Douglas Bowman had to quit Google, and Valleywag explains it all for you (to hell with Owen!). I had a similar experience at Yahoo, so I'm only surprised Douglas lasted this long. The comments on Valleywag are really sad though; a palpable hostility towards "precious," "childish," "short-sighted" designers (you can look for yourself, I'm not linkin'). A lot of product design is really bad, sometimes the designers get a chance to do something really good with a job, but not often.

Jared Spool, an Extremely Important Person, once told me over Pad Thai that "visual designers are just failed artists." I took that personally, being a failed artist (heh), but didn't understand why the "visual" distinction was necessary... I guess he would have to be a failed artist as well if he just said "designers"? Or he has to get the frustration of just speaking at conferences out somehow.

Facebook's redesign inspires widespread unhappiness and derision. On Techcrunch, incredible bile is thrown at the designers. I can't say I like it, but why does anyone think that Facebook is anything other than an ongoing experiment? Facebook users are not "customers," they are collaborators in inventing new ways of being connected, and much is required of them sometimes. The new Facebook stuff is not very good, but at least they haven't given up like Irene Au and the crew at Google.

I have attempted to be useful as a designer, and had enough failures and successes to know a good deal of humility. There's no research method, process, innovation technique, conference presentation, or even extra-talented designer that magically makes good stuff.

UPDATE: Another comment thread at an article about designers quitting Google, filled with ignorant stuff. It really does seem that there is a cultural lack of understanding about design and what it is. I suppose the only real solution is to increase the overall cutlure's understanding and ability to parse visual and experiential elements; then (and probably only then) will people want a specialist to make the choices about those things instead...

Posted by ben at 8:17 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Recently I've found myself having very unpleasant conversations with people about work. Often, both of us are in a bad situation, and there is no easy way to make the project better, only 'least bad' answers. It's a negative situation. Dealing with the disappointment and upset in this situation often leads people to act badly, myself included. I push too hard, questioning people's conclusions too much, and generally am a nuisance. One might even say an "asshole." I am not mean, but probably irritating.

When I went to school and worked my first few jobs, demanding bosses were the norm. Animated discussions, arguments, and emotion were part of caring about the work. I had a boss who extracted good things out of bad situations on a regular basis. I hated him at first, but eventually grew to admire him and respect him. Bewilderingly, I no longer have passionate arguments with people about work. Instead, discussions and meetings are meant to reinforce decisions already made. Negativity is to be avoided, and any criticism is almost offensive (even if just in tone).

I certainly can understand the desire to make work fun, lighthearted and focus on the positive at work, but I think something was lost. Progress and good work doesn't come easily. In fact, it's really easy to do mediocre work when everyone is afraid of failing (and getting laid off). There are great people who can avoid that and still be full of sweetness and light, but those people are few and far between, and the emotions involved are not going to last as long as good work. Abusive, mean behavior is wrong no matter what. But I find myself wishing for a couple of assholes at work, people who would shake things up, force the issues, and push past the usual solutions. But for now, I'll just try to stay positive :)

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I've been taking pictures for a long time (far too long to have learned as little as I have!). When I was a teenager, I developed and printed black and white film, at the Salt Lake Art Center (now I can admit that I should have been paying for the darkroom time, but I simply walked in and used the equipment and chemicals, for months). In those days, they taught the Zone System. When I managed to get it right, it worked well, but it was tricky. Years later, I have a digital camera that produces decent exposure ranges straight out of the box, no thought by me required. Nonetheless, I thought I would look around for information on how to more directly control exposure.

The Zone System is (and here, people who know more will cringe) a way to plan how a picture's lights and darks will be captured and printed. Spot meters that older cameras had (like my Minolta SRT-303) just measured the exposure off the part of the image in the middle of the frame, so if there was another part of the picture that was much darker or lighter, that part would be way too light or dark.

For example, if I took a picture of a person in a car in bright sunlight, the spot meter would tell me to expose for the sun reflected off the car, say 1/500 of a second at f/16 (with ISO 400 film). If I did that, everything but the hood of the car, including the person, would be completely black. Following the Zone System, I decide that the highlights on the car would be the brightest thing in the picture, and the person would be in the middle range. So, I increased the exposure 3 stops, to f/5.6, and the person's face becomes visible (while the highlights on the car become pure white). It took a lot of practice to make these decisions, however.

Now, meters in cameras are using the entire image to decide the exposure, basically building in the Zone System into the camera's exposure calculation (this is the "evaluative" mode my camera has). If you are interested in more direct exposure control, then, it seems that you are left with:

• using the camera's meter in spot mode, manual exposure, and using the traditional zone system
• using the camera's meter in evaluative mode, automatic exposure, and let the camera own the exposure

Neither one of these is particularly satisfying to me; the evaluative mode is better than I am at exposure calculation even if I set the exposure manually (since I still use the meter), and I really have no desire to go back to spot metering. I found a third option:

• Underexpose everything, shoot in RAW mode, and adjust the values of the picture after it's copied to the computer

This has produced the most satisfying results so far; without any special software or too much worry about exposure, I can still use my Zone System knowledge to peg parts of a picture to particular values of light and dark I choose.

