Meditations on Power in Design

I've recently come to the realization that the process of building stuff (interfaces, experiences, software, etc.) following the principles of design in a client-supplier relationship is most often a story about resolving the conflict between hierarchical and more egalitarian/communal work structures. Which unfortunately means that allowing the design process to flourish is primarily a question of producing an appropriate system of mitigating power - like a kind of workplace judo.

The root of the conflict, (like all power struggles) is money. The person paying for a product is trying to solve a problem. And for that they provide money to people whose business it is to figure out how to solve problems. The client therefore brings two positive things to the table: the ability for people to provide for their families and accumulate desirable possessions and experiences (represented by money), and a thorny problem that requires a number of those people to solve.

Unfortunately, they also quite often bring a third thing to the table, which is ceded to them because of what is perceived to be their "ownership" of the problem: They bring an excessive amount of power over the final solution. They have the power to pull the plug, to remove the ability for the people working on the problem to provide for themselves, their families and their loved ones.

So with the imbalance of power that comes from a typical client relationship, excessive hierarchy is often immediately brought in as a way of resolving the potential risk that money or time will be wasted. Results must be provided by a certain date, so the project now has to be managed, therefore Project Management is born. And the client now needs to be managed to provide a line of defense for the team that is building the thing, therefore Account Management is born.

And you need those lines of defense if you're trying to build something within a framework of an antagonistic client superpower. You need people to get up in the morning and get beaten up over timelines and client whims because they provide a necessary buffer between the client and the team building the project. Because the process the team needs to follow has nothing to do with hierarchy. It has to do with collaboration and communalism, with careful listening, observation and iteration. It's about involving the lots of people in the design conversation and translating what they are saying, thinking and feeling into a thing that other people will find both desirable and useful.

There are actually many paths that can get you to the answer of developing a system in which design can flourish. None of them are necessarily easy, but neither is the waste that excessive hierarchy produces.

I don't have the answer, but I think there are some different approaches to the problem - different paths which, if taken wisely, could lead to good answers.

Meditation Number One

Since money is a primary issue in the power imbalance, how could you remove money from the equation? In other words, how could you create a system in which people can spend the time required to design an answer to a problem, while still being able to provide for themselves? I'm thinking open source here, but not many people make a sustainable income from open source ventures. Without winning the lottery, are there new ways of making a living without requiring money?

Meditation Number Two

Or... what if you framed the relationship differently? How could you reframe the client relationship so that the client had an active role in the solution? Allowing them to be an equal partner rather than an antagonistic force? This is called collaboration - by involving clients in the process, you ensure they have a stake in the solution. The main challenge with this would seem to be that the nature of the problem (i.e., money=veto) doesn't really go away. Unless your client is the head honcho, you'll still run the risk of the plug being pulled by someone not involved in the process.

Meditation Number Three

Or... think how you could remove the client from the relationship, but retain a source of income Maybe this is really just called entrepreneurism, because the traditional answer is to get income by selling your services to thousands of people. (Yet technology is opening up the possibilities for new developments in this arena).

For some reason, this feels like the most harmonious and simple of all the meditations, because although the "client" doesn't go away, the success of the thing you're building is based on satisfying all of your clients, i.e., your customers. You're still subject to the whims of your clients, but in a much more distributed and possibly sane way. The problem with this is getting off the ground has traditionally been expensive and often a long-term game, which often requires you to give up part of your company in return for cash. Are the low barriers of entry that we are seeing today helping to mitigate that?

Thoughts? It seems that many smart people are trending toward trying to solve the issue of power in one of these ways rather than living in the traditional subservient client model. 

Kill the Keyboard, Save the World

For my undergrad university thesis in 1994, I wrote about 30 pages on the implications of the phenomenon of emoticons on the Usenet ;-). I concluded with the admittedly difficult-to-prove prognostication that due to the nature of electric media (McLuhan's term) within 50 years the western phonetic alphabet would become irrelevant and would be replaced by some more symbolic system.

(I got a B-minus. :=0 )

15 years on, and I pretty much stand by my assertion, B-minus aside - the only things keeping phonetic alphabets alive right now are the millions of keyboards (both physical and digital) tethered to our computing devices. This silly mechanism of 104 (or so) buttons laid out in a grid is still our most consistent and reliable way of translating our thoughts into digits. Speech recognition is interesting, but most people will be hard-pressed to get over their embarrassment of talking to a machine until there's a strong motivation to do so, or until product designers make our machines resemble cute animals so we can tap into the power of anthropomorphosis. 

