Monthly Archives: July 2014

The Fault is in Defaults

25 Friday Jul 2014

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“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

So Cassius says to Brutus in Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar Cassius was trying to convince Brutus to join the plot to assassinate Caesar. As I recall, things did not turn out well for Julius Caesar. Or for Brutus. Or for Cassius. Or, ultimately, for Mark Anthony either, but that’s another story. The point is that there is always an interesting tension between imagining that we ourselves are the masters of our fate. It is our ability, or attitude, or grit, or whatever that determines how much money or happiness or health we have. Or, on the other hand, there is the view that things are pretty much beyond our conscious control and due to our heredity, our environment, our upbringing, etc. Both views are partly true and both have their place. If you are a user of a product and you want to get something accomplished, blaming the stupid product will not help you accomplish your goals. On the other hand, if you are a product developer, it will not help you to blame your user. You need to design thoughtfully.

I was reminded of this debate today by trying to scan a document. In general, I am amazed how excellentscanners and printers are today, not to mention CHEAP! I was born in an era of expensive, heavy, noisy, dot matrix printers or teletypes. You’ve come a long way, baby! But the software that actually lets us use these marvelous machines. Hmmm. Here there is a lot of room for improvement. Today, I repeatedly tried to scan a one page document to no avail. I thinkI finally diagnosed what the problem was. The scan screen came up with a default that said “custom size” and the defaulted “custom dimensions” were 0 by 0. Because, obviously, the development team had done a thorough study of users and found, I suppose somewhat surprisingly, that the most common size of image people wanted to scan was 0 by 0. I suppose such images have the advantage that you can store many more of them on your hard drive than images that are 8.5 by 11 inches or 3 inches by 5 inches, say.

But this is not an isolated example. Often there are “defaults” which seem to me to be rather odd, to say the least. Right now, my google map application, for no discernible reason, has decided that a good default location for me is the geographical center of the continental United States. It was not “born” with this default but somewhere along the line “developed” it. Why? I have never travelled (knowingly) to the geographical center of the United States. I have never wanted to “find” the geographical center of the United States. Yet, for some mysterious reason, whenever I do try to find a route to say, the dentist who is ten miles away, the map app tries to send me from Southern California to the geographic center of the US and then back again. I can eventually get around this, but next time I open up the app, there we are again. Of course, I am tempted every time to just to see the place (near the corners of Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas and Missouri. And, “with no traffic”, it only takes a little over 22 hours to get there. The phrase, “with no traffic” in Southern California is equivalent to “when pigs fly.” So, tempting as it is to drive 22 hours to the geographical center of the US and then 22 hours back (provided the sky if filled with flying pigs) in order to go to the dentist who is a few minutes away, I haven’t yet actually taken the trip.

I am tempted to rant about the absolute ludicrosity of “sponsored links” (which cheeringly informs me that I could take a side trip to a gynecologist on the way to the dentist) but I’ll try to stay on topic. Where do these defaults come from? Is this just a nerd’s nerd free choice as a perk of the job? Do they seriously conceptualize size in terms of a two dimensional grid with an origin at zero zero and therefore this is a “logical” default for paper size? Are they trying to do the user a favor by saving space?

I am hoping there is a product manager out there who can answer these questions. I am hoping things will turn out better than they did for Caesar and Brutus and Cassius.

the “RULES” of CreaTIVity

15 Tuesday Jul 2014

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Last week, I finished the on-line course: 5 Habits of the Highly Creative Teacher, and I still keep thinking about it. It strikes me that everyone hasto be creative pretty much all day long just to live. For example, if you move through your physical environment by walking, you have to readjust your balance as you go. If you live with six cats, you have to be ready for one of them (in this case, Jones) to burst into the path of where you are about to plant your foot. What I have to do is try to keep from spilling my breakfast all over the carpet. I am convinced that cats do this, not to annoy, but to destroy. The chances of bringing down such a large beast as I am are slim, but if they succeed, they figure they will be able to feast for days on my carcass. It is, in management-speak a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) for a housecat. I am reasonably sure that none of my cats have actually read any books on management theory, but they seem to grasp many of the concepts instinctively. Any way, the point is not about Jones and his ilk but about me and my ilk — namely human beings. We have to adjust our plans and our behavior constantly in response to external events. Sure, we have skills (walking, driving, talking, listening — well, okay not listening) but these are not pre-programmed sequences of actions. We may have plans but we constantly adjust these without endless committee meetings or e-mail chains. If I had had to get my spleen and liver on board with my sudden change of direction, I’d be lying on the floor dead and Jones would be feasting.

