The larger implication is that the birth of human culture was triggered by a new kind of connectedness. For the first time, humans lived in dense clusters, and occasionally interacted with other clusters, which allowed their fragile innovations to persist and propagate. The end result was a positive feedback loop of new ideas.

Sounds an awful lot like what the Internet is doing, no?

Funny how things can pop into your head when you’re not thinking about them. I can’t remember why this occurred to me last week … but it was one of those thoughts I realized I should write down so I could use it later. So I tweeted it. Lots of people kindly “re-tweeted” the thought, which immediately made me self-conscious that it may not explain itself very well. So now I’m blogging about it. Because that’s what we kids do nowadays.

My tweet: User Experience Design is not data-driven, it’s insight-driven. Data is just raw material for insight.

I whipped up a little model to illustrate the larger point: insight comes from a synthesis between talent, expertise, and the fresh understanding we gain through research. It’s a set of ingredients that, when added to our brains and allowed to stew, often over a meal or after a few good nights’ sleep, can bring a designer to those moments of clarity where a direction finally makes sense.

I’ve seen a lot of talk lately about how we shouldn’t be letting data drive our design decisions — that we’re designers, so we should be designing based on best practices, ideas, expertise, and even “taste.” (I have issues with the word “taste” as many people use it, but I don’t have a problem with the idea of “expert intuition” which is I think more what a lot of my colleagues mean. In fact, that Ira Glass video that made the rounds a few weeks ago on many tweets/blogs puts a better spin on the word “taste” as one’s aspiration that may be, for now, beyond one’s actual abilities, without work and practice.)

As for the word “data” — I’m referring to empirical data as well as the recorded results of something less numbers-based, like contextual research. Data is an input to our understanding, but nothing more. Data cannot tell us, directly, how to design anything.

But it’s also ludicrous to ask a client or employer to spend their money based solely on your expertise or … “taste.” Famous interior or clothing designers or architects can perhaps get away with this — because their names carry inherent value, whether their designs are actually useful or not. So far, User Experience design practitioners don’t have this (dubious) luxury. I would argue that we shouldn’t, otherwise we’re not paying much attention to “user experience” to begin with.

Data is valuable, useful, and often essential. Data can be an excellent input for design insight. I’d wager that you should have as much background data as you can get your hands on, unless you have a compelling reason to exclude it. In addition, our clients tend to speak the language of data, so we need to be able to translate our approach into that language.

It’s just that data doesn’t do the job alone. We still need to do the work of interpretation, which requires challenging our presuppositions, blind spots and various biases.

The propensity for the human brain to completely screw stuff up with cognitive bias is, alone, reason enough to put our design ideas through a bit of rigor. Reading through the oft-linked list of cognitive biases on Wikipedia is hopefully enough to caution any of us against the hubris of our own expertise. We need to do the work of seeing the design problem anew, with fresh understanding, putting our assumptions on the table and making sure they’re still viable. To me, at least, that’s a central tenet behind the cultural history of “user experience” design approaches.

But analysis paralysis can also be a serious problem; and data is only as good as its interpretation. Eventually, actual design has to happen. Otherwise you end up with a disjointed palimpsest, a Frankenstein’s Monster of point-of-pain fixes and market-tested features.

We have to be able to do both: use data to inform the fullest possible understanding of the behavior and context of potential users, as well as bring our own experience and talent to the challenge. And that’s hard to do, in the midst of managing client expectations, creating deliverables, and endless meetings and readouts. But who said it was easy?

There’s a difference between random, anonymous pot-shot behavior and creating a secondary persona. It could very well be that a writer has good reason to create a second self to be the vehicle for expression. The key to this facet of identity is reputation.

In order to gain any traction in the marketplace of ideas, one must cultivate a consistent persona, over time. In effect, the writer has to create a separate identity — but it’s an identity just the same. Its reputation stands on its behavior and its words. If the author is invested at all in that identity, then its reputation is very important to the author, just like their “real” identity and reputation.

The Internet is full of examples where regular people have joined a discussion board, or started an anonymous blog or Live Journal and, before they know it, they have friendships and connections that are important to them in that parallel world of writing, sharing and discussion. Whether those people know the writer’s real name or not becomes beside the point. (Sherry Turkle and others have been exploring these ideas about identity online for many years now.)

