PS for a better idea of what I’m getting at, here are some previous writings:

The Contexts We Make
Context Management
Let’s Get Something Straight about IA
The Machineries of Context
The Function of Context for IA
Context and “Choice Architectures”
Linkosophy

Another 10-minute, abbreviated talk.

That’s already a mouthful … But here’s the longer version, if you’re so inclined … 

It’s easy to dismiss Second Life as kitsch now. Even though it’s still up and running, and evidently still providing a fulfilling experience for its dedicated user-base, it no longer has the sparkle of the Next Big Thing that the hype of several years ago brought to it.

I’ll admit, I was quite taken by it when I first heard of it, and I included significant commentary about it in presentations and writings I did at the time. But after only a few months, I started realizing it had serious limitations as a mainstream medium. For one thing, the learning curve for satisfying creation was too steep.

Three-dimensional modeling is hard enough with even the best tools, but Second Life’s composition toolset at the height of its popularity was frustratingly clumsy. Even if it had been state-of-the-art, however, it takes special knowledge & ability to draw in three dimensions. Unlike text-based MUDs, where anyone with half decent grasp of language could create relatively convincing characters, objects, rooms, Second Life required everything to be made explicitly, literally. Prose allows room for gestalt — the reader can fill in the details with imagination. Not in an environment like Second Life, though.

Plus, to make anything interactive, you had to learn a fairly complex scripting language. Not a big deal for practiced coders, but for regular people it was daunting.

So, as Second Life attracted more users, it became more of a hideous tragedy-of-the-commons experience, with acres of random, gaudy crap lying about, and one strange shopping mall after another with people trying to make money on the platform selling clothing, dance moves, cars and houses — things that imaginative players would likely have preferred to make for themselves, but instead had to piece together through an expensive exercise in collage.

At the heart of what made so many end up dismissing the platform, though, was its claim to being the next Web … the new way everyone was supposed to interact digitally online.

I never understood why anyone was making that claim, because it always seemed untenable to me. Second Life was inspired by Neal Stephenson’s virtual reality landscape in Snow Crash (and somewhat more distantly, Gibson’s vision of “cyberspace”), and managed an adroit facsimile of how Stephenson’s fictional world sounded. But Stephenson’s vision was essentially metaphorical.

Still, beyond the metaphor issue, the essential qualities of the Web that made it so ubiquitous were absent from Second Life: the Web is decentralized, not just user-created but non-privatized and widely distributed. It exists on millions of servers run by millions of people, companies, universities and the like. The Web is also made of a technology that’s much simpler for creators to use, and perhaps most importantly, the Web is very open and easily integrated into everything else. Second Life never got very far with being integrated in that way, though it tried. The main problem was that the very experience itself was not easily transferable to other media, devices etc. Even though they tried using a URL-like linking method that could be shared anywhere as text, the *content* of Second Life was essentially “virtual reality” 3D visual experience, something that just doesn’t transfer well to other platforms, as opposed to the text, static images & videos we share so easily across the Web & so many applications & devices.

Well, now that I’ve said all that somewhat negative stuff about the platform, what do I mean by “what we learned”?

It seems to me Second Life is an example of how we sometimes rehearse the

Recent version of the SL "Viewer" UI (danielvoyager.wordpress.com)

future before it happens. In SL, you inhabit a world that’s essentially made of information. Even the physical objects are, in essence, information — code that only pretends to be corporeal, but that can transform itself, disappear, reappear, whatever — a reality that can be changed as quickly as editing a sentence in a word processor.

While it’s true that our physical world can’t literally be changed that way, the truth is that the information layer that pervades it is becoming more substantial, more meaningful, and more influential in our experience of the world around us.

If “reality” is taken to be the sum total of all the informational and sensory experience we have of our environs, and we acknowledge that the informational (and to some degree sensory, as far as sight and sound go) layer is becoming dominated by digitally mediated, networked experience, then we are living in a place that is not too far off from what Second Life presents us.

Back when I was on some panels about Second Life, I would explain that the most significant aspect of the platform for user experience wasn’t the 3D space we were interacting with, but the “Viewer” — the mediating interface we used for navigating and manipulating that space. Linden Labs continually revised and matured the extensive menu-driven interface and search features to help inhabitants navigate that world, find other players & interest groups, or to create layers of permissions rules for all the various properties and objects. It was flawed, frustrating, volatile — but it was tackling some really fascinating, complex problems around how to live in a fluid, information-saturated world where wayfinding had more to do with the information layer *about* the actual places than the “physical” places themselves.

If we admit that the meaning & significance of our  physical world is becoming largely driven by networked, digital information, we can’t ignore the fact that Second Life was pioneering the tools we increasingly need for navigating, searching, filtering & finding our way through our “real life” environments.

What a city “means” to us is tied up as much in the information dimension that pervades it — the labels & opinions, statistics & rankings — the stuff that represents it on the grid, as it is the physical atoms we touch as we walk its sidewalks or drive through its streets, or as we sit in its restaurants and theaters. All those experiences are shaped powerfully by reviews and tips of Yelp, or the record of a friend having been in a particular spot as recorded in Foursquare, or a picture we see on Flickr taken at a particular latitude and longitude. Or the real-time information about where our friends are *right now* and which places are kinda dead tonight. Not to mention the market-generated information about price, quantity & availability.

It’s always been the case that the narrative of a place has as much to do with how we experience the reality of the place as the physical sensations we have of it in person. But now that narrative has been made explicit, as a matter of record, and cumulative as well — from the interactions of everyone who has gone before us there and left some shadow of their presence, thoughts, reactions.

One day it would be interesting to compare all the ways in which various bits of software are helping us navigate this information dimension to the tools invented for inhabiting and comprehending the pure-information simulacra of Second Life. I bet we’d find a lot of similarities.

1. It’s amazing how easily corporations can fool themselves into feeling good about the experiences they create for their users by making elaborate dreamscapes & public theater — as if the fictions they’re creating somehow make up for the reality of what they deliver (and the hard work it takes to make reality square in any way with that imagined experience). This reminds me a bit of the excellent, well-executed dismemberment of this sort of thinking that Bret Victor posted this past week on the silliness & laziness behind things like the Microsoft “everything is a finger-tap slab” future-porn. Go read it.

2. Viral videos like the CocaCola Happiness Machine don’t only fool the originating brand into feeling overconfident — they make the audience seeing the videos mistake the bit of feel-good emotion they receive as substantial experience, and then wonder “how can my own company give such delight?” I’ve seen so many hours burned with brainstorming sessions where people are trying to come up with the answer to that — and they end up with more reality-numbing theatrics rather than fixing difficult problems with their actual product or service delivery.

Post after the cut — but it looks nicer on the MQ Blog ;-)

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been seeing the CocaCola “Happiness Machine” video off and on for several years now. It keeps being passed around as a champion of great customer experiences. If you haven’t seen it yet, feel free to check it out on YouTube. It’s up to over 4 million views and still counting.

Every time I see this movie I get a little more frustrated and annoyed. Maybe I’m a big old Scrooge for feeling this way. Or maybe I’m just human.

Because when I use a Coke machine, I don’t encounter a benevolent puppet-show-cornucopia of good feelings, free pizza and flower bouquets. I experience something very different. So I made my own little movie — and here it is.

So what happened here? And what’s my point?

The product was a Coke — but in order for me to get to the product, I had to go through some very impersonal, unpleasant machinery.

That’s not unlike what so many organizations are having to do on the web and other digital media: they’re not really in the software business, in the same way that Coca Cola isn’t really a vending-machine-design company. But the experience I have with the core product is definitely affected by the experience I have with its medium of delivery.

Using a vending machine like this hasn’t gotten much better in about 20-30 years, frankly. This machine I used is pretty new, but it’s much like the one I used in my high school break room in 1983 (one of the first I encountered that took paper money, not just coins).

Does the machine meet the requirements of its engineering? I suppose so… it takes money (sometimes), and spits out a product. It makes it clear what brand the product is and what you’ll get for your dollar. But what it doesn’t do is have the right kind of conversation with me around the product.

Why can’t I see which brands of soft drink are in stock and which aren’t? Even when I push the button it won’t tell me — I have to put in my money first. Why on earth?

And why would anyone design a machine like this so that it shakes the soda so it spews all over me when I open it? (Reducing the carbonation, btw, making it less pleasant to drink once the foam dies down …)

I’m not just picking on Coke by the way. As a native Atlantan, I grew up drinking this stuff like water, so I’m picking on it partly because it’s part of my background. But we run into things like this all the time, whether soft drink machines or school systems, auto repair or the doctor’s office. Bureaucracy is its own kind of ‘soft machine’ and often needs re-designing as much as any mechanical contraption.

When we make machinery — software or hardware — experience design is about getting at these human dimensions, and making sure the medium of delivery not only avoids spoiling how the customer feels about the product, but enhances that experience.

A long time ago, in certain communities of practice in the “user experience” family of practices, an acronym was coined: “DTDT” aka “Defining the Damned Thing”.

For good or ill, it’s been used for years now like a flag on the play in a football game. A discussion gets underway, whether heated or not, and suddenly someone says “hey can we stop defining the damned thing? I have work to do here, and you’re cluttering my [inbox / Twitter feed / ear drums / whatever ...]”

Sometimes it rightly has reset a conversation that has gone well off the rails, and that’s fine. But more often, I’ve seen it used to shut down conversations that are actually very healthy, thriving and … necessary.

Why necessary? Because conversation *about* the practice is a healthy, necessary part of being a practitioner, and being in a community of other practitioners. It’s part of maturing a practice into a discipline, and getting beyond merely doing work, and on to being self-aware about how and why you do it.

It used to be that people weren’t supposed to talk about sex either. That tended to result in lots of unhappy, closeted people in unfulfilling relationships and unfulfilled desires. Eventually we learned that talking about sex made sex better. Any healthy 21st century couple needs to have these conversations — what’s sex for? how do you see sex and how is that different from how I see it? Stuff like that. Why do people tend to avoid it? Because it makes them uncomfortable … but discomfort is no reason to shun a healthy conversation.

The same goes for design or any other practice; more often than not, what people in these conversations are trying to do is develop a shared understanding of their practice, developing their professional identities, and challenging each other to see different points of view — some of which may seem mutually exclusive, but turn out to be mutually beneficial, or even interdependent.

I’ll grant that these discussions often have more noise than signal, but that’s the price you pay to get the signal. I’ll also grant that actually “defining” a practice is largely a red herring — a thriving practice continues to evolve and discover new things about itself. Even if a conversation starts out about clean, clinical definition, it doesn’t take long before lots of other more useful (but muddier, messier) stuff is getting sorted out.

It’s ironic to me that so many people in the “UX family” of practitioner communities utterly lionize “Great Figures” of design who are largely known for what they *wrote* and *said* about design as much as for the things they made, and then turn to their peers and demand they stop talking about what their practice means, and just post more pat advice, templates or tutorials.

A while back I was doing a presentation on what neuroscience is teaching us about being designers — how our heads work when we’re making design decisions, trying to be creative, and the rest. And one of the things I learned was the importance of metacognition — the ability to think about thinking. I know people who refuse to do such a thing — they just want to jump in and ACT. But more often than not, they don’t grow, they don’t learn. They just keep doing what they’re used to, usually to the detriment of themselves and the people around them. Do you want to be one of those people? Probably not.

So, enough already. It’s time we defend the D. Next time you hear someone pipe up and say “hey [eyeroll] can we stop the DTDT already?” kindly remind them that mature communities of practice discuss, dream, debate, deliberate, deconstruct and the rest … because ultimately it helps us get better, deeper and stronger at the Doing.

 
Update: There’s now an archive of podcasts from IA Summit 2011! And here’s a direct link to the podcast for this session (mp3). Or see them on iTunes.
 

I think there’s a lot of potential for design training & evolving methods to incorporate abetter understanding of how our brains function when we’re doing all the work of design.

See the program description on the conference site, and download the podcast or read the transcript at Boxes & Arrows.

Also, thanks to Luke W for the excellent summary of my talk.

The danger, of course, is that you over do it. You overplay your hand – you make things clearer than they actually are. I constantly try to keep aware of, and beware of, that. I think it’s correct to compare our conceptual scheme to a scaffolding from which we describe things, but by George it’s a pretty messy scaffolding. If it starts looking too tidy and neat that’s a sure sign you’re misdescribing things.”

via TPM: The Philosophers’ Magazine | Hacker’s challenge. (emphasis mine)

It strikes me this is true of design as well. There’s no one way to see it, because it’s just as organic and messy as the world in which we do it.

I mean this both in the larger sense of “what is design?” and the smaller sense of “what design is best for this particular situation?”

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that most things are “messy” — and that while any one solution or model might be helpful, I have to ward against letting it take over all my thinking (which is awfully easy to do … it’s pleasant, and much less work, to just dismiss everything that doesn’t fit a given perspective, right?).

The actual subject of the interview is pretty great too … case in point, for me, it warns against buying into the assumptions behind so much recent neuroscience thinking, especially how it’s being translated in the mainstream (though Hacker goes after some hard-core neuroscience as well).

I know everybody says “it’s with mixed feelings” that they do such a thing, but for me it’s definitely not a cliche. Vanguard has been an excellent employer, and for the last 6 1/2 years I’ve been there, I’ve always been able to say I worked there with a great deal of pride. It has some of the smartest, most dedicated user-experience design professionals I’ve ever met, and I’ll miss all of them, as well as the business and technology people I’ve worked closely with over the years.

I’m excited, however, to be starting work with Macquarium on June 28. On a personal level, it’s a great opportunity to work in the the region where I live (Charlotte and environs) as well as Atlanta, where the company is headquartered, and where I grew up, and have a lot of family I haven’t gotten to see as often as I’d like. On the professional side, Macquarium is tackling some fascinating design challenges that fit my interests and ambitions very well at this point in my life. I can’t wait to sink my teeth into that juicy work.

I’ve been pretty quiet on the blog for quite a while, partly because leading up to this (very recently emerging) development, I also spoke at a couple of conferences, and got married … it’s been a busy 2010 so far. I’m hoping to be more active here at Inkblurt in the near future … but no promises… I don’t want to jinx it.

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.