of the Westinghouse logo without talking about the engineering of a Westinghouse refrigerator. Why should we not be able to do this about graphic design on the web?

My theory is that many web professionals, even graphic designers who work exclusively on the web, look down their noses on the crafts and traditions of “graphic design”. They have been doing this since the early days of the web, back in the 1990s, when it was common for smug young designers to feel superior to print-based graphic designers who didn’t yet know what they were doing on the web. How many of you slick web design professionals remember a time back in the 1990’s when we laughed at the poor old graphic design geezers trying to make HTML pages using Quark Xpress?

Well, those days are over. The joke is old. And you know what? All these years of people believing that graphic design was a lesser discipline, of contending that graphic design is barely an important factor in the bigger picture of web design, have led to precisely the predicament that Armin is complaining about: Web sites, in general, still don’t look as compelling as the historical graphic and visual icons we’ve come to know and love in other media. His point is entirely valid, and Joshua’s attitude only manages to prove Armin’s point. Graphic design on the web kinda sucks.

And as long as we continue to insist that graphic design is a non-entity, we will never have good graphic design on the web.

(I’ve written about this before when I argued last year that the AIGA fell into the same trap when they decided the G no longer means “graphic”. It’s sad that it’s still happening.)

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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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In the 17th century, a peculiar phenomenon emerged in England: men with no family or institutional ties to one another would gather informally to socialize, debate, and network with like-minded peers and colleagues, to discuss everything from politics to literature to economics, building social connections between them that hadn’t existed before. They met in taverns and coffeehouses, and they called these gatherings “clubbes”. Most famous of all was the Mermaid Tavern’s “Friday Street Club”, whose members included Sir Walter Raleigh, John Donne, Ben Jonson, and, if legend is to be believed, even William Shakespeare.

Today, of course, we take the concept of the “club” for granted, but the idea hasn’t been around forever. Four hundred years ago it was genuinely novel to see people regularly meeting for reasons other than governance, religion, defense, family, or business purposes. The club was wholly new idea in the evolution of human social relations, enabling people to connect in ways they’d never connected before.

Today we face a similar step in this evolution. We are witnessing the emergence of a new way for people to relate to each other and to meet new people using the so-called social web. What’s more, this new model has a lot in common with the clubs of the 17th century, and indeed with all the face-to-face clubs that exist today.

I’ve argued in the past that social networks are brands, where people choose to associate with the networks they identify with emotionally in the same way we choose products based on brand affinities. But today’s online communities are also clubs: they are loosely-formed private organizations akin to nightclubs, country clubs, and social clubs. Every social network will, over time, attract people with similar cultural interests and affinities, and just like in the physical world these shared interests are far more important than the amenities of the club’s meeting place. MORE…

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