What publishing has provided us, definitely since the printing press and especially since the Internet, is the ability to express ideas as *ideas* with very little worry about real-life baggage, anxieties, expectations and relationships getting in the way. It’s a marketplace where the ideas and their articulation can stand on their own.

Of course, history shows a long tradition of pseudonyms. Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton wrote under pseudonyms in order to make their points (Franklin as “Mrs Silence Dogood” and later — as an open secret — “Poor Richard”) and Hamilton as “Publius” (which happens to be the pseudonym adopted by the blogger at the center of the disagreement mentioned above). Other writers modified or changed their names so as to improve their chances of publication or being taken seriously. Marian Evans was able to publish brutally, psychologically frank fiction, partly because she published under the name George Eliot. And Samuel Clemens famously wrote under the name Mark Twain, as a way to reinvent his whole identity. While all of these don’t fit a precise pattern, the point is that publishing has always had generally accepted innovations involving the writer’s identity.

None of this is to say that anonymity doesn’t come with a downside. It certainly does. But lumping all anonymous or pseudonym-written writers into the same category doesn’t help.

It appears someone has posted the now-classic episode of Nightline about Ideo (called the Deep Dive) to YouTube. I hope it’s legit and Disney/ABC isn’t going to make somebody take them down. But here’s the link, hoping that doesn’t happen.

About 10 years ago, I started a job as an “Internet Copywriter” at a small web consultancy in North Carolina. By then, I’d already been steeped in the ‘net for seven or eight years, but mainly as a side-interest. My day jobs had been web-involved but not centrally, and my most meaningful learning experiences designing for the web had been side projects for fun. When I started at the new web company job, I knew there would need to be more to my role than just “concepting” and writing copy next to an art director, advertising-style. Our job was to make things people could *use* not just look at or be inspired to action by. But to be frank, I had little background in paid design work.

I’d been designing software of one kind or another off and on for a while, in part-time jobs while in graduate school. For example, creating a client database application to make my life easier in an office manager job (and then having to make it easy enough for the computer-phobic clerical staff to use as well). But I’d approached it as a tinkerer and co-user — making things I myself would be using, and iterating on them over time. (I’d taken a 3-dimensional design class in college, but it was more artistically focused — I had yet to learn much at all about industrial design, and had not yet discovered the nascent IA community, usability crowd, etc.)

Then I happened upon a Nightline broadcast (which, oddly, I never used to watch — who knows why I had it on at this point) where they engaged the design company Ideo. And I was blown away. It made perfect sense… here was a company that had codified an approach to design that I had been groping for intuitively, but not fully grasped and articulated. It put into sharp clarity a number of crucial principles such as behavioral observation and structured creative anarchy.

I immediately asked my new employer to let me order the video and share it with them. It served as a catalyst for finding out more about such approaches to design.

Since then, I’ve of course become less fully enamored of these videos… after a while you start to see the sleight-of-hand that an edited, idealized profile creates, and how it was probably the best PR event Ideo ever had. And ten years gives us the hind-sight to see that Ideo’s supposedly genius shopping cart didn’t exactly catch on — in retrospect we see that it was a fairly flawed design in many ways (in a busy grocery store, how many carts can reasonably be left at the end-caps while shoppers walk about with the hand-baskets?).

But for anyone who isn’t familiar with the essence of what many people I know call “user experience design,” this show is still an excellent teaching tool. You can see people viscerally react to it — sudden realization about how messy design is, by nature, how interdependent it is with physically experiencing your potential users, how the culture needed for creative collaboration has to be cultivated, protected from the Cartesian efficiencies and expectations of the traditional business world, and how important it is to have effective liaisons between those cultures, as well as a wise approach to structuring the necessary turbulence that creative work brings.

Then again, maybe everybody doesn’t see all that … but I’ve seen it happen.

What I find amazing, however, is this: even back then, they were saying this was the most-requested video order from ABC. This movie has been shown countless times in meetings and management retreats. And yet, the basic approach is still so rare to find. The Cartesian efficiencies and expectations form a powerful presence. What it comes down to is this: making room for this kind of work to be done well is hard work itself.

