A few weeks ago, I got an email from a young undergrad interested in SVA’s Interaction Design MFA program (where I teach a class in the fundamentals of interaction design).

The student, a talented web designer, was curious about the relationship between “web design” and “interaction design” and “user experience”, and what the future holds for UX and IxD. I thought it would be nice to share some of my response:

It’s hard for any IxD program to avoid the overwhelming presence of the web as the epicenter of most people’s (technological) interactive experiences. And the faculty of the program at SVA certainly draws deeply from the web design world. But the meaning of “the web” itself is blurring — when you use an app on your iPhone, or get a DVD from Netflix (or view a streaming NetFlix movie via your DVR), or read a book on a Kindle, are you not, to some degree, interacting with the web? My point is that “interactive systems” are bigger than just the web even if the web is a big part of them: that they involve so much more in terms of physical processes (Netflix had to invent a warehousing system), business models (should Kindle books cost the same, less, or more than physical books?), and that they’re always incorporating new technologies (touchscreen UIs fundamentally change how web design is done, and imagine how Apple’s tablet will shake up “web” design). Interaction design is influenced by entertainment, games… and global concerns like sustainability and digital accessibility.

In my class, we’ve worked on web sites, mobile apps, physical devices, and even just social system design (for example, how does a taxi driver “work” as a planned interactive system?). I think I am typical of SVA’s faculty in my attitude that great web design is just a flavor of great interaction design, which in turn is a flavor of experience design. So we don’t teach web design specifically, but students who want to focus on web design are absolutely free to do so, and we are happy to evaluate, guide, and teach ideas and concepts that advance web-based experiences. But I’d be lying if I told you that the web as we know it now is going to be the dominant interaction design paradigm of 2020. The fundamentals of interaction design aren’t about HTML and CSS, nor even about hard drives and keyboards. It’s about human beings, our relationships with each other (socially, business, culturally), with media, and with technology.

There is definitely a lot of demand for people who can bring this higher and broader thinking to projects. What I like about the SVA program is the dialogue students have access to — with each other and with the faculty. It’s something you can’t get in most workplaces, and especially not so rapidly and intensely. You are required to talk not just about what you did, but how and most importantly WHY. It’s one thing to design something, it’s another thing to justify why in the world the world needs what you designed. Hopefully, that’s what the program gets students to think about and know how to express.

Finally: I wouldn’t be in this field, or teaching in the program, if I didn’t think that UX was *the* most important factor in creating beauty and happiness in the coming decades. Making stuff that people like to use, well, I’ve wanted to do this since I was a kid making stuff out of paper and legos.

I hope that gives a little more insight into the program and perhaps even into my thoughts about IxD and UX overall. Good luck, and let me know if I can help any further.

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What is interesting about Wikipedia? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not how it it is made.

A “wiki” is a content source powered (in general, completely powered) by social software technology, with people collectively creating and refining the content. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is the quintessential wiki — while there are other major wikis, from the addictive TV fan site Lostpedia to the new and astoundingly-awesome online typography reference Typedia, Wikipedia is still the mother of all wikis. Wikipedia has so thoroughly conquered our mental model of what an information reference is supposed to be that its most salient concept (social editing) has become inseparable from its fundamental purpose (complete information).

(In fact, I’ve started to notice people using the wordlet “pedia”, rather than “wiki”, to indicate “socially-powered content”. It seems that, for some people, a “wiki” and a “pedia” are the same thing, which to me is tantamount to thinking the “hi” in “hijack” means “airplane”, justifying “carjack” as a legitimate word.)

The “pedia” in Wikipedia is a nod to the “encyclopedia”. The wikipedia, we are supposed to infer, is an encyclopedia powered by a wiki. It’s beyond encyclo, it’s wiki!

The word encyclopedia means “complete or well-rounded” (i.e., encyclo) + “knowledge or learning” (i.e., pedia). So, interpreted one way, “Wikipedia” can mean “People getting together to record knowledge”, which of course is exactly what Wikipedia is.

But Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales could just as well have called it “Encyclowiki”, meaning “people getting together to describe everything”, which in many ways is what Wikipedia, in its blossoming omniscience, has ultimately and more resonantly become.

For it is no longer impressive, at least to me, that Wikipedia is community-generated. Big deal, I get it, I agree with it. I buy into the Here Comes Everybody premise. I take the wisdom of crowds for granted. Like millions of others, I am thoroughly sold on Wikipedia, especially after seeing topics I thought I knew everything about described in informative, passionate, and sometimes astonishing detail. It’s the content that draws me, not the phenomenon that caused the content to get there (if anything, the phenomenon has, and continues to be, Wikipedia’s biggest perceived weakness).

