Articles by Andrew

Owner of inkblurt.com

Explain IA and win a thousand bucks!

January 13, 2010 by Andrew | 2 comments

Peter Morville and the IA Institute have joined forces with some excellent sponsors to host a contest. To wit:

In this contest, you are invited to explain information architecture. What is it? Why is it important? What does it mean to you? Some folks may offer a definition in 140 characters or less, while others will use this opportunity to tell a story (using text, pictures, audio, and/or video) about their relationship to IA.

Be sure to note the fine print lower on the Flickr page (where there’s also a link to a free prize!):

Our goals are to engage the information architecture community (by fostering creativity and discussion) and advance the field (by evolving our definitions and sharing our stories). We believe this can be a positive, productive community activity, and a whole lot of fun. We hope you do too!

I’m glad to see most of the chatter around this has been positive. But there are, of course, some nay-sayers — and the nays tend to ask a question along the lines of this: “Why is the IA Institute having to pay people to tell it what Information Architecture is?”

I suspect the contest would come across that way only if you’re already predisposed to think negatively of IA as a practice or the Institute as an organization — or people who self-identify as “Information Architects” in general. This post isn’t addressed to those folks, because I’m not interested in trying to sway their opinions — they’re going to think what they want to think.

But just in case others may be wondering what’s up, here’s the deal.

Information architecture is a relatively new community of practice. As technology and the community evolve, so does the understanding of this term of art.

For some people, IA is old hat — a relic of the days when websites were mere collections of linked text files. For others, IA represents an archaic, even oppressive worldview, where only experts are allowed to organize and label human knowledge. Again, I think these views of IA say more about the people who hold them than the practice of IA itself.

But for the rest of us, this contest is just an opportunity to celebrate the energetic conversations that are already happening anyway — and that happen within any vibrant, growing community of practice. It’s a way to spotlight how much IA has evolved, and bring others into those conversations as well.

Of course, the Institute is interested in these expressions as raw material for how it continues to evolve itself. But why wouldn’t any practitice-based organization be interested in what the community has to say about the central concern of the practice?

I’m looking forward to what everyone comes up with. I’m especially excited to learn things I don’t know yet, and discover people I hadn’t met before.

So, go for it! Explain that sucker!

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EBAI was awesome

October 19, 2009 by Andrew | 4 comments

ebai

EBAI, The Brazilian Information Architecture Congress (basically the IA Summit or EuroIA of Brazil) was kind and generous enough to invite me to Sao Paulo as a keynote speaker, closing their first day. They gave me a huge chunk of time, so I presented a long version of my Linkosophy talk, expanded with more about designing for Context. It was a terrific experience. Here’s just a smattering of what I discovered:

  • Brazilian user-experience designers tend to use the term Information Architecture (and Architect) for their community of practice — which I think is a fine thing. (I explained we still need to agree what “IA” means in the context of a given design, but who am I to tell them “there are no information architects“?)
  • These people are brilliant. They’re doing and inventing UX design research and methods that really should be shared with the larger, non-Portuguese-speaking world.
  • I wish I knew Portuguese so I could’ve understood even more of what they were presenting about. (Hence my wish it could all be translated to English!)
  • Brazilians have the best methods of drinking beer and eating steak ever invented: small portions that keep on coming through the meal means your beer is never warm, and your steak is always fresh off the grill. Genius!

Thank you, EBAI (and in particular my gracious host, Guilhermo Reis) for an enlightening, delightful experience.

