Hillel sums it up nicely:

Every new idea in the modern world, every new initiative, just about every effort, public or private, personal or business-related, includes some form of digital expression. Software is the medium for that digital expression. Today, software is everywhere, whether we know it or not. Not just on our computers, our tablets, our phones, and our gaming devices (which could all be the very same object) but in our cars, in traffic lights, and in our thermostats. And in the future, this pervasiveness will only increase — dramatically. Imagine a world where every surface (and plane) is a potential display. Software is the primary language of the digital world we are creating.

Whether it’s a birthday party requiring invitations, selling a house and advertising it on a web page, a new business, a new non-profit, a new curriculum from a third grade teacher, they all generate a need for digital expression. And that digital expression is more often than not sloppy, unfriendly, dumb, and in many cases… insulting. Whether the person with the idea is writing new software from scratch or using existing software to create a digital experience is irrelevant. The time we spend interacting with these creations is only going to increase. And the need for modern and talented technologists and software designers who share a holistic perspective on making these experiences positive has never been greater.

Software is the ubiquitous and universal medium that blankets our exponentially expanding digital world. More software is coming — whether we like it or not. The only question is whether any of it will be any good.

About three months ago, I was transformed by a talk Sharon Ann Lee gave on redesigning success. Lee is a cultural trend analyst and author who runs “a think tank/studio on trends, culture and creativity.” Her talk has been buzzing around in my mind since watching it.  Lee recommends: 1) know your numbers 2) live in the power zone 3) create a poetic vision of your life.  Because a poetic vision serves as your North Star, keeping your heart/dream/life-purpose mission at the forefront of your mind and guiding decisions about what projects to take on, I’ve wanted to start drafting mine.  Well, today I did! I filled out the worksheet she emailed me and created my very first draft. Your poetic vision is a project that is in perpetual beta, constantly being tested and redefined, so although I need to work on it, I’m pleased that I now have a good first draft. [Note: I began drafting this post on January 9, 2012, which is the day I drafted my poetic vision.] 

Lee’s talk was also important to me in a long journey I’ve been on to reclaim myself as an artist. Identity, and how you think about yourself is so powerful. Though I liked drawing when I was younger and creating visual art, I didn’t particularly have more of an affinity for it than most children (though I think children are amazingly creative and artistic!).  I wasn’t labeled an “artist” by my family or education institutions nor did I think of myself as one.  The way I thought of myself as a “creative” person ebbed and flowed.  But more and more, bit by bit, I started thinking of myself as belonging in the Creative Camp.  Though I didn’t think of myself as a (capital A) Artist, I knew creativity was important to me and I just felt like I belonged with poets, artists, dancers, and other creative people.  Several birthdays in a row in my late twenties, I modeled my birthday parties after those a 5 year old might have, with coned party hats, and lots and lots of paper, magazines, scissors, crazyons, markers, tape, and glue spread out on a long table. The idea was to create an environment for people to create, engage, and connect with one another through art with no judgements attached - after all it was modeled and branded as a birthday party a 5 year old might have! There was no way to have “bad art.” The point was to have fun and connect and explore art-making.

In July 2010, I went (hesitantly) to a night for artists to work on something deemed artist liberation. The basic idea behind the evening was to work on the idea that art is important, that what we each were striving to do with art was important, and that while oppression against artists was damaging and hurtful — and real —  we could keep going forward with what we believed in.

I knew this group was very open and non-judgemental about who qualified as an artist, so though I decided to self-identify enough to go, I didn’t feel like a “real” Artist, and  wondered if maybe I shouldn’t be there at all.  It was amazing, and I had probably the first major breakthrough in beginning to think of myself as an artist.  Afterwards, I tweeted (lightly edited for clarity):

Inspired by artists and thinkers I met with tonight. Some thoughts I had: 1) Ideas are (one of) my medium. 2) The Internet is a giant playground 3) The open, social web *is* art & creativity, realized (and other stuff). 4) designing play & interaction is art making. 5) I love humanity.

I didn’t have to think of myself as a visual artist to be an artist.  Being an artist was a way of looking at the world, of being in the world, and interacting and influencing the world.  I could look at problems, I could look at situations, I could look at the wonder of the universe with an artist’s mind.  Lee’s talk took this idea that had already been percolating in my mind, and made it more real by describing the way she came to think of herself as an artist.

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Kevin Wong gave an informative and engaging talk, “8 lessons as a UX professional,” at the University of Washington’s Information School in late October.  Since graduating with his BS in Informatics from UW in 2007, he’s worked as a user researcher (and designer) at the design firm, Artefact.  The purpose of the talk was to give iSchool students some context about what it means to work in the UX field. I’ve been curious about Artefact and following the company for about a year or so and thought I’d check out his talk as an alum.  

What follows are my rough notes from his talk. Unfortunately, my notes for each slide were not all scribbled in my notebook equally (I left my Macbook Pro at home).  I was able to write down more with some slides than I was for other. But each was important!

Kevin first gave some context around what it means to be a user researcher and why he was drawn to the field.  Basically, his job attempts to understand why people do what they do; to understand behaviors, goals, and motivations.

Slides:

1. Develop a point of view: As a researcher/designer it’s important to have your own unique, thought-out way of approaching problems. Kevin gave the iSchool’s ethos of openness as an example of a point of view.
2. Build a case:  Where does a solution come from? Justify it. Do the research up front to build your case using  1) first hand data like going out and talking to real users 2) second hand information like trend analysis and market research that companies like Forrester provide.
3. Keep it simple:  We’re all limited on time.  About making pitches: executives want the meat and potatoes, not everything on the farm.  While you might find all kinds of interesting data points from your study and research, boil down the important information while making a pitch.
4. Think about outcomes: Ask, what do I want to develop in the end? It will make a difference in how you work whether the final outcome is a simple prototype, flash prototype, research report, or video.
5. Get feedback: Often! There is no reason not to get feedback.  Make prototypes and go out and test them and then learn from your mistakes.
6. Tell stories: This helps you focus on the information you want to present. This is hard, it’s a art, and something that requires practice.
7. Use what you know best: Regarding what tools to use, there’s no set combination of tools, no silver bullet. Use what you know best because you’ll be most effective using those tools.  Artefact tries to encourage a multitude of tools at their company , instead of being a one-tool shop.  This allows for more flexibility in applying the right tool to demonstrate X or Y functionality in a prototype. In other words, one tool might be great in demonstrating one functionality, while another might do better at showing a different functionality.
8. Work with people who are better at something else:  People new to a field often start off as generalists, and then specialize over time. But how do you figure out what to specialize in? Think about what it is that you really like doing and are good at, and use it as a vertical.  Amazing mind-share and creation can happen when two people who specialize in different areas come together and partner on a project (or aspect of a project). We can’t be experts in everything. But we can learn from others who are experts and share our own expertise to move a project forward.

After the presentation, Kevin took questions from the audience.

A student asked what classes he took and recommends.  Research Methods, Design Methods, but especially his Capstone Project were important.  (Incidentally, his capstone project was the same as mine: conference design!) Kevin related that the capstone project allowed him to apply things he learned in class. He advised, “work with people who compliment you; who think about the same problem, but in different ways.” I loved this answer.

Someone else asked what got him the job at Artefact.  ”LinkedIn is your best friend.” (I joined LinkedIn after his presentation.)  He also advised working on your portfolio.  In response to another question about how to make a good portfolio he had several points:

• talk about the problem
• showcase your solution
• highlight your process (how did you get to your solution)
• show evidence
• show your role
• (Also problem solvers can take any domain and think about it. Does your portfolio show that?)

I asked Kevin what books he recommends, and any other reading material he keeps up with.  His response:

Books:

• Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge
• Blink by Malcom Gladwell

Other reading resources:

• Boxes and Arrows
• UX Matters
• Blogs of other design firms like Frog
• Adaptive Path
• Fast Company
• Research and Strategy [I couldn’t locate a link for this one.]

Another very cool thing I learned during Q&A was about Artefact’s White Spaces Initiative which functions similarly to Google’s 80/20 principle (or, as we joked, their 100/20 principle due to the long hours Google employees typically log).  The idea behind the White Spaces Initiative is to leverage employees’ natural passions and interests. When time allows, employees can dive deeper into subjects they’re naturally interested in. For instance, one employee is enthusiastic about the idea of wearable technology and sensors as fashion.

I left Kevin’s talk impressed both with him, and Artefact. In fact, it’s what lead me to ask him for an informational interview.  

Johnny Holland has a fantastic interview with anthropologist and researcher, Genevieve Bell who is the director of Interaction and Experience Research at Intel.

Storytelling and social participation, this woman is speaking my language!

Currently, we are exploring changing notions of storytelling and social participation; charting the shift in use of cameras, phones, and televisions; and hacking the latest screens, printers, and sensors to see what we can make with them, just to name some of our work. (my emphasis)

On collaborating across disciplines: 

DM: On the subject of messiness, designers are stepping up to challenges that address cultural, technological, and political complexity. We’re not only collaborating with other disciplines, but our work itself is becoming transdisciplinary. What do you see as the strengths and limitations of the designer’s contribution? What do we need to be aware of?

GB: I think our biggest challenges (and opportunities) are about creating the possibilities of collaboration. For me, that means we need to invest in making our work, our methods, and our insights intelligible to the broadest possible base. Being transdisciplinary means committing to work across disciplines and across cannons and methodologies. It means we have to be generous and genuine and always committed to moving the conversation forward.

On neo-Marxism, and understanding the whole, socio-political system:

DM: What new skills and knowledge should interaction designers who’ve been focused on screen-based projects be developing now to design for smart objects and environments?

GB: I think there is a lot to be gained for reading the work in material culture from neo-Marxism through the Manchester School and the various American reinterpretations of cultural studies. There is much to be gained from the theoretical perspectives that have been rehearsed in that body of work. I think we need to continue to privilege thinking holistically. Even if you are not designing for the whole system or the whole environment, I suspect you need to understand it. For me, that means we also need to attend to ideas of power, both social and political, as it has much to do with these news spaces we find ourselves exploring. (my emphasis)

Bell’s interview does a good job of highlighting the importance of social sciences in design and design research. Who knew that my BA in Sociology would come in handy in this way? I certainly didn’t.

Lots more yummy brain food in her interview — go read the whole thing.  You can also catch her at Interaction 12 in Dublin as she will be one of the keynote speakers.

In October, I discovered an intriguing post by Kevin Walker, “Design Research and Research Design,” and tweeted my key takeaways.  While interesting, it’s somewhat of a long read, which makes it perfect for an experiment I’m trying out: augmenting Twitter with Tumblr. The reasons behind this experiment are to: 1) cut to the chase of meaty articles, yet provide a bit more context than Twitter’s 140 articles allows as to why I find them important, 2) keep interesting articles from getting lost and forgotten in my Twitter stream (I’m close to 4000 tweets right now).  Hopefully Tumblr’s search function and ability to tag will be an improvement over Twitter’s abysmal findability!

The thrust of Walker’s piece is how we can improve research with design methodology and design thinking: 

Much of design is informed by research of some sort; research, on the other hand, is almost never informed by design. Over the past several months, my students and I have built a curriculum centered around the idea that research and design are two sides of the same coin. We took it for granted that research can inform design; what took us by surprise was the great extent to which design can, in turn, enhance research. (my emphasis)

Also interesting: applying journalistic methods to research:

Indeed, while not necessarily seen as worthy in academic circles, journalistic methods have long been perceived as accepted practice in design research: interviewing people, investigative research, writing it up in concise and coherent stories — this is one of the strongest ways designers come to know their users. Calling it journalism — even investigative journalism — instead of scenarios or user stories exposes critical issues to the budding designer-researcher: it introduces methods, helps to define motives and ethics, and reinforces the necessity for ruthless objectivity. (my emphasis)

Another important point Walker makes is around communicating ideas. I couldn’t agree more — communication is paramount! Successful designers are masters at engaging their audience through the story of their design.  

More important than tools, though, research desperately needs design expertise to better communicate its findings. We found this out first-hand when it came time to present the results of our airport project to industry and government officials. So accustomed were they to reading long, boring reports and documents that simply seeing research concisely and visually presented on nicely-designed posters was a revelation to them. Some of the students’ work was immediately picked up for commercial development. (my emphasis)

I enjoyed reading how — through the process Walker outlines in his post — his design students changed how they approached design projects. They saw the importance of research:

It was vindication that we were doing something right. More important to me was watching the students go from designers to researchers: in January they tended to approach projects with already sketched-out ideas in their heads; by June they were already formulating their own methodologies and handing in publication-quality research paper. (my emphasis)

Biggest takeaway:

As designer-researchers, we can make our own tools for investigation.

This seems obvious, but important. I’m always curious how different researchers invent new methodologies on the fly to best answer research questions. Applying design methodologies and thinking to this process can, I think, help us to be more successful.

(Hat tip: David Sherwin, @changeorder)

Futurist Jamais Cascio has long been one of my very favorite thinkers about technology, society, and cultural transformation.  I first discovered his writing when I worked at Grist (I was there from 2004-2007), and he was writing for Worldchanging, which he co-founded. My BA is in Sociology, and as an undergrad I was particularly interested in the study of social change movements.  Jamais deeply understands — and articulates eloquently — that technology is a manifestation of culture.  For a long time now, he’s written and spoken about the socio-political aspects of technology. Here’s one example:

Whether we talk about AI or molecular manufacturing… we may talk about them as gadgets, nuts and bolts, we may be fascinated by the underlying circuitry, but the choices that we make about what we pursue and what we abandon, the decisions that we make about what goes into the code, and ultimately the policies that we develop around how to integrate this into society have political origins. The more that we can make explicit the political aspects of these technologies, the better we will be able to handle the repercussions when they do eventually emerge.