This is why I am glad that Typedia is Typedia and not Wikitype or Typewiki. Typedia is, above all, a compendium of knowledge about type. The fact that it is socially-powered is something we can and should take for granted (and, of course, participate in). This kind of comprehensive one-stop collection of esoteric knowledge simply isn’t going to happen, ever, without social participation.

Basically, we’re all wiki now. We already work together. It’s the pedia part, the knowledge itself, we’ll always be striving for.

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I’ve submitted two talks for the 2010 SXSW Interactive conference. As you might know, SXSW’s selection process includes a period of public review to gauge general interest in the panels submitted (they call them “panels” even though many of the submissions, including my own, are single-speaker sessions).

I would be deeply grateful if you, gentle Graphpaper reader, would put in a vote for my sessions. If you want to comment on my ideas — and I’d love it if you would — please do so at the SXSW site. (You have to register to vote, but it’s an easy and painless sign up.)

Here are my proposals (click the title to see the voting page):

• The Human Interface (or: Products are People, Too!)
  More and more, users are interacting with web sites and software on a conversational, physical, psychological, and emotional level — just like we’ve always interacted with other people. UX designers, then, must stop thinking about interfaces as dumb control panels and begin using technology to envision interfaces (literally!) as human beings.
  .

• Re-Invent the Wheel!: Redesigning your Design Process
  It’s the start of a new project. You’ve got requirements, guidelines, data, research. Now what? Like an artist staring at a blank canvas, designers of interactive products often don’t know where to start. Instead of following a rigid methodology or waiting for the perfect idea to appear out of the blue, designers must invent new tools and tricks to foster real UX innovation.

I’m particularly excited about the first one, as it ties together so much of what I love and/or things I know a lot about: interaction design, science fiction, culture and literature in design, artificial intelligence, human behavior and emotional design. It’s kind of like “The Graphpaper.com Experience, Live!”

Sharing the love

There are a few other talks I think you ought to consider voting for, as well, from people I like and think people should be listening to: MORE…

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When it comes to social media, it is easy to be dazzled by big numbers and strong opinions. But often what is really needed isn’t a comprehensive strategy with metrics and targets, but a charming and intelligent human personality.

The majority of people who today call themselves social media experts, even the legitimate ones who actually know what they are doing, were complete social media newbies only a couple of years ago. Some very likely took the plunge only a few months ago.

I’ve seen people who didn’t have a Facebook page, people who’d skeptically asked “What the hell is this Twitter crap?”, jump in head first and, within a few months, become absolute masters of social media with tens of thousands of connections and followers and influence over some of the biggest names in their field. I’ve seen people in their teens and in their 60s become social media virtuosos, at least within the fields they really know and love, some of them virtually overnight.

I also know hundreds of people who have lots of friends on Twitter, who regularly blog and speak about social media, and who know all about the different companies, people, and technologies in the social media space, but who would be absolute freaking disasters if they had to put those skills to the service of a brand or company. I know this because they have volatile personalities, crummy writing skills and sloppy grammar, glaring personal issues, or are just ignorant of important subject matter. But with thousands of friends and immense popularity across lots of social media.

In other words, jerks, blowhards, and idiots are perfectly capable of mastering the logistics and technologies of social media, but do you really want them managing your social media?

There is undoubtedly a kind of social media skill that has nothing whatsoever to do with expertise with social media tools and technologies, but which all great social media success stories have in spades. Social media tools and technologies can be learned in a matter of days or weeks by the right people as long as they have other important skills: A passion for the product or the field they are working for, for example, is essential. A great personality. Great interpersonal communication skills. A sense of dignity and balance, and political sensitivity. Empathy.

In fact, this traditional stuff is WAY more important than having any experience whatsoever with social media. A so-called social media expert with thousands of hours of experience managing and building social networks and products could easily ruin your social media strategy simply by being a bad cultural fit with your audience and customers. And a total newbie — a kid from the mailroom, a user interface designer, or maybe the CEO herself — might become your company’s social media rainmaker simply because they completely understand your audience and believe in your product.

Charm can be bought, and it can be taught. But usually it’s simply a matter of finding it and letting shine.

