Daneomatic

When I said that all I wanted to do for the winter of 2003-2004 was work as a ski town bum, I wasn’t being completely forthright.

As Hood River emptied out that fateful fall and all my surf bum friends left town, my life got real slow, real fast. I had a lot of time to ponder, I had just finished reading Zeldman’s Designing With Web Standards and Eric Meyer on CSS, and my experience tuning up the website at our windsurfing shop gave me the confidence that hey, I could probably do this web design thing professionally.

I looked up Portland design agencies. I lived on Monster.com. I researched every single outdoor sports company that interested me, and got into contact with them. By the time all was said and done, I had sent off more than a dozen resumes and cover letters to companies all over the west coast. Given my diverse experience and proven coding skills, I was confident that something would come up.

Nothing came up. All I got for my efforts was a friendly rejection card from Outside Magazine. I still have that card, and I still have my subscription to Outside, even though I’m not part of the Rolex-laden jet-setting adventurer demographic. From the other companies, though? Nothing. Not a peep. Not even an acknowledgment of receipt. Later I learned that this was the game, that perhaps I had an order of magnitude more work to go if I actually wanted to hear a response for someone.

So that didn’t work. Indeed, my life is full of these false starts, where I’m sure that this bearing, this here bearing that I’m holding right now, will take me to land. Many times it doesn’t happen, and I get turned and spun around and forget where I am, and drift lost and listless before bumping into something.

It was only after my brief interlude with this unbroken circle of rejection that I hatched the hair-brained scheme of working at a ski resort. And then it happened. And then I suddenly was employed by a ski resort, subsisting on hot cider and “40% off” fries, but not really working for a ski resort.

Landscaping. Despair. Another downward spiral. A picture of me clutching a McDonald’s apron in my tiny little fist.

I continued combing the Bend Bulletin’s online classifieds, and then without warning something came up. There was an opening for a web support specialist at a software company in Bend, that specialized in website management and targeted email marketing. I visited their website, which turned out to be a horrid face-stabbing mess, but by this point I had already fallen so far that I had no standards left. This company was obviously a spam house, and I was determined to become their new spamming telemarketer.

With these expectations I began filling out their online application form. It started out fine, requesting the usual personal information and job histories, but quickly descended into a carnival of the grotesque. After every submit button I was greeted by a new page filled by a fresh set of forms. This gauntlet of pain was made all the worse by the fact that whatever awful code they were using for their application process, it had disabled the delete key in my web browser.

After thirty minutes of agony, with no indication of how long I had left, I became increasingly snarky. I called them out on the delete key. I insulted their development team. I swore a lot. And damn if after all this they didn’t want me to explain, in detail, “How to build a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.” I refused, I fucking refused, and instead told them how to supercool a can of Guinness. In all seriousness, this is what I pasted into my job application:

Say you want to spend your evening with a few cans of Guinness, because you live in the States and the only way you can get semi-decent Guinness is from a can. Have you ever been discouraged by the requirement that you must chill a can of Guinness three hours before cracking it open? Of course you have. Here’s a bad way to supercool your pint of Guinness, so you can enjoy it in less than an hour.

First live somewhere cold, have it be winter and have snow on the ground. Make sure you are really tired after a hard day at work, and fairly delirious. While still in your house take off your shoes and socks because you’re sick of wearing your shoes all day. Roll up your pants so you don’t get them crusted with snow. Grab a paper grocery bag and some mittens and head outside.

Be sure you have an old tin can of corn to prop the door open, so it doesn’t lock behind you and you need to walk around the entire building, though snow drifts, in your bare feet. Be sure you know how to use the tin can. Go outside, try repeatedly to prop door open, and flee back indoors every time your bare feet get too cold on the ice. When you finally have the door figured out, kneel down and fill the grocery bag with snow. Scamper back inside and dump the snow in your sink. Open Guinness four-pack and dump in snow. Fill sink with water, and turn snow into a superconductive slush.

Sit back and smile. You are a genius.

I expected nothing back, figuring I had put them in their place.

As it turns out, however, the company wasn’t a spam house at all. They were a small seven-person software shop that built web-based content management systems, and offered website development and hosting to regional businesses. They spent all their time working on building websites for paying customers, and ironically invested nothing in their own web presence. Despite their lousy web-facing appearance the company was legitimate, and I got an interview partially because I called them out on the delete key. My complaints had settled an age-old argument in the business, that fixing their delete bug in Opera was a waste of time because no one actually used Opera.

