Tag: design

Desire lines in dictatorships

I’m in the midst of Robert Moor’s fascinating On Trails: An Exploration, and he mentions desire lines. Defined as paths “created as a consequence of erosion caused by human or animal traffic,” they are usually a shortcut through grass that’s a more direct line between two points.

“They can be found in the parks of every major city on earth,” Moor writes, including those of repressive authoritarian regimes, where dictatorial architects despise them as “geographic graffiti” because they belie the “authoritarian failure to predict our needs and our desires.” Efforts to remove or impede desire lines are almost always fruitless: “Wise designers sculpt with desire, not against it.”

Once you realize what a desire path is, you’ll see them everywhere. I love discovering terminology for everyday phenomena that I didn’t realize actually had a name. Here are a few more I like:

Slip lane: The diagonal lane at an intersection that allows you to turn right at an intersection without entering it.

Rumble bars (aka drunk bumps, growlers, drift lines): The slotted lines on highway shoulders that cause your tires to rumble when you drive over them.

Road verge (aka curb lawn, devil strip, easement, parkway, and many more): the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the road.

They are specific but simply worded, almost onomatopoeic in how they describe common but often invisible design. Can’t wait to add more to this list. Any suggestions?

January 24, 2018 2 Comments

Man’s Search for Responsibility

Finally got around to reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. In one part he talks about a hypothetical “Statue of Responsibility”:

Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

Clever, I thought when I read it. But when I was researching Frankl after reading the book, I learned the Statue of Responsibility is (becoming) a real thing:

I like how it flips Liberty’s arm motif. There isn’t a permanent site for it yet, but I hope it comes together.

Some other quotes from the book I enjoyed:

  • “For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.”
  • “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.”
  • “Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”
  • Prisoners looking at sunset: “How beautiful the world could be.”
  • “Self-actualization is possible only possible as a side effect of self-transcendence.”

January 9, 2018 Add Comment

Cmd + Ctrl: towards smarter searching and dumber devices

Let me echo Austin Kleon’s ode to the search box:

Maybe it’s not so much the command prompt I’m nostalgic for, but the days when the computer wouldn’t do anything without me — I had to explicitly tell the computer what I wanted to do, and if I didn’t tell it, it would just sit there, patiently, with a dumb look on its face.

I really miss how computers used to be “dumb” in this way. The primary computer in my life — my “smartphone” — is too smart. It used to constantly push things on me — push notifications — letting me know about all sorts of stuff it thought I wanted to know about, and it continued doing this until I had the good sense to turn them all off. It’s dumber now, and much better.

Besides text messages and Snapchat pictures of my new nephew, I don’t get notifications on my phone and haven’t for a long time. I can’t imagine how people with news or social media apps subject themselves to the onslaught of Fresh Hell in their pockets all day.

In Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, Cory Doctorow writes about the need to be protected from computers as they burrow further into our lives and bodies:

I want to be sure that it is designed to take orders from its user, and to hide nothing.

Take orders and hide nothing. Command and control. Pull rather than push. Make Computers Dumb Again.

Relatedly, at Mashable, “Stop reading what Facebook tells you to read” calls for consumers to break out of Facebook’s detention center walled garden and use a web browser to find things:

By choosing to be a reader of websites whose voices and ideas you’re fundamentally interested in and care about, you’re taking control. And by doing that, you’ll chip away at the incentive publishers have to create headlines and stories weaponized for the purpose of sharing on social media. You’ll be stripping away at the motivation for websites everywhere (including this one) to make dumb hollow mindgarbage. At the same time, you’ll increase the incentive for these websites to be (if nothing else) more consistent and less desperate for your attention.

See also: Just don’t look.

Here’s to smarter searching and clicking by everyone in 2018.

December 30, 2017 Add Comment

Norman Doors & More: Notes on ALA 2017

I went to the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago two weeks ago. Got to meet up with old colleagues, collect some sweet pens, and hear some interesting speakers, including the godfather of Hamilton, Ron Chernow. But most enriching were the sessions I attended. Here are some notes from the ones that enlightened me the most.

The Intentional Library: Creating A Better User Experience With Service Design And Design Thinking

Presenters: Joe Marquez, Annie Downey, Julka Almquist, Juliana Culbert

This session got me thinking about how to look at our library space as if I were a tourist seeing it for the first time. Would our service design make sense to them? If we aren’t intentionally seeking feedback from patrons and staff about how we can meet people’s needs and eliminate patrons’ “pain points”, then we’re not serving our patrons well.

Another key takeaway was that from a patron’s perspective, everyone who works in the library is a librarian; they don’t understand the professional distinctions. So regardless of job title, all staff should understand the library as a whole and be ready to serve the patron with good customer service skills.

Notes:

  • “If the point of contact between the product and people becomes a point of friction, the designer has failed.” -Henry Dreyfuss
  • If seeking to implement new design, follow the process: empathize → define → ideate → prototype → test → implement
  • need fresh eyes on space and processes, like a tourist
  • there are differences between what people say, do, think, and feel
  • discover people’s needs and pain-points, and create solutions to those so users can get what they want
  • educate colleagues on user experience (UX) and what it looks like to put into practice
  • questions to consider:
    • what is the audience?
    • what is the goal, call to action for users?
    • what is the timeline?
  • mindset to have:
    • everyone is a designer
    • embrace failure
    • people are at the center
  • prototyping builds confidence and saves money
  • Inherited ecology: older things and systems that haven’t changed but should, need new eyes
  • libraries are “tightly coupled” system, so changes affect everyone
  • from patron’s perspective, everyone is a librarian; all staff should know library as a whole
  • understand needs and expectations of patrons: these are often unexpressed
  • everything is a service
  • establish reasonable duration and tempo for patron services
  • accessibility: a range of behaviors are available to patrons
  • ask patrons: what problems do libraries solve? why are we important?

Resources:

What Do You Need to Know? Learning and Knowing and Libraries in the Age of the Internet

Daniel Russell is Google’s Über Tech Lead for Search Quality and User Happiness and he studies “how groups of people think about, understand, and use the technology of information.” He expanded on the concept of informacy, or the literacy of information, which requires a deep knowledge of information as a domain and knowing how to work well within it. Three things he said librarians ought to know were: 1) what’s possible to find online, 2) what search capabilities allow you to find them, and 3) what do you need to know to be able to do this? Pairing these skills with curiosity and a skeptical eye will help librarians make the shift in mindset from things that used to be impossible to find to what’s now expected to be provided instantaneously.

Notes:

  • Russell is a software engineer, research scientist, and a self-described “cyber-tribal-techno-cognitive-anthropologist” who studies “how groups of people think about, understand, and use the technology of information”
  • literacy: the ability to read and write in a symbol system and assumed, associated body of knowledge; defined with regard to a cultural group
  • “Pear Republic” hoax on Snopes is an example of the “false authority” fallacy
  • Need to perceive knowledge gap
    • skills of how to look things up
    • attitude of curiosity
  • Things librarians ought to know:
    • What’s possible to find online
    • What search capabilities allow you to find them
    • What do you need to know to be able to do this?
  • example of finding location of a photo using EXIF metadata (EXIF Metadata Viewer) and Google Maps
  • intuition/understanding of what and how often you do something is unreliable
  • informacy (like numeracy): the literacy of information
    • deeply knowledgeable about information as a domain, and knowing how to use and interact with it
  • Ctrl-F not used by 90% computer users: why?
  • Examples of untrustworthy sources on the internet:
    • fake author “Lambert Surhone” on Amazon
    • Clonezone
    • Italian Wikipedia article for Leonardo da Vinci much longer than English one: which one is better?
  • need to shift thinking from impossible to instantaneous
  • how to convert attitude from complaining to seeking out answers?
  • Social metacognition strategy of using “contact list intelligence”: know people who know things you don’t
  • “When in doubt, search it out”
  • “knowledge exists outside of yourself”
  • Three keys:
    • learn how to ask questions
    • know who can answer questions
    • know what tools are out there