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Quick

October 13, 2009 by Andrew | No comments

mother always called it the quick
so that was always still is its name
that bit of fingerflesh around the nail sewn
by magic into the wrapped fingerprint we all have
embossed on our extremities unique index thick
opposing thumb she might catch me gnawing and when she did

she’d say be careful or you’ll be done
chewed it all down into the quick
my teeth pulling at the splinter of skin going thicker
into the sensitive crease it should have a name
that crease but I’ve not heard should have
taught me something the way it hurt like a sewing

needle pressed and wriggled so
it reddens swells maybe bleeds she did
warn me I should have listened I should have
that moment back but watch it skitter away so quickly
what if every moment had a name
we could never remember them no matter how thick

the books where we kept them and no matter how thick
the shelves to keep the books no matter how stiff the spines are sewn
our very lives would burn them history’s fuel a comet trail of names
of moments and minutes hours and days what’s done
and undone it was years before I learned that quick
means alive versus dead and dead the part I’d chew until I had

hit nerve that bleeding cuticle sting that has
a lesson someplace about blood that nothing is thicker
and what we know about moments that nothing is quicker
see how simple children could sing it on a seesaw
tick tock up down until the shrill bathtime mothercall but do
you leave no you play until snatched awake by your full name

hurled from the kitchen door a great net woven of your name
and you’re waving goodbye to the neighbor boy who has
that same blue jacket from last year and in just a minute you don’t
quite see him in the dusk that descended so soon so thick
just the glow of clouds stretched pink raw and sewn
with veins of yellowing light and suddenly your steps are quicker

until you find yourself under the thick blanket with the soft-sewn
edge tucked under your chin quick quick tick tock sleep has
taken you alive even though it doesn’t know your name

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Courageous Redirection

September 25, 2009 by Andrew | 10 comments

roadsigns

I’ve recently run across some stories involving Pixar, Apple and game design company Blizzard Entertainment that serve as great examples of courageous redirection.

What I mean by that phrase is an instance where a design team or company was courageous enough to change direction even after huge investment of time, money and vision.

Changing direction isn’t inherently beneficial, of course. And sometimes it goes awry. But these instances are pretty inspirational, because they resulted in awesomely successful user-experience products.

Work colleague Anne Gibson recently shared an article at work quoting Steve Jobs talking about Toy Story and the iPhone. While I realize we’re all getting tired of comparing ourselves to Apple and Pixar, it’s still worth a listen:

At Pixar when we were making Toy Story, there came a time when we were forced to admit that the story wasn’t great. It just wasn’t great. We stopped production for five months…. We paid them all to twiddle their thumbs while the team perfected the story into what became Toy Story. And if they hadn’t had the courage to stop, there would have never been a Toy Story the way it is, and there probably would have never been a Pixar.

(Odd how Jobs doesn’t mention John Lasseter, who I suspect was the driving force behind this particular redirection.)

Jobs goes on to explain how they never expected to run into one of those defining moments again, but that instead they tend to run into such a moment on every film at Pixar. They’ve gotten better at it, but “there always seems to come a moment where it’s just not working, and it’s so easy to fool yourself – to convince yourself that it is when you know in your heart that it isn’t.”

That’s a weird, sinking feeling, but it’s hard to catch. Any designer (or writer or other craftsperson) has these moments, where you know something is wrong, but even if you can put your finger on what it is, the momentum of the group and the work already done creates a kind of inertia that pushes you into compromise.

Design is always full of compromise, of course. Real life work has constraints. But sometimes there’s a particular decision that feels ultimately defining in some way, and you have to decide if you want to take the road less traveled.

Jobs continues with a similar situation involving the now-iconic iPhone:

We had a different enclosure design for this iPhone until way too close to the introduction to ever change it. And I came in one Monday morning, I said, ‘I just don’t love this. I can’t convince myself to fall in love with this. And this is the most important product we’ve ever done.’ And we pushed the reset button.

Rather than everyone on the team whining and complaining, they volunteered to put in extra time and effort to change the design while still staying on schedule.

Of course, this is Jobs talking — he’s a master promoter. I’m sure it wasn’t as utopian as he makes out. Plus, from everything we hear, he’s not a boss you want to whine or complain to. If a mid-level manager had come in one day saying “I’m not in love with this” I have to wonder how likely this turnaround would’ve been. Still, an impressive moment.

