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 an interesting tension arises when we imagine that we ourselves are the masters of our fate. We like to imagine that it is our ability, or attitude, or grit that determines how much money or happiness or health we have. On the other hand, we also realize that many things are pretty much beyond our conscious control and due largely 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 by trying to scan a document. In general, I am amazed how excellent scanners 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? Here, there is still a lot of room for improvement.
Today, I repeatedly tried to scan a one page document to no avail. I think I 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.
This absurd default is not an isolated example. Often there seem to be “defaults” are rather odd, to say the least. My google map application, for no discernible reason, 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 that particular 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.
Now, a more serious impact of “defaults” have insinuated their way into my daily life. That would be bad enough, but this insinuation has also found its way into the lives of my relatives, my friends, my neighbors, my countrymen, and even my fellow humans throughout the world.
For about 250 years, America had a default that different political parties would play by the same set of rules. Of course, parties sometimes pushed at these rules or interpreted them somewhat differently. They argued and debated about which criteria were most important for various offices. But the default for both parties was that we lived in a democracy; that the citizens choose their leaders; that the truth matters; that we keep our agreements; that our leaders don’t simply use their position of power to line their own pockets and settle their private grudges.
Those defaults are now out the window. All of them. The result will soon be inefficient and ineffective government but it won’t stop there. When government officials are open to bribery, then private businesses will tend to be led by people with lower standards of ethics. They, in turn, will tend to hire people with lower standards of ethics. They, in turn, will treat their customers more cavalierly, more contemptuously. Customers, in turn, will care less about being civil to the people whom they interact with. And so it goes.
Newsflash: Playing really low quality Musak while the customer is on hold for 40 minutes does not improve the customer experience. Nor, does always playing the message that you are experiencing “unusually heavy volumes” right now improve your credibility. Now, I admit that someone in marketing who thought about for about 15 seconds *might* think that playing really bad music would be a good thing. After all, people do pay money to listen to music. Not everyone is a pirate. And, people spend a lot of time listening to music. Here’s the thing that might come to you if you study the rocket science surrounding this situation for about 20 or 30 seconds. People pay to listen to the music they choose. They do not pay to hear the music you choose. Furthermore, people pay to listen to music that is high quality. Granted, sometimes, when nothing else is available some of the people some of the time would prefer low quality music to no music at all. But no-one chooses absurdly bad quality music over silence. One more thing: unless you are a love-struck pre-teen, you do not listen to the same short sequence of music over and over and over and over for an hour at a time. No. You listen to a piece of music. Then, you listen to a different piece of music. Then, you listen to a different piece of music.
Now, I do grant that it is somewhat useful if you are going to put your customers on hold for 40 minutes that you give some sort of signal other than complete silence to show that you are still there and haven’t had the system “hang up” on them (which happens all too often but is another topic). But playing loud, obnoxious, very low fidelity music is not the answer.
Back to credibility. If you are really monitoring the call volume and the customer calls at a time of really unusual high call volume, you may want to tell them that they would have better luck another time. But if you always play this message, what do you think it does to your credibility? I am amazed to find that my credit union, an otherwise fine institution, always plays this message. And every single time, it makes me think twice about whether I can really trust my funds to an organization that clearly lies every single day.
You might think that it’s bad for business to lose credibility. Of course, it is. But it’s far more than that. It’s a betrayal of the very thing that makes us human. We did not succeed in covering so much of the planet by having the sharpest claws or teeth. Nor is it because of our great strength. It’s because our language enables us to learn from each other across time and space and culture. That happens when people trust each other and are trustworthy. Of course, one may gain a short-term advantage by lying. But the long term impact of enough lies is nothing less than the complete breakdown of human civilization.
After moving from Westchester County New York to the San Diego area, we were asleep (again) on an air mattress awaiting almost all of our material possessions to arrive the next day. We were awakened by a call from our moving company that our things would not be arriving tomorrow morning as promised. Or ever. Indeed, our furniture, clothes, electronics, papers, photographs, paintings, kitchenware, bedding, etc. had all been destroyed in a truck fire near Albuquerque, New Mexico. This was something of a disaster for us, and, from a positive “customer experience” standpoint, a disaster for the moving company.