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A week ago, Jesse James Garret veritably bellowed the words “user experience designer” in his plenary address at this year’s IA Summit in Memphis, attempting to create some common ground between the information architects and interaction designers in the room and across the industry. In a strong and deeply-felt speech, he admonished the community (-ies?) for their factionalism, but in doing so may have helped stoke some controversy around the very term — user experience — he thought would help bring unity and focus.

I, for one, have called what I do “user experience design” for a decade. In 1999, working at Rare Medium before starting up Behavior, all of the visual designers, information architects, and HTML and Flash technologists were grouped in the UXD department, thanks, I suspect, to the vision of our creative director Gong Szeto. In 2003, I went to speak at my first IA Summit, serving on a panel entitled “User Experience and IA“, with no less than Peter Morville, Terry Swack, Jess McMullin, and moderated by… Jesse James Garret. The panel generated a lot of discussion, mostly about the meaning of “user experience” itself.

After this year’s summit, this conversation has sparked up yet again, most notably on the IxDA mailing list. I shared my own thoughts on Jesse’s argument there, and reproduce them here:

I found nothing whatsoever to disagree with in Jesse’s plenary. In fact, it all seemed obvious and non-controversial. Of course, it was neither. :-(

I hope that folks don’t see Jesse’s declaration as being synonymous with some kind of death of IA or IxD or whatever. He’s not asking anyone to change what they do, but merely to recognize that we are all involved in a broad but very special community of practice. “UX” describes it in a way that includes lots of people who should be working together more closely than it seems we are.

From day one at Behavior we’ve used the term “user experience” to describe everything we do — including visual design, sound design, and copywriting, for example. It’s enabled everyone on the team to feel like we share the responsibility for an important result: a compelling user experience.

On the other hand, we rarely actually use the word. It’s our ambient expertise, it’s the air we breathe. So ubiquitous and appropriate for describing the things it is that it’s almost not worth mentioning except when trying to distinguish it from something it is not.

Which is, of course, why humans have terminologies in the first place. We like the term UX because it doesn’t draw a line between IA and IxD and visual design and writing, but it does draw a line between all of those things and, say, database design, marketing, fashion design, and basket-weaving. Which we often have to do when, for example, we are pitching our services to clients who need to understand how we fit in to their needs.

It’s useful when discussing the strategies behind businesses making products, for whom executives need to distribute dollars between different areas — having a UX budget that’s distinct from a tech or marketing budget helps strategize how a product can succeed or fail.

And as said already, it’s useful when creating communities of practice: A UX conference, or a UX track at a conference, is a sensible way of organizing speakers and panels. Narrowing it down to IA or IxD (or writing or sound or video) might make sense if there are enough sessions narrowly focused on those areas, but I’ve found that most practitioners find it difficult to talk about any of these without talking about the others. It happens, and it’s a good thing that it happens, but it’s also a good thing that we blur the lines and wander across the borders.

In short: No need to throw down any walls here. Just open some gates.

Then, over this past weekend, I noticed David Gray from Xplane tossed his hat into the fray, this time on Twitter. An interesting Twitter-debate ensued (”askrom” is me):

davegray: #ux = hUman eXperience

billder: RT @davegray: #ux = hUman eXperience

askrom: @billder @davegray If we don’t say “user” then we’re not talking about interactivity. hUman eXperience would then include books, movies …

askrom: … It defeats the purpose of carving out an area of practice when it’s defined to include everything under the sun.

ggertz: @askrom @billder @davegray I define UX as an aesthetic not just an area of practice.So in tht sense it does involve everything under the sun

davegray: @askrom people don’t interact with books?

ggertz: @davegray <<

apolaine: @davegray People don’t interact with books in the sense of interactive media, no. They interact on a psychological level of course, but …

askrom: @davegray Sure. And people also interact with movies and sculptures. And to the extent that they do, we can certainly call them “users”.

askrom: @davegray I firmly beleive that interaction design has been with us for millenia, but it’s the concept/focus on “use” that’s especially new.

askrom: @davegray Only someone living in an era of pervasive machines — and their users — would consider a book something that can be “used”.

davegray: @askrom isn’t that the nature of design? Don’t all designers design interactions and human experiences? Why not just say “designer?”

askrom: @davegray I would agree, but realistically “design” includes perfectly valid but passive forms like wallpaper patterns and curtain fringes.