You might think it’s necessary to have a Steve Jobs around in order to achieve such redirection. But, it’s not.

Another of the most successful products on the planet is Blizzard’s World of Warcraft — the massively multiplayer universe with over 10 million subscribers and growing. This brand has an incredibly loyal following, much of that due to the way Blizzard interacts socially with the fans of their games (including the Starcraft and Diablo franchises).

Gaming news site IGN recently ran a thorough history of Warcraft, a franchise that started about fifteen years ago with an innovative real-time-strategy computer game, “Warcraft: Orcs & Humans.”

A few years after that release, Blizzard tried developing an adventure-style game using the Warcraft concept called Warcraft Adventures. From the article:

Originally slated to release in time for the 1997 holidays, Warcraft Adventures ran late, like so many other Blizzard projects. During its development, Lucas released Curse of Monkey Island – considered by many to be the pinnacle of classic 2D adventures – and announced Grim Fandango, their ambitious first step into 3D. Blizzard’s competition had no intention of waiting up. Their confidence waned as the project neared completion …

As E3 approached, they took a hard look at their product, but their confidence had already been shattered. Curse of Monkey Island’s perfectly executed hand-drawn animation trumped Warcraft Adventures before it was even in beta, and Grim Fandango looked to make it downright obsolete. Days before the show, they made the difficult decision to can the project altogether. It wasn’t that they weren’t proud of the game the work they had done, but the moment had simply passed, and their chance to wow their fans had gone. It would have been easier and more profitable to simply finish the game up, but their commitment was just that strong. If they didn’t think it was the best, it wouldn’t see the light of day.

Sounds like a total loss, right?

But here’s what they won: Blizzard is now known for providing only the best experiences. People who know the brand do not hesitate to drop $50-60 for a new title as soon as it’s available, reviews unseen.

In addition, the story and art development for Warcraft Adventures later became raw material for World of Warcraft.

I’m aware of some other stories like this, such as how Flickr came from a redirection away from making a computer game … what are some others?

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Why We Just Don’t Get It

September 4, 2009 by Andrew | 19 comments

In an article called “The Neuroscience of Leadership” (free registration required*), from Strategy + Business a few years ago, the writers explain how new understanding about how the brain works helps us see why it’s so hard for us to fully comprehend new ideas. I keep cycling back to this article since I read it just a few months ago, because it helps me put a lot of things that have perpetually bedeviled me in a better perspective.

One particularly salient bit:

Attention continually reshapes the patterns of the brain. Among the implications: People who practice a specialty every day literally think differently, through different sets of connections, than do people who don’t practice the specialty. In business, professionals in different functions — finance, operations, legal, research an development, marketing, design, and human resources — have physiological differences that prevent them from seeing the world the same way.

Note the word “physiological.” We tend to assume that people’s differences of opinion or perspective are more like software — something with a switch that the person could just flip to the other side, if they simply weren’t so stubborn. The problem is, the brain grows hardware based on repeated patterns of experience. So, while stubbornness may be a factor, it’s not so simple as we might hope to get another person to understand a different perspective.

Recently I’ve had a number of conversations with colleagues about why certain industries or professions seem stuck in a particular mode, unable to see the world changing so drastically around them. For example, why don’t most advertising and marketing professionals get that a website isn’t about getting eyeballs, it’s about creating useful, usable, delightful interactive experiences? And even if they nod along with that sentiment in the beginning, they seem clueless once the work starts?

Or why do some or coworkers just not seem to get a point you’re making about a project? Why is it so hard to collaborate on strategy with an engineer or code developer? Why is it so hard for managers to get those they manage to understand the priorities of the organization?

And in these conversations, it’s tempting — and fun! — to somewhat demonize the other crowd, and get pretty negative about our complaints.

While that may feel good (and while my typing this will probably not keep me from sometimes indulging in such a bitch-and-moan session), it doesn’t help us solve the problem. Because what’s at work here is a fundamental difference in how our brains process the world around us. Doing a certain kind of work in a particular culture of others that work creates a particular architecture in our brains, and continually reinforces it. If your brain grows a hammer, everything looks like a nail; if it grows a set of jumper cables, everything looks like a car battery.

Now … add this understanding to the work Jonathan Haidt and others have done showing that we’re already predisposed toward deep assumptions about fundamental morals and values. Suddenly it’s pretty clear why some of our biggest problems in politics, religion, bigotry and the rest are so damned intractable.

But even if we’re not trying to solve world hunger and political turmoil, even if we’re just trying to get a coworker or client to understand a different way of seeing something, it’s evident that bridging the gap in understanding is not just a peripheral challenge for doing great design work — it may be the most important design problem we face.

I don’t have a ready remedy, by the way. But I do know that one way to start building bridges over these chasms of understanding is to look at ourselves, and be brutally honest about our own limitations.

I almost titled this post “Why Some People Just Don’t Get It” — but I realized that sets the wrong tone right away. “Some People” becomes an easy way to turn others into objects of ridicule, which I’ve done myself even on this blog. It’s easy, and it feels good for a while, but it doesn’t help the situation get better.

As a designer, have you imagined what it’s like to see the world from the other person’s experience? Isn’t that what we mean when we say the “experience” part of “user experience design” — that we design based on an understanding of the experience of the other? What if we treated these differences in point of view as design problems? Are we up to the challenge?

Later Edit:

There have been some excellent comments, some of which have helped me see I could’ve been more clear on a couple of points.

I perhaps overstated the “hardware” point above. I neglected to mention the importance of ‘neuroplasticity‘ — and that the very fact we inadvertently carve grooves into the silly-putty of our brains also means we can make new grooves. This is something about the brain that we’ve only come to understand in the last 20-30 years (I grew up learning the brain was frozen at adulthood). The science speaks for itself much better than I can poorly summarize it here.

The concept has become very important to me lately, in my personal life, doing some hard psychological work to undo some of the “wiring” that’s been in my way for too long.

But in our role as designers, we don’t often get to do psychotherapy with clients and coworkers. So we have to design our way to a meeting of minds — and that means 1) fully understanding where the other is coming from, and 2) being sure we challenge our own presuppositions and blind spots. This is always better than just retreating to “those people don’t get it” and checking out on the challenge altogether, which happens a lot.

Thanks for the comments!

* Yet another note: the article is excellent; a shame registration is required, but it only takes a moment, and in this case I think it’s worth the trouble.

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Favorites are FAIL for web security

September 1, 2009 by Andrew | 6 comments

I don’t usually get into nitty-gritty interaction design issues like this on my blog. But I recently moved to a new address, and started new web accounts with various services like phone and utilities. And almost all of them are adding new layers of security asking me additional personal questions that they will use later to verify who I am. And entirely too many are asking questions like these, asked by AT&T on their wireless site:

badsecurity1

I can’t believe how many of them are using “favorites” questions for security. Why? Because it’s so variable over time, and because it’s not a fully discrete category. Now, I know I’m especially deficient in “favorite” aptitude — if you ask me my favorite band, favorite food, favorite city, I’ll mumble something about “well, I like a lot of them, and there are things about some I like more than others, but I really can’t think of just one favorite…” Most people probably have at least something they can name as a favorite. But because it’s such a fuzzy category, it’s still risky and confusing.

It’s especially risky because we change over time. You might say Italian food is your favorite, but you’ve never had Thai. And when you do, you realize it blows Italian food away — and by the next time you try logging into an account a year later, you can’t remember which cuisine you specified.

Even the question about “who was your best friend as a kid” or “what’s the name of your favorite pet, when you were growing up” — our attitudes toward these things are highly variable. In fact, we hardly ever explicitly decide our favorite friend or pet — unless a computer asks us to. Then we find ourselves, in the moment, deciding “ok, I’ll name Rover as my favorite pet” — but a week later you see a picture in a photo album of your childhood cat “Peaches” and on your next login, it’s error-city.

I suspect one reason this bugs me so much is that it’s an indicator of how a binary mentality behind software can do uncomfortable things to us as non-binary human beings. It’s the same problem as Facebook presents when it asks you to select which category your relationship falls into. What if none of them quite fit? Or even if one of them technically fits, it reduces your relationship to that data point, without all the rich context that makes that category matter in your own life.

Probably I’m making too much of it, but at least, PLEASE, can we get the word out in the digital design community that these security questions simply do not work?

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Awesome link-trove of game-studies research

July 10, 2009 by Andrew | No comments

The excellent Neuroanthropology blog offers up a terrific list of links to recent research & articles covering topics like Design, Research, Addiction and Art Criticism. Check it out!

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Human culture sparked by “new kind of connectedness”

July 7, 2009 by Andrew | 1 comment

Jonah Lehrer explains the import of a study described in Science.

The larger implication is that the birth of human culture was triggered by a new kind of connectedness. For the first time, humans lived in dense clusters, and occasionally interacted with other clusters, which allowed their fragile innovations to persist and propagate. The end result was a positive feedback loop of new ideas.

Sounds an awful lot like what the Internet is doing, no?

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Data vs Insight for UX Design

July 6, 2009 by Andrew | 9 comments

UX Insight Elements

Funny how things can pop into your head when you’re not thinking about them. I can’t remember why this occurred to me last week … but it was one of those thoughts I realized I should write down so I could use it later. So I tweeted it. Lots of people kindly “re-tweeted” the thought, which immediately made me self-conscious that it may not explain itself very well. So now I’m blogging about it. Because that’s what we kids do nowadays.

My tweet: User Experience Design is not data-driven, it’s insight-driven. Data is just raw material for insight.

I whipped up a little model to illustrate the larger point: insight comes from a synthesis between talent, expertise, and the fresh understanding we gain through research. It’s a set of ingredients that, when added to our brains and allowed to stew, often over a meal or after a few good nights’ sleep, can bring a designer to those moments of clarity where a direction finally makes sense.

I’ve seen a lot of talk lately about how we shouldn’t be letting data drive our design decisions — that we’re designers, so we should be designing based on best practices, ideas, expertise, and even “taste.” (I have issues with the word “taste” as many people use it, but I don’t have a problem with the idea of “expert intuition” which is I think more what a lot of my colleagues mean. In fact, that Ira Glass video that made the rounds a few weeks ago on many tweets/blogs puts a better spin on the word “taste” as one’s aspiration that may be, for now, beyond one’s actual abilities, without work and practice.)

As for the word “data” — I’m referring to empirical data as well as the recorded results of something less numbers-based, like contextual research. Data is an input to our understanding, but nothing more. Data cannot tell us, directly, how to design anything.

But it’s also ludicrous to ask a client or employer to spend their money based solely on your expertise or … “taste.” Famous interior or clothing designers or architects can perhaps get away with this — because their names carry inherent value, whether their designs are actually useful or not. So far, User Experience design practitioners don’t have this (dubious) luxury. I would argue that we shouldn’t, otherwise we’re not paying much attention to “user experience” to begin with.

Data is valuable, useful, and often essential. Data can be an excellent input for design insight. I’d wager that you should have as much background data as you can get your hands on, unless you have a compelling reason to exclude it. In addition, our clients tend to speak the language of data, so we need to be able to translate our approach into that language.

It’s just that data doesn’t do the job alone. We still need to do the work of interpretation, which requires challenging our presuppositions, blind spots and various biases.

The propensity for the human brain to completely screw stuff up with cognitive bias is, alone, reason enough to put our design ideas through a bit of rigor. Reading through the oft-linked list of cognitive biases on Wikipedia is hopefully enough to caution any of us against the hubris of our own expertise. We need to do the work of seeing the design problem anew, with fresh understanding, putting our assumptions on the table and making sure they’re still viable. To me, at least, that’s a central tenet behind the cultural history of “user experience” design approaches.

But analysis paralysis can also be a serious problem; and data is only as good as its interpretation. Eventually, actual design has to happen. Otherwise you end up with a disjointed palimpsest, a Frankenstein’s Monster of point-of-pain fixes and market-tested features.

We have to be able to do both: use data to inform the fullest possible understanding of the behavior and context of potential users, as well as bring our own experience and talent to the challenge. And that’s hard to do, in the midst of managing client expectations, creating deliverables, and endless meetings and readouts. But who said it was easy?

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Legitimate Pseudonymity

June 9, 2009 by Andrew | 1 comment

There’s been a recent brouhaha in the political blogosphere about whether or not it’s ethical to publish under a pseudonym. And a lot of the debate seems to me to have missed an important point.

There’s a difference between random, anonymous pot-shot behavior and creating a secondary persona. It could very well be that a writer has good reason to create a second self to be the vehicle for expression. The key to this facet of identity is reputation.

In order to gain any traction in the marketplace of ideas, one must cultivate a consistent persona, over time. In effect, the writer has to create a separate identity — but it’s an identity just the same. Its reputation stands on its behavior and its words. If the author is invested at all in that identity, then its reputation is very important to the author, just like their “real” identity and reputation.

The Internet is full of examples where regular people have joined a discussion board, or started an anonymous blog or Live Journal and, before they know it, they have friendships and connections that are important to them in that parallel world of writing, sharing and discussion. Whether those people know the writer’s real name or not becomes beside the point. (Sherry Turkle and others have been exploring these ideas about identity online for many years now.)

What publishing has provided us, definitely since the printing press and especially since the Internet, is the ability to express ideas as *ideas* with very little worry about real-life baggage, anxieties, expectations and relationships getting in the way. It’s a marketplace where the ideas and their articulation can stand on their own.

Of course, history shows a long tradition of pseudonyms. Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton wrote under pseudonyms in order to make their points (Franklin as “Mrs Silence Dogood” and later — as an open secret — “Poor Richard”) and Hamilton as “Publius” (which happens to be the pseudonym adopted by the blogger at the center of the disagreement mentioned above). Other writers modified or changed their names so as to improve their chances of publication or being taken seriously. Marian Evans was able to publish brutally, psychologically frank fiction, partly because she published under the name George Eliot. And Samuel Clemens famously wrote under the name Mark Twain, as a way to reinvent his whole identity. While all of these don’t fit a precise pattern, the point is that publishing has always had generally accepted innovations involving the writer’s identity.

None of this is to say that anonymity doesn’t come with a downside. It certainly does. But lumping all anonymous or pseudonym-written writers into the same category doesn’t help.

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The Deep Dive, 10 Years Later

June 2, 2009 by Andrew | 4 comments

It appears someone has posted the now-classic episode of Nightline about Ideo (called the Deep Dive) to YouTube. I hope it’s legit and Disney/ABC isn’t going to make somebody take them down. But here’s the link, hoping that doesn’t happen.

About 10 years ago, I started a job as an “Internet Copywriter” at a small web consultancy in North Carolina. By then, I’d already been steeped in the ‘net for seven or eight years, but mainly as a side-interest. My day jobs had been web-involved but not centrally, and my most meaningful learning experiences designing for the web had been side projects for fun. When I started at the new web company job, I knew there would need to be more to my role than just “concepting” and writing copy next to an art director, advertising-style. Our job was to make things people could *use* not just look at or be inspired to action by. But to be frank, I had little background in paid design work.

I’d been designing software of one kind or another off and on for a while, in part-time jobs while in graduate school. For example, creating a client database application to make my life easier in an office manager job (and then having to make it easy enough for the computer-phobic clerical staff to use as well). But I’d approached it as a tinkerer and co-user — making things I myself would be using, and iterating on them over time. (I’d taken a 3-dimensional design class in college, but it was more artistically focused — I had yet to learn much at all about industrial design, and had not yet discovered the nascent IA community, usability crowd, etc.)