But the point of this post is to point out that in this disaster, there is an opportunity for the moving company to be proactive and excellent and greatly ameliorate or even turn around this customer service disaster. They could, for example, send us a personal apology. They could be in constant contact about the status of any remains. They could arrange for us to visit the site of the fire at their expense. They could arrange to quickly reimburse us at least for the full amount of our insurance with the moving company so that we could get on with our lives as best we could. Obviously, photo albums, the drawings my kids made, letters from friends, my grandfather’s paintings, and souvenirs from a lifetime of travel could not really be replaced. But what *could* be replaced needed to be so quickly. And, given that we were in a somewhat vulnerable state, this disaster really offered an opportunity for the company to provide the very best customer service they possibly could under the circumstances.
That was the opportunity. What did they do instead? They basically refused to communicate with us. At every opportunity, they balked; did not answer emails; did not answer phone calls; did not offer reimbursement. As we found out later, they did not even pay the towing company who moved their van off the Interstate. Instead, they focused on how to limit their potential liability by withholding as much information as humanly possible. They refused to let us even come to the site and examine our stuff. We found out the day before, thanks to our insurance company, that we would be able to see our stuff on Friday if we flew to Albuquerque and rented a car to drive to Continental Divide. There we discovered the charred remains of our things. And, we discovered that nothing had been done for an entire month to protect our things (or those of the other two ex-patrons who shared the misfortune of choosing this moving company). What was left of our clothes, photos, furniture, etc. was all open to rain, wind, and passersby for over a month.
Continental Divide is a fitting metaphor for the choice that a company faces when they make a BIG mistake. They can admit the mistake and do everything in their power to make it right to the customer. Or, they can do everything in their power to continue to screw the customer in order to save costs, face, and limit liability.
Of course, the same choice also faces government. Any government will make mistakes. But then what? Do they admit those mistakes and try to ameliorate the damage? Or, do they deny, minimize, lie, obfuscate, point fingers elsewhere?
Symmetry is often a really nice thing. I like snowflakes as much as anyone. So long as no more than three gather at any one time.
And, I suppose that making a building with four identical sides probably saves marginally on costs. Maybe.
But if you really care about the “customer experience” wouldn’t it be nice if the customer can figure out how to enter your building? I mean, enter it without walking the perimeter a few times. Especially if it is raining, or sleeting, or boiling hot, or dark. There is a variant on this which is popular with convention centers. They are required by law, I guess, to have approximately 480 doors or more. However, typically, all but one or two of these are locked.
Perhaps an argument could be made that making the entrance to a building difficult to detect adds to security. I seriously doubt it. A determined burglar could find out by trial and error or observation where the door is. That burglar has plenty of time because you see, being a burglar is how they make their living. But not so your customer. Much as you would love to *think* that your customer has nothing better to do than circle your establishment trying to find a way in, they do, in reality, have better things to do.
Recently, I had occasion to visit Paris. Do you have any trouble finding the doors in the building shown? Last year was the 850th birthday for Notre Dame. So, having an entrance which is distinctly visible from a distance as an entrance, we would have to say is a *solved problem*, n’est pas? Check out Pattern 110, Main Entrance, in Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language.
How do we celebrate Umbrella Day? Put up an umbrella tree with little paper umbrellas we’ve collected in a lifetime of drinking fruit flavored nerve poison? Hey! Here’s one way we could celebrate: get rid of the necessity of a nuclear umbrella and while we’re at it, why not get rid of war altogether? It benefits very few of the people involved. Look it up.
No, I suspect that how we are really supposed to celebrate “Umbrella Day” is to buy more umbrellas. Buy more umbrellas? That sounds right. No doubt, this was something cooked up by manufacturers of umbrellas. I doubt the raindrops lobbied for it. A group of consumer fans who just happen to love umbrellas to an inordinate degree? Possible, but extremely unlikely. It’s not the umbrella’s fault; it’s that an umbrella addresses a miserable problem: getting wet when you don’t want to get wet. And, the umbrellas never do a perfect job. They wet the interior of your car and home. They pinch your fingers. People use them! I use them. They are useful. But I don’t think people love them enough to spontaneously beg their government for Umbrella Day. You can call me a cynic; it’s okay. I’m pretty sure it was the Umbrella Manufactures.
That doesn’t mean I won’t appropriate Umbrella Day for my own purposes which are to have fun writing and to entertain some folks out there. Whenever I think of umbrellas, one of the first things that comes to mind was a “QUALITY” meeting all managers in an anonymous telecommunications company (ATC) were required to attend. We listened to talk after talk, many with exciting PowerPoint pie charts and bar charts. No fewer than seven members of the audience were carried out on stretchers for tachycardia brought about by the sheer exuberance of the final slide showing the PILLARS of ATC QUALITY.
