send your children to conferences

December 12, 2013

here is a revelation for anyone who has never been to a conference that’s relevant to their profession: it’s a great way to validate that you actually know what you’re talking about. I mean, honestly, we mostly operate within the duck quack void of self-appreciation and we’re only really interrogated and challenged when we’re required to present, with authority, our opinion on what our interpretation of ‘good’ is in the narrow context of our own practice. but spending a day or two listening to people just like you, presenting their own ideas, propositions and theories, is a day or two where you quickly come to the realisation that you’re not, in fact, the imposter you thought you might be. you’re actually reasonably good. fuck it. you’re very good.

a colleague of mine is out in san francisco this week, at a conference where there are some very clever, very smart people talking about design practice. I say they’re very clever and very smart, but really, I’ve no idea. at least I’ve heard of them. they’ve mostly written a book about something or other that’s relevant. but, you know, I’ve never worked with them, so I can’t personally say whether they’re any good at what they do. but they tell a good story. and that’s what we’ve got to go on. and this colleague reflected on her first day at the conference with a telling phrase: I am getting the feeling we actually are doing stuff so right! and she means that as a company and as the individuals that make that company what it is. and I’m not surprised. because that’s the feeling I get when I attend similar events.

when you find yourself in a safe environment, and there’s not much safer than conferences, especially those with a significant proportion of first-time speakers, then that’s when you give yourself permission to evaluate your own position. my first speaking engagement was at the IA summit. I’d never done any public speaking before, least of all about my own practice. but that environment was as perfect a place as any to evaluate, compare, contrast and make your own conclusions about how you’re placed on the weird global/parochial peer spectrum. and really, it’s not a question of relativity. it’s much more about reassurance and a sense of acknowledgement.

which is all a rather roundabout way of saying that there is much to be gained from attending a conference of like-minded individuals to understand your own position within that community. I advocate conference attendance as a learning experience. bluntly put, I recommend conference attendance as the place where training budget is invested, because I believe that proactive conference attendance adds value as a career development opportunity by a factor of at least ten over traditional training or courseware. it’s definitely where I spend all my training budget. and if that runs out, especially where the IA summit is concerned, I’ll pay for it myself. it’s a no-brainer.

listening post: xtc – towers of london

commercially viable interaction design mastery

December 9, 2013

as this train slips by the half lit empty warehouses on the edge of town, imagination rustles the carrier bag of existence. I had a vivid dream last night about travelling on a train that gets cut lengthways from front to back as I’m travelling on it. just as I was about to extract meaning from that dream, my alarm sounded, like the distant call of a train, because I had to get up to get a train. the recursion of circumstance contained in those few seconds demanded that I extract some kind of metaphor from it, but try as I might, there really wasn’t one. maybe something about a train of thought (stabs self with pencil of despair).

I met with a very bright person today who is very interested in pursuing a career in interaction design. so keen that he is pursuing a masters degree in interaction design. and while he is doing that masters degree, he would rather like to get commercial experience in practicing interaction design. upon discussing which, I suggested it would be very good if this could somehow enable us to better inform the curriculum for a masters degree for interaction design such that it enables graduates to be commercially relevant and employable because christ knows commercial design companies are forever moaning about academic design curriculums not being commercially focused enough and the irony of the recursion of him needing commercial experience to be commercially viable while suggesting we can somehow use his experience to inform the structure of a commercially focused interaction design course is not lost on me although most of that sentence possibly was.

I bought a paramore album yesterday. I can’t explain that at all.

listening post: my bloody valentine – only shallow

patterns

December 6, 2013

on the discovery and deliberation of patterns it is a better thing we do to deny our learning and reference the landscape that we surface for whereupon some fresh faces are removed from their host and commune upon the meaning and principle of the very elements that evoke the things which we’re bound to call engagement emotion experience and delight then our challenge must be to question the very semantics of our endeavour for when we distribute this cognitive load and balance expectations most notably on the axis of strategic and attainable then there will be a mountain of prejudice and presumption that once manifest and articulated may only result in an irresistible deference to an equilibrium that defines the problem for as much as we coalesce around the principles and we refine refine reiterate and replay we ultimately provide our own context and that is where we imagine those patterns as extensions of the understanding we currently have rather than an understanding of what can be we may at times realise such distances from our everyday that we are able to explore without constraint and within that we can begin to discover those patterns that behaviourally would seem to get us closer to some kind of new resolution then within those arbitrary boundaries we’re going to realise our own conditions and parameters and they will determine the measure of success against which our interactions and behaviours can be evaluated making the estimation in those terms enables those participants and practitioners to filter around a common axis with a predictable set of data without this earthing there can be no parity and without this parity we’re divergent at best and tangental at least if we can begin to recognise what common language enables us to articulate then the patterns begin to emerge

listening post: mallory knox – lighthouse

on specificity

December 3, 2013

when we were trying to find a suit for my dad when my sister got married, there wasn’t much of a plan. I mean, there wasn’t a particular style or look we were going for. we didn’t really have a great understanding of what might be the right thing, other than it should probably be a bit, like, summery. but beyond that, we were at a bit of a loss. so we thought we should consult the expert in these matters. a tailor.

having explained to the best of our ability exactly how we thought my dad’s suit should manifest, having stumbled over at least half an oxford english dictionary and a couple of rogets, we alighted on a deafening silence, accompanied by an awkward gawping stare, waiting, almost reverently, for said tailor to deliver a verdict. and when he spake it felt as like it were the very voice of heaven cascading over our heavy shoulders. and he did spake unto us thus: “you need something a little…” yes? “…a little…” go on? “well…”

“unstructured”

…

“let me show you”

actually, it was the perfect description of what was required. I can’t really describe to you how the suit looked, but I think you can get an idea from that single word. but it isn’t the word that made the difference. it was the acknowledgement that specificity in of itself wasn’t the thing that was providing any clarity. it was using the right language based on the context that made the difference. and he just made that word up. but it was exactly the right word at the right time, based on the information he had.

I am the least academic person I know. I’m a terrible intellectual and appallingly unintelligent. do I know tufte? no I don’t know tufte. have I been getting away with it as a user experience designer for ten years? maybe. but you can’t personally say that unless you’ve worked with me and I’ve disabled comments for anybody who has worked with me.

I’ve done good things though. I have apparently made clients happy. I haven’t changed the world. I haven’t set out to. but to the best of my abilities I design for the user based on the evidence I have. much like the tailor. I really don’t know whether I’m using a taxonomy, an information architecture, a flow diagram, a blueprint, a journey map, a haynes manual, a cognitive disentropy matrix or whatever. I could really not care what those things are and the limits or constraints of what they’re supposed to communicate.

but I’m good at finding the word. and if I can sit in a room, with a pen and something to use it on, then I can probably show you what I mean. and that’s about as specific as it gets.

listening post: gemma hayes – shock to my system

on exposure

November 28, 2013

I was speaking with Andrew the other day about the transition from in-house to agency and how that adjustment takes place after a number of years at the former. because a number of years at the former has a particular pace and a particular comfort in the ownership and management of the design you do and the thinking you think and the constraints you know and the collaboration you undertake and the scrutiny under which you find yourself and the measurement of success that you might be subjected to which is likely measured over a period not much less than a decent-sized freelance contract against a set of goals and objectives mapped out over a period not much less the bronze age.

if you have spent a meaningful amount of time as a resident designer on the client side, either as a larger team, or, worse still, as the design team of one, you’ve likely woken up at your desk one day and realised you can probably go back to sleep for a while and nobody will notice until the end of the quarter. a massive generalisation of course, and more likely just an accurate description of my 14 years in-house, but the point is that the pace and scrutiny is different. and it can be a safe place. and you can get away with it. and you can sometimes disappear completely.

once you make the change, however, you can suddenly find yourself very exposed. I thought it was perfectly acceptable to take 6 months to design a faceted navigation system for a line of hardware. and, you know, it kind of was. but as soon as you get started on your first proper design project agency side, you are immediately aware that there is something different. people want to know what you’re doing all the time. they want to know why. they want you to explain to them the things they don’t understand and tell you why those things you suddenly can’t articulate aren’t actually that good anyway. they want to question everything you do. and, by the way, that 6 months? that’s actually 6 days here. if there’s one thing that really hits home in your first 3 months of transition, it’s the change in pace. and it’s not that the change in pace is a bad thing. it’s just that it feels like you don’t have enough time to think. which means you don’t have enough time to design. which is stressful and surprising and difficult and awkward. because you might not actually be able to do it. you might fail. and everyone will be able to say they told you so. and you’ll be exposed.

if I’m honest, it took about a year to get used to the change in pace, which I’m sure will be validated by the account teams who’s budget I used to work that out. I’m pretty efficient now. and that doesn’t mean I’m by any means a worse designer for being a more efficient designer. it just means I’m a bit quicker. if anything, I believe it makes me a better designer, since I’ve worked on the skill that is understanding and articulating the very thing in a given design challenge that is where the opportunity lies. and I can do that very quickly. and I can do it for multiple design challenges. and I can move from studio to studio, whiteboard to whiteboard, desk to desk, and I can point to the thing that matters. it’s an acquired skill. it takes time to learn. but the efficiency in the clarity is what facilitates pace.

the less tangible form of exposure comes when you are suddenly placed under an intense level of interrogation regarding the very thing that you think makes you a designer in the first place. your design thinking. or whatever you want to call it. that process you go through when you think about stuff. and write down words. and draw boxes. or abstract categorisations of emotions. maybe you use different colour pens. maybe you cut bits of paper out and rearrange them in a way that you think is the responsive version of the jean genie. whatever you do to evolve insight into articulation. evidence to ideas. you know, DOING DESIGN THINGS. for that is the place where you’ve likely never really had to justify yourself to other people who might actually be designers too who might even be better designers who might even be honest designers who might actually tell you what they think. because when design is money, clarity is currency. you really need to be able to explain yourself. be under no illusion, when you work for an agency, your constraint is time. but your reputation is all about quality. so quality is, and should be, ruthlessly monitored, evaluated, and understood. and that’s why the integrity of design and design thinking is the first thing that you will get caught out on. well, apart from the pace thing. but it’s not personal. even though that’s what it feels like the first few times someone like me sits down with you, looks at your designs and pulls that horrible squinty patronising-but-really-caring face that tells you there’s something not quite right. but I do that because, actually, there’s something not quite right. I’ve exposed you. how you then deal with that is that up to you. if you’re anything like me, you’ll probably print out pictures of me and stick them to your bedroom door whereupon you’ll spend a full 3 nights throwing manically sharpened pencils at them sobbing in your underpants slowly mouthing “I can design. I’m a good designer. I can design. I’m a good designer. I can design. I’m a good designer” over and over and over until you’re all cried out and you collapse on the floor onto a pile of ripped up creative reviews as the queen is dead plays on repeat over the wail of sirens and the incessant banging on the door.

you get over it. it’s all part of the transition. welcome to the real world.

listening post: biffy clyro – 57

on pathways

November 26, 2013

sometimes I get all wistful about forest paths and the unloved tracks of forgotten intent. often that’s because I’m wondering where my dog is. equally often it’s because I wonder where my god is. which is to mean that I can’t begin to describe the realisation of paths less travelled whether I consider them in terms of dog or god. there’s no difference. all there is is the relic of some lost spark of curiosity manifest in the loose dirt and leaves of time.

for clarity, I don’t believe in a god. sometimes I don’t believe in my dog. but I do believe that these manifestations of chaotic traversals that scar this earth have more to do with synchronicity than we might imagine. those pathways in the forest are both the magic and the mundane. the structured and the intangible. the mirror and the well. the loved. the unloved. but above all, inextricable and beautiful. for every half-trodden pathway, there exists a sense of the terrible and wonderful history of the moments that make that path place. place where you, I, my dog, and an epoch of experiences come together in the half-light and a half-glance as we pass through time and wonder; what if?

whereupon someone’s jack russell jumps at the leg of time itself and the moment is lost in an apology and a god biscuit. but, just before that, as time stands still at the branch of life, where instinct begets choice and all history collides, we’re faced with the overwhelming sense that not taking that path might be to deny ourselves reward. reward for curiosity. reward for courage. reward for conviction. if we don’t take that path now, we’re just another part of someone’s else’s tomorrow. the tomorrow where they, their dog, and an epoch of experiences come together in the half-light and a half-glance as they pass through time and wonder; what if?

but the truth about these paths is that you can’t find these paths if you look for these paths. for they exist only in the blind spots of consciousness. you can only see them if you look away. and then only if you’re in the right place. at the right time. and only if the path is looking for you. and there’s a raven on an oak tree reciting the autobiography of edgar allen poe. or something. the point is, as we move through time and space on the bark and boards of our earthly existence, our sense of place is as much to do with the predictability of the path as it with the beauty of the unknown. and seizing the unknown may be our only chance to be lost to the forest forever.

there’s no parallel with findability or discoverability here, much as I’d like to bring it to a conclusion that has something vaguely to do with signposting and waymarking and user experience, it’s just something that’s occurred to me and I wrote some words about. maybe I could draw a parallel to information architecture or something. maybe not.

listening post: genesis – supper’s ready

Things what I writ

send your children to conferences

commercially viable interaction design mastery

patterns

on specificity

on exposure

on pathways

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Things what I writ

send your children to conferences

commercially viable interaction design mastery

patterns

on specificity

on exposure

on pathways

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