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.

• Leave a Note (4)

Photo from A Typical Joe of some Georgia roadside signage. Why don’t I ever see anything like this in New York City?

The opening sentence in today’s Times Magazine cover story (about the state of political confusion in America’s Christian Right) depicts a phenomenon I’ve long wondered about:

The hundred-foot white cross atop the Immanuel Baptist Church in downtown Wichita, Kan., casts a shadow over a neighborhood of payday lenders, pawnbrokers and pornographic video stores. To its parishioners, this has long been the front line of the culture war.

Indeed, whenever I travel in Bible Belt country or in so-called “red states”, I am often struck by the absolute depravity and crass exploitation that I see all around me — in places where, as conventional wisdom would have it, the people are supposed to be the most morally upstanding Americans, especially when compared to people like me, an amoral atheist New Yorker.

New York City has its seedy side, of course, but what you see in the red states is way different. If you drive along the main highways of West Virginia, rural Pennsylvania, Texas, Indiana — almost anywhere, it seems — you are bound to pass long stretches of seedy strip clubs, quasi-legal gambling venues, drug and alcohol addiction centers, DUI lawyers, and corrupt check cashing places for miles and miles. You’ll even see billboards for abortion clinics.

But among these you will also find a seemingly equal number of churches and religious groups whose primary mission is to save local people from the very businesses that operate next door. Driving down the highway it’s a moral checkerboard: church, strip club, church, slot machines, church, payday loans, etc. These two opposing forces are literally positioned right next to each other, like opposing armies in WWI, entrenched a hundred feet apart. You get a distinct feeling that there is a war going on from door to door in thousands of American communities.

Maybe I just don’t notice it, but I can’t think of any part of New York City, or anywhere in New England, where you can find this kind of Sodom & Gomorrah right out in the open where families have to see it every single day. Which is why I’m often more than a little startled when I see gigantic billboards of ecstatic naked porn stars in exactly those parts of the country which are, by conventional wisdom, supposed to be the most righteous and moral places on Earth.

Can it really be that I have a puritanical streak in me? I personally don’t find the sex businesses offensive, exactly– at best they’re sad and stupid, and that’s enough for me to not really want to look at them — but IMHO the casinos and rip-off lenders are downright evil and thoroughly destructive to society.

All told, you can hardly blame red staters for thinking that America is in a culture war when their highways are already raging moral battlefields. But the war is not what the media or the leaders of the religious right would have you think it is. It’s not Blue States vs. Red States. I think the Times has it right: The front line is within the red states, where husbands are fighting wives, parents are fighting children, and neighbors are fighting neighbors.

Red staters, in turn, cannot blame New York and LA for their addictions to gambling, pornography, crystal meth, or easy credit. They should look to their own governments, Democrat and Republican, and into their own souls.

One might be tempted to attribute this phenomenon to simple moral hypocrisy, concluding that that the most religious people are, in fact, the most depraved (as seen in recent GOP scandals). But that’s just too simple. I think that people are driven to embrace religion, and then to back religious political movements, because of the moral corruption they feel directly threatens them and their families. But that meanwhile the broader culture, unanchored, confusedly drifts from one extreme to the other, from righteousness to sin, in the same town, the same family, and even in individual people.

The problem, I suspect, is that most of the leadership of the religious right is obsessed with political objectives that do not even attempt to address the real problems that people face and fear — poverty, addiction, teen pregnancy, ignorance — and instead they attack problems that have nothing to do with real-world core moral and social challenges. They want to lower taxes for the wealthy, make gay marriage illegal, prevent discussions of sex and contraception in school, roll back or oppose civil rights for immigrants, women, religious minorities. These issues are powerful for getting political backing and electoral popularity, but they do not help in the real battlefield where people’s lives are ruined by ignorance and addiction.

Until the religious right realizes that New York City is not Mordor projecting a beam of evil at them and tearing their families apart, and that the real problem is right in their own backyard, they, and we, will never be at peace.

• Leave a Note (9)

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?

• Leave a Note (37)

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?

• Leave a Note (19)

When I write a blog post about something I’m not an expert on, which is pretty much everything I write about, I usually Google the hell out of it first to (a) make sure I don’t say something stupid, (b) get some ideas I can build on to make myself seem smarter, and (c) avoid writing something that someone else already said.

But sometimes I don’t bother to research the things I’m writing about. I may deliberately avoid spending time looking at what others have said about something before I go ahead and bloviate on the subject myself. Sometimes, I’m essentially blogging blind.

Besides laziness, why would I want to deliberately avoid the benefits of expressing an informed opinion? Well, this ignorance allows me to explore the idea in a little bit of a vacuum, to see where the idea takes me without the influence of other people’s thinking, however clever they may be.

