“Consumer” is one of those words I’ve never been comfortable with. Along with “user”, it refers to real people as simply receptacles for whatever companies churn out for them. It’s a lazy, impersonal, demeaning, and ultimately unhelpful word.

Alex Bogusky thinks that as consumption is inevitable, people just need to be better consumers. I agree that’s needed, but still believe our word choice matters and can be improved. Lots of other people think so too.

The most obvious and simple change is to substitute “people” for these dirty words. That works almost universally, and I use it effectively in my design practice. But today I stumbled upon a use of another word that is more than benign–it’s empowering:

Transformation.

The article itself takes the side of “producers”, acknowledging that nothing is truly produced; it is merely transformed from one (perhaps natural) state to another. Carrying that theme through to the people we design for emphasizes that they too will transform what they receive, putting their stamp on it, doing good or ill with it.

Transformation happens to products, commodities, experiences, and ideas. The word transformation recognizes that people have the opportunity to improve what they receive, but also the responsibility of managing it.

I’m going to try substituting the word “transformer” for “person” in my work–probably just to myself at first–to see if it changes my design decisions.

Jonathan Keats continues to blow my mind:

“Until today science has been completely dominated by one species,” says Keats, an experimental philosopher and former director of the Local Air & Space Administration…”People may not be biologically equipped to understand the universe at a fundamental level, he contends. “Other species might be better adapted to the task.”

Keats believes that the most promising candidates are bacteria…”But they need facilities,” says Keats. While their minuscule size lets them experience quantum phenomena on a first-hand basis, they have no natural way of exploring the galaxies….

“Rows of petri dishes filled with brackish water – teeming with cyanobacteria – will be set up atop a flat screen monitor laid flat on its back. The monitor will glow with images of the cosmos provided by the Hubble Telescope.”

An interesting idea:

Thanks to the competitive nature of electoral democracies, many – often most – citizens end up being governed by a party they didn’t vote for. But there is a way to ensure that every single voter is satisfied by the results of an election: simply have each voter governed by the political party he or she picked at the polls. – Starting over: Ultimate democracy

Perhaps not surprisingly, this is proposed by a Swiss economist. Here in Switzerland, people often choose in which canton to live based on the policies–welfare, health care, law, education and taxation–of that cantonal government. As the federal system is relatively weak, these policies make up the bulk of your government, so choosing where to live is also a political decision. The Free State Project in the United States has similar ambitions, centered around making New Hampshire independent and libertarian. And other “global nomads” we’ve met in our travels mention the policies of their current country as a big reason they’ve moved there. What if, instead, you could live where you like but still choose your policies?

I can’t see how this would accomodate shifting political views, common resources like roads and water supply, and long-term investments (what if you voted against Social Security when you were young but later decided it wasn’t such a bad idea), and it would require a massive amount of oversight and administration (so libertarians wouldn’t really be happy no matter how they voted), but it’s an intriguing concept nonetheless. Perhaps piloting in a single area with mostly individual effects–like health care?–would be a way to start.

Step 1: Find the best, most experienced, most professional product designer you can.

Step 2: Ask them what to do.

Step 3: Do what they say.

Profit! Ok, maybe a little more detail would help.

For Step 1, your goal is to find the person with the most experience designing products that will work with you. This may or may not be someone with the title “designer”; if you find a “product manager” or “engineer” who has successfully led a dozen projects to good results, that might be the best person to trust. You’re looking for quantity of past work (remember the ceramics class) and quality (defined by whatever metric is most important to you and the project–innovation, aesthetics, market success, reliability, etc). Whatever their title, you should make it clear to everyone on the project that this person is the lead designer.

Don’t know any great designers? Ask everyone you know who their favorite designer is, then ask that designer about the best person they know. Repeat until you run out of time and/or money.

Step 2 is pretty straightforward but often forgotten. In the heat of the moment, most people revert to voicing their own answers rather than asking questions. Designers work best when their opinion is sought out, not when they have to shout to be heard. Their job is to make design decisions, so bring them everything you can. A good designer will be humble enough to say they don’t know when that’s the case.

The wrong way to interpret Step 3 is to assume every lead designer should act like a dictator–shouting orders and demanding obedience. A great designer will first set up a design process that includes everyone on the team in the right way. They’ll probably ask more questions than give answers (see Step 2), and will want to understand all the various options and known constraints.

But at some point decisions have to be made (specified in that process) and at that point you have to follow the person you’ve entrusted with design authority. A project where only half a design is followed can turn out worse than one with no design. A great design is holistic and integrated, and if you choose to compromise it–through impatience, penny-pinching, or simply lack of appreciation for the design quality–your product will not be great. On the other hand, products that do fulfill their designed form and function are a breath of fresh air and a shock to a world accustomed to mediocrity and imitation.