askrom: @davegray … and yet, at some level, even wallpaper has an experiential impact, too. Hmmmm…

mediajunkie: sorry, guys, but “human” is not any sexier (or, ironically, more humane) than “user.” human is a sci-fi nerd word in most ears

askrom: @mediajunkie Right. And some of the best UX designers (Temple Grandin) don’t design for humans at all!

davegray: @askrom Utility, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. defined by the context not the designer. I am losing your point.

askrom: @davegray Heh, I lost my point, too. I’m articulating both sides now. My core point, still, is that thinking about “users” has unleashed a..

askrom: @davegray … new way of designing things and a new way of thinking about design. Real utility is, indeed, a new kind of beauty.

davegray: @askrom if #ux designers only design things that can be used in a mechanistic sense, that seems needlessly limiting

askrom: @davegray Hmm. Can you clarify a “use” that is not mechanistic? Trying to wrap my head around that one.

davegray: @askrom nice. “utility has unleashed a new kind of beauty” I like that thought. I feel that way about clarity.

akacolleen: @davegray “I feel that way about clarity.” Now, I like *that* thought. #editorsforclarity

cchastain: @davegray @askrom How about: an exp that has a “user” must also have a function that requires interaction?

cchastain: Use, therefore, is not limited to pure utility….and it could include museum spaces, conferences, and, yes books.

askrom: @cchastain “requires” or merely “invites” interaction?

cchastain: @askrom Ah…invites, I think. That sounds much better. :-)

davegray: @askrom LOL just reading thru some of these tweets. I like the sound of “Wallpaper Experience Designer” :)

zakiwarfel: @askrom but do we really need to worry about being confused with someone who designs wallpapers? Really?

The conversation continued later in the day and into the night, and was similarly transcribed by Steve “Doc” Baty. Continue the thread there…

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Two weeks ago, BusinessWeek’s next Design and Innovation blog asked for my thoughts on this month’s Facebook home page redesign, as a kind of follow-up to my thoughts in those same virtual pages a year ago.

I was asked to opine on the new design without having viewed the actual live site, which was launching the following week. This seemed reasonable to me at the time given that the site’s new features were announced, illustrated, and widely-known ahead of time (via a very comprehensive home page preview announcement) to anyone who was paying attention to that kind of thing.

I was really excited about the real-time feed user experience described in the home page preview. My exact words:

The new FB real-time home page is pretty cool, actually… it’s crossing the line between the old-fashioned page-based web and the live experience of television and broadcast media. In this case, it’s broadcasting from friends to friends — which it always was, of course, but now it’s more visceral and more real. I think people will love it. They’ll be glued to their screens, and will want to add more friends and applications just to increase the flow of content on their home page.

This is “Web 2.0 Complete”: When web people use the term “Web 2.0″, they mean two different things. First, they mean the social web, where *people* make (and are) the content. Second, they mean the pageless web, where web sites react dynamically and fluidly, without page reloads and refreshes. The new Facebook design combines both of these.

I thought it was kind of clever, if a little corny, of me to note that the new Facebook home page was simply conforming to some kind of basic “Web 2.0″ bandwagon orthodoxy, bringing the two flavors of Web 2.0 niftyness into one delicious treat.

But a week later when the new home page actually began to roll out and replace millions of Facebook users’ old home pages, the backlash was immediate and seething and nearly unanimous (a Facebook poll found 94% of users didn’t like the new design). Oh man was I embarrassed! To have praised a user experience so breathlessly only to have my opinion immediately contradicted by the public’s rabid scorn!

Turns out, however, that users were complaining about the new page’s lack of real-time status updates from your friends. And yet Facebook had already clearly and prominently promised that feature as part of the redesign. In fact, I based the core of my analysis of the new site on that very feature, which they had already promised to deliver. They deployed the new design with much fanfare but without real time status updates.

Betrayed! Betrayed by a press release! There I am, praising a non-existent feature. Like an idiot.

Well, happily my premature praise no longer needs to cause me so much shame: Today Facebook has announced that the real-time reporting is going to occur after all. So the BusinessWeek report won’t be such an embarrassment to me after all.

Of course, this is the second time Facebook has announced this feature before delivering anything. Fool me once…

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One of the problems faced by designers trying to integrate their work with most software development processes, even (or possibly especially) with Agile development, is that the literature makes no distinction between software development and software design, or at least no distinction that makes any sense to dedicated user experience designers.

The common complaint among interaction designers working with Agile is that, with some important exceptions, the design of the “user interface” is seen as a cosmetic final stage in the overall software development process. The fundamental designing of the software itself, however — the interactions, the mental models, the metaphors and behaviors — is built-in to the overall Agile process, woven in with with and indistinguishable from the software architecture and code development.