Better Service than Amazon and Nordstrom: Secrets to How It’s Done

Presenters: Jane Martel, Linda Speas, Caroline Heinselman

This was presented by staff from the Arapahoe Library in Colorado, which gets very high marks in customer service rankings, even compared to popular companies like Amazon and Apple. I gathered there were 3 aspects of their customer service success. One was creating “exceptional experiences” for patrons that “surprise and delight” them and turn what would otherwise have been a good but standard library experience into great ones that they might tell their non-library-using friends about. Another was finding ways to “say yes” and avoid saying no in customer service situations, and documenting the times you have to “say no” so that you can pinpoint problems and get to yes. Another was rigorously training and supporting staff, not only in how to provide great customer service but also by allowing staff to feel fulfilled in their jobs by gathering positive stories of staff successes.

Notes:

  • poor customer service acts as a barrier to access
  • library being essential vs. “nice to have”
  • what can we offer to bring in more non-users? Nothing to convince them to come.
  • who are we at our best?
  • get users to “tell a friend” via word of mouth; create exceptional experiences they will want to tell about — ”surprise & delight”
  • specifically ask people to tell their friends/family about good library experiences
  • find ways to say yes and avoid saying no
  • hire for people skills over library skills: harder to teach
  • train and support staff: CS training for all
  • Process: greet warmly and smile, introduce yourself, have good small talk, offer assistance in “let’s find out” attitude, say thank you, make known they aren’t interrupting
  • have someone intentionally look at birds-eye view of CS
  • have staff submit positive stories: recognition/morale, training examples, board (Desk Tracker or Google Form?)
  • new hires: welcome bag, lunch, etc.
  • October 3 Customer Experience Day cxday.org
  • Tips for improving CS:
    • No log or Sorry/Thanks log to chart when have to say no and spot pain points
    • annual CS survey for patrons: look for things that either can be solved or are repeated
    • online anonymous comment form
  • staff see much more than patrons do

Desegregating Public Libraries: The Tougaloo Nine

Presenters: Michael Crowell, Geraldine Edwards Hollis, Susan Brown

This session was less about modern library practices and more about how past ones have failed patrons. Geraldine Edwards Hollis was one of the Tougaloo Nine, a group of students in Mississippi who did a “study-in” at their local segregated library and were arrested. Hollis told the story of the experience, which I’d never heard about until then. The session was a good opportunity to consider potential blind spots we have in current library services and honor those who risked their livelihoods to challenge them in the past.

Notes:

  • Hollis: a voracious reader
  • During this session was the first time Hollis had seen footage of the study-in and her arrest since it happened
  • Hollis: they didn’t want to just do lunch counter sit-ins or something mediocre: they did a library because libraries and reading mattered
  • Group started with 50 students interested, but once possibility of beatings, jailing, or even death was made clear, only 16 remained interested
    • many had parents who worked for state and schools, so those who remained had the least at stake
    • 16 total involved: 9 in the library, the rest on lookout
  • parents didn’t know until a few hours before
  • Hollis made her own clothes, was very meticulous; “I made sure I was well padded” for jail with lots of layers
  • Hollis: we were told all their lives we didn’t belong, but what what we were showing was “we belong where we want to be”
  • Read more: Wayne Wiegand’s Desegregating Libraries in the American South and the new journal Libraries: Culture, History & Society

Asking for a Friend: Tough Questions (and Honest Answers) about Organizational Culture

Presenters: Susan Brown, Richard Kong, Megan Egbert, Christopher Warren

This panel was comprised of one middle manager and three library directors, all of whom had taken over from long-serving directors and embarked on an overhaul of their organizational structure and culture. It was largely Q&A, with librarians voicing a variety of frustrations with their management, office politics, and other challenges that can pop up in the library environment. Key takeaways include: managers need to remember that some people view change as loss, and creating change means accountability combined with compassion.

Notes:

  • organizational culture is something you can hope will change, or be intentional about it
  • moving people to different offices was “worst thing ever” (Kong)
  • can’t reshape OC alone: need evangelists
  • OC defined by worst behavior that manager allows
  • counter toxic culture with emphasis on serving patrons
  • accountability + compassion to create change
  • communicate a lot, but also hold people accountable to consuming it and responding; if there are complaints of communication lack, look for what’s underneath
  • find ways to help people contribute to positive culture
  • trust: say you’ll do something, then do it — performance tied to trust
  • directors/managers should give time to allow feedback, but once decision is made staff should follow it; everyone gets a voice, but not a vote
  • re: siloing, Kong resists designating one authority figure or chain: wants people and departments to talk to each other
  • mixed departments on project teams and interviews
  • “what’s broken, what’s the rumor” at meetings
  • Junior Librarian program to mentor high schoolers and get non-traditional people in LIS
  • technical change vs. adaptive change (mindset)
  • some view change as loss

July 7, 2017 Add Comment

One Year in the Revolution

Tom Hanks, the most famous typewriter enthusiast in the world, couldn’t be a better ambassador for the field. Whether in a podcast or film or newspaper, he tells the Good News with his trademark charming gravitas. Though I’m sure longtime collectors wince at the thought of prices rising with such high-profile boosterism, it’s ultimately good for people and for typewriters—if only to save some from key-choppers or the dumpster.

A little over a year ago was when I first read Richard Polt’s The Typewriter Revolution, which set me off into this new world. I’m typing this draft on a Smith Corona Electra 12, the first typewriter I bought after enlisting in The Revolution. ($5 at Goodwill, still the lowest I’ve had to pay.) The Electra set me off into a typewriter mania, and my collection quickly burgeoned. Every antique mall and thrift shop was a potential holder of The Next One. I joined the Antique Typewriter Collectors Facebook group, read up on repair and maintenance, enlisted loved ones in searching for typewriters, annoyed friends and coworkers talking about my new hobby, and even took the plunge on an eBay purchase.

But once I hit my apartment’s MTC (Maximum Typewriter Capacity), I knew I had to temper my passions and come to balance. Once I realized I didn’t have to buy every decent typewriter I saw—that I had developed discernment (and a price limit) for what I really wanted—the ardor subsided and I’ve been able to appreciate what I have, while always keeping an eye open for a deal. All throughout, my wife has remained supportive (especially after I got her a pretty yellow Kmart 100), and continues to indulge me every time I describe my latest repair success or grumble about a particularly vexing dysfunction.

I wasn’t the tinkering kind of kid. I liked Legos and building forts, but lacked the mind for creative engineering that I saw in others. Even today I’m not a car guy and can only do basic home repairs. But I’ve really enjoyed learning typewriters. I’ve gradually gained the confidence to dig around inside them and learn how their innards work. Unlike computers, they are complicated but still able to be discerned. Though stunning works of art, they aren’t meant to sit in glass like an heirloom; they demand to be used and figured out.

When I casually grabbed The Typewriter Revolution off the library shelf, I couldn’t have guessed it would lead me into a new world of discovery and joy I enter every time I uncase a typewriter and roll some paper around the platen. But after a year of that, I’m still ready for more.

February 3, 2017 Add Comment

Now I Sit Me Down

A chair is an everyday object with which the human body has an intimate relationship. You sit down in an armchair and it embraces you, you rub against it, you caress the fabric, touch the wood, grip the arms. It is this intimacy, not merely utility, that ultimately distinguishes a beautiful chair from a beautiful painting. If you sit on it, can it still be art? Perhaps it is more.

Indeed it is. Witold Rybczynski’s new book Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair: A Natural History is one of my favorite genres: a nichestory (as in niche + history). Like the first Rybczynski book I read (One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw), this one is a loving and learned micro-history of an everyday thing we usually don’t regard at all. The book weaves Rybczynski’s expertise and personal experience with stories about influential designers and craftsmen throughout history, along with some wider cultural criticism.

NPR’s review of the book has a nice collection of Rybczynski’s own illustrations from the book of the many different kinds of chairs he writes about. After reading this you’ll see them everywhere.

September 13, 2016 1 Comment

How to Feel Small

I like things that make me feel small.

Like If The Moon Were Only 1 Pixel, a “tediously accurate scale model of the solar system” that, as you scroll horizontally, reveals the vast span of our neighborhood:

Or Why Time Flies, a philosophical exploration of our fungible awareness of time:

Or The Scale of the Universe (my favorite), which, as you zoom in and out, shows the comparative sizes of all creation, from the largest supercluster to the smallest neutrino (notice how everything at some point is the same size):

Or Lightyear.fm, a “journey through space, time & music” that plays songs of the past according to how far their waves have traveled from Earth since they were released:

Or The Deep Sea, made by Neal Agarwal, which shows as you scroll down the creatures (and shipwrecks) that live at different depths of the ocean. Spoiler alert: the ocean is very deep.

August 7, 2015 Add Comment

DDC 380-389: We built this city on rock and roads

A Teach Me How To Dewey production

This Is How We Dewey:

  • 380 Commerce, communications, transport
  • 381 Internal commerce (Domestic trade)
  • 382 International commerce (Foreign trade)
  • 383 Postal communication
  • 384 Communications; Telecommunication
  • 385 Railroad transportation
  • 386 Inland waterway & ferry transportation
  • 387 Water, air, space transportation
  • 388 Transportation; Ground transportation
  • 389 Metrology & standardization

Honestly, I was surprised by how intrigued I was by this section. Typically I’m not one to fall for anything relating to commerce, but I’m officially coming back to this section to find stuff for my to-read shelf. As represented by the Dew3 picks below, I’m often fascinated by how systems, especially concrete and/or historical, come into being. So while I wouldn’t care much for systems of thought or abstract things, I’m all over the Transcontinental Railroad and space transportation, despite my highly limited knowledge of engineering. Or perhaps it’s because of that lack of knowledge that I’m interested. Knowledge rocks! As do trains!

The Dew3:

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
By Tim Wu
Dewey: 384
Random Sentence: “Is Google destined to arrive at its Napoleonic moment?”

Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869
By Stephen Ambrose
Dewey: 385.0973
Random Sentence: “This was hard work, dangerous and claustrophobic.”

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways
By Earl Swift
Dewey: 388.122
Random Sentence: “Even by his standards, he was stinking rich.”

August 12, 2014 Add Comment

iPad? I think not

Originally published in the North Central Chronicle on April 16, 2010.

With all the near-orgasmic praise Apple’s iPad has received lately, I feel like I should want to get one. But I don’t.

Let’s be honest: it’s a cool toy. It does most of the things and iPod Touch or iPhone can do but on a bigger, more vibrant LCD screen. It also does some of the things a laptop does but in a more simplified and mobile way. But I don’t see the point of shelling out $500+ for a product fresh out of the factory just because Steve Jobs says it’s the future.

The Cult of Apple is a little too much for me right now. Sarah Palin whined a lot about the news media fawning over Barack Obama during the presidential campaign, but that was nothing compared to the reception Jobs’ Apple products get every time they are released into the world.

I understand brand loyalty, but some Apple fans get so wrapped up in their products it becomes hard to take their constant adulation seriously. While Apple’s products are often worthy of the praise they receive—it’s a sleek and dependable brand with great marketing—let’s not get carried away.

Jobs may be right: the handheld touchscreen technology the iPad embodies will probably eventually become the standard for computing and communication. Like the iPhone and iPod before it, it will get better with every generation they release. And more people will probably buy it once Apple’s competitors like Google and Microsoft release their own version of the tablet computer.

But the iPad as it is now is not there yet. As the first generation of its kind, it’s going to receive some major upgrades in the next few years. Remember the first generation iPod? At the time it was revolutionary, but now it’s laughably archaic. 

The iPad, I suspect, will be similar. It’s cool now, but I’m going to let it cook a little longer before I buy what Steve Jobs is selling. Once tablet computers become a legitimate and irreplaceable technology—and offered from more companies than just Apple—then will it be worthwhile to invest in it.

Until then, it’s still just a toy. A very expensive toy.

April 16, 2010 Add Comment