Once I learned about their business I was stoked. Seriously, working for a software startup? Unlimited snacks and soda? I didn’t care if I would be doing phone support for pissed-off customers, this was everything I wanted! Web design! Crazy, creative people! Small company! No hierarchy, no bureaucracy, no bullshit!

They offered me the job.

I was conflicted, though. This was everything I wanted, yes, but this was everything I wanted two months ago. I wanted to work for a web design shop in September, back during my resume bonanza, but now I wanted to be a snowboard bum and live on the mountain. The job was 40 hours a week, and they didn’t want to budge on that. They wanted commitment. The mountain was zero days a week right now, but would become seven days a week over the holidays. Right when the web company wanted to hire me on.

In a matter of days I went from nothing to nobody, to everything for everybody. I accepted the position, worked the holiday season at the mountain, and in early January started my job as a full-time web support specialist. It was bliss. In a matter of months I would find myself working as a full-time web designer, and soon I would be their marketing director.

But first, I needed to break my leg.

End Part II. Review Part I or read Part III.

I came into this program thinking I had a pretty good understanding of what design is. Design isn’t just the way a product or interface looks, of course, but how it works. Design isn’t just about efficiency or economy of motion, but the way an object makes a user feel when using it.

Design is user-centered. Design should remove pain points, but even this goal sets the bar too low. Design shouldn’t simply remove pain, but create joy. Design is about your users, not you. Design should induce a sense of flow. Your product, whatever it may be, should make your users feel like they’re kicking ass.

Good design is deceptively simple. It’s not done when there is nothing more you can add, but when there is nothing more you can take away. Be ruthless. Kill your darlings. Get rid of everything that is not absolutely necessary, and then remove some more. Prune, prune, prune. If you’re not crying, you’re not cutting deep enough.

Omit needless words. Eliminate verbiage.

Break of Day

These were all concepts that I took to be self-evident as I entered this program. I had already taken down heavy draughts of the design Kool-Aid and I was thirsty for more, so imagine my surprise when I was given nothing. I was frustrated when our initial projects centered around running focus groups, conducting ethnographic research, and building cultural probes. When it finally came time to “design” something, like an updated version of Google Reader, we were told to spend most of our time not actually designing, but finding our core argument. When it came time for evaluation, the professor cared more about our “core” than about the innovative concepts we developed. Honestly, we might as well have designed nothing, and simply gone up in front of the class to present some vaporous idea.

My annoyance with the program extended beyond class, too. I volunteered to help redesign the HCI/d website, and even after a month working on the project we still haven’t designed anything. We interviewed students and had a series of agonizing meetings where we defined the goals of the site, and only now have we started sketching anything that resembles a website. Like, the goal of the site is pretty obvious, right? To recruit prospective students. I could have figured that out in, like, five seconds on the can. Why did this require a month’s worth of meetings?

Why did this require a month’s worth of meetings?

For me, it all started coalescing during the IDEO presentation last Friday, when Tom Stat began dispelling the myth of the lone creative genius. He shared a number of innovative design ideas that completely upended their respective markets, including Amazon, Tivo and Netflix. These ideas did not fall fully-formed out of the brain of a genius. Amazon did not burst, clad in armor and brandishing steel, from the forehead of Zeus. Indeed, even if Jeff Bezos was entirely and independently responsible for the original concept, there is no doubt that Amazon underwent numerous revisions, expansions and contractions on its long road from idea to launch.

The point is, “genius” as a generative tool is unreliable, unpredictable, and incredibly risky. The design process, however, is a way that sharp individuals can get together as a team, and come up with highly innovative and destabilizing results. Good design is not an accident. Design is deliberate, conscious, and carries with it values and judgements. Unfortunately for us, design is also a lot of work. I think we’ve all figured this out by now.

And this, this is what I have since discovered as the fatal flaw in my understanding of design. I already knew that design was more than veneer, that it had to be woven into every part of the development of a product. I assumed this knowledge would be my tightly-wrapped cloak, that would shield me from the bitter storm promised by Marty and the second-years. I was already on board, and I figured I would be immune to the destruction.

Boy was I wrong.

When the semester began I was surprised that we started with all this talk about research and observation and insight and reflection. I figured we were just establishing the fundamentals, and that it all would blow over soon and we would finally begin designing things.

As weeks became months, however, and we were still talking about cores and processes, I became incredibly frustrated. I felt dead inside. I was ready to leave the program, this stupid program that has design in its name, where you don’t even design anything. Two months in, not a breath has been wasted on interface design patterns, or user interface elements, or Fitt’s Law, or anything else that one thinks would be covered in a human-computer interaction design program. In fact, one of our courses this semester is an exercise in socratic philosophy, more than anything else.