At the conclusion, to make sure that the excitement we all feel when sitting for non-interactive presentations all day didn’t somehow dissipate when we walked out the door, each manager was presented with an ATC QUALITY umbrella of our very own!
Whether ATC management arranged for the downpour that hit the city the moment we left the meeting or whether it was sheer happenstance, I don’t really know. In any case, it was a fortuitous event from the perspective of the quality folks because now we would instantly see just how important quality is in our daily lives.
The umbrellas served their purpose: they showed just how much top management cared about quality.
(By the way, there really are useful approaches to the important topic of quality. This wasn’t that.)
The umbrella is a device that can be used in many situations. In the summer between my Junior and Senior years in college, I worked as a child care worker at a psychiatric hospital for kids. I lived in a tiny basement studio apartment in the “Little Italy” part of town. My cheap bed had a line of broken springs so my umbrella served as a brace so that I didn’t sag onto the floor. The umbrella bent but did not break. I was much lighter then.
On one occasion, one of those tiny non-human vampires some might call “a bat” broke into my tiny room and flapped endless noisy loops inches from my head.
Slowly, I eased my way out of bed. I slid the umbrella out of its place and when the bat was at the far end of my cell, I opened the umbrella and slowly worked my way toward the door end. My left hand held the umbrella shield before me, much like a muggle version of a Patronus Charm. I slid my right hand over and opened the door. The next time the bat approached the door, out they went. Yay! I like win/win solutions even with mini-vampires. Bats, incidentally, are really cool critters! They are useful to us for a number of reasons, and that’s pretty nice. But they are also just cool in their own right. Their “bat-ness” is every bit as marvelous in its own way as our “human-ness.” The point is that we can use the umbrella in ways the umbrella manufacturers probably never envisioned.
Now, we turn to the one of the most powerful umbrellas in the world.
The “UNbrella.”
For several years, my wife and I attended the Newport Folk Festival — a wonderful outdoor concert with two score of the very best folk performers. One of the reasons I like outdoor concerts is so that I can dance. I mean by that that I can dance the way I want to and not get ejected from the venue.
The Newport Folk Festival was no exception. Typically, we had very good luck weather-wise, but one year, it poured. It wasn’t a drizzle. It wasn’t a sprinkle. Nor was it short, hard summer shower that lasts a half hour and then the sun comes out and the rainbow comes out and everyone’s clothes dry in the sun. Nope. This was a constant downpour.
We knew it “might” rain so we came prepared with rain clothes and large umbrellas. The stage was protected so the performances went on as scheduled. I, like most, huddled under layers of clothing and beneath an umbrella.
I was cold.
I was not dancing.
I thought to myself, “I came here to dance. I am going to dance.” So I did. I shed my clothing save for my bathing trunks and I traded in my UMbrella for an UNbrella.
Four hours later, it was still raining. But the mood was completely different. Now, half the crowd was dancing in their bathing suits. Everyone was happy! All thanks to the power of the unbrella.
Speaking of vampires and werewolves…
“Beware when you wear ware that you are aware that it is merely ware you’re wearing. You are not your wear.”
It seems odd to specify a property of natural order in terms of what it is not. On the other hand, I cannot come up with a positive alternative that doesn’t bring other connotations with it. I think it’s related to “unified” or “integral” or “belonging” or “inter-related” but none of those seem quite so on the mark as does “Not-Separateness.”
Christopher Alexander’s degree from MIT was in architecture. Part of the reason he may have chosen this particular term is in reaction to some examples of architecture in which the architect seems to be in the business of constructing a building whose primary purpose is to make them famous regardless of what that building does to the neighborhood or the occupants.
Imagine Mr. Bigg designs a house that is a perfect black cube set on on vertex. In effect, this design says to me: “I am BIG. I am Mr. Bigg! I am a genius! You would have never been brilliant enough to design a house that is a cube on its vertex! You would have wasted your time and done something mundane like placed the cube on the ground on one of its faces. Anyone could think of that! But I put it on a vertex!” Indeed, we may easily imagine that he says words to this effect when his interview is reported on in the (mythical) architectural journal, Things that look different!
“Mr. Bigg, you made the Bigg House out of black steel and black glass. Some critics have argued that this doesn’t fit with the existing neighborhood of stone cottages with thatched roofs.”
“Of course, little minds will always criticize Bigg ideas.”
“Yes, yes. It also means that the construction costs of the house were quite high. And, the estimated costs of heating and cooling are much higher as well.”
“Nothing that a worthwhile (i.e., wealthy) client can’t afford.”
“Some have also argued that it is inconvenient for the occupants who have to walk up and down at a steep angle and that furniture such as dressers, tables, chairs, and beds do not accommodate well to the tilted walls.”
“Let me ask you aquestion. Would you have ever thought of putting a cube on its corner? No. I didn’t think so!”
Of course, this is exaggeration. But not much.
We would hope that User Experience designers take into account the users, their tasks, their contexts, and the way in which their designs interact with other related artifacts, people and processes. We would hope that applications and artifacts and services are all designed with the property of “Not-Separateness.”
In the early 1980’s, I worked in the IBM Office of the Chief Scientist. My main assignment was to get IBM to pay more attention to the usability of its products. As part of that process, I visited quite a few IBM development labs around the world and spoke to many development teams. On many of these visits, I was accompanied by the Chief Scientist, a brilliant physicist, who “got” usability.
On one occasion, we watched a new printing technology. Instead of printing out black printing on a white sheet of paper sized 8.5” x 11” or A4, this printout was of no standard size. The printing was black on a shiny silver sheet that curled severely. The Chief Scientist asked the head of the development team how they envisioned this being used.
Chief Scientist: “Once someone printed this out, what would they do with it?”
Answer: “Oh, anything they liked.”
Chief Scientist: “I mean, would people tape this into a notebook or paste it? Or would you imagine notebooks that would bind such paper?”
Answer: “It’s not up to me to decide how people would use it. Doesn’t it look cool?”
Another type of answer we heard more than once to the question, “How would this be used?”
— “Oh, it’s a (replacement/upgrade) for this other IBM product.”
“But who would use it and for what?”
“It has three main components. Would you like a description of the components?”
Of course, there is a place for “playing around” with technology and thereby discovering things which someone else may find a use for. But in design and development of a product or service, having a clear notion of context of use and the users and tasks is fundamental. Of course, other users may appropriate a product or service for purposes beyond those envisioned by the original designers. That’s cool.
What’s not cool is designing a device that is to be used in the bright outdoor sunlight and then testing the display in a typical office environment. Have you ever run across something like that? I have.
A more subtle lack of contextualization in design occurs when the design team fails to realize how many interruptions happen to the user while they are trying to accomplish a single task with the new application. If you “test” the application while the user is in a quiet “usability lab” and can give your tasks their undivided attention, then necessitating them to remember the invisible internal state of “Insert” versus “Edit” mode may not be a big deal at all. They will simply remember. But in their office environment, they may be interrupted by a phone call, a message, or their boss entering their office and asking a series of detailed questions. If they now go back to the task at hand, there is about a 50-50 chance that they will correctly guess whether they are in “Edit” mode or “Insert” mode.
A design which shows the property of Not-Separateness is the natural result of a process which shows not-separateness. Here are a few common ways to help ensure the design process grows organically from the users and their goals & contexts.
* Put people on the design team who are familiar with the users, and/or their tasks, and/or their contexts.
* People on the design team observe people engaging in the relevant processes, whenever possible, not — or not only — in a “Usability Lab” but in the actual work environment.
Jointly develop a product or service with the group who will use the product or service.
Observe people actually using product P (or service S), version N so that version N+1 will be better attuned to the needs of the users.
Gather and understand feedback from service calls and help desks and customer complaints in order to improve over time.
There will be benefits to a company who takes such approaches beyond initial sales. If you’ve done any gardening, you will appreciate that the quality of the tomatoes you enjoy eating is related to the quality of the soil and the quality of the care you give the tomatoes. Similarly, a product or service that has the quality of Not-Separateness will not only be useful — users will fight to keep your product or service. It becomes integrated with the environment. To change the brand means that they will have to change the way they work; possibly even with whom they work. Not-Separateness is likely a path to what business people like to call a “Cash Cow.”
