Your Friends Aren’t Dead Parrots
Smithsonian NMNH bird collection, photo by Chip Clark
There’s a beautiful yet unpalatable quality to this photo. The human mind craves vast and organized displays, yet the idea of dead animals sorted into boxes unsettles the heart.
For scientific categorization, a room like this is perfect—I want to see a macaw, and I want to see it right now. In fact, show me ten macaws, show me any bird I want to see. However, the cold sort of birds by species isn’t a great way to sort everything—relationships with people, for example.
Defining relationships is difficult, but not impossible: Friend, foe, family. The problem is that relationships themselves aren’t easy categorical buckets.
One facet of this issue is that relationships change over time (see Kevin’s great post on this issue). A macaw isn’t going to morph into a canary, but a friend may turn into a girlfriend.
However, the other large failure of such an organization schema: it’s not a natural compartmentalization of the people in our lives.
If there’s one human behavior social networks feed off of, it’s our obsessive need to share. We revel in each others’ success, fall with each others’ failures and get to know each other through common interests. We ultimately love Facebook, Twitter and Google+ because they help us connect with the people we want to have a relationship with.
When you have a relationship with another human, sure, you can put labels on it. My mom, sister, brother and cousin are my family. My boyfriend is my boyfriend. My professor, manager and coworker are my professional network. However, when I come to a nugget of content I want to share, I simply don’t stop to think of people in that way.
I don’t know if this is an effect of our fractured age, but we have different kinds of friends. There is that friend you ask for recipes, that friend you go to bars with, and that very special friend you’d tell if you got cancer. I’d never want my entire family to know I cheated on a test, but I might tell my sister and my roommate—just like if I discovered Trololo Man, I might want to share mostly with my cousin and a couple buddies from my old a cappella group.
We don’t generally find content expressly to cater to a group. We typically find gold in our travels and then want to share. So isn’t it artificial to lump people into categories rather than sort by the content itself?
Show me a social network that easily differentiates between “people I’d tell my address to” and “people who care I met Paula Scher”. That will be the rub.
Designers Just Make Pretty Pictures: Demeaning Critique
(As a pre-emptive disclaimer, this has nothing to do with my first two weeks at Twitter. I have an in-depth update coming up about my job and my coworkers, who are wonderful human beings. I believe with all my heart that they would never say such a bile-inducing phrase).
There are many bad terms for people we don’t like. Here are a few. Hussy. Dick. Douche.
What do all these insults have in common? In a single word, they not only tell you that the person they are referring to is a jerk, but also illuminates gender.
The glory of artful language is that if you pick the right word, you can efficiently describe a situation. Instead of, “male jerk who likes to sleep with anything with legs,” you can say, “manwhore.” When you tell a story, this effect can be powerful. Crassness and judgments aside, it replaces the slashes of verbal parrying with a Zorro-esque Z.
Let me run another word by you. Pretty.
This word makes me want to burn down the crit room. When you call something ‘beautiful,’ it’s overwhelmingly positive. There is never room to mistake ‘beautiful’ as a derisive comment. ‘Pretty,’ however, is a backhanded compliment that people feel obligated to counter. Some proof: here’s a comparison of the first four results for, “designers just make pretty pictures” and “designers just make beautiful pictures”.
None of the results for ‘beautiful’ are actually related to that statement, while all of the ‘pretty’ results are articles or comments appealing people to respect designers.
While ‘it’s pretty!’ is a synonym for ‘it’s beautiful’ to most innocent wielders, in critique it often has the efficiency of ‘manwhore.’ When someone says, ‘it’s pretty…’, they typically mean, ‘eh, it’s beautiful, but thoughtless.’
First off, let’s address the fact that snarkiness and cynicism don’t have a place in a productive critique. If our intent is to improve each other and do good work, veiling your feedback with sarcasm is harmful.
Secondly, why bring the issue of beauty into the matter at all? While beauty is subjective, one of the goals of design -is- ultimately to create beauty through evocative contrasts, gruesome or golden. No one approaches any interface saying, “I’m going to make this thing all busted and ugly,” and people don’t fault a good interface for being beautiful.
Should we really despise a work more so for being visually considered and thoughtless than for being ugly and thoughtless? Should we hate a physically beautiful person for owning a symmetrical face, or because they ask why poor people can’t keep their yards clean like the rest of us?
Perhaps the scornful ‘pretty’ is a disgust for deception. Perhaps the outward beauty leads us on, and that’s what we really hate when we say, ‘pretty’. The promise of a delightful experience, dashed by the reality of flippant thinking.
Regardless, to give specific and actionable critique, let’s be transparent. If a piece has a harmonious composition but inappropriate typefaces and colors, be specific and state both sides. It’s okay for a thoughtless design to get a couple things right. It’s still thoughtless regardless of good kerning, and would be thoughtless with bad kerning as well. Leave ‘manwhore’ and ‘douche’ for storytelling.
I love Brian Eno’s idea of life as a whole as the creative process, that downtime is almost like sleeping and dreaming. While I commend the occasional 15 hour day, 15 hour days every day will result in insanity and bad ideas.
Halflife by Meghan O’Rourke
One of the most beloved books in my collection. Whenever I feel like I’m losing my language, this is my first stop.
Status board in progress. Left hand pane will show projects and tasks, middle will show meetings and index prices, right hand shows muni/caltrain times and weather. Adding server status and who’s going to be out of the office. To be displayed on a big TV.
Excuse my shaky hands! Too much coffee…
Why people jump down your throat when you say discrimination doesn’t exist
@Mike_FTW: Let this be a notice: you put together an all-male, all-white conference and I *WILL* go to war with you. And you will lose.
Reading Mike Monteiro’s tweet and subsequent debate made me realize I’ve become one of those people inflamed by the mere mention of racism and gender discrimination. I’m not sure I can be blamed after reading some of these responses, including such gems:
@MatthewDonnely: if there happen to be no good women speakers available then why higher a poor one over a good man? It works the same both ways
@genuinechris: and yet - they are poor negotiators. I have seen world class talent for pennies on the dollar from women.
@JohnONolan: @Mike_FTW Are you retarded? How many black swimmers do you know? How many white 100m sprint runners? How many female fighter pilots?
I believe in human beings. I think the majority of these men genuinely think they live in this bunny-rainbow world where everyone is given a fair shake and no one is judged by skin color, weight, or the ability to hold an erection.
However, being a young female interaction designer, and more freakishly, an Asian-American female interaction designer, I don’t. Let’s get it straight right off the bat that I have a really nice life, one that wouldn’t be possible even two decades ago. People are generally good to me, so this isn’t any kind of woe-is-me post. This is merely to give a curious man insight into why people get so angry when he says that he has never witnessed discrimination and that design hiring must be a strict meritocracy (ie, hiring a team of only men, because there are just more talented men than women).
I think we all can agree on the extreme acts of discrimination. Locking the car door when you see black people on the sidewalk, assuming Jews are trying to swindle you, not interviewing someone because he has a kid at home, yes?
So, here’s the bad news. There’s a whole other brand of discrimination, which is more passive and involves more than your individual choice of letting someone sit in the front of the bus. This is where the statement, “if there happen to be no good women speakers available then why higher a poor one over a good man?” comes in.
There are many great women who shape design. Jessica Hische, Debbie Millman, Kim Goodwin, etc, etc, etc. If one genuinely asked a bunch of women and some cosmic whirlwind made them all suddenly unavailable, fine. I think there are enough female designers that the gap between women and men wouldn’t be ‘poor’ and ‘good’, but maybe we are mincing words, here.
However, I’m betting that the lack of women is due to the fact that women were vastly underconsidered when coming up with a list of the very best designers. Making a conference that is supposed to be about the state of an entire industry all-male is like taking a census of a city and only marking the people who walk past your Starbucks window. It’s as if to say, those other people, they exist over there somewhere…but they’re not walking by the window so who gives?
Ok, so now I’m betting all my manfriends in the audience are pulling out their hair and saying, look at the data, Ash, there just aren’t that many women who do interaction design! It’s a numbers issue! We don’t discriminate!
Yes, my friends, it is a numbers issue. But, don’t you find it boggling that the interactive design industry, one that prides itself on helping people achieve their goals and communicates with normal human beings is dominated by white males? If we’re fighting for the user, why is the interaction design population not representative of the population at whole?
Either the honest answer of, “Ash, I could really give a rat’s ass,” or the more common, “I don’t know, most girls probably just don’t like interaction design if they’re not choosing to go into it.”
Ok, so let’s talk about why men become interactive designers. It’s a marriage between the left and right brains, it moves fast, it’s new and exciting, it’s available to many people, it can pay pretty damn well, it involves working on close teams of smart people…the list goes on.
So, what they’re saying is, because a girl lack a penis, these types of things don’t appeal to her. In which case, I’m calling shenanigans. That sounds like an awesome career. Why else are there so many amateur designers and self-taught who gravitated towards design after they found their other previous callings unsatisfying?
If the reason men went into interaction design was, it feels really good on my penis, I would understand. However, it seems like none of the great things about being an interaction designer touch upon anything gender related.
If not a lack of appeal, then the only other alternative is that women lack the natural ability to keep up with the challenges of being an interactive designer.
Uh oh. Getting into Third Reich territory up in this business.
I know. These men don’t intend to discriminate or hurt anyone, but they continue the tradition of assuming it’s the woman’s fault and the woman’s decision to languish in obscurity. And so, no one is villainizing the industry for hating women. People are villainizing it for being lazy and comfortable in a world where girls in even my young generation were told to sew trinkets and do laundry while boys play with saws and sandpaper.
Don’t hire a woman who is worse than a man strictly because she is a woman. Seek out talented women to add to your organization/conference/whatever as an active choice to try and shift this ridiculous and weird inequality. I promise that even if you seek her out and fail to find her, your initiative will punch a door into the boy’s club of interaction design by creating the prospect of a gender equal future.
