Just as soon as a brush up on my soldering skills and have room for a new coffee table, I’m gonna build me one of these.
As an aside, I ordered some stickers from the same outfit. Happily, I could pay with PayPal, and the result was the awesomest PayPal screen I’ve ever seen.
Gen-Xers got a bad rap for a while in the 90s. There was the whole "slackers" media craze in the 90s (which some of us recognized as not having much to do with true Slack, Praise "Bob"). In retrospect, all that was about was a bunch of relatively smart middle-class youths looking at the jobs the previous generation had in mind for them and thinking: "Nah …." Which is normal intergenerational behavior. But at the time, I recall a lot of Boomer fretting about lazy kids these days, etc. Funny thing was, (and I’m thinking in terms of zeitgeists here, not actual data), it seems like the minute there was something actually interesting to do — like a radical technological and cultural shift happening out in the fabled West, for example — there was a collective packing of bags, moving out, and suddenly all the former slackers were putting in 80+ hour weeks at dot-com jobs. Followed by a boom, then a bust, then a boomlet, and here we all are.
80+ hours can make (some) sense (in certain circumstances, for not too long) when you’re changing the world at a crazy start-up. But it makes much less sense as the crazy start-up starts to get big and stable — and it takes a toll when done over the long haul. Unfortunately, some companies have tried to keep that aspect of their start-up culture a little too long. Which brings us to Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency by Tom DeMarco.
Preston Smalley recommended the book to me, and I found it pretty compelling. It’s aimed primarily at managers of knowledge workers (e.g. designers and software developers), but could also be useful, or at least therapeutic, for folks who’ve been subjected to certain kinds of work cultures. It’s really a couple of ideas wrapped up in one (smallish) package:
There were a bunch of "a-ha" moments for me in the early chapters — DeMarco has a nice way of capturing the absurdities at the heart of some cherished workplace cultural habits simply and neatly. The later chapters are a little more scattered, but then figuring out what to do is always a little harder than figuring out what not to do.
"You’ve got to wear pointy shoes so you know which way you’re going."
— Joe Strummer
A quick note to point out that Shri Mahesh has put together this nice wiki of blogs by current and former eBay employees. There’s some good stuff in there — and if you fit the description, you should add yours as well!
Ever thought about hanging out your own shingle? If so, you’d better think about how you’ll handle health insurance. If you’d be covered through a spouse’s insurance, you’re probably set, but otherwise you might have to buy individual health insurance, which typically costs more. And that’s if you’re lucky enough to get individual health insurance, since it could be denied to you for all sorts of reasons — from serious prior conditions to minor ones like allergies, ear infections, or joint sprains. Or because you’d been a lumberjack or carnival worker. (Here’s a list of over 50 reasons health insurers may reject you. It’s scary stuff.)
Jacob Hacker talks about healthcare as one type of increasing risk for folks in the US in his book The Great Risk Shift, along with retirement and jobs. It’s a great book, full of meaty policy goodness (if you like that sort of thing), but the basic point is simple: in some important ways, Americans are at greater risk of dramatic swings in income, prolonged job loss, massive healthcare costs, and other forms of economic insecurity than in the past. For example, he states that "The chance that a person with average demographic characteristics will
experience a 50 percent or larger drop in income over a two-year period
has risen from 7 percent in the early 1970s to 17 percent in 2002." So it’s not just healthcare risks we have to worry about. He goes on to talk about both the causes of this shift and some possible policy solutions, and I hope we’ll hear more about some of those solutions as the various presidential campaigns start heating up.
So, what does this have to do with design (other than discouraging design entrepreneurs starting their own consultancies)? Well, while actually fixing the problems probably requires national policy changes, those can take a while. In the meantime, we can think about designing products and services that can help folks at least manage these risks.
I first started thinking about this when Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, came to talk to the product team at eBay a while ago. He’s a pretty engaging speaker, and frames the history of the company as a series of products inspired by deep customer insights — insights which he cheerfully admits they came to very late in some cases. One such case was the origin of Quickbooks — for many years Intuit researchers noticed that a significant number of Quicken users seemed to be small businesses. This didn’t make any sense, as it was designed for home financial use, not accounting — until they eventually realized that there was a need for small business accounting software designed for non-accountants.
I was intrigued by his mentioning, as a similar case, a new software product created specifically to manage health insurance paperwork Quicken Medical Expense Manager. It turns out that the inspiration for this came from even closer to home, as this story (PDF) relates:
Dan Robinson’s life changed forever in the winter of 2000. His newborn son entered the world with a rare illness that required a life-saving heart surgery — the first of many, it would turn out — when he was just two months old …
At the time of his son’s birth, Dan was an engineering manager with the Quicken team and Intuit Inc. As the parent of a child with a serious medical condition, he experienced firsthand how stressful managing medical expenses can be.
By 2001, the Robinson’s medical bills exceeded $1.2 million. "I felt overwhelmed by the number of bills and statements — I was unable to make sense of it all, Robinson said …
Robinson developed his own basic medical expense management software program and proposed a more formal software solution to the Quicken organization for development. At first his ideas was met with skepticism, but eventually he was given the go ahead to pursue it. The premise was simple: develop a product that could help track healthcare expenses and insurance for individuals and families.
I think this is an amazing example of product design targeting a real and scary risk (the risk of bankruptcy due to overwhelming healthcare costs) and helping empower individuals to manage that risk. Product designers have a tendency to talk about what good things using their product will do for their customers — but sometimes the best path is to help manage risks, i.e. reduce the likelihood of bad things happening.
Edit: My friend Karen posted about this subject (and dictators and complex systems) a little while ago.
Sometimes you gotta pay attention to what the Internet oracle is saying, and right now it’s apparently saying "wiki!"
We’ll start with yesterday, when I was pointed to the corollary to my science fiction about search engines post by boingboing: science fiction about wikis! Specifically, the story Wikiworld by Paul Di Filippo:
Realizing that such a task was beyond my
own capabilities, I called in my wikis: The
Dark Galactics. The PEP Boyz. The Chindogurus. Mother Hitton’s
Littul Kittons. The Bishojos. The Glamazons. The Provincetown
Pickers. And several more. All of them owed me simoleons for the
usual—goods received, or time and expertise invested—and now they’d
be eager to balance the accounts.
Then a friend pointed my at a cartoon that summed up the problem with wikipedia.
Finally, Dahlia Lithwick at Slate explained to me — and i think she’s right — that babies invented community-based collaborative authorship:
I took my small sons to visit family over the holidays. As invariably
happens when one wants to show off one’s young, the smaller one’s face
exploded into great green ropes of snot only seconds after deplaning.
The consumptive Victorian wheeze followed mere hours later. And
suddenly, he was no longer my baby. He was a server-side wiki.
So there you go. I’m not sure why the Internet decided it’s wiki zeitgeist week, but it clearly must be.
Yes, this is YAiPP (Yet Another iPhone Post). But after squee-ing about the object itself (and I did), and after pondering the effect of the thing on the mobile industry (and I have), and weighing the implications of pulling both Yahoo! and Google into the mix as visible partners (yep, that too), I’m left to puzzle over how the iPhone might change the practice of design.
Here are some quick thoughts — and they’re not fully baked, more lightly warmed at best:
I’m probably most excited about the multi-touch interface. This is the kind of interface breakthrough we’ve been seeing from CHI conferences, research papers, and really smart people for years, and yet somehow never gotten into a workable mass-market product. And now we have it! The "pinching" metaphor is compelling, but I can’t wait till people really start designing for multi-touch — there are scads of other gestural interactions that need fleshing out and could enrich existing applications.
The accelerometer is almost as exciting–it seems to be mostly used for nice portrait/landscape transitions in the demo, but the potential applications are vast. I can think of Wii-like game controlling, tilt controls for maps (PDF), Ping’s peephole displays, and more fun stuff.
I am a little concerned about the "button issue." In his presentation (which was superb), Steve Jobs made much of the previous smart-phones’ keyboards — pointing out that they are both ugly (true) and inflexible (also true). Apart from the aesthetic, the inflexibility is a real issue — it’s one of the things that has kept phone/PDA/internet devices from achieving true integration: the controls needed for each are different, and the typical solutions until now have been to either add more buttons (ew) or have them do double duty in some awkward fashion. Jobs is totally right that this sucks, and that having exactly the right controls for the application solves that problem.
But is that worth the lack of tactility? Others (somewhere, I’ve lost the link) have noted that it will probably mean it’s a very "in your face" product — you’ll need to haul it out and stare at it while using it for many purposes. I think that’s fine for the "Blackberry people," as I think of them, as they’re kind of like that anyway — but what about the text-happy kids with their fast messaging? I’ve always assumed that they achieve the speed by using the physical affordances of the keypads, much like the speed typers of yesteryear. Will that work with a visual-only keyboard? Will they care?
And about those kids! I’m still a little puzzled by whether the iPhone has real location awareness (it’s sort of implied that it does, but I can’t see mention of it in the tech specs, and like many features, I’ve seen both denials and affirmations of GPS in the trade press. But assuming it does work, (or if not, gets added to an upcoming model), I think we’re looking at another leap in social network applications. I’m imagining location-aware MySpace (or whatever the new hotness is) usage, some sort of Dodgeball-on-steroids mania hitting the youth of today and changing the way people relate to each other.
(Plus, it’s OS X, so you can always drop back to a command line and use pine if you’re a geezer like me.)
…. whew. Floating gently back to Earth, how do we designers start prepping for this? I suppose we’ll have to bone up on the academic literature, re-examine assumptions about what is and isn’t possible in our interfaces, play with our imaginations, read developer notes (if they’re released), and wait until June.
Sad news: Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant noodles, chairman and founder of Nissin Foods, and the product design-oriented president described in Project X: Cup Noodle, has died. He was 96. The Sydney Morning Herald obituary notes that "In July 2005, Nissin introduced a vacuum packed instant noodle
specially designed for Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi to eat
during the US space shuttle Discovery’s mission." (via boingboing)
I’ve been enjoying my extended winter vacation and have few thoughts about design to share at the moment, it being more of a sleepy end-of-year tree and gifts and food and friends and family time.
So, instead, I give you my unscientific top 10 non-design books of 2006. I’ve been keeping track of and writing mini-reviews for all the books I read for just over a year, and it’s interesting (to me) to look back over them. They’re mostly science fiction, fantasy, and graphic novels (which is not a surprise), but fantasy seems to be outpacing science-fiction by a bunch. Also, there are very few non-design non-fiction books, even less I ended up liking.
In no particular order, my favorite non-design-related books of 2006:
Three Days To Never – Tim Powers
Excellent Tim Powers book.
If you’re not reading Tim Powers you really should be. Contains the
same crazy secret history stuff as the recent books (in this case the
Mossad, Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, out-of-body-experiences), but with
characters you care about a bit more.
Spin – Robert Charles Wilson
Best Hard-SF book I’ve read in a LONG while. Really amazing concept.
Feels very like classic SF while totally contemporary — like some odd
combination of Isaac Asimov and Gwyneth Jones.
Never Let Me Down – Kazuo Ishiguro
One of the most depressing books ever. Beautiful, yes, nice to see someone who is
thought of as ‘literary’ tackle science fiction and do it really well,
yes, worth reading, yes. One of the nice reviewers on the back called
it ‘elegiac’ which is NY Times type reviewer code for both "goddamn
depressing," which it is, and "kind of boring," which, while it is
excruciatingly slowly paced, it is not.
His Majesty’s Dragon – Naomi Norvik
Napoleonic wars with dragons. Excellent fantasy candy reading.
Lamb – Christopher Moore
Subtitle:
"The gospel according to Biff, Christ’s childhood pal." Look, NOTHING
could live up to that subtitle, right? But it almost does. Between the
mostly historically accurate details mixed with the wildly
inappropriate anachronisms and theological banter, I enjoyed it a ton.
Five Crazy Women – Carla Speed McNeil
By
far the best graphic novel I’ve read yet this year. Set in an ongoing SF world, this book is about one man and his relationships with crazy
women. You can read most of it here: http://www.lightspeedpress.com/
The Fate of the Artist – Eddie Campbell
Absolutely
brilliant. Eddie Campbell is now pretty much my favorite comics
author/artist — I have never figured out why navel-gazing
autobiographical stuff works for me in comics form but doesn’t
(usually) in prose. But this odd mix of bits and pieces and things —
funny comics, interviews with his daughter, historical meanderings —
all dancing around some personal
revelations — is just wonderful.
The Colorado Kid – Stephen King
184
pages of original pulp with an excellent, and perfectly inappropriate,
pulp cover. It is now apparent that
Stephen King really, really, really doesn’t care if his books will piss
people off by not being what they expect.
50 Degrees Below – Kim Stanley Robinson
Sequel to 40 Days of Rain.
I’m assuming that "60 feet of melted Antarctic ice-shelf water coming to KILL YOU" is
next. Technically about the dangers of radical climate change (and what
we could do about it) KSR valorizes (realistically) the DC bureaucrat,
the urban homeless, lunatics who live in treehouses, and rogue liberal
Senators. This book did, in fact, scare the pants off me.
Perfect Circle – Sean Stewart
Perfect
Circle has ghosts, punk rock, and Houston. It’s the most
amazing, sweetest, saddest novel I’ve read in a year or two, and will
break your heart in parts.