If you’ve ever walked through a neighborhood after a hurricane, you’ve likely seen many uprooted trees. When you look at the roots of an uprooted tree, what do you see? Of course, you see roots. But what else? You see rocks and soil all around and embedded into the roots. They are Not-Separate. In a hurricane, there are typically not only high winds. There is also a lot of rain. The trees are hit with a double whammy. The wind pushes the tree but the rain weakens the solid soil in which the tree is embedded. It is the combination that makes it very difficult for the tree to “hold on” and keep from falling over.
Living things, just like us, have a 4.5 billion year history of living. The living things adapt over time to their environment and they mold the environment to their needs. They are not separate. Flowers appeal to the insects who pollinate them. The insects who pollinate them are adapted to the characteristics of the flower. A horse adapts to their rider and the rider adapts to their horse. A product or service must have a design that serves the needs of its stakeholders. For a product or service to have maximum beauty, utility, and longevity, it must also have a way to adapt to the changing needs of the users and other stakeholders. At the same time, if the users and their organizations adapt to the product or service, then true Not-Separateness is achieved.
If you want to skimp on designing your product or service, you can make it more separate, more divorced from its context, its users, and its tasks. Of course, if you do that, you also make much easier for your users to abandon your product and switch to a new one.
Another way to think about this in terms of systems theory is where you draw the boundary. If you draw a sharp boundary around your product, you may find that, over time, your product becomes ever more peripheral to the community you’re trying to support and your product is ever more fungible with others in its class. On the other hand, if you draw the boundary around the product or service and the people and organizations who provide the product or service then, you are on the path of ever tighter interconnect.
Not-Separateness is not only a quality of good design in terms of not overly separating the context and users from the product or service. It is also a good quality for the organization that produces products & services. Of course, some people today must manage a giant amorphous “organization” of tens of thousands of people so they set up divisions, and departments, and groups, and teams, and positions etc. There may indeed be a “UX Department” and a “Software Department” and a “Hardware Department.” That’s all fine. But it is counter-productive if the UX Department sees itself as separate from the rest of the company. To a great extent the success of the UX Department depends on the success of the Hardware and Software Departments. The Sales Department’s success will, of course, depend partly on the skills of the Sales Department. But it will also depend on the success of the UX Department, HW, SW and Services.
Have you ever had a paper cut? It isn’t just the skin on a quarter inch of the inside of your ring finger that’s cut. You’re cut! It isn’t just that the finger feels pain. You feel pain! That causes you to take steps to ameliorate the pain and to try to make sure it doesn’t happen again. That’s why empathy in leadership is important. A leader must feel empathy for all, or the organization will disintegrate from lack of Not-Separateness. At some point, a raccoon may chew off its own arm in order to escape a trap.
But it isn’t the first thing that occurs to them every time they experience a thorn in the paw!
The raccoon doesn’t say to itself: — “that paw is giving me pain! I’m going to chew it off! Then, it won’t hurt any more.”
Evolution did not evolve a raccoon that acts that way. Self-mutilation exists but it is typically a last resort.
But not for corporations. It is the first thing they think of:
“Our (you name it) Department is not performing well. Let’s lay them off and outsource it.”
What does that say to every thinking employee in the entire corporation? It says:
“You know what? All this talk about teamwork and pulling together is a total bunch of bull$hit. You cannot trust management to do what’s best for everyone. You can only trust them to do what’s best for them.”
Living forms in nature are living forms. Their parts have severe Not-Separateness with the other parts of that form. Often, as in well-functioning families or teams, that extends to all members of the group.
Not-Separateness is essentially deep cooperation. I give to the larger community by becoming a part of it and doing my part in it. I lend strength to the community. In return, I gain strength from that community. It is not a zero sum game, of course. The community, if it is functional, is much stronger than the sum of the individuals in that community.
This is so deeply embedded in 4.5 billion years of evolution that it does not surprise me that we recognize beauty as being even more beautiful if it is not separate. Not-Separate enhances beauty because, like all the other properties, it is essential to life.
Eventually, if humanity is to survive, we will realize that Not-Separateness applies to all of us. We are not there yet. But that doesn’t mean we cannot appreciate and design Not Separateness in our products, in our services, and our lives.
Thomas, J.C. and Kellogg, W.A. (1989). Minimizing ecological gaps in interface design, IEEE Software, January 1989.
Thomas, J. C. (2012). Patterns for emergent global intelligence. In Creativity and Rationale: Enhancing Human Experience By Design J. Carroll (Ed.), New York: Springer.
