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To be wildly successful in a group of designers, your first ideas need to be wildly divergent.
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From a good post on design communication by Jason Severs:
One of the first things you learn in a formal drawing class is to actually see what you observe. If we are asked to draw an object in a still life, say a bottle, we tend towards drawing what we remember about the object (like the average shape of a wine bottle) rather that what we actually see directly in front of us. Our brains – for reasons that I won’t explore right now – summarize the sensory data received through our eyes and in some act of cognition, allows us to recognize that we are looking at a bottle.
Linus Torvalds (sent to me today by Katie Jamison)
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And I will go further and claim that _no_ major software project that has been successful in a general marketplace (as opposed to niches) has ever gone through those nice lifecycles they tell you about in CompSci classes. Have you _ever_ heard of a project that actually started off with trying to figure out what it should do, a rigorous design phase, and a implementation phase?
Dream on.
Software evolves. It isn’t designed. The only question is how strictly you_control_ the evolution, and how open you are to external sources of mutations. And too much control of the evolution will kill you. Inevitably, and without fail. Always. In biology, and in software.
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America stands at a complex crossroads, economically, technologically, socially and geopolitically. Major forces are reshaping the idea of America, its government’s contract with its citizens, its brand, and its role in the world. And there is not a single global challenge that can be addressed without it.
That’s full screen, live streaming, high-def video, which is pretty amazing when you think about it (considering this website is not a major network television outlet).
From Information Aesthetics:
The data.gov.uk Newspaper [newspaperclub.co.uk] is a tangible prototype of a potential service targeting people who recently moved into a new area, and shows information about the area, such as local services, environmental information, crime statistics, travel times, transportation options, education and healthcare.
![From Information Aesthetics:
The data.gov.uk Newspaper [newspaperclub.co.uk] is a tangible prototype of a potential service targeting people who recently moved into a new area, and shows information about the area, such as local services, environmental information, crime statistics, travel times, transportation options, education and healthcare.](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_krx3qfcUMK1qzw5oyo1_500.jpg)
Last week I noted a post by John Hagel called Stupidity and the Internet in my post on the The Post-Screen Web. Hagel covered several topics in that post, one of which was the web’s effect upon thinking and whether short-form content makes that effect a negative one. He writes:
If it is about content, will snippets trump books and will we all be dumber for it? As someone who has never mastered the art of the snippet, let me proudly count myself as one who still sees profound value in the long form where texture and nuance can be teased out and explored…
Snippets of information, loosely coupled, have enormous value in enhancing peripheral awareness and provoking new ideas.
At the same time, snippets of information alone are deeply dangerous. They distract us with never-ending waves of surface events, spreading us ever thinner and obscuring the deeper structures and dynamics that ultimately are shaping these surface events. Those of us who stay only on the surface, swimming in a sea of snippets, will ultimately lose sight of land.
We need books, or whatever the digital long forms of content are that will replace the book, to help us penetrate the surface and explore the deeper structures and dynamics that make sense of the changes around us.
Don’t Panic! We’re in the thick of it, but all is not lost.
Ultimately, I think that Hagel is right. In fact, I agree with many of the thinkers who are concerned with the future of literacy in light of our digital life. I am concerned too. When writer’s like Nicholas Carr talk about not being able to focus on a book like they used to, I can relate. But I’m not ready to declare a state of emergency. I think we’re in the middle of a significant shift in the way we engage with information and learn because of technology and that there’s no compelling reason to assume that reading will die. For more optimism like this, watch Andrea Lunsford, a researcher at Standford University, describe her study which led her to conclude that student writing ability has not declined as a result of recent technological changes.
There is a place for both short and long-form writing.
In the meantime, there is a place for both short and long-form writing. Each form has merit as a content strategy, depending upon the goals the writer has. In a presentation I gave recently called Professional Writing for the Unprofessional Writer, I elaborated on the different functions of short formats (i.e. blogs), and longer formats (i.e. monthly newsletter articles or whitepapers). Here’s the gist of it:
Short-Form (Blogs)
Blogs take a cumulative approach to tell an ongoing story with many short posts. In other words, if you blog on behalf of your company, you’ll want to think long term, allowing the “idea” or identity of the company to be worked out over potentially years of regular posting. Remember, blogs are essentially relational, so when someone subscribes to your blog’s RSS feed, they’re making a commitment to getting to know you and/or your company. The way you write should respond to that fact. One other thing that I really value about blogging is that it provides a good opportunity to explore new and untested ideas. I feel free to ruminate on things that might be risky and even say things that I’ll disagree with later when writing for our blog in a way that I don’t with our newsletter.
Long-Form (Newsletter Articles)
Long format writing, on the other hand, develops a single idea in a more in-depth manner contained in one article. This kind of writing requires a more strategic approach. Because of the infrequency of this format (for example, I write one newsletter article each month) your ideas need to be as tested as possible. You’re going “on the record” in each article, and at the rate of 12 a year, it will take much longer to bury an idea that you’ve come to disagree with than it might had you written about it in your blog.
Patience
The only additional consideration of the long-form is that it is much more difficult to win readers than it is with short-formats. It obviously requires much more investment- attention and time- of the reader to get through multiple pages of content, so you have to captivate them early. This is not easy. I’m not sure I know how to do this consistently.
No matter what format you choose to write with, you must be patient and let your voice develop over time. Writing is an art that takes years of repetitive practice to do even passingly well. Again, I’m not sure where I am with that, but I know by reading things I wrote even last year that any improvement from then I owe to the commitment to regular writing.
Reblogged from proofmathisbeautiful| |#
Wow, this is really an incredible project. BLDGBLOG has the details:
For his student thesis project at the Bartlett School of Architecture, Thomas Hillier produced an immersive narrative world, complete with origami-filled hand-cut book pages and an elaborate model of the story’s architectural landscape. Hillier’s project was called The Emperor’s Castle and it was inspired by the work of Japanese printmaker Hiroshige.
This is an image of a postcard I sent to Able Parris in 2006 while I was living in Penang, Malaysia. Able and I spent about two full years sending correspondence back and forth between our homes in Providence, Rhode Island and then between Malaysia and the US once I’d moved out there. Click the image or here to see the full gallery of 187 postcard images.
From the Pentagram blog:
Monica Pidgeon, who with Pentagram co-founder and architect Theo Crosby edited and transformed the journal Architectural Design (AD), died on September 17 at age 95.
I just finished reading an insightful post by John Hagel, which he titled Stupidity and the Internet as a response to Nicholas Carr’s much-discussed Atlantic piece, Is Google Making Us Stupid? I like the way that Hagel re-frames the discussion based upon form rather than effect. His idea seems to be that “the internet” (I’m going to use “the web” instead) can’t be assessed in simple either/or terms of stupifying or edifying, but aught to be considered based upon its currently evolving form. Here’s a quote:
The debate also largely took the Internet, and specifically the World Wide Web, in its current form as a given. This is a dangerous assumption given the speed of change in the underlying technology foundations of the Internet.
As one small example, we are seeing rapid evolution of both social network platforms and physical presence tools that will lead to a much more complex interweaving of physical and virtual environments. Sensors and imaging tools will give us much greater visibility into the world around us.
This point is pretty important, I think. I mentioned the “fractalization” of the web in Part 1 of my Future of the Web article, which speaks to his point about the increasing complexity and interwovenness of the web. In Part 2, I also thought about the shaping of the web by mobile and “web-enhanced” devices. These two concepts are going to have an extremely significant effect upon how the web is shaped and used in the very near future.
Then Hagel goes on to say something fascinating:
Tacit knowledge – that which cannot be readily expressed in published content of any length, whether snippets or books – has always been our most valuable knowledge. You can read all the books you want on brain surgery, but that alone will never qualify you to perform brain surgery. At an even simpler level, no book can teach you how to ride a bicycle.
The ultimate impact of the Internet on our intelligence will hinge on its ability to support the creation and sharing of tacit knowledge. Again, we are at the earliest stages of tapping into this potential.
This is where my skepticism tends to kick in. I often lament the real experiences I’m not having when I’m spending the majority of my time in front of a screen. Granted, I think what Hagel has in mind is that the potential to create and share tacit knowledge over the internet is contingent upon a post-screen web. In other words, a web that can be experienced and shaped away from the desk or handheld device. While such a web would enable tacit knowledge, it will also narrow the divide between the real and the virtual to such a degree that discerning between the two will be a matter of perspective or opinion. This could be frightening, or… something else.
Interesting image from the portfolio of Suprb.
This is a wonderful piece (the unabridged version of what was recently published in WIRED’s UK edition of its Digital City issue) by Adam Greenfield on how cities are currently taking (and will continue to take) shape around technology. Here’s how he gets right to the point and frames the discussion:
It is by now clear that over the last decade a great number of people on Earth, in the developed and the developing world both – certainly the overwhelming majority of those reading these words – have embraced the digital mediation of everyday life, to such a ferocious extent that it can already be difficult to remember how we ever got through our days without the networked things around us.
Without necessarily considering the matter with any particular care, as individuals or societies, we have installed devices in our clothing, our buildings, our vehicles and our tools which register, collect and transmit extraordinary volumes of data, and which share this data with the global network in real time. If some of us once – and recently! – thought of this as the domain of “ubiquitous computing,” the words are already starting to sound obsolescent, as clunky as “horseless carriage.” This is simply the way we do things now.
And barring the usual panoply of potential catastrophes, it is only likely to be more so as time goes by, for an ever larger proportion of us. Under such circumstances, it’s only natural to expect that a great many of these systems will wind up speaking directly to the challenges cities were designed to resolve, as well as those with which they cannot help but confront us…
You’ve probably heard the point before, if not repeatedly: that the advance of technology has happened at such a pace as to “lap” our own ability to perceive it, such that we are tending towards the consideration of it in retrospect (e.g. “Oh yeah, I can send email, listen to music, take pictures, and make telephone calls all with the same portable device!”). What Greenfield is doing here is pointing out that when technology has such a shaping power over society, then the ways in which we are able to envision the future shaping of urban planning and architecture- in other words, how we will live- are challenged by our own myopia. His thoughts here are fascinating, and I encourage you to read the entire article.
Here’s one last pertinent quote:
it’s surpassingly hard to be appropriately critical and to make sound choices in a world where we don’t understand the objects around us. Understanding networked urbanism on its own terms, however wise it might be, requires an investment of time and effort beyond the reach of most…
In the networked city, therefore, the truly pressing need is for translators: people capable of opening these occult systems up, demystifying them, explaining their implications to the people whose neighborhoods and choices and very lives are increasingly conditioned by them.
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