As I pointed out some time ago, when people communicate they are always designing and interpreting, not coding and decoding. People use language in endless new and creative ways all the time. Let us even imagine you are telling a joke you have told scores of times before. As you tell it, a train roars by and you either pause or raise your voice till the train goes by. This, in essence, is creativity. You are using what you know in order to create a new twist on the delivery of your joke appropriate to the circumstances.

What is also interesting is this: Almost all people are creative almost all the time BUT they do not “count” what they do as creative. They imagine themselves as in the large majority of “non-creative” people because they have been told they lack skill in writing poetry or painting. For that reason, their mental model of themselves is that they are not capable of creativity when in actuality they express themselves creatively every time they move; every time they speak.

So, here is the challenge I am wondering about. Is there a way to show people that they are actually being creative in many areas of life all the time; getting them thereby to alter their self-concept and their self-talk so that they see themselves as creative people and therefore take it as “okay” to be creative in every other area of their life as well? Would they be willing to run full tilt at a weighty problem and try to time their actions so as to topple that problem? If my cat can, can you?

Five Habits of Highly Creative Teachers.

08 Tuesday Jul 2014

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Teaching. Creativity. Teaching + Creativity –> Skepticism. And yet, I had to admit that I had tried to use creativity myself in teaching. For example, I had taught a required course for RN’s in statistics — a course that they typically had no real desire for. So, I had tried to make it fun, understandable, and provide a way for them to see how it actually was important in their career and their life. For example, I made cartoons to explain the F-test and to help them remember the steps.

And, even among my teachers, there had been those who were creative and encouraged creativity. For example, in my high school English class, I complained that we were underlining verbs and nouns in meaningless and random sentences and that we *recalled* some of this random and meaningless material. Hence, it would be better to use material that had some meaning to it. My teacher encouraged me to run an experiment and indeed, I showed that people in my class really were remembering these meaningless sentences.

Okay. So, maybe teaching and creativity could be positively related and not antithetical. I thought I would give it a try any way. Perhaps I could learn some techniques for additional creativity. That could prove useful.

The course did not seem to carry a warning label however, that the course material was not just “out there” but “in here”! This course required an internaljourney not just learning about “stuff.” Instead of “easy” assignments such as “write a Shakespearean Sonnet about alligators” —which I could probably do in a half hour, it had assignments such as “write something about a topic that is central to your life.” What? How long? What topic? What is central to my life?!

So…such open ended assignments cause me to go in circles. Of course, I can think of *many* things which are central, but which is the most central? Or, are all these things equally important? And, how much of an effort is it worth writing about it? And, do I write about it now, or do I think about it more first? And, will writing about it cause me to “freeze” my ideas when I may want to change what is most central tomorrow? Yikes.

Despite the difficulties, the course was very worthwhile and I recommend it to anyone who has the chance to take this in the future. A few of the habits in particular were things I had fallen out of and been reminded of. For example, the course introduced the notions of curation and remixing. I had long ago discovered that becoming immersed in a field allowed me to be creative in that field; indeed, it forced creativity. But along the way, by being constantly busy at work and required to do things too quickly I had fallen into the habit of relying completely on what I already knew.

The second thing I needed to be reminded of was the importance of tribe. I have always been most productive and had the most fun when working with a group. Yet, it was always easy to find these and now I am in a position where I need to create one or more.

And, finally, one of the reasons open ended assignments are so difficult for me is that it is very hard to know whether I “won” or “finished” or was “successful.” So thinking more deeply about the concept of “failure” was also really useful.