Thomas, J. C. (2001). An HCI Agenda for the Next Millennium: Emergent Global Intelligence. In R. Earnshaw, R. Guedj, A. van Dam, and J. Vince (Eds.), Frontiers of human-centered computing, online communities, and virtual environments. London: Springer-Verlag.
Thomas, J.C. (1985). Human factors in IBM. IBM Research Report. RC-11267. Yorktown Heights, NY: IBM Corporation.
While all the previous properties of natural order seem positive, clear, and obvious, this one seems mildly scary. It reminds me of death, somehow. It’s true that individual death is part of the overall reality of life, it still seems scary. It’s reminiscent of whirlpools, caverns, the abyss. I suppose some of our tiny distant ancestors may have faced the dark mouth cavity of a large predator — a shark, a cave bear, a saber toothed tiger. And a few of those who were terrified enough to flood their bodies with adrenalin may have escaped to reproduce and pass on the terror of utter darkness genes to their offspring, including me.
In a friendlier interpretation, the void could be thought of as “empty” space, or more accurately, extra space not filled with functional items. From that perspective, The Void promotes rest, relaxation, rebirth, regeneration. Your day should include “The Void” in terms of activity — sleep, certainly, but also times that are unscheduled and restorative. If you are scheduling a day long meeting and every minute is accounted for ahead of time, there is no “margin” for something which catches the passion of participants to spill over. There is no time for unanticipated contingencies or for people to reflect on what is happening.
Similarly, a space (whether computer memory or physical space) that is completely “taken up” with data or things becomes inflexible. In extreme cases, nothing can be done because there is no room to move things.
When I was a kid, I used to enjoy puzzles that consisted of 15 square pieces and one blank space. The idea was to move the pieces around until the pieces were arranged into a particular numeric sequence (or made a picture). It’s immediately obvious that if there is no space, there is no way to move the pieces and whatever order they are in is the order that they will stay in.
It seems that people who want to control everything want exactly that — no space — no void — no possibility for change. It may be related to the mystery of overworking so many people with long hours despite decades of research showing people are more productive with shorter hours.
In a living human being, there is typically “space” in our respiratory system and our digestive system. To have zero space means we cannot eat and we cannot breathe. We do have spaces within our body — ventricles in the brain, sinuses in the head, and — crucially — females have a place that can accommodate the creation of a new life within.
A hive, or a garden, or a city may indeed be crowded, but if it literally has zero space, it dies, just as we would. The void allows flow — in the case of the individual human body, space allows for the flow of food and the flow of air.
A science that has no void, no space, has no flexibility. It is no longer science but dogma.
A budget with no space, no void, means every penny has been pre-assigned and this is not an effective way to budget.
Games typically have space (Go, Chess, Checkers, Monopoly) as do sports (Tennis, Baseball, Soccer, Basketball). Play often consist of using, changing, and manipulating space. The baseball pitcher tries to throw the ball so that it crosses through spaces where the hitter cannot easily hit it well. The hitter tried to hit the ball where the fielders cannot reach the ball. The tennis player tries to “build a point” by creating more space; e.g., by pulling their opponent progressively wider so that a shot can be hit into such a large space that it cannot be reached at all. In most games and sports, the amount of empty space, particularly at the beginning of play is relatively large. In chess, as in American football, play begins with a large space between the teams. In many games, there are special terms for spaces. A “Luft” in chess is a place for your King to go if attacked on the back rank by a queen or rook. In American football, the quarterback throws passes from the “pocket” which is supposed to protect them from tacklers.
Under Umbrage, everything living and loving was smothered by a rule, or at least she wished it were.
To me, “The Void” connotes more than space, however. “The Void” seems to refer to a relatively large, concentrated space. In music, for example, without any space, there is just a long, annoying noise. But “The Void” isn’t just the space between notes. It seems as though it must be a significant silence such as after the tuning and before the first note is played or the space between movements in a symphony.
Of course, we can contemplate things at different scales. If we see Alternating Repetition from a distance that allows us to see the alternating repetition, we might see gaps as spaces, but not as examples of “The Void.” If we moved our point of view so that only one such gap were visible, it might become an example of “The Void” at another scale.
Most of our everyday reality is physically made up of empty space. Every atom is more than 99.999 % empty space. At that scale, it’s mostly void or at least mostly space. And, at the other extreme, although it may seem that space is crowded when you see the Starship Enterprise go through the universe at “Warp 9” that’s an illusion to make it more interesting. Most of the universe (and our solar system) is empty space. The sun which is by far the largest object in our solar system has a diameter of 865,000 miles. That’s big! But the nearest planet, Mercury, is 40 million miles away. And, that planet is the only thing in its orbit.
Once I was driving with my family from San Francisco to Salt Lake City. Around 3 am, in the absolute middle of nowhere with no lights and no moon, I stopped the car and ran a quarter mile from the road into the desert to look up at the stars. It doesn’t “look” empty of course. Far from it. Yet the sheer blackness of the background and the vastness of it made it seem like a true void. In fact, because of contrast with the sharp and sparkling stars, the vast void was made into even more of a vast void.
An atrium, a central courtyard, a reflecting pool — can these be voids that strengthen the center?
If we look at a void, does that produce a different aesthetic feeling from when we are in a void that surrounds us? If you and your family or friends or tribe huddle around a campfire at night, the fire is a center. You can see the faces of people in the firelight. But you are aware that each of you knows that surrounding your little group is darkness. Sometimes, in movies, someone will remark, “Well, it’s quiet.” To which, the proper response is, “Yeah. Too quiet!” When the frogs and crickets stop making noise, the heaviness of the silence becomes oppressive. It might mean that large predators are about, each with their own maw of void. Being in a large space that has no perceptible features is awe-inspiring or even fear-inspiring. Looking at a large space that is situated in the context of a pattern may echo that feeling slightly, but to me, it feels very different.
The same tune can be played on a piccolo or a base vile.
When it comes to user experience, what comes to mind for me is the empty page or the empty canvas or the empty spreadsheet. These are large unfilled spaces. To compose, whatever the medium, requires of us a kind of courage. We must “enter” the empty space. In order to write, we must also allow for empty space within us. As I write, I find that there is always a rhythm of “describing” things that have “come up” for explication and then pausing — staring as it were into the blackness, the void, of my own consciousness. I allow things to arise from that inner void and show themselves. I don’t always know what it will be.
I think that process (and not wanting it disrupted) is one reason that I, like so many others, found “Clippy” to be so annoying. Whenever I was allowing for the void to reveal to me what I wanted to say, “Clippy” would imagine I was stuck and offer a suggestion (invariably irrelevant).
Perhaps you or one of your kids has played “8-ball.” You ask it a question then you shake it a little and an answer “appears” in a little window. The most enthralling time is that space between when you ask the question and the answer appears. Of course, it’s fun thinking of the questions and interpreting the answers, but the most dramatic part is waiting for the answer to appear. In that moment, you may suddenly realize what answer you want to appear.
If an application is to support any kind of creative activity, it should not “rush” the user and it should provide the user empty space in which to create. That emptiness can be intimidating, but I still think it’s necessary.
My desktop has many icons, tool bars, and windows. The only true void is the blank part of the writing pane in Pages. Visually, since the blank part of the page is white, it doesn’t seem much like a void. There is enough space between the icons and menu items to make them legible, but there is no “void” there. Visually, the only thing that really strikes me as a void is the totally black rounded rectangle beside the color sphere in the Format window. It’s black because that is the color of the text I’m writing in. Its function is nothing like that of an actual void.
The void may symbolize death, but it also symbolizes life. It is the happening place. It is the dance floor. It is the game board. It is the playing field. It is waiting for the curtain to rise. It is the movie theater when the lights go out but the movie has not begun. It is also the movie theater when the credits have done rolling but before the house lights have come up. If it is death, it is also rebirth. If it is birth, it is also the end.
As every moment of our existence and our attention becomes commoditized and sold to the highest bidder, there is ever more pressure to eliminate the “wasted space” inherent in the void.
Running into the ocean; diving into a pool; deciding to have a child; moving; divorcing; falling in love; losing a loved one; starting a composition; beginning a design — these are moments when we brush up against the void or enter it or avoid it or incorporate it into ourselves. We like to fool ourselves that there is some process or routine or formula or piece of software that can take all the uncertainty out of these transitions into the unknown.
That’s all illusion. It’s the very nature of life itself — that dance on the razor edge between chaos and repetition — to embrace the void. We try always to “avoid” The Void.
Nature doesn’t “abhor a vacuum.” Nature is mostly vacuum.
But we abhor a vacuum. Our productivity tools are geared toward reducing “The Void” as much as possible. Children are shuttled from one high intensity activity to another to ensