Christopher Butler

"The most important reason to stop multitasking so much isn’t to make me feel respected, but to..."

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:00:53 -0400

“The most important reason to stop multitasking so much isn’t to make me feel respected, but to make you exist. If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?”

- Jaron Lanier (amen!)

(via scannedpages)

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 08:19:55 -0400

(via scannedpages)

"Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it all when you are analyzing a dream."

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 10:22:05 -0400

“Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it all when you are analyzing a dream.”

- Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols

If book designs disrespected attention as much as websites do,...

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 10:41:29 -0400

If book designs disrespected attention as much as websites do, they’d probably look like this.

My thoughts on cultivating user attention…

This is one of my favorite non-existant places in Chapel Hill....

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:54:22 -0400

This is one of my favorite non-existant places in Chapel Hill. This lanscape architect’s office used to exist behind Penang restaurant, next to the old location of 3Cups but moved out a couple of years ago. Whenever I was over there, I’d look in the window and think about what it would be like if it were my office. Today, it’s my desktop wallpaper - a window into the past!

"The sign is always less than the concept it represents, while a symbol always stands for something..."

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:45:41 -0400

“The sign is always less than the concept it represents, while a symbol always stands for something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. Symbols are natural and spontaneous products.”

- Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols

Designing for Attention I’m not a fly. I’m just...

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:33:50 -0400

Designing for Attention

I’m not a fly. I’m just putting that out there. Not that there’d be anything wrong with it if I was. I mean, I’d be able to see across an almost complete 360 degrees! Sure, I’d have massive, grotesque, compound mirror-ball eyes, and sure, I’d probably get picked up by G-men and spend the rest of my days in a government lab, but I’d be able to focus on more than one thing at a time! Actually, I’d be the ideal web user. I could read an article while simultaneously reading all the other information on the page. I could divide my attention ten ways if I wanted. That’d be nice. But I’m not a fly, website designers, I’m a human! I only have two eyes, ok? I can only focus on one thing at a time. And you know what, I’m ok with that. I really am. I’m glad I can walk down the street without having to worry about scaring innocent children. So I just want to clear that up. I’m not a fly. I’m not even a “fly-person.” I’mjust a person. So, here’s my question: Why are most web pages designed for fly-people?

Designers, seriously, let’s make today the last day we create pages for fly-people. Instead of continuing to create confused, unclear and unfocused pages—pages that include more information than is necessary and in a way that undercuts their core purpose—let’s adopt a new standard, following a very simple rubric: enabling attention. Most of the ways in which we go about getting attention ensure that we will fail at keeping it. See, we’ve been adept atstealing the attention of viewers (ultimately from ourselves, mind you)—that eye-catching graphic, the moving advertisement, the blinking text, the many, many links to click—but we’re now learning that stolen attention never stays long. Lasting attention must be earned, and in order to earn attention, we must first respect it.

In designing for attention, there are two particular issues that we need to be concerned with: the “readability” of our pages, and the distance we expect web users to cross to reach information. Let’s get into it…

Read the full article >

"I think our society is no longer properly valuing the intangible potential of innovation, even if we..."

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:00:45 -0400

“I think our society is no longer properly valuing the intangible potential of innovation, even if we have to be a little uncomfortable with the risks associated with it, and a little bit willing to fail, pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off and try again. We don’t seem to want to do that as much as we used too.”

- Dean Kamen (via)

We don't need that.

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 08:50:53 -0400

I just read a description of a new project - being funded by the National Science Foundation - to develop what they call the “Neurophone system,” a direct brain to phone interface. I find it amazing that we’re awarding grants - regardless of how small they are in the grand scheme of things (Neurophone has received around $300K so far) - for projects like this when we have much more pressing problems that are far more worthy of immediate attention, problems that could certainly interrupt many of the assumed controls that concepts like the Neurophone likely depend upon. Things like electrical resources, a sufficiently idle market, or even the continued operation of entities able to dole out funding. In other words, a collapsed society doesn’t need brain phones.

What’s also irritating is to see “green rationalization” for these concepts in their abstracts. (The NeuroPhone promises “new energy-efficient techniques and algorithms for low-cost wireless EEG headsets and mobile phones,” among other things.) I’m fairly certain that our mobile phones aren’t at the top of the energy-inefficiency list, that is, as long as we have airplanes, cars, trucks, buses, buildings, homes, appliances, etc.

In my company, we are continually evaluating research and development on the basis of what is needed. Until the items of greatest need are supplied, we don’t even consider addressing anything that is purely a matter of “wouldn’t this be neat?” The skewed sense of priority that enables projects like this to be funded reminds me of much more clearly sad situations, like the dilapidated homes of gaming addicts, where the water has been shut off, the cupboards are bare, and the children are malnourished, yet the computers are running.

We need to get real.

I just love this opening scene (to Contact).

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 09:00:45 -0400

I just love this opening scene (to Contact).

The possibilities for large-scale deception using technology...

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 11:54:45 -0400

The possibilities for large-scale deception using technology like this are growing to a troubling degree.

bmdesign:

“On Thursday the 20th of May 2010, Samsung was the first to introduce a large-scale commercial 3D-Outdoor projection in the Netherlands, at the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam. Between 22.30 and 00.30 on the evenings of the 20th, 21st and 22nd of May, the public was able to view the addition of a new dimension to this historic building. “

"More important, we may pay closer attention to reading as an element in what used to be called the..."

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 09:00:45 -0400

“More important, we may pay closer attention to reading as an element in what used to be called the history of mentalities - that is, world views and ways of thinking. All the keepers of commonplace books, from Drake to Madan, read their way through life, picking up fragments of experience and fitting them into patterns. The underlying affinities that held those patterns together represented an attempt to get a grip on life, to make sense of it, not by elaborating theories but by imposing form on matter. Commonplacing was like quilting: it produced pictures, some more beautiful than others, but each of them interesting in its own way. They reveal patterns of culture: the segments that went into it, the stitching that connected them, the tears that pulled them apart, and the common cloth of which they were composed.”

- Robert Darnton, The Mysteries of Reading, from The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future, page 173

"The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety..."

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:09:28 -0400

“The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.”

- Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety, page 44

(via scannedpages)

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:46:13 -0400

(via scannedpages)

Sean Carroll on time-travel

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 11:13:44 -0400

Sean Carroll on time-travel

5 Things I'm Thinking Right Now

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:13:49 -0400

(Saw it first here. Then here and among other hip UK designers that I don’t know personally but wish I did.)

Giving myself five minutes for this:

1. I’m learning that there is a limit to the amount of information I can take in and synthesize properly. Rather than just cutting some out, I want to give serious thought to what I take in. Particularly in regard to reading web content, the echo chamber is a significant factor. I want to impose a rule, something like “don’t read pseudo-writers.” Now about that definition of “pseudo”… oh, and “writers.”

2. Trust and knowledge. In many ways, human knowledge is a house of cards. Trying to dismantle it carefully, getting to the root, fundamental, non-negotiable concepts without which everything else you know cannot be is an exercise not to be undertaken at bedtime. During walks to work is probably better…

3. Workspace. Finding a balance between efficiency/productivity/inspiration.

4. Design simplicity for tomorrow… My last two articles have dealt with this - what the underlying purposes should be for web design and marketing and how we should strive for increased simplicity. My next one will be out this week and hone in on the idea of respecting attention.

5. Time travel. Because I often am, and because of this.

What are you thinking about right now?

Musing on the App Marketplace, Value, Ethics, etc.

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:23:23 -0400

Right. I’ve given myself 15 minutes to get this out. No editing, just a brain-dump of a thought I had at lunch today.

My feeling at the moment is that the app marketplace is, for the most part, comprised of applications that are not valuable. They’re not worth paying cash for, nor are they worth the time spent developing them at all. Their worth should be a measure of how helpful they are, but if you have to try hard to integrate them into your life or workflow, then they are not helpful. A good tool is indespensable and proves itself by use.

So what does that mean for iPhone/iPad apps? I guess it means that the app marketplace is an essentially (brute) capitalist market. The validation is purely a matter of whether someone will buy the app, not whether the app is useful, or valuable by any objective measure. Are we alright with that? For developers and designers of these terrible apps, there must come a point - pre-launch, of course - at which they realize they are creating useless junk. Yet they proceed anyway, not out of any malice, I imagine, but just out of a desire to make something and hopefully profit from it. But how unsatisfying. For consumers, I get the sense that people consider apps to be throwaway purchases. They’re mostly so inexpensive that if the app doesn’t become indespensable to them, the loss isn’t a concern. But what about in the aggregate? I’d love to know how much the average apps marketplace customer has spent since it’s launch - both in terms of cash and in terms of the number of apps downloaded.

My worry is that this structure degrades critical thought, creativity, care for objective value, and a whole host of other things pertinent to regard for humankind. It certainly can’t be sustainable.

What do you think?

Alain de Botton on the Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. This is...

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 12:01:44 -0400

Alain de Botton on the Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. This is the author speaking about his book, which I found to be very good.

"This successful industry of England, with its plethoric wealth…which of us has it enriched? We..."

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 09:00:46 -0400

“This successful industry of England, with its plethoric wealth…which of us has it enriched? We have sumptuous garnitures for our life, but have forgotten to live in the middle of them. Many men eat finer cookery, drink dearer liquors, but in the heart of them, what increase of blessedness is there? Are they happier, beautifuller, stronger, braver? Are they even what they call ‘happier’? Do they look with satisfaction on more things and human faces in this God’s Earth; do more things and human faces look with satisfaction on them? Not so…We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.”

- Thomas Carlyle, 1843 (writing of England, but his words could easily be applied to present-day America)

"Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for..."

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:39:56 -0400

“Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another - which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver. The new car will rapidly be absorbed, like all the other wonders we already own, into the material backdrop of our lives, where we will hardly register its existence - until the night when a burglar does us the paradoxical service of smashing a window to steal the radio and brings home to us, in the midst of the shattered glass, how much we had to be grateful for.”

- Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety, pg. 197