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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My father-in-law Donald F.B. “Jamie” Jameson passed away last week. He was — and forever will be — the center of my wife Peggy’s soul and, through her, a quietly influential part of my own life.

Today’s Washington Post has a fascinating and moving obituary, focusing largely on his career in the CIA and his work with prominent Soviet defectors. There’s a lot in there that I didn’t even know about him, and it’s an enlightening portrait of another era in world politics.

Despite the cloak-and-dagger reality of his career and the gravity of his work, however, Jamie was through it all a dreamer and a storyteller whose main objective in life seems to have been to perpetuate his own idyllic storybook childhood in his own children and in the world around him, despite incredible adversity.

Normal blogging will resume shortly. Lots still going on.

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The Colossus digital computer, completed in 1943, helped the Allies win WWII.

I’m disappointed in the pace of technological change lately, in particular when you consider that we live in a time of war.

During World War II, some of the most astounding technological developments of all time were developed, both by the Allies and the Axis powers. In some cases existing technologies advanced by leaps and bounds, and in other cases new technologies emerged from practically nothing in less than half a decade. The list of revolutionary innovations that emerged during the war years is staggering:

• Radar and Sonar
• Computers and Cryptography
• Rockets
• Jet Aircraft
• Nuclear Reactors
• Penicillin

Lesser innovations, at least in comparison to these milestones, came as well in fields as diverse as project management, communications, transportation, and medicine. And of course, more soberingly, many military technologies were advanced or fully realized during the war, including aircraft carries, submarines, and atomic bombs.

America is now at war again, against an enemy whose tactics continually confound and frustrate us. And yet, as far as I can tell, our pace of technological innovation over the past six years — longer than all of WWII — has been utterly pathetic.

Backward Priorities

Think of all the areas in which new technologies could be helping us in the so-called “War on Terror”, or in the fight against insurgents in Iraq: Machine translation, bomb and toxin detection, robotics including unmanned aircraft and ground forces, new forms of logistics, management, and troop rotation, new generations of armored vehicles, leaps forward in mobile communications, new medical and psychological treatments for injured soldiers… I’m not a military visionary by a long shot, but even as a layman I can imagine some of the kinds of developments we urgently need and how much better off we could be.

And yet instead of investing in military and technological innovation, our government seems to be spending its energy and money on outdated and ineffective older technologies. Even leaving aside the moral and constitutional questions, our technological strategies are at best stagnant: From anti-missle defense to domestic wiretapping to flat-out torture, our anti-terror strategies seem to have gone backwards in time rather than forwards. The Bush Administration has probably spent more time, energy, and taxpayers’ dollars on lawyers crafting arguments to defend medieval torture techniques than they’ve spent on developing newer and more reliable interrogation technologies.

Maybe it’s all a secret?

Many people will argue that perhaps the government and the Pentagon already are, in fact, developing and using astounding new technologies every day, and that the general public just doesn’t know about it. They will ask: Did the American people know what the physicists were doing with the Manhattan Project? Did the British people know what the mathematicians were up to at Bletchley Park?

Of course, these are the same people who argued that President Bush had mountains of proof about Saddam’s involvement in 9/11, but that because the material was so secret he couldn’t share it even with members of Congress. Or that the evidence against the prisoners at Guantánamo is rock-solid but is so sensitive that nobody even in the American judicial branch can be trusted to see it.

These arguments are preposterous, of course. If Bush had proof for Saddam’s connection to 9/11, he would have released it at all costs. Half of the prisoners at Gitmo, far from being provably guilty, have been freed.

If the Administration was truly committed to increasing America’s technological advantage against our existing and potential enemies, we would see many of the results every day, for example in the security at our airports, toll plazas, banks, and government institutions. We’d see newly-funded research programs at our universities. We’d see new anti-money-laundering technologies in place in the financial sector. We’d see commercial products using technologies developed in the military and finding their way into consumer electronics. And American combat casualties would be reduced.

Let’s face it. There’s no secret weapon or secret plan.

Where we should be:

Many of the technologies that would help us in the War on Terror are exactly the kind of technologies that could easily trickle into the private sector with no harm to our national defense. Alternately, helpful military technologies could emerge, with government support, from our private sector.

Machine translation is a great example of where we have fallen short: In six years, couldn’t we have invested billions of dollars in a program to make a machine that can reliably transcribe spoken Arabic into textual English? Or for that matter, any language into any other? Private sector technologies have slowly been scratching at the surface of this, from commercial speech-to-text software to the many online translation algorithms, such as the legendary Alta Vista Babelfish, that have existed for over a decade. But given that our ability to understand foreign languages has never been more important to national security, shouldn’t there be a Machine Translation Manhattan Project?

Or interrogation: The New York Times had an analysis of the state of America’s interrogation technology a few weeks ago, and it is embarassingly pathetic:

As the Bush administration completes secret new rules governing interrogations, a group of experts advising the intelligence agencies are arguing that the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable.

The psychologists and other specialists, commissioned by the Intelligence Science Board, make the case that more than five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has yet to create an elite corps of interrogators trained to glean secrets from terrorism suspects.

While billions are spent each year to upgrade satellites and other high-tech spy machinery, the experts say, interrogation methods — possibly the most important source of information on groups like Al Qaeda — are a hodgepodge that date from the 1950s, or are modeled on old Soviet practices.

Meanwhile, this week’s New Yorker includes a survey of current lie-detection technologies, in particular a new technique using MRI scanners to detect deception. The article says that the Pentagon is indeed exploring this technology, but it seems pretty clear that the private sector is leading the charge. Although the tech is still primitive and unreliable, at least for now, it shows some promise. Shouldn’t we have moved from waterboarding to reliable brainscanning by now? Such an advancement in interrogation techniques would not only help us militarily, but also in the court of public opinion: discontinuing physical torture would go a long way towards putting America back in a position of moral advantage.

Any serious presidential contender for 2008 should propose that the USA is technologically a full decade behind where we can and should be in protecting ourselves against today’s new threats. The Administration’s abject neglect, and downright hostility, towards advanced science and technology has gone on long enough. It’s time to bring the eggheads back.

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Sartre would be proud.

The shocking (and to many viewers, utterly disappointing) ending of The Sopranos series finale was perfect. The tableau itself was a perfect jewel: the nuclear family all together, happy it seems for the moment, but completely surrounded by unknown and unseen danger. David Chase pumped the scene full of more tension than any other moment in the series’s history — is the whole family about to get whacked? — but ultimately there is no concrete evidence for the audience to be sure that any violence is about to happen.

Most of the predictions made about the finale, even the ones in our office pool, are still possible, as they always have been. The violence that surrounds the Soprano nuclear family has always been the subject of the series, and the finale simply wrapped that up into a single vignette, a microcosm of the whole 8-year series.

Consider the Seinfeld series finale, where the core cast found themselves in jail for, apparently, eternity. This ultimate predicament was a microcosm, too, of the series itself and the relationship between Seinfeld’s four core characters, the Seinfeld nuclear family, if you will. Seinfeld was often called a show about nothing, but it was always about the characters. Every episode we learned more about, and dove deeper into, the four main characters and explored a little bit about some unique and colorful secondary characters.

The Sopranos finale was similar. We’ve never asked The Sopranos for long-arc plots with carefully-planned setups, mysterious clues that come to fruition later. Generally, all that ever happens on The Sopranos is that we are drawn deeper and deeper into our understandings of the characters, particualarly Tony, and occasionally we find surprises inside of them. This is what The Sopranos is about, not plot. My wife, Peggy, noted that ultimately The Sopranos was not a “gangster movie” but a “soap opera”. And in a soap opera, ultimately, nothing ever happens. Dr. Melfi’s decision to end Tony’s therapy also reflects this realization, that despite all her efforts over eight years, Tony has not changed and will not change. The final moment of the show encapsulated this tense stasis perfectly.

The Behavior office pool got almost nothing correct, but we had one phenomenal write in winner: “Cliffhanger”. Some of us got Phil Leotardo’s hit. But that’s it. And nobody predicted that Christopher would come back from the dead as a cat.

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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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