In Mitch Kapor’s Software Design Manifesto, originally delivered in 1990 and included in Terry Winograd’s Bringing Design to Software (1996), it’s clear that this ambiguity has deep roots:

Software design is not the same as user interface design.

The overall design of a program is to be clearly distinguished from the design of its user interface. If a user interface is designed after the fact, that is like designing an automobile’s dashboard after the engine, chassis, and all other components and functions are specified. The separation of the user interface from the overall design process fundamentally disenfranchises designers at the expense of programmers and relegates them to the status of second-class citizens.

The software designer is concerned primarily with the overall conception of the product. Dan Bricklin’s invention of the electronic spreadsheet is one of the crowning achievements of software design. It is the metaphor of the spreadsheet itself, its tableau of rows and columns with their precisely interrelated labels, numbers, and formulas—rather than the user interface of VisiCalc—for which he will be remembered. The look and feel of a product is but one part of its design.

On my first read, the whole terminology of this felt alien to me. Is the paper spreadsheet metaphor not the “user interface design”? It seems “look and feel” is being equated with “user interface” here, but I think he’s implying that what I consider the user interface is, in fact, the software itself. I suppose this is a more glorified definition of the word “software” than what I am accustomed to, one in which the software design included the mental model of the user’s approach to the software.

On my second read, though, it became clear that Kapor is in fact laying the early groundwork for what we now call interaction design. He still sees it as closely bound with programming, although he is clear that it’s not the same thing. He is also working in a climate where user experiences are far simpler than they are now — graphic capabilities were primitive, network interactions were almost non-existent, and interfraces had few modes, even few features. Today, with the high level of complexity of both computer code and user interfaces, it’s easier to consider the two challenges (user experience and code) separately — or even better giving primacy to the user interface — the part that people actually see and use.

Design and Technology

It’s obviously important that interaction designers are well-versed in what the technologies they are designing for can actually do. I wonder, however, what interaction designers today would think of the degree of technical expertise Kapor requires of designers:

Technology courses for the student designer should deal with the principles and methods of computer program construction. Topics would include computer systems architecture, microprocessor architectures, operating systems, network communications, data structures and algorithms, databases, distributed computing, programming environments, and object-oriented development methodologies.

Designers must have a solid working knowledge of at least one modern programming language (C or Pascal) in addition to exposure to a wide variety of languages and tools, including Forth and Lisp.

In preparing the syllabus for my upcoming course this fall at SVA, I am quite certain that I don’t share Kapor’s technical requirements for a software design education, neither specifically (Forth?) or generally. Instead, I think a firm grounding in a broad range of designed experiences far outweighs any need for hands-on experience in the deepest challenges of technology implementation.

Yes, some designers will delve deep into technology, being hands-on coders and fabricators of interactive artifacts. In fact, some great interaction designers already spend most of their days thinking of themselves primarily as technologists. Others, however, will focus on the design parts of interaction design. These people will most often work closely with other individuals and teams to implement their designs.

In short, great design will come from great designers, and great technologists will make those designs happen. Sometimes these skills will be found the same person, but increasingly not. An interaction design education should support both models, of course.

Interfaces and Software

Despite my difference with Kapor’s admonition, I still think that in a way we are coming full circle. The recently-articulated idea that the “interface is the spec“, or even “the interface is the product“, isn’t so different from Kapor’s thinking. The metaphors, mental models, and processes that users experience using the software are, in both cases, the most definitive and salient qualities of the “design” of the software (not, as many software development processes presume, the architecture of the code or the technical features that happen under the hood).
The important thing that Kapor left out, however, is that the “user interface” — the stuff that comes between human beings and cold hard technology –  should be thought of as including graphic design as well as the underlying conceptual models of the interactive experience he rightly praises. In fact, the “user interface” concept should also include the software’s motion graphics, its sound and music, the copywriting, voice and personality, the community that builds around the product, and so many other qualities of software design that, frankly, had not really come to maturity yet in 1990.

We are only recently starting to appreciate the idea that interaction design is really about the intersection of the behaviors of systems and people (a favorite word of mine for obvious reasons). The explosion of new and innovative software experiences brought on since 1990 by the World Wide Web and console video games, I think, has fundamentally changed our understanding of what software can be.

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The Innocent Eye, 1981 Mark Tansey

In the web design consulting business, there’s always been an unspoken assumption that our clients just don’t get the web. I’m sure this is true with many other consulting businesses, but for web consultants this has been particularly true.

And it’s easy to see why: Until recently, it actually was kind of true. Clients used to hire web designers and developers to do something they had no clue how to do themselves. Sometimes they were even desperate, lost in the woods.

Until about 1999 or so, almost all web design projects started from scratch. If someone hired you to build a web site, it was likely that almost nobody on the client side had ever built a web site before. And the few individuals who did have any experience often operated in a culture of ignorance and inexperience, requiring a tangible dumbing-down of the whole client-vendor relationship. Consultants with a few site launches under their belts would have to spend a lot of time explaining to their clients some very basic concepts about the Internet and HTML, or were forced to repeatedly illustrate how the client’s ideas were impossible to implement or would create impossible user experiences.

On the other hand they could also get away with some blatant snake-oil salesmanship and techno razzle-dazzle, and often didn’t have their work closely scrutinized by their clients. God knows how many pre-dotcom-bust web consultancies built thriving businesses whose revenues were possible only by virtue of this expertise disparity.

But around the end of the last decade things started to change. Site designs became site redesigns. One-off static web sites became ongoing dynamic web businesses. Experienced consultants jumped the rails and joined client teams. Clients built up their own internal competencies in all areas of web site strategy and implementation: design, technology, usability, marketing.

By the early 2000s, web services vendors would frequently encounter clients who had more experience working with the web than they did. Now it’s an everyday occurrence.

Today’s clients know as much as we do.* It’s now hard to find a person responsible for a company’s internet strategy who hasn’t been making web sites in one way or another for a decade or more. Sure there is the occasional outlier, people who have landed or kept their jobs despite manifest technological incompetence, but no more so than in any other corporate arenas.

And yet I still regularly hear designers and consultants stereotyping their clients as if it were still 1999, as if they were still dealing with people who had never bought a book online and don’t know how search engines work, much less joined a social network or had their own blog. This is just wrong. This kind of attitude doesn’t help you as a consultant, nor does it help designers and consultancies as a whole. If this sounds like you, I suggest you drop it. You’re making your clients mad and probably coming across as more than a little condescending.

[* Perhaps you noticed the asterisk above. I want to be clear that I am not implying that consultants are irrelevant, or that our clients don’t need us anymore. Naturally clients hire designers precisely because we know things they don’t, because we have experiences, talents, skills, and competencies they lack. And there are huge swaths of corporate culture who are still clueless. It’s our job to be at least one step ahead of our clients (and our peers for that matter, to think about and tackle problems with an eye towards learning lessons that can apply to future challenges and future clients. It’s our job to bring fresh new ideas to our clients. That much has not changed and should not change.

My point, really, is that by assuming your clients are profoundly ignorant about technology and design, you are missing a chance to collaborate with people who may be your peers in a lot of ways, people who often know their own businesses and objectives extremely well. You are missing a chance for a truly harmonious relationship where client and designer bounce ideas off each other to produce greater results than the designer, no matter how visionary they are, could have accomplished on his or her own.]

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Design is often characterized as a collaboration between two entirely different modes of thought — logical thinking and emotional thinking. In the various fields of design for interactive products, I think these different modes may be starting to manifest in the job titles we give ourselves.

Catriona Cornett publishes a fun and insightful, and cleverly conceived, blog called inspireUX, in which she regularly publishes short and thoughtful quotes from UX people, some famous, some not so much, but always interesting and inspiring. Quite often her quotation selections address these different philosophies directly.

Today’s item got me thinking:

“Enough confidence to believe you can solve any design problem and enough humility to understand that most of your initial ideas are probably bad. Enough humility to listen to ideas from other people that may be better than your own and enough confidence to understand that going with other people’s ideas does not diminish your value as a designer. True concern for the comfort and happiness of other people, including your users and your teammates.”

- Larry Tesler in Designing for Interaction by Dan Saffer on what makes a good interaction designer

The last sentence is key. I suspect sometimes that a key difference between the temperament of people who self-identify as “information architects” versus “interaction designers” is increasingly turning out to be empathy. All UX people claim to possess this quality, and Larry Tesler isn’t the first to point out its necessity as a design skill. But is it really a quality found in equal amounts across all IA/HCI/UXD professionals?