Three steps. Easier said than done…but worth trying.

“Users of social networking services are 30% less likely to know their neighbors.” – PEW Internet survey

When I was a senior in high school, a teacher asked me to join the impromtou speaking team. In this competitive speech event, you received a question from a predefined category–for the category “transportation”, it might be something like “Should seatbelts be mandatory?”–and had just 6 minutes to prepare and deliver a speech on it. I had previously acted in drama events, and even improv comedy, but never spoken seriously without preparation.

The first time I tried it, alone with the teacher, I nearly cried. Standing in front of the room, I stumbled through a few points loosely related to the question, forgot to express an opinion, and trailed off to silence after only a minute or two. Undeterred by my failure, my teacher showed me a few tricks to help connect my thoughts and pace my speech better. After a lot of practice and a few competitions, I began to feel more comfortable and deliver better responses. Eventually I made it to the state finals, alongside competition who had much more experience than me.

The most interesting thing I learned from my impromptou experience was the power of nonsense spoken with conviction. I found that with just 5-10 unique stories or data points on a category (e.g. “transportation”), I could string together a compelling argument for almost any question. It wasn’t important that I believed what I was saying, or even that my arguments were consistent across questions. In fact, I would frequently use a single anecdote or data point multiple times in a single day to argue completely opposite things–and as the judges were different for each question, my shifting opinions were no problem. The important thing was that what you said sounded believable on the first pass, which was influenced as much by how you said it as what you said. My bar for “knowing” something was lowered to pass anything that received superficial approval and sounded confident.

As you might expect, this taught exactly the wrong lessons to a self-centered and overconfident teenage boy, which I’ve spent years painfully unlearning in the real world. As I progressed through university and various jobs, working on increasingly difficult and complex topics, it became clear that falsely knowing–and acting as such–was a liability, not an advantage. My polished speaking skills, and the belief in my own ability to spin believable solutions out of thin air, combined to set me up for a bigger fall when I encountered situations I wasn’t actually prepared for. The questions I worked on now demanded real, not postured, solutions, and the critiques I received were not from sympathetic teachers at weekend student events, but from brilliant and exceedingly logical friends, mentors, and colleagues searching relentlessly for the truth.

This problem actually gets worse as you gain experience. It’s natural to believe that your years of experience have given you an instinct for “what works” and what doesn’t; that because you’ve been around for a while you can skip some of that boring background work. But in a rapidly-changing world–and anything worth working on seems to be “rapidly-changing”–the facts themselves are shifting so fast that prior experience can also be a handicap. The more you learned on the last project, the more you need to unlearn on the next. It’s the cognitive equivalent of the Innovator’s Dilemma: as soon as you get good at something, it becomes useless and your investment in it becomes a burden.

What’s the alternative to this? For me, the solutions have all involved humility and patience: learning to say “I don’t know”; asking for advice; listening more than I speak. Practicing mindfulness through reflection and meditation, to recognize when things have changed and require new approaches. Recognizing that knowing takes time, especially when you’re experienced, and planning extra time to figure things out.

People often think leadership is about personality; that no one knows the right answer, and that you just need to act like you do. Steve Jobs said early in his career, “Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.” With his recent geek-beatification, people are taking this statement as gospel, and acting confident despite not knowing a thing. I’ve personally watched an entire generation of product managers and designers turn into wannabe-Pied-Pipers based on this advice.

But that’s exactly the wrong lesson to learn from Steve’s work. Instead, look at what he actually did–continually disrupt his own past successes. Apple under Steve Jobs was a place that repeatedly cancelled successful products and replaced them with new ones; Steve himself would make outrageously opinionated statements about product features and then completely change his mind with the next generation. In some cases this may have been calculated misinformation, but in others he clearly made an about-face on something he had strongly believed.

Don’t act like you know when you don’t. It’s ok to not know right now. Wait and work until you do know, and recognize that what you knew yesterday may be holding you back today.

U.S. manufacturing is rapidly going away, exemplified by this story about Apple which shows the power of scale and cultural advantages in China and other Asian countries. Thus ends a century of American innovation in manufacturing, starting in the days of Henry Ford and the assembly line and reaching its zenith in and after WWII.

I’ve always felt like design is a more sustainable industry for nations, as no one can better design for a culture than its own citizens–and I say that as someone whose current job is to design for other cultures. As Apple itself shows, design “alone” can create huge amounts of wealth for companies and individuals. But it’s still unclear whether a culture can sustain itself by only designing, and outsourcing the manufacturing of, the products and services it uses.

Of course there’s no guarantee at all that the number of jobs in the world will exactly equal the number of people in it. I just hope that the work we’re doing to evolve design practice provides enough fulfilling work for enough people to get us to a sustainable place–worldwide.

Today I learned: Samuel Beckett (Nobel Prize-winning modernist playwright, Waiting for Godot), used to drive Andre the Giant to school, because the future wrestler was already too big to fit on the school bus.

John Kilduff (previously mentioned) just keeps pushing the human race forward; this time blending margaritas and painting at the same time…while cycling through a park). And crashing sometimes.

“We ran out of ice, we ran out of everything…but we didn’t run out of passion!”

“Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.” – Mulla Nasrudin, via Jared Spool

“When you cut into the present the future leaks out.” – William Burroughs, on the “cut-up” technique of randomizing his writing.

I think watching this would be a pretty good way to start each day; filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg explores gratitude, mindfulness, and the beauty of the world we live in and people we live with:

Could also be seen as the sentimental counterpart to Louis CK’s celebration of the modern world.

There are innumerable examples of this, but my favorite is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Before this novel’s rise to prominence, any discussion of intrusive surveillance was singularly bloodless…

But a science fiction writer, Orwell, has given us a marvelous and versatile vocabulary word for discussing this: now we can say, ‘‘Your surveillance idea is a bad one because it is Orwellian’’ – we can import all of that novel and its horrors with one compact word…

It’s this trick of putting blood and sinew into the argument that is the best that science fiction has to offer. It’s this that makes science fiction more relevant in an era of technological upheaval and social chaos. – Cory Doctorow

“People in organizations don’t change until their fear of survival exceeds their fear of learning” – Organizational theorist Edgar Schein, via Katherine Fulton

But to think that buying the book gets you somewhere, that’s maybe the bigger fallacy. It’s just like the evidence that shows the most dangerous people are those that have been taught some financial literacy. They’re the ones who go out and make the worst mistakes. It’s the people that realize, “I don’t know anything at all,” that end up doing pretty well. – Tyler Cowen

I’ve been worried about the fact that as I get older, I feel like I “know” less and less. But in today’s world, falsely believing you know something can be a lot more dangerous than simply admitting you don’t know.

If you had succeeded by obsessively focusing on customers, wouldn’t you trick your competitors by saying you didn’t listen to them?

A friend explained some of the intricacies of Arabic to me the other night; I thought I’d write down the most striking aspects:

• Status in the ancient Arab world was greatly influenced by your language abilities. Ancient heroes were language experts, not usually warriors or political leaders.
• The Koran, in fact, was especially notable due to its masterful Arabic language. The quality of the writing was what gave it authenticity.
• Perhaps because of this, the ancient vocabulary was much bigger than today’s.
• Arabic generally uses a single, unique word to express even complex subjects. It does not use prefixes or suffixes to build word, so words with similar meaning can sound very different.
• The written language mostly omits vowels.
• Objects (“table”) have gender and verbs depend on which gender the person you’re speaking about is.
• Plurals have a special case when there’s exactly two of something.
• Students generally enter university without any formal training in grammar. Most take an introduction to it just to experience how difficult it is.
• The meaning of a word depends on its position in the sentence and its pronunciation.
• Ancient writing can still be read, as the script is much the same.
• Poets would battle each other – just meet and try to impress each other with their command of language. One famous story tells of a poet who amazed his challenger by responding with a sentence that was a complete palindrome and still fit the conversation.
• When a line doesn’t work, the phrase “it won’t rhyme” means it doesn’t match one of the traditional 13 poem templates.
• Every line has to fit that pattern.

Russell Davies talks about what comes after “digital”:

The magic and silliness of the web can escape from behind the screen and spill into the world, sweeping away the pristine banality of mass consumer electronics in a tide of walking gonks and talking doorknobs. It’ll be stupid and brutal and glorious and fun. And designers will absolutely hate it.

He finishes by citing a quote by Turing that suggests he was less than enthralled by computing:

The property of being digital should be of greater interest than that of being electronic. That [computing machinery] is electronic is certainly important because these machines owe their high speed to this, and without the speed it is doubtful if financial support for their construction would be forthcoming. But this is virtually all that there is to be said on the subject.

It begins here:

These two videos are the future of news, surveillance, and cinema. When everything is a camera, everything changes. Reminds me of scenes in science fiction, especially The Dervish House and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.