Then I happened upon a Nightline broadcast (which, oddly, I never used to watch — who knows why I had it on at this point) where they engaged the design company Ideo. And I was blown away. It made perfect sense… here was a company that had codified an approach to design that I had been groping for intuitively, but not fully grasped and articulated. It put into sharp clarity a number of crucial principles such as behavioral observation and structured creative anarchy.

I immediately asked my new employer to let me order the video and share it with them. It served as a catalyst for finding out more about such approaches to design.

Since then, I’ve of course become less fully enamored of these videos… after a while you start to see the sleight-of-hand that an edited, idealized profile creates, and how it was probably the best PR event Ideo ever had. And ten years gives us the hind-sight to see that Ideo’s supposedly genius shopping cart didn’t exactly catch on — in retrospect we see that it was a fairly flawed design in many ways (in a busy grocery store, how many carts can reasonably be left at the end-caps while shoppers walk about with the hand-baskets?).

But for anyone who isn’t familiar with the essence of what many people I know call “user experience design,” this show is still an excellent teaching tool. You can see people viscerally react to it — sudden realization about how messy design is, by nature, how interdependent it is with physically experiencing your potential users, how the culture needed for creative collaboration has to be cultivated, protected from the Cartesian efficiencies and expectations of the traditional business world, and how important it is to have effective liaisons between those cultures, as well as a wise approach to structuring the necessary turbulence that creative work brings.

Then again, maybe everybody doesn’t see all that … but I’ve seen it happen.

What I find amazing, however, is this: even back then, they were saying this was the most-requested video order from ABC. This movie has been shown countless times in meetings and management retreats. And yet, the basic approach is still so rare to find. The Cartesian efficiencies and expectations form a powerful presence. What it comes down to is this: making room for this kind of work to be done well is hard work itself.

And that’s why Ideo is still in business.

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Some great reading about brains.

May 18, 2009 by Andrew | 4 comments

Brain (from Wikipedia)

Lately, I can’t seem to get enough of learning about brain science — neurological stuff, psychological stuff, whatever. Bring it on. There’s an amazing explosion of learning going on about our brains, and our minds (and how our brains give rise to our minds, and vice-versa).

I can’t help but think this is all great news for designers of all stripes. How can it but help for us to better understand how cognition works, how we make decisions, how our identities are formed and change over time, or even what it means for us to be happy? There are a few really excellent articles I’ve run across recently (and seen lots of folks linking to from Twitter as well).

First, this beautifully written, deeply human piece in The Atlantic on “What Makes Us Happy?” It follows a unique, longitudinal study of a generation of men who were first measured and tracked at Harvard in the 30s, as mere teenagers. It’s deftly honest about the inherent limitations in such work, but shows how valuable the results have been anyway. Mainly it’s worth reading because of its poignancy and introspection.

Another article: “Don’t! The Secret of Self Control” is from Jonah Lehrer, who’s fast becoming the Carl Sagan of Neuroscience. (And I mean that in nothing but a good way.) It looks at discoveries regarding delayed gratification, and how it’s connected to intelligence, maturity and general life success over time.

And another from the New Yorker: “Brain Games” about behavioral neurologist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, who has figured in a number of things I’ve heard and read lately about brain science. (Reading the article requires free registration, but do read it!) I found myself wishing I could quit my job and go to UC San Diego for a completely unnecessary degree, just so I could have regular conversations with this guy and his colleagues. Among the coolest stuff discussed: how deeply social we are without even knowing it, how we construct our identities, and the possibility that we might measurably discover how human consciousness emerged, and how it works.

I can’t get over how exciting all this subject matter is to me. I suppose it’s because it combines all my favorite stuff … it’s answering questions that philosophy, theology and the creative arts have been gnawing at for generations.

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