Our Central Nervous System Has No Keyboard

If you understand something about McLuhan's theories in the Extensions of Man, then you understand why visual communication is becoming more pervasive in our society - because electric technologies are extensions of our central nervous system. And we experience our reality and interface with our CNS through our senses. 

Writing and other communication systems, successful though they may be, are simply low-fidelity tools that allow us to share what's in our heads with others. I say low-fidelity, because what comes out of our hands when we write is very different from what would come out of our mouths when we speak , and that itself is very different from what would come out of our heads if we were simply to "think" things to each other. In short: there's a huge gap between the thoughts I'm thinking and the words I'm writing right now. It takes a lot of effort to close that gap. And that effort takes a lot of time. And that time represents waste. 

We Waste So Much Time

The implications of this are incredibly important to the practice of collaborative work. When you're trying to build complicated things with lots of people, you spend incredible amounts of time communicating things to those people, arranging for our physical bodies to all be in the same room at the same time to talk over the same things. The communication overhead becomes increasingly high with every body that is added to the project, and especially every body that is added to the project who isn't responsible for DOing anything on it, but has to make a decision about it. 

We've all been there.  You sit in a meeting room and brainstorm a bunch of amazing ideas with some great people - you've got it all on the board, with sketchy scribbles, boxes and arrows flying. You've developed a conceptual model, written in erasable marker ink, that all the participants understand and agree on. You've created a symbology, a visual vocabulary that maps to a problem you're all sharing in your heads. Then you all look at each other and say, "Okay, so who's going to put this into a powerpoint so we can communicate it to XYZ?" 

Then some poor sucker then has to read all of the scribbles and transcribe it into a digital format like a Powerpoint deck. He laboriously draws boxes where a scribbled line was drawn in less than a second. He retypes all of the text, written on the board in less than a minute. The work of honing and crafting and making a PowerPoint or Keynote deck starts. In the end the team spends two weeks creating a 28 page powerpoint deck that represents what a few individuals came up with in less than an hour, but means nothing to the people who were not at the meeting. So things need to be explained, rationalized, defended. Along the way, ideas become stillborn and don't develop. Important ideas get forgotten. People spend enormous amounts of time justifying the time they spent on things. And then they're sent home with Carpal Tunnel syndrome because of all the keystrokes they've performed trying to communicate and justify ideas that they came up with in less than an hour.

Our Problems Can't Afford This Amount of Waste

When you realize that this scenario is one that is repeating itself millions of times over across the planet, you start to get a picture of how much we are wasting. 

Given the promise of the future - of pervasive computing, virtual reality, emergent reality, nanotechnology, all that - when you sit down and look at what we're doing, it seems that we're mostly just wasting time. It's incredible that we get as much done as we do. But think how much more we could get done if we had better interfaces with our global CNS.

If we had a smooth interface with our global CNS (okay, ultimately I'm talking about plugging our heads in, Matrix-style, though it does make me cringe a little :-P ), not only would technology not limit us, but we would be free to develop digital human languages that would mirror thought more closely, and free us from the shackles of linguistic determinism (the idea that the language you speak moulds the way you think).  We could be able to start tapping into the universal grammar dictated by how our brains have developed, to communicate with all humans, and even our machines in a way that minimizes the physical labour of communication and REALLY start to be able to build amazing things. 

And then we'd really be getting somewhere. Until then, I'll do my very best to type as fast as I can, and design projects that emphasize doing over talking about what we're doing.

Lego and Star Wars: Intersecting Design Universes

As my friends and coworkers will attest, I'm a big Lego fan. I love the flexibility that such a simple system enables. I love playing with it. But I also appreciate it as a metaphor.

Another thing I've loved for a long time is the Star Wars universe. Over the years, I've probably bought and played more Star Wars games than any other license.

And you might expect - and you'd be right - that I also love the Lego Star Wars games, which combine my two loves (along with a bunch of hilarious cut scenes).

Aside from the gameplay, what I really really admire, however, is how both Lego and LucasArts have created consistent and complete, fully realized design universes. What's most fascinating about Lego Star Wars (to me) is that it exists at the intersection of those two universes. Looking at that intersection reveals some interesting lessons about the power of pattern languages.