I’ve noted before that many, if not most, of the practicing IAs I’ve known seem, at least to me, to have major difficulties with the whole empathy thing, preferring instead to “geek out” on the design itself. They like to dive deep into structure and logic and organization, often at the expense of stepping back and imagining how others will experience a product. And for many IAs the ability to do that kind of deep structural dive and understand the full implications of information and process design options is precisely what makes them really great at what they do — designing seamless, efficient, logical, powerful interactive systems. I mean that.

The plethora of UX tools and exercises, from personas to mental models to contextual inquiry, designed to enable IAs to break out of that logical focus and to get “into the heads” of their users bespeaks, I sometimes think, the degree to which that audience needs those tools. Not that all designers can’t benefit from a deeper understanding of their users and audiences, but somehow the degree to which the IA and HCI communities seem to crave these tools, to a degree that many other design professionals don’t come close to, may be telling.

Self-identified interaction designers, however, seem to — almost by definition — center their thinking around users. Even the job titles suggest a different focus, on things versus people: Information architects architect information. Interaction designers design interactions. Some designers seem to naturally conduct many of the aforementioned empathy exercises almost subconsciously, I’ve seen, and are able to articulate their imagining of user experiences in a way that is often the instantaneous equivalent of a time-consuming mental model or persona exercise. It’s an emotional skill, I think.

Of course I am going to say this: Both modes of operation, logic and emotional design, are valuable, and in fact they compliment complement each other. And often both modes of thinking are found in the same person (which might explain why so very, very many of us are deeply torn between calling ourselves information architects versus interaction designers).

Of course, I could be 100% backwards here, or just plain 100% wrong. What do you think?

(Post title, of course, stolen from David Armano)

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In his Time Magazine Person of the Year interview, Barack Obama said “it turns out there’s some spending that has to be done on information technology, for example, that we can do very swiftly.”

If recent speeches by the new President are any sign, I sure hope he’s talking about rural broadband access. Like many others, I don’t think we can be complacent about America’s lagging IT infrastructure, and for a good many reasons.

Some aren’t so sure, however, at least about the rural part of that equation. My friend Adam Greenfield is a well-known advocate for humane connectedness through pervasive urban digital infrastructure (I know “advocate” is not the right word — Adam’s work is equal parts caution and possibility).

From near-term omnipresent wireless broadband to a futuristic cloud of RFID gizmos mediating our social and municipal interactions, the vision of living a seamless networked experience using benevolent technology seems both exciting and inevitable.

And, by all accounts, this will happen most noticeably using the city street as the primary test and launch platform. The urban environment is the easiest and most logical place to implement this vision since the “last mile” (moving information from the big pipes that cross the globe to the little pipes that lead into our homes and mobile devices) will always be an costly obstacle, and since so many people can be reached in a small physical area.

But another friend, David Sleight, opened my eyes to another perspective — the view from the country. Although David is currently a Manhattanite, his family roots are in the woods of upstate New York where for many the idea of getting even regular ol’ wired high speed access to the information superhighway is still an impossibility. David loves the country and would, all things being equal, prefer to live there, but for him urban living is quite simply a necessity for a career in the information and technology economy.

And all things simply aren’t equal.

Millions of Americans still live in rural environments where broadband Internet access is not even an option (except through unreliable and expensive satellite connections). Much of the nation is still unserved by 3G, Edge, or even mobile voice access at all. Living in the country pretty much excludes you from participation in the aforementioned technology economy.

So this is what I hope (and predict) Obama is talking about: Bringing the Internet — the *real* Internet, not the dial-up Web 1.0 of 1998 — to the millions of Americans currently living without it. I’m not just talking about high-bandwidth experiences like Flickr, YouTube, and Hulu. I’m talking about the less-glamourous low-bandwidth experiences that happen every day on the Internet: co-workers exchanging PowerPoint decks, transferring medical records to rural clinics and hospitals, downloading hundreds of emails from friends and family, people debating politics on blogs and message boards, or even just regular everyday surfing through dozens of websites without waiting endlessly for them to load.

Some will argue the current situation isn’t so bad given the disproportionally rural residency of our country when compared to broadband leaders like South Korea, Denmark, or Iceland. Some even argue that people in the country don’t really need or even want broadband access.

I don’t buy either of these arguments. I don’t think we should settle for inequality just because we’re a less urbanized nation than our global competitors. What’s more, I really don’t think people who lack access to technology have any idea about the user experience they are missing. It’s not like we’re talking about force feeding cable TV to the Amish here.