And that’s why Ideo is still in business.

Lately, I can’t seem to get enough of learning about brain science — neurological stuff, psychological stuff, whatever. Bring it on. There’s an amazing explosion of learning going on about our brains, and our minds (and how our brains give rise to our minds, and vice-versa).

I can’t help but think this is all great news for designers of all stripes. How can it but help for us to better understand how cognition works, how we make decisions, how our identities are formed and change over time, or even what it means for us to be happy? There are a few really excellent articles I’ve run across recently (and seen lots of folks linking to from Twitter as well).

First, this beautifully written, deeply human piece in The Atlantic on “What Makes Us Happy?” It follows a unique, longitudinal study of a generation of men who were first measured and tracked at Harvard in the 30s, as mere teenagers. It’s deftly honest about the inherent limitations in such work, but shows how valuable the results have been anyway. Mainly it’s worth reading because of its poignancy and introspection.

Another article: “Don’t! The Secret of Self Control” is from Jonah Lehrer, who’s fast becoming the Carl Sagan of Neuroscience. (And I mean that in nothing but a good way.) It looks at discoveries regarding delayed gratification, and how it’s connected to intelligence, maturity and general life success over time.

And another from the New Yorker: “Brain Games” about behavioral neurologist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, who has figured in a number of things I’ve heard and read lately about brain science. (Reading the article requires free registration, but do read it!) I found myself wishing I could quit my job and go to UC San Diego for a completely unnecessary degree, just so I could have regular conversations with this guy and his colleagues. Among the coolest stuff discussed: how deeply social we are without even knowing it, how we construct our identities, and the possibility that we might measurably discover how human consciousness emerged, and how it works.

I can’t get over how exciting all this subject matter is to me. I suppose it’s because it combines all my favorite stuff … it’s answering questions that philosophy, theology and the creative arts have been gnawing at for generations.

I’m not saying this just because I’m fortunate enough to have an article in it, either. In fact, I hope my tortured prose can live up to the standard set by the other writers.

Link to contents page for Journal of IA Volume 1, Issue 1

Link to the PDF of my article: “The Machineries of Context”

What I meant by “flourishing” is the act of extemporaneously mixing other media besides verbal or written-text language in our communication. That is: people using things like video clips or still images with the same facility and immediacy that they now use verbal/written vocabulary. “Mixpression” is an ungainly portmanteau, I’ll admit. But it’s more accurate.

(Earlier, I think I had this concept overlapping too much with something called “taste performance” — more about which, see bottom of the post.)

Victor Lombardi quotes an insightful bit from Adam Gopnik on his blog today: Noise Between Stations » Images That Sum Up Our Desires.

We are, by turn — and a writer says it with sadness — essentially a society of images: a viral YouTube video, an advertising image, proliferates and sums up our desires; anyone who can’t play the image game has a hard time playing any game at all.
– Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, p 33

When I heard Michael Wesch (whom I’ve written about before) at IA Summit earlier this month, he explained how his ethnographic work with YouTube showed people having whole conversations with video clips — either ones they made themselves, or clips from mainstream media, or remixes of them. Conversations, where imagery was the primary currency and text or talk were more like supporting players.

Here’s the thing — I’ve been hearing people bemoan this development for a while now. How people are becoming less literate, or less “literary” anyway, and how humanity is somehow regressing. I felt that way for a bit too. But I’m not so sure now.

If you think about it, this is something we’ve always had the natural propensity to do. Even written language evolved from pictographic expression. We just didn’t have the technology to immediately, cheaply reproduce media and distribute it within our conversations (or to create that media to begin with in such a way that we could then share it so immediately).

The means of production and distribution simply haven’t allowed most regular people to mix imagery into their communication with any ease. We resort to “remember that scene in that movie?” and we describe it with words. But when we have A/V equipment and the media in reach (for something like a class or presentation), we don’t hesitate to just show the clip — this was true even when all we had was VHS. What we’re seeing is just more of the same — but much much more, because the media is so much easier to grab and display in the midst of our communication.