Star Wars

Every Star Wars game i have ever bought fits into the Star Wars universe. The sound of the lasers, the floorplans of the ships, Hoth, etc.. they're all consistently rendered. When I explored Kashyyk in Knights of the Old Republic, it mapped pretty well to my understanding in Lego Star Wars. Snow walkers are pretty much always vulnerable to being tied up by harpoons, no matter what game you play. Star Wars has become so much more than a bunch of movies and merchandise. It has a system. It has rules that you can understand almost innately, and the more you engage with that universe, the better you understand it.

Lego Games

Lego video games are also fully realized universes. For one thing, everything in a Lego game is made of rendered Lego bits, which is itself probably one of the most perfect modular systems ever invented (ok, i'm gushing here, I admit). But pretty much all of the vehicles in Lego video games are also available for purchase in stores. So after playing through the game, I can actually go out and buy, then build, modify and experience an actual model that I first experienced in the virtual world. In Lego Batman, you find yourself in streetscapes populated with Lego models straight out of the Lego City series of models. There are police cars, helicopters, fire trucks, dump trucks, etc. You could actually recreate the entire scenes you just played (although it would be damned expensive).

It's actually quite a bizarre experience when you go into a toy store and you see the exact same police truck model that you have intimate knowledge of from a video game sitting on the shelf. You realize you thought you knew that police truck, but you didn't really know it - because you didn't experience how to build it. I have a feeling that as 3D printers become possible, this bizarre feeling may become more common and real.

The Intersection

Lego and Star Wars are compatible design universes because they are systems designed for complementary things. Lego, essentially, is a system for modeling. Whether it's modeling reality or some science fiction universe, it really doesn't matter. When you think about it, Lego pieces are really just metaphors for matter. All that really matters with Lego, is that the pieces fit and follow the logic of the system.

Star Wars is a universe that is designed to provide a stageset, backdrop and actors for telling stories. Whether those stories are told in Lego, TV, movies, plastic toys or life-size costumes, it doesn't really matter. All that matters is staying true to the story.

The Point

When you're looking at creating something, you can do a lot worse than looking at to Lego and Star Wars for inspiration for developing a consistent design system. As you're creating the system, ask yourself "Is this system logical? Does it make sense? Can it be extended? Could it be combined with other systems?" Although the Lego and Star Wars universes were created to serve different ultimate purposes, they're both compatible, and, indeed, by combining the two systems, each one extends its reach and power - Lego extending into a fantastic universe and multibillion dollar franchise, Star Wars extending into the hands of children and grown lego afficionados like myself.

The Invisible Interface

In "Understanding Media," Marshall McLuhan writes that the technologies we create extend some function of our physical selves. A lever extends our arm. A bicycle extends our feet.

When it came to mass media, he classified print and radio as electric media. Electric media, he wrote, are primarily extensions of our central nervous system.

By thinking about TV and radio in this way, he was able to deeply understand much of the nature, significance and the impact on human perceptions of their world through the use of these media. In fact, so deep was his understanding that a lot of what he wrote about the significance TV and radio really seem to apply more to the World Wide Web than to TV and radio. He was ahead of his time; he died before the Internet was fully born.

Seeking Perfection In Interface Design

I've been thinking a lot about this idea lately, and what it means for what I do, as an information architect. I've been thinking about what interfaces will look like in a thousand years. Because I have no crystal ball, what that means, really, is I've been thinking about what a perfect (by today's standards) human-computer interface would be like.

Today we primarily use buttons and pointers to interface with a machine. And these buttons and pointers themselves interface with several layers of software that control hardware that connect to the Central Nervous System that we call a computer network, or the Internet.


Compared with our actual central nervous system, this is an extremely clunky interface, requiring a significant amount of training and cognitive skills. Amongst other things, we have to know how to read and write to be able to operate a computer. And that's just the beginning... we need to know how to turn it on, connect it to a network, operate a pointer, understand software conventions, etc.



Our own interface with our central nervous system is completely invisible. As I'm typing this, there is very little barrier between my thoughts and the actions of my fingers. I don't have to access pulldown menus or hierarchies like Movement-->Digits-->Index Finger-->Push-->Letter D. (And that's oversimplifying the task of typing the letter D).

And even though there is no visible interface, we still manage to get a lot of things done.

If you accept that computer networks are an extension of our central nervous systems, then it stands to reason that the perfect interface with such a technology would be an invisible, completely smooth interface, perhaps the kind of interface we may see in a hundred or even a thousand years.