Here’s another: 

Technology is political behavior. Technology is social. We can talk about all of the wonderful gadgets, all of the wonderful prizes and powers, but ultimately the choices that we make around those technologies (what to create, what to deploy, how those deployments manifest, what kinds of capacities we add to the technologies) are political decisions.

The more that we try to divorce technology from politics, the more we try to say that technology is neutral, the more we run the risk of falling into the trap of unintended consequences.

Since I basically eat this stuff for breakfast, I was delighted to find a talk he gave at Guardian Activate 2010 examining drivers (and tensions between these drivers) in how the Internet is evolving.  I love his opening:

Technology is culture. Technology is not a field unto itself. It’s a manifestation of our culture. It embodies our beliefs, our norms, our politics. And so when we think about the future of technology — when we think about the future of the Internet — we really need to be thinking about the future of how we interact with each other. How we relate to each other. The future of who we are.

Jamais laid out three drivers:

Consumption (not just simply buying stuff, but reading and listening to content)

Creation (making and creating)

Connection (how we relate to one another)

He then talked about these drivers in combination:

Consumption + creation = the attention ecology. “People spend a lot of time making and listening, making and reading, making and consuming.”

Creation + connection = When we make things for other people, and they make things for us, it’s “more of a collaborative process, it’s something that’s done in community, not just a market.”

Connection + consumption = focused on empathy than attention

Jamais then juxtaposes two camps of thinkers about technology: 1) Those who think that computers + humans will make us “giants.” Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near, is an example of someone in this camp.  2) Those who think that technology is destroying us in one way or another.  He gives Nicholas Carr as an example of someone convinced that technology is making us stupid.  

In 2009, Jamais wrote a counter article in The Atlantic to one Carr wrote also in the same magazine arguing that, in fact, technology makes us smarter.  But now that he’s had more time to reflect, Jamais says — and I wholeheartedly agree with him —

Making us smarter isn’t the critical story. The critical story is do they make us better people. Do they allow us to become better people.

Threading back to the point from the beginning of his talk about the importance of understanding how we interact with each other, he says:

That tension between consumption and connection, between creativity and consumption. All these delicate balances between these drivers of transformation. These have a very an important effect, a very critical effect on how our relationships manifest. 

He discusses briefly what people refer to as the “attention economy” — the desire for your eyeballs. Well, apparently so much of what we’re bombarded with is fear and pain driven because:

If we pay a limited bit of attention — a very quick hit — the part of our brain that gets best stimulated are fear and pain (physical pain).

But — now this is really cool: 

It turns out that if you pay a little bit more attention, if you spend a little bit more time engaged with whatever this connection is, what gets stimulated — the parts of the brain that light up are the parts that respond to virtue, and admiration, and emotional pain — essentially empathy.

If you have technologies that help empower the ability to spend more time — to give more consideration to the world around you — what you have are technologies that help to enable greater empathy, and ultimately to create a better world. 

Yes! This last bit actually reminded me of something I tweeted November, 2010:

Thought that’s been percolating in my mind, but formed more clearly at #makeathon: How do we #design technology that allows people to be 1/2

their best selves? I wanna ensure humanness is a part of tech #design. Kindness. Play. Generosity. Intelligence. Hope. Power. #makeathon 2/2

Something else I wrote as part of a two-part tweet also comes to mind, “designing play & interaction is art making.”

One of the things that most drew me to design after first (really) bumping into it in grad school, is the idea of agency. As a designer, you’re very, very actively creating something, whether it’s visual or experiential. 

Towards the very end of his talk, Jamais speaks to this very important notion of agency: 

When we talk about the Internet, when we talk about computers — these are intensely human technologies. These are intensely, critically driven by our culture, our norms, our values. And the degree to which we think that these technologies just happen to us — that stuff gets made… ‘This just happens to us’… And that’s wrong. You’re setting yourself up to be essentially a victim because you’re giving up agency, you’re giving up your right to speak.

Technologies don’t just happen to us. Technologies are not independent of us. We create them, we control them. And ultimately we determine what shape they will take as they evolve.

I’m with Jamais. Let’s create and design technologies that speak to our highest values as a culture. We can create the future we want. As Mark Read, a maker/hacker/organizer from the Occupy Wall Street movement so eloquently put it:

We have to throw off our despair about the future world we might be facing, because if we come together as people and humanity, we can change it.