Some, like Adam, might say that people who choose to live in the country have by definition chosen to live a technologically backwards (and, importantly, increasingly unsustainable) existence. That the responsible and ethical choice for any modern human is to live somewhere easily and affordably accessible by wires and roads and mass transit (and food and water), in an economically-efficient and environmentally-benign way — i.e., what cities do best.

I find this argument immensely appealing. But I, too, happen to love oceans, forests, lakes, and mountains almost as much as I love the city. I often entertain a fantasy of living at least part of my life in a beautiful, remote rural setting. Perhaps this fantasy is selfish and wasteful, but I also wonder if ever information technology finally replaces the combustion engine as the primary medium of human economic activity could we not, in fact, flatten this ethical disparity a little and make rural life a little more appealing to those of us who want to leave a slighter carbon footprint?

Want vs. Need

Is supporting rural broadband, then, merely a way to make urbanists’ retirements more luxurious, or to explore an impossible utopian future? Is this a matter of want or need?

I’ve never thought that we should cease to push the boundaries of our science and technology in order to ensure that more down-to-earth and pressing needs are met. We need to find a cure for cancer and land a person on Mars, for example. They’re both noble goals.

And although I am deeply critical of its implementation, I never really opposed the One Laptop Per Child project on principle, nor did I ever think that the money would be better spent directly on food or medicine. We need both experimental and conventional programs.

Broadband for rural America should be seen as a “great work” project, like the Internet itself, whose benefits may take years to be fully realized.

In short, we should be investing in technology for everyone, in cities and provinces. Clearly we should pursue subsidized free public WiFi for densely concentrated urban areas, transit systems, and public facilities — it’s the cheapest way per capita to bring our citizens and our economy to where they inevitably want and need to be. But we should also invest in the likely-far-costlier enterprise of bringing broadband and digital cellular access to people in the country: those who can’t walk to a corner Starbucks, who don’t ride a subway, and who can’t possibly use some cool iPhone app to find a great Korean barbecue only a few blocks away.

Economic Benefits

So why do this? Well, most convincingly there is the economic argument: Can it hurt to have tens of millions more people shopping online, consuming online media, opening vast opportunities for information and education and, most importantly, enabling millions to participate in a future of information-based labor through rurally-situated technology industries, telecommuting and self-employment? Can one argue against having as many people (Americans, if you’re patriotic :-) ) as possible learning to use and navigate what will undoubtedly be the primary medium for any future world economy?

This is a matter of global competitiveness. America has fallen from 4th to 17th in the world in broadband penetration. The US began our critical interstate highway system in the 1950s — 20 years after Germany began building their autobahn network. We shouldn’t once again wait until we are two decades behind to do this.

Social Benefits

Beyond of the plain economics of it, I also can’t help but to advocate this idea as a matter of sociopolitical principal: It does harm to the group psyche to perpetuate a have/have not culture, where one cohort is participating in the emerging cultural and economic hegemony and another is excluded. The free market alone cannot make this happen any more than it could bring about universal education, the interstate highway system, or the Internet. This will take government action.

But it’s more than a simple question of fairness to me. As long as rural America is kept in the slow lane with respect to access to information and culture, the more they will feel isolated and resentful of the mainstream “connected culture”, viewing them, incorrectly, as out of touch elites. They will then, I fear, vote regressively and conservatively. I’ll admit this thinking may be a matter of unjustified faith in certain (liberal) ideals, but I actually believe that exposure to diverse ideas and people, combined with full and equal participation in a healthy economy, produces, in general, increased social tolerance, better education, and cultural and intellectual progress. Wisdom, peace, and prosperity through connectedness.

Perhaps best of all, wouldn’t broadband for the sticks enable an actual reversal of the polarization of our culture, ending the “The Big Sort” phenomenon where conservatives and liberals are increasingly locating themselves in self-segregated homogenous counties. Hell, decent Internet access might make life in the country attractive to snobby urban sophisticates who might otherwise find the boondocks economically and culturally untenable. If I can meet city clients online and connect with city friends online, why do I need to live in the city?

Ultimately if you like to walk to the store to buy food, if you like bright lights and hustle and bustle, if you enjoy bumping into hundreds of interesting and diverse people every day, then no amount of broadband access will draw you from your urban world. You can certainly count me in that camp. But I can’t bring myself to simply write off non-urban America to a life of electronic destitution and information poverty — their deprivation does affect my happiness. We’re all too closely connected to let the digital divide continue to grow.

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