Eventually, we'll get so pissed off with keyboards, mouses and even multi-touch interfaces that we'll ditch them in favor of, oh, I dunno, holographic or cybernetic interfaces controlled by gestures, words or thoughts.

We may even modify our bodies to be more compatible with our technologies. Computers will have shrunk infinitesimally small, and the age of ubicomp will truly be here. It's quite possible, as well, in that kind of timeframe that we'll do away with the binary base that our technology uses today and use something based on a dna-like biological technology. Something that delivers on many of the advantages of digital, without the complete stupidity of it.

It's interesting to think about a completely smooth or even invisible interface that mimics what we would consider telepathic-like capabilities. Interesting structures would need to be in place to filter out messages from other people, in much the same way we create software structures like groups. It's also interesting to note, supporting the central nervous system theory, that messages are getting much shorter and more "thought-like" (I'm thinking twitter here).

Thinking about this kind of a future puts designing software interfaces into perspective. The implication, at this kind of timescale, is that if you're trying to develop something to stand the test of time, you should be looking deep inside the minds of human beings to understand how they work, and not limit yourself to how technology works today. In the end, it's all about people.

Free Idea to Solve the Texting While Walking Conundrum

I was having lunch with some friends this week when the topic of the dangers of walking while texting came up. In case you're unaware of this important public safety issue, there have been a number of incidents of people colliding with things on the sidewalk while texting on their cellphones.

This has prompted the powers that be in London to wrap lamp posts and other sidewalk obstacles in marshmallow cushions, and the American College of Emergency Physicians to issue an alert about the dangers of texting while walking (and of course driving).

It's all fine and well to say, "um, just don't do it, dummy," but we all know we're going to. It's an occupational hazard.

But I'm particularly concerned, since iPhone sales are going through the roof, about all of my friends with their first iPhone. They're all so engrossed in playing with the shiny slick interface, that they haven't thought the dangers of this activity through.

Anyway, I like the idea of wrapping street objects in fluffy marshmallows. I think it'll make cities feel a lot more... soft and friendly. But the more pressing issue for me is what to do about fast-moving objects. I mean, should you be walking through an area of frequently falling objects (e.g. pianos, 500 lb weights, sticks of ACME dynamite, etc.), you can't really rely on those objects being padded. Even if they were, a padded piano dropping from 50 feet above street level is still a piano dropping from 50 feet. It won't be pretty.

So that's where my idea for a little technological assistance comes in.



Basically, it consists of a simple add-on device and an app. The add-on device is a little holder for a convex mirror that allows the phone's camera to survey a wide swath of street and identify potential dangers. The software app would calculate vectors of objects and identify when those objects were likely to intersect with the person's path.


When a danger is identified, the camera takes over whatever application the user (cough idiot) is using and displays the realtime footage of the street, plus a very large warning, telling the user what course of evasive action to take. I had considered putting an "ignore" button in there as well, so that the user could choose to ignore the message, but if you think it through, it's really not required :-). Actually, on second thought, I think there should be one in there, but instead of ignore it should look like this:

My Introduction to A Timeless Way of Building

At work I was recently asked to conduct a workshop for a general audience on using design patterns.

I planned the workshop to be largely focused on the USING aspect of that topic (more on that in future posts), but to frame it up I prepared a short presentation on the origins of design patterns.

I have to confess that until I was preparing for this presentation, I had never heard of Christopher Alexander, the architect who, in the 1970s, first came up with the concept of patterns and pattern languages, (even though I had been using design patterns in my work for a long while now).

Learning about his work on these topics was a revelation to me, and as I began to read more, I experienced a kind of epiphany, the result of a confluence of ideas and thoughts I’d been having recently around how to work better, how to have more fun doing it, and, ultimately, how to build better things.

For the presentation I didn’t have the time to read his books, but I read whatever I could turn up in Google searches online. Here are some of the better links I discovered that discuss his work:

• Gardenvisit.com - 'A City is not a tree': It is a landscape
• Summary of A Pattern Language
• Pattern Language.com
  
• Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog - A Timeless Way of Building Software

Now that the presentation has passed, I’ve had some time to source and read his books (a good chance they’re in your local library system, by the way). To get the full benefit, you really do have to read at least “The Timeless Way of Building” from cover to cover. It’s brilliant. You won’t look at anything built by humans quite the same way again.