The difference, then, is ease of access and distribution, which always results in dramatic increases in something that we were naturally doing anyway, just with more inertia. It’s the same dynamic behind the explosion of blogs (the Web) and self-published magazines and newsletters (desktop publishing software + photocopiers).

People have always grabbed whatever was available to them to help them express themselves to one another. But for the first time in human history, we have an explosion of available chunks of expression to choose from, and a communication platform on which to use those media chunks.

So I think we can maybe think of this as a Return of Imagery — using literal images in ways that we haven’t been able to do “on the street” since we first started abstracting written language from literal pictures.

It’s interesting that Gopnik, in the quote above, uses the word “game.” I haven’t read the quote in context, but it sounds like he means it with a slightly disparaging tone. Yet I’m also sure Gopnik is familiar with Wittgenstein’s concept of “language game” — and I kind of hope that’s what he means. Language has always been, in a sense, a “played” activity. It’s just that now many of us have more game pieces to play with.

I realize, too, that this is a phenomenon limited to those of us with access to such technology. But that’s increasingly becoming a commodity. Today’s cutting-edge video-phones are the every-day technology of developing societies within a couple of years. We didn’t think, a few years ago, that we’d see blogs, digital photography or video coming out of less developed areas, and yet they’re increasingly apparent. I have to wonder what my kid’s conversation with her global peers will look like 10 years from now, when she’s 23?

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Footnote: About “taste performance,” which is related but not quite what I was getting at. (Thanks to Austin for sending me that article a while back.) Taste Performance is about ornamentation & accessorizing. Just as we might now wear clothes or carry bags with particular logos, messages, brands or attitudes represented (everything from Threadless T-Shirts, Louis Vuitton handbags), we can imagine a near future when activated fabrics allow us to have clips from favorite movies or music videos, or a series of images by favorite artists, playing in a loop on our garments & the things we carry.

Of course, taste-performance is communication as well — everything we do in public involves some kind of communication, whether conscious or not, including body language, tone of voice, even pheromones. And that fits better with the term “flourishing,” which sounds like what a peacock does with its feathers. What I had in mind was more what a magician does with her cards. It’s a visual, supportive expression, adding meaning to what’s already being said (so that it changes the meaning in some way — shapes it explicitly or obliquely).

My colleagues did some great work — hopefully it’ll all be up on Slideshare at some point. But here are the slides I contributed. Alas, there are no “speaker notes” with these — but most of the points are pretty clear. I would love to blog about some of the slides sometime soon — but whenever I promise to blog about something, I almost guarantee I won’t get around to it. So I’ll just say “it would be cool if I blogged about this…” :-)

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Just one more blog plug for the workshop some of us are doing before the IA Summit in Memphis this year.

Links:
See the Pre-Con Page at the Conference Site.
Register Here

For those of you who may be attending the IA Summit in Memphis this year, let me encourage you to look into the IA Institute’s pre-conference workshop called “Beyond Findability: Reframing IA Practice & Strategy for Turbulent Times.”

A few things I want to make clear about the session:

- We’re making it relevant for any UX design people, not just those who self-identify as “Information Architects.” In fact, part of the workshop is about how different practitioner communities can better collaborate & complement other approaches.
- By “Turbulent times” we don’t just mean the economy, but the turbulence of technological change — the incredibly rapid evolution of how people use the stuff we make.
- It’s not a how-to/tutorial-style workshop, but meant to spark some challenging conversation and push the evolution of our professions ahead a little faster.
- There will, however, be some practical take-away content that you should be able to stick on a cube wall and make use of immediately.
- It’s not “anti-Findability” — but looks at what IA in particular brings to design *beyond* the conventional understanding of the practice.
- We’re hoping experienced design professionals will attend, not just newer folks; the content is meant to be somewhat high-level and advanced, but you should be able to get value from it no matter where you are in your career.

Here’s the quickie blurb:

This workshop aims to take your IA practice to a higher level of understanding, performance and impact. Learn about contextual models and scalable frameworks, design collaboration tactics, and how to wield more influence at the “strategy table.”

If you have any specific questions about it, please feel free to hit me up with an email!

*Note: the IA Summit itself is produced by ASIS&T, not the IA Institute.