We all saw how e-Readers took off this Holiday season and that it may just a matter of time, really, before book discounters could potentially go the way of the big box video rentals, like Blockbuster or Hollywood, and music stores like Tower Records and HMV. Amazon is better insulated against this because they’ve diversified their risk, but you can see it in the big boxes like Best Buy: everything is bits. Hard media is passe. Publishing rights and deals are the new currency in such an economy. I would not be surprised to see not only big time houses do well, but small independent publishing should flourish through the new Apple online bookstore, as podcasting did under iTMS. Amazon has never been able to leverage this as Apple could and hopefully will. Now Apple owns the world’s largest music, movies, and bookstore chain. I get the sense that Amazon’s happy to just sell through Apple, so long as they mind their own business. But there will be a day when Amazon will want more from their partnership, and that will be the end of that.

I have seen some snippy comments about the technology not being so special, in fact, not new technology at all, but those same people said the same things about the Nintendo Wii when it was announced. Again I would say no one is looking at emerging markets, no one is looking at the vast untapped needs out there, no one is looking at how regular, everyday people use computers, now and for the foreseeable future. But this is what divides the design thinkers from those who don’t. The best way to predict the future is to create it, and that’s what Jobs demonstrated today. Again.

Magic shelf?!

I’m thinking no. The genie’s already out of the bottle. In essence, there is no design style that is sui generis “Chinese” per se. Perhaps even the notion of design itself, although it poses as universal, actually is historically conditioned by the West as a kind of discursive formation. At the risk of prematurely speaking, one cannot talk about Chinese design because Chinese designers have not begun to build a national discourse of their own, the narrative of seeing, thinking and shaping for themselves, out of “native”, pre-colonial design history, to solve their own problems using “native” ways of doing so, and not “imported” ways of doing so, such as constructivism, modernism, so on. Largely, when they use such techniques, they’re really only copying from others, doing “what the market tells them” will work, what someone has taught them.

Chinese Design, therefore, properly only refers to the act of form-giving in a more or less Western manner, with pre-colonial or traditional Chinese flourishes, by people who are Chinese or are designing for Chinese and maybe to a degree by foreigners living and working in China. This differs from big-letter Chinese Design because the work seen today does not stem from a purely, uniquely Chinese historical aesthetic tradition, but from the chaotic and tumultuous centuries of engagement with Western ways of form giving, as we see with product and advertising work, i.e. communications design from Hong Kong and Shanghai before the Second World War, and then of course the mainland engagement with the Soviet realist propaganda after 1949, and of course modernism and its discontents take over in Hong Kong after 1949 as well.

I doubt there will be a rejection and revolution in this regard, and I think it is too late for any rejection to be successful so as to “restart” Chinese Design ex nihilo. But, if this were undertaken, a wholesale rejection of western form ways, fashions, trends, and the like, basically, a return to pre-colonial Chinese aesthetics, perhaps then we might be able to talk about Chinese design as its own discourse. Perhaps because colonialism is part of the historical condition, therefore it is inescapable to talk about Chinese design without reference to the colonial masters.

Anyone who talks about Chinese design today cannot however elide or exclude this colonial form of intellectual history as if it does not exist, although it is telling to me why this has not been criticized more loudly. Chinese design cannot also, as I am seeing in a paper from Design Issues, be simply academically explained away by simplistic and outdated colonialist notions about Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, collective identity, so on: every such simplistic textbookish stereotype can be countered by the rich, direct knowledge gained from actual observation of the real conditions on the ground and the lived experiences of people, their histories, their aspirations and failings.

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Shortly thereafter interviewed with a bunch of different places: Amazon, which has a grueling interview process, and would have been quite exciting, except it seemed they weren’t interested so much in a user experience person as they were in someone who was more a designer who had UX chops; Critical Mass, which seemed very ad agency and interactive marketing driven, not much for usability and user experience practice; passed the stringent hiring process at TandemSeven, only to find no job waiting for me at the end due to the economic climate; talked to Fry, which seemed much like Brulant; talked to Acquity Group, which has great people, but the job was clearly not a good match for either of us. There were a lot of conversations that led nowhere. A lot of resumes submitted electronically, a lot of hustling. Finally got some work at Manifest Digital, which was alright, actually, took care of a bunch of us after a gig fell through after starting, and paid pretty well for a few months. Around October or so, I was very surprised to be approached by a recruiter for Siemens in the deep northwest suburbs, and started talking to them, and was faced with a pretty technical interview, but, clearly passed and was hired in short order. And since then it’s been a pretty interesting time.

It is at once disorientingly different and similar in strange ways. Because I am no longer working in e-commerce but in healthcare, on medical devices, the goals are of course quite different. We’re not developing methodologies either to pressure people into buying more or how to make it easier to find or buy things, aka, increasing lift and flow. We are however still helping users to achieve tasks and goals through interactions with an application. What we’re doing here is definitively traditional applications development, which doesn’t have web conventions, or the kinds of behaviors built into it that we’ve learned from the tens of millions of user behavior observations over the last 10 or more years. But then too, so many people have cast their lot onto the web that often times the desktop application development side has been overlooked as a result. I may take a course at Cooper Interaction Design in the near future, and there is a conference for improving the usability design of medical devices in Virginia later this month.

Mostly my disappearance from correspondence with you, my beloved readers, is due to me becoming familiar with this new work and the processes that we must undergo to ensure that the product gets launched in a safe and timely fashion. Our in-house process is fairly heavyweight, with oversight from peers and management and also compliance with international engineering and safety design standards, and the documentation process is also quite heavyweight as well. There have been things I haven’t had to design for before, such as whether or not an audible signal meets a sufficient level of loudness in decibels, or, a setup with two monitors. The team I work with has a mix of hardware and software competencies, people who came from other parts of the company from overseas, and there are clinical experts on staff. There are challenges working with an international team located at our headquarters in Forchheim, in Bavaria, Germany as well as in Bangalore in the state of Karnataka in India, the greatest of these is getting in the same time zone so we can get on the same page. Even though the common corporate language is English, I often find that a good interaction design diagram in the form of the particular kind of wireframes we learned to make at Sears Online Services (by way of Orbitz and so on) might makes things more helpful. But this requires that people be taught how to read them, and even when we used these diagrams at Sears, I didn’t think that the offshore team understood this stuff all that clearly. We’ll have to try a few approaches. I did show my German counterparts how we do this work here, and I don’t think they use the same methodology as I saw a few powerpoint presentations that demonstrate interaction. But none of these challenges is insurmountable, although, it does require quite a bit of time.

There have been plenty of site visits in the last year to meet with doctors, nurses, applications support and trainers. There are regulatory bars within this industry against gifts or tokens even for usability testing. Observing users is the same as usual, tasks, discount usability, so on, which is complicated by the kind of users we deal with. Perhaps the most disconcerting thing has been those moments when a patient is wheeled into the laboratory for an emergency procedure, or seeing an already very ill patient during a procedure, and usually the intervention must take place then or surgery for bypass must be scheduled immediately. It is at that moment that you realize that the kind of work that you are doing is important, far more important than almost anything else you have ever done in your life, because you are crafting tools that will enable someone to make decisions about someone else’s life. If that person was related to you, or was you yourself, wouldn’t you want that tool to be as precise and as easy to use as possible? And so, for all my complaining, I actually find myself quite deeply engaged in the work that I feel I should have been doing all these years.

“The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future - must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.”

I am learning all manner of things about our users. See, in my past work, if something went badly, the user didn’t get their purchase. But now, when things go badly, someone could die. That’s the difference between a good and bad user experience here.

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