“A Timeless Way of Building” is still, after all these years, applicable and relevant. Most importantly, I do believe that his ideas are not fully comprehended by the majority of the community of people who are building things on the web, (and I'm using the term 'community' broadly here).

In future posts I’m going to delve into the details of his concepts and how they have related to me personally in the work that I’ve been involved with. Including how a bunch of us, working on a project unknowingly rediscovered his pattern language process, without knowing anything about him.

The Unionville Sprints

I live in a place called Markham, which is about an hour outside of Toronto. I commute in to the big city using a commuter train called the Go Train. I've been doing it for over a year now, and there are a lot of things I really love about it.

One thing I particularly enjoy is that everyday I get to spectate a unique form of competition in which scores of commuters returning home rush as quickly as they can to their cars in an effort to beat the bottleneck of traffic. The best example of this on the particular line I take occurs at Unionville station.

As a race venue, Unionville has a number of unique elements that make it particularly rife for competition.


First, there is the large parking lot which hosts quite a lot of baking cars. The lot is free to Go Transit users, so there's no incentive to taking public transportation to the lot (actually public transportation users are actually penalized because they have to pay the fare for the bus to the lot). The lot is almost always at near capacity.

Second, there is the fact that the train only comes once every 30-40 minutes, which helps to concentrate the number of people into large competitive fields. (The most popular heat is the 5:20 train.) Third, there is the platform, (towards the bottom of the diagram), which is raised above the level of the parking lot, forcing people to navigate down a limited number of staircases. Finally, and most importantly, there is only one way out of the parking lot, down a road, at the end of which is yet another bottleneck otherwise known as a traffic light.

Conditions couldn't be better for creating a competitive atmosphere. Bottlenecks for commuters leaving the parking lot can be excessive if you are not in the top ten. The further back you are, the worse it gets. Pretty much the only things missing are medals and medal podiums. The prize for the top commuters? The ability to get on your way without the daily 20 minute traffic jam.

How the Game is Played

There is actually a lot of strategic thinking that goes into being the first out of the gate. At the start of the day, competitors need to carefully place their car to balance how far they run with how far they drive. This is not as simple as it seems, as it depends in large part about how large a load you're carrying, what your physical condition is, and how fast you can start your car. (It's even more fascinating during a snowfall in winter, when brushing your car off comes into play.)

It may seem to make sense to park as closely as you can to the train doors, but remember then that you'll have to avoid other people running for their cars, which will slow you down. But if you park on the far side of the lot, you'll have to contend with the risk of others who park closely mowing you down. So it seems as if it's best to park a little ways away from the train platform, so you can outrun your competitors and not have them in your way.

And competitors must align themselves to be first out of the train doors. Which means they actually have to select a good seat on the train or at very least must move themselves (within the bounds of social etiquette) to the best train door at the earliest possible moment after the previous station.
Because of the limited numbers of staircases that lead down to the parking lot, it's key for any Unionville sprinter to know exactly which train car they're on and remember where their car is in relation to the door that will be opening. Because if you're not one of the people closest to the door, you may want to consider giving up.

Here's a video taken of the last race I witnessed.

What's the Point?

Well there are a lot of interesting things about this from an experience designer's point of view. First of all, it's a fascinating set of circumstances that have led to this level of competitive atmosphere associated with going home from work. Go Transit couldn't have designed a better race course.

But Go Transit likely didn't design the parking lot with the idea of creating as highly a competitive atmosphere as they have. In fact, I think they probably had it in their minds to have a safe and convenient way for people to access their cars and get home at the end of their workdays. But through the compounding bottlenecks they've actually created a more stressful environment for people going to work.

Lessons can be learned from this when designing interactive experiences as well. Lessons about the importance of participatory design, walking a mile in your users' shoes. But also how design choices, conscious or unconscious, can create either an atmosphere of competition or collaboration, and how those choices can have a ripple effect throughout the system you're building.

Because it's not just the parking lot design that's lacking in this case. There are a whole host of interrelated factors that create the environment - the frequency of the trains, the propensity for people to drive rather than take public transportation to the lot, the long traffic light cycle, etc. And these factors, this unintended competition, spills over into people's lives and into the life of the city. People are actively worrying about how they quickly they will be able to get home for their kid's recital, or to make dinner. In other words, they're worrying more about how to figure out how to do a trivial activity quickly and simply than on being able to fulfill their actual goals and live their lives.