But more importantly, I think, I will sometimes keep my head in the sand simply to avoid the discouragement that I am prone to once I realize that something I may have thought was quite clever has actually been explored by others already.

This is, I think, a key to innovation — making sure you are well-informed about prior art without ever throwing up your hands because of some misbegotten fear that it’s all been done before.

• Leave a Note (7)

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.)

• Leave a Note (0)

Leisa Reichelt coined the term “ambient intimacy” to describe the genre of social computing apps led by Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce. She was interested in the constant sense of closeness users feel with their circle of friends, no matter how far-flung, through technologies that informally reveal us to each other.

Jyri Engeström, co-founder of Jaiku (and newly minted Googleplexian), called this phenomenon “peripheral vision”, your ability to informally or even unconsciously know what’s going on in your social circle.

Recently, however, I’ve noticed that my Twitter stream contains a lot more than just what people are doing. They’re starting to use Twitter to express their emerging ideas and to begin tentative conversations about things they are thinking about.

In fact, even as I enjoy the ambient intimacy of having the incidental knowledge about what my friends are doing, I’m finding that the sharing of ideas is the most valuable part of Twitter. My Twitter friends send links to interesting sites, they announce their latest blog posts, and they talk about the new ideas they are reading about and hearing about, usually at the moment they first experience the idea. Or they’ll ask a provocative question (”Does anyone use friendster anymore?”) and see what it generates.

But most exciting of all is when someone shouts out their own half-baked idea (in 140 characters or less), and the rest of the group piles on to shape the idea further. Spontaneous “collective musing” occurs. This whole process is over in only a few minutes, and then the whole dialogue fades away into the ether. The ideas, however, live on in our heads, and eventually some even take more concrete form.

The Twitter medium allows these informal and impromptu communications to occur in a way that, for example, posting to a mailing list, publishing a blog post, or posting a question to a Q&A social site can never quite do. It’s something just a little bit less than a conversation.

In the same vein, Bruce Nussbaum today quotes Roger Martin from the Rotman School of management, who says “Blogging is intellectual prototyping.” If that’s the case, then Twitter is intellectual doodling.

• Leave a Note (6)

Every person, place, thing, and idea whose name can be found on the Internet has an existence that can be detected and measured by search engines. The relentless spiders of Google will find you and rank you (and let’s leave for another day the techno-philosophical question of whether web pages that have no incoming or outgoing links can be said to exist at all). This measurement is, to me, a kind of “pulse”, telling us how strong — how healthy — any given idea is in our collective digital mind.

So whenever we Google our own names (and you know you’ve done it!), we are in effect checking this “Googlepulse” to see how healthy we are in terms of our visibility and connectedness on the Internet. We are, in a sense, measuring our very digital existence.

This measurement will fluctuate over time as the number and freshness of the links to a particular topic varies, much as a person’s pulse will vary during their life as they grow, get in and out of shape, and undergo the natural effects of aging. In January of 2006, if you Googled “iPhone” you probably wouldn’t see much, but in January of 2007 you’d find a hell of a lot. In a sense, this measurement is like what doctors do when they take your vital signs — pulse, blood pressure, etc — and take note of how they change over time. Google is our digital doctor.

(Of course, Google isn’t the only way to do this. You can also gain insight into a concept’s digital pulse via overall site rankings at Alexa, blog tracking at Technorati (especially Technorati Mini), del.icio.us, blog trackbacks, any news web site’s internal alert systems, Neilsen’s Blogpulse metrics, news and blog aggregators, and of course any other search engine. Even Twitter now allows you to essentially measure your Twitterpulse through an alert system. I’m focusing on Google simply because it pretty much encompasses all of the above.)

Being the health nut that I am (and being highly narcissistic), I am no longer satisfied to simply Google myself every so often. I need a constant blinking light telling me my pulse. Which is why I love Google Alerts. Google Alerts is a new (?) feature that allows you to set up persistent search queries and then receive notifications in daily emails about any new activity with that keyword.

So I’ve set up some of my own Google Alerts for several variations on “Christopher Fahey” and “graphpaper.com”, and it’s fun to see them roll in every morning telling me who is talking about me and where I am showing up. My awareness of my “footprint” on the Internet (to introduce another metaphor) has gone up a bit, I think.

The ironic thing about this is that most of us probably have a better idea of our own Googlepulse than we do the pulse of our own living beating hearts.

UPDATE: I’ve set up a Google Alert for “Googlepulse” to measure the Googlepulse of “Googlepulse”. My haste to move this post from draft to live was inspired by an offhand remark I made on Twitter, and the response I got from David Armano urging me to move quickly. This meta-experiment should be fun. So far, even my original Tweet doesn’t show up on Google. Now that I’ve linked to it, I’m sure it will.

• Leave a Note (6)