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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A fascinating article in last Sunday’s New York Times documents a recent study in which it is shown that predicting the success of cultural products (such as movies or music) is impossible, and that a phenomenon called “cumultive advantage” — where people prefer something largely because other people already prefer it — will usually overcome any empirical qualitative preference individuals may have for one product over another.

Marketers, for all their reliance on research, have long suspected this, which is why for years they have been looking to “coolhunters” to help them locate emerging tidal waves of coolness while the “cumultive advantage” is still building up steam. Instead of trying to create new products that will succeed because they were designed to meet a known and measurable consumer demand, they try to emulate products that are ascendant and that reveal previously-unknown consumer preferences.

This phenomenon may seem perfectly reasonable when it comes to movies and music, but I think it’s also true for user interface design: To the extent that any given UI can be called a “cultural product”, it is vulnerable to the wild unpredictability of culture. We may not always recognize it, but almost every UI is a type of cultural product.

This might seem hard to accept. Obviously, Justin Timberlake and Star Wars are cultural products, but the iPod, too, is a cultural product. The Nintendo Wii is a cultural product. Windows Vista is a cultural product. Amazon.com is a cultural product. These products have particular timeliness, particular aesthetics, and particular creative voices — thus they are cultural.

All of these cultural products have pure usability components to their user experience, but the cultural component — the product’s style — is often a major factor in the product’s success or failure. Sometimes it is the predominant factor, outweighing usability and feature-richness, as I think is the case with the iPod.

The ability to predict the success or failure of a UI design before a product is released is the foundation for the entire careers of many of us in the user experience design profession, so this argument may be troubling to many of us who think that there are empirically right and wrong ways of designing a UI. It’s hard to accept that a product’s hot color scheme, seductive finish, or ornamental trimmings — not to mention the brand name, ad campaign, or celebrity spokesmodel — could be far more important to the product’s success than the product’s long feature list or elegant ease-of-use.

I see the Times article as further evidence that no matter how many tests we do to show that one UI convention is better than another, when it comes to cultural products the “it depends” option is so overwhelmingly dominant that no conclusive best practices can ever be stated with confidence. Until you actually build something and have people use it, you will never know. And until then, the product development team’s resident “coolhunter” may have better insights into the product’s potential for success than anyone on the user research team.

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Everywhere you go, you see 16:9 widescreen television screens playing regular 4:3 video programs stretched out to fit across the whole screen. You see these in airports, banks, bars, and offices. Maybe you even see this in your own home.

Presumably, the owners of these TV screens can’t bear to see all those extra black pixels on the left and right sides going to waste. The thought of not using those pixels — pixels that cost hundreds of dollars! — is so unbearable that the owner is willing to tolerate the fact that everyone and everything they see on the screen is literally 50% wider/fatter than they are supposed to be.

To me, the sight of such a stretched-out, distorted screen is utterly unbearable. Totally unwatchable. It might as well be upside down to me, the people look so wrong. And yet to millions of people, this is normal and acceptable. Can they not see that it looks completely wrong? I mean, honestly: Can they not tell the difference? MORE…

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New technology products often take us by surprise. In 1992, for example, we couldn’t possibly have dreamed of how the Internet would transform the world by 1997, only 5 years later. The best innovations are things “you never knew you wanted but cannot live without” kind, inventions that come out of nowhere. YouTube, for example. Or TiVo.

But certain other technology products are so obvious that when they finally emerge many people shrug and wonder “what took it so long?” We knew they were coming, but year after year they never actually materialized.

When they do materialize, we are overjoyed. After years of waiting, for example, we are finally getting MP3 players into cel phones.We are using wireless networks and bluetooth more and more, but we knew we wanted this stuff years ago. The technology consumer will often heap glowing praise on these kinds of new technologies as they emerge, calling them innovative and groundbreaking, when in fact the functionality of the products is merely filling a hole that everyone knew was there.

The Apple iPhone is a perfect example: while the UI is indeed remarkable, almost nothing about it is technologically innovative or new. If you asked me (or just about any of my friends) to describe the perfect cel phone feature set, it would look a lot like an iPhone. In fact, as the owner of a Windows PocketPC phone for nearly 5 years, nothing about the iPhone’s tech specs surprised me. The UI, again, is great and very innovative, but the hardware itself and the basic concept of the device is wholly old news. MORE…

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A strange part of the US real-estate boom is the housing construction boom. Across America, brand-new housing developments are sprouting up like kudzu vines, tearing down forests and farmland to build new housing as fast as possible. Behind this are many factors: immigration, ongoing white flight from the cities, the growth of suburban sprawl, the emergence of technology boom towns, and other geographic and economic factors.

The dominant architectural style of this new growth has an overt “country” look, a kind of caricature of 19th century quaint Americana: gabled roofs, whitewashed siding, twisting rolling streets with absurdly Anglophilic names like “Greyswallow Terrace” and “Cedarpost Square” (names obviously generated by a computer program, as they have absolutely no relevance to the actual landscape or history of their location), plenty of grassland (although, generally, a sad lack of trees). They stretch across the landscape as far as the eye can see, and the consistency of their style strongly evokes the conformity of the 1950’s Levittown housing model.

Sometimes they are single-family standalone dwellings (”McMansions“, the fatter and more ostentatious cousin of what I’m talking about here), sometimes they are multiple-unit buildings with a single-family façade. Occasionally these “homes” (they never call them “houses”, always “homes”) will have a slightly-urban “townhouse” feel, with splotches of red brick and perfunctory sidewalks, but even these units will generally be topped off with the requisite white siding and pointed roofs.

The general style seems, I think, to be a hybrid of the country estate and the urban housing project, marrying the illusion of landed aristocratic luxury with the logistical efficiency of cookie-cutter subsidized apartment life.

Unfailingly, this housing trend always reminds me of the movie Back to the Future Part II. MORE…

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I saw Dreamgirls this weekend — it was great!

I’ve been to my fair share of movies where the audience broke out into enthusiastic and spontaneous applause before, but they’ve almost always applauded some kind of triumphant action scene, never clapping and cheering for an individual performer. Which is to say that they are applauding the film itself, not the humans in it.

That is, until this weekend. Jennifer Hudson got at least three full rounds of applause from my Brooklyn audience, whose boisterous cheering for the performance (and singing along occasionally) almost seemed to suggest that Ms. Hudson was actually up there on stage in front of us to hear our appreciation.

For most of my “young adult” life (that is, my teens and twenties) I despised musicals. I thought they were phony and vapid — why in the world would a pair of New York street gangs suddenly form up into chorus lines and sing in the middle of the alley? Why would a group of sailors on shore leave suddenly burst into song and synchronized tapdancing on restaurant tables? It was silly to me, not worthy of the serious taste I liked to think I had.

And yet countless critical “top ten” lists include Singin’ in the Rain. This always baffled me. How can this be?

Well, over the years I’ve started to notice that I think I actually do like a lot of musicals. I may in fact, have liked a lot of musicals all along — but only certain kinds: I’ve realized that I pretty much only like musicals about musicals, or at least musicals about people who sing and dance and perform. MORE…

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On election night last week, we were channel surfing and comparing the coverage by the various networks. We ended up for a spell at Comedy Central, where Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert exchanged snappy banter with each other in a kind of parody of network news coverage.

Surprisingly, there was a part of me that found it a little tiresome, and I thought to myself “Why don’t these guys just talk like normal people and tell us about the election results, instead of all this rehearsed repartee?”. They were acting out scripted set-peices and skits, or riffing on the results by digging into a selection of pre-planned gags and jokes.

Of course, this is Comedy Central, so the scripted quality of the “reportage” is to be expected. Still, despite our deep appreciation for CC’s two “anchors”, we grew impatient and craved the hard news coverage that only a real network can offer. So we resumed by surfing on over to Oppositeland: Fox News.

I immediately noticed that the narrative and theatrical quality and structure of Fox’s coverage was really no different from Comedy Central’s. Each pundit was talking to the other pundits as if the other person didn’t already know what they were going to say, and yet it was clear that everyone knew exactly what everyone else was going to say. Their conversations were fake in every way — not quite scripted, exactly, but so incredibly contrived as to be basically a kind of vaudeville act. MORE…

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