So where is the design?

All this nonsense, I thought. The sooner we could get this procedural garbage over and done with, the sooner we could get to the good stuff. The sooner we could start designing.

Just recently it all began falling into place in my head. I realized that my conceptualization of design, while perhaps decently sophisticated, was terribly narrow in scope, and included only about the final ten percent of the process. I was familiar with the principles that govern the construction of a design once an idea has been established, but I knew nothing of how to reach that idea.

All this nonsense we have been doing, it is far from nonsense. This is design. Indeed, 90 percent of the design process is informing your final design argument, and yet I was only familiar with that final ten percent. Without a good design strategy, you’ll certainly be able to rush into a design and start building something sooner, but it’s ultimately going to be a weak design with a weak argument. Design is a marathon, and in my hubris I thought I could take a taxi to within 500 feet of the finish line and still claim a fair victory.

This program is obsessed with the process, and not the final product, because the process will ultimately inform everything we will ever design. Ever. If we do not understand these fundamentals, if we have not been immersed in the design process, and if we are not able to abstract these procedures and apply them in different contexts, the world owes us nothing.

I sincerely believe that this program addresses one of the most important things being undertaken in the world right now. This is a complete reconceptualization of what it means to create anything, from products to systems to policies. If humans are to exist in their current capacity for another hundred years, we need to begin informing our actions with deliberate design-based thinking.

Everything is a design problem.

We are learning a mental and procedural framework that will guide the values we hold, and the design decisions we make, for the rest of our lives. That is why this is hard, and that is why this is important.

In the interest of full disclosure, before I became a big-shot graduate student I was something of a dirtbag. I would guide wilderness trips, eat roots and berries, and participate in all sorts of dirtbag activities like frisbee, rock climbing and hacky sack. Indeed, I would also burn Nag Champa, wear hemp necklaces, and buy sarongs emblazoned with cultural symbols that I didn’t understand. I am proud to say, however, that I have never owned a pair of devil sticks.

I’ve been thinking a lot about slacklining for the last few days. Slacklining is a popular dirtbag sport, where you string up a one-inch thick piece of webbing between two trees. You pull it really tight and then you try to walk across it. If you’re really good, you walk across it, spin around, and then try to walk back. If you’re really, really good, you do flips and rolls and stuff. To get this good, however, you will need dreadlocks. A huge knotted mass of dreadlocks.

Slacklining is incredibly difficult when you first try to do it. Humans don’t naturally have what it takes, and even if you have incredible balance you still need to go through the difficult process of learning how to do it. Just standing on the slackline, even less walking on the slackline, can be challenging. During their first few attempts most people have this sort of “Elvis leg” thing going on, where the instant they put weight on their foot it shakes back and forth at an alarming rate. You put your foot on the slackline, you try to stand up, you shake it like Elvis for half a second, and you fall right off. Damn, eh?

Slacklining isn’t very complicated. Indeed, unless you have dreadlocks and are doing backflips and handstands, it’s just walking. Sure, walking on a one-inch surface that is incredibly unstable is very difficult to do, but it certainly isn’t complicated. The path towards mastery is through practice and muscle memory. Whether you’re aware of it or not, as you practice slacklining your brain is analyzing all the small muscle movements in your body. Over time it identifies the “Elvis leg” as an unproductive motion, and your muscle memory moves in to compensate. Before you know it the Elvis leg is gone, and you’re working on your first step. Then two steps. Then you’re going for the other end of the slackline.

It’s hard and frustrating and even I am not that good at it, but if you keep on practicing you’ll continue to unconsciously get better. With slacklining there isn’t a whole lot for your brain to do, but it’s a skill that you begin to internalize over time. In a way, this is how I feel my design education is progressing. It isn’t a perfect analogy, as I would argue that producing designs, especially simple designs, is extremely complicated. However, right now I don’t see any particularly clear path when it comes to solving a design problem, and so I find myself wasting all sorts of time pursuing dead ends.

I’ll spend two hours trying to put together an appealing three-color palette, only to scrap it entirely two days later in favor of something else. All creative design comes in fits and starts, of course, but instead of walking to the other end of the slackline, right now I’m just trying to stand up. Still floundering on my shaky Elvis legs, I have not yet had the practice necessary to eliminate these excess, unproductive motions. In learning the theory and motivations behind HCI design I hope to internalize these thoughts and techniques, and unconsciously weave them into the fabric of my design process.