• I underexpose (I set the EV compensation to minus 1/2 stop) because digital cameras don't capture as much information about the bright areas of the picture as film does, so I want to be sure I get whatever detail is in the highlights
• I use RAW mode because it lets me change the exposure of the picture after it's shot without losing any information
• I adjust the exposure on the computer because I still want to decide what the most important part of the picture is (and what should get the 'middle range' in the photo). Almost all the time, this is as simple as adjusting is the white, grey, and black points (something every single program for handling digital photos can do; Picasa, iPhoto, etc.).

Sometimes I will set two or three other points to use a transfer curve in the RAW conversion, but not so much anymore. The photo above was taken in this way (I show it in black and white because I think it has a great middle dynamic range that illustrates the idea -- the pretentiousness of black and white is just a bonus). Next, I am going to have to figure out how to get a handle on the weird white balance problems I have...

Posted by ben at 1:26 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

...and a better world for my daughter.

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As I approach the singularity (doing the whole spectral clustering thing on my own, rather than relying on genius kids for the heavy lifting), this caught my eye as a great rationale for doing the semantics-free work:

An interesting property of corpus-based theories of cognition (such as Latent Semantic Analysis) is that they cannot be tested independently of the corpus. Imagine that we collect a corpus, run and Single Value Decomposition on it, and use the resulting space to predict human similarity judgments between certain words. Imagine that the model does not explain the data very well. Is it that the model's processes are unrealistic, or is it that the corpus is not very representative? In this situation, those two factors are confounded. A possible solution is to test the same model with different corpora and different tasks. If the models explains the judgments' variance across different situations, we have more convincing evidence of the psychological reality of the model. ("Creating Your Own LSA Space," Jose Quesada, Carnegie Mellon University 2002.)

Chris Anderson's article "The End of Theory" takes this to a overwrought extreme:

Google's founding philosophy is that we don't know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that's good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required. That's why Google can translate languages without actually "knowing" them (given equal corpus data, Google can translate Klingon into Farsi as easily as it can translate French into German). And why it can match ads to content without any knowledge or assumptions about the ads or the content.

Clustering as an interface, by contrast, doesn't care about semantics, and doesn't even try for a strict ranking. Groups and rough hierarchy fit human models of organization much better than a long list (much as piles remain the usual way people organize). Loose piles don't have to be semantically understood, a set of items is easier to take in and choose from (with two dimensions -- item and group -- rather than one). And when the algorithm is based on purely on user activity analysis, a better interface for presenting results, solving the interface problem (and thus engendering and capturing more user interaction) is really solving the whole problem of giving people information in ways they can understand it and use it.

UPDATE: Taking this further, it's been seen for a long time that changes in behavior often happen when a few people that are part of a small group cause that entire group to adopt the change (like buying a kind of shoe, or phone, etc.). This is called the "cluster effect":

"The cluster effect is similar to (but not the same as) the network effect. It is similar in the sense that the price-independent preferences of both the market and its participants are based on each ones perception of the other rather than the market simply being the sum of all its participants actions as is usually the case. Thus, by being an effect greater than the sum of its causes, and as it occurs spontaneously, the cluster effect is a usually cited example of emergence."

Posted by ben at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

In an article about Flickr by Virginia Heffernan ("Sepia No More" in the New York Times Magazine), she bemoans what she sees as the dominant aesthetic on Flickr:

As art-school photographers continue to shoot on film, embrace chiaroscuro and resist prettiness, a competing style of picture has been steadily refined online: the Flickr photograph. ...the most distinctive offerings, admired by the site's members and talent scouts alike, are digital images that "pop" with the signature tulip colors of Canon digital cameras.

To me, the site's most popular photos are as good as or better than most magazine photography. Flickr members have created large amounts of quality work from the willingness to love and critique each other's work and newly available decent equipment. This is work that would otherwise not exist if not for the site, a strong contribution to popular culture.

It's hard to believe that Ms. Heffernan would confuse popular culture with incandescent art in the offline world; why does she try to mix the two up on the Web?

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Sarah just turns me to warm goo, babbling all the clichés I've heard, because the overwhelming love blows all other thought away: She amazes me every day, she is beautiful, precious, it is such a blessing to take care of her, it is unnerving how fast time slips away, etc. We are so, so lucky. She is three!

Posted by ben at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

The Mets have come into their own as a team, finally. They have a convincing claim on leadership of the East, built with hard work and despite missing their best pitcher, while the Yankees cannot find a win with a huge roster of monster talents and an almost hysterical desperation. It shouldn't be this way looking at it from the "moneyball" point of view, or the momentum point of view, or any point of view really. The Mets are comprised of a decent payroll of good players, a couple of stars, and a good coach, but they have no superheros among them to speak of. They play doggedly year after year, occasionally miraculously, mostly unevenly, sometimes heart-breakingly badly, but come back again and again somehow to compete in the most tantilizing, frustrating place in the world: just outside the Yankee's spotlight (clearly, a great place to get slowly and quietly good, though).

It's worth mentioning the way The New York Times has dealt with this switch in fortunes: amazingly badly. Here's a grudging, fourth-paragraph quote from their main story as the Mets took their second win in the series with the Yankees, and pulled away from the Braves to first place in their division as the Yankees fell apart: "But nothing about this game [...] could alter what those around here already suspected: The Mets are a better team, and not only because of their record, which improved to 28-14, the best in the National League..." As the capper, the headline for the article is "Another Injury to Another Pitcher And Another Loss for the Yankees." Give me a fucking break. They should stop reading team popularity polls and cover what's actually happening.

Regardless of what happens this year (the Yankees will eventually do something, the Brewers and the Indians look pretty good; it seems wide open), these Mets look like they are settled down and playing for themselves, and it's great to watch.

UPDATE: Wow, what a difference three weeks makes! Despite all the injuries, I'm still loving watching those Mets...

UPDATE 2: Oh my fucking God what the fuck was that?????!?!?! Utter, complete, total humiliation!!!!

Posted by ben at 2:32 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

It was impossible for me not to know about the iPhone as soon as it happened, I am a sucker for anything Apple. But I don't actually want one, which is weird to me, as usually I would want one of each from the entire Apple Store. I don't love my Treo at all, but the main value in it for me is as an Internet device; for that the damn keyboard is the affordance that makes it workable and useful. I really do hope that the touch screen is a great text entry thingy, but having used many, I can't really see how it will be.

But I do like the phone for the way that the interface is implemented. It is nicely visually polished, and the interaction design is ok, but what really makes it sparkle I think is the cinematic way that all interactions have smooth transitions from one state to the next. Looking at the demo of retrieving a voice mail, all the steps flow smoothly into one another, and when I close an item it zooms back into the place where it came from.

It's profoundly relaxing to see, and makes me realize how much brain overhead it takes on a daily basis to look at my phone and interpret what is happening, what just happened, and what I can do next; these things take very very tiny bits of attention, but it really adds up. It's like a tracking shot in a movie; where rather than cutting from shot to shot to show someone doing something the camera simply moves to follow them continuously ( I think of the opening sequence in Nashville and Boogie Nights — it works to introduce the characters because it's obvious whose story it is from the shot, instead of asking you to interpret artful framing or a sequence of different emphases into a whole).

Web design could use some of this continuous quality. The fanciest Ajaxified sites are still mostly a deck of flash cards, unfortunately.

UPDATE: I now own one, of course. My skepticism lasted only until the price drop :)

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I've always loved the deck of cards Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt published back in the 70s, Oblique Strategies. The koan-like ambiguity is helpful when wrestling with design decisions. I like words, but I thought some of the concepts would be even more usefully vague in pictorial form...

Posted by ben at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Barnard College Emily Gregory Award 2006, acceptance speech by (my aunt) Amy Trompetter

"You were born with your authentic self and your ethical integrity intact. You are moving from innocence to sophistication and deciding what are the realistic compromises that you must make in order to live in this imperfect world that you have inherited from past generations. My advice is to do puppetry, or something similar, which offers infinite possibilities to you.

"To recommend itself, puppetry offers no prestige and certainly no monetary gain. It is as labor intensive as the work of medieval artisans. As a puppeteer, you are assured of hard work and obscurity, which is very freeing as long as your passions are fully engaged in what you are doing. There is nothing to lose. The beauty of the work is its own reward and it will sustain you. Of course you do not have to be a puppeteer, but you must follow your heart. Do the life’s work that you are meant to do.

"Theater and puppetry demand not only the most labor-intensive and time- consuming dedication. Theatre workers must also study and know everything about history, art, music, movement, psychology, religion, languages, writing, dramaturgy, and so on. Theatre is by nature multi-disciplinary, and demands a life-long quest for knowledge. Every new production opens a whole new field of study. Idea drives good theater and the distillation of precise and profound idea enacted onstage is one of mankind’s most powerful means of communal expression.

"On the one hand, there is your well-developed intelligence, and on the other, the intelligence of the people and things around you. You can impose your own intelligence on your creative work, but when you begin to respond to the intelligence outside of your self, then your work will take off. There is an intelligence that is inherent in the universe, in nature, in each living being that you meet, in the materials that you work with. Puppetry has its own intelligence, which is almost too simple, and then on the flip side, it is the most mysterious and profound. It is easily missed, but not by Barnard students and not tonight. I interpret tonight’s award as an honor to a discipline called puppetry.

"These final words were left by a friend, on my answering machine as a horoscope reading before leaving for Russia. They may be the words of Gandhi. 'Every moment of your life is infinitely creative and the universe is endlessly bountiful. Everything your heart desires will come to you, but only if you are a brave rebel who relentlessly resists the conventional wisdom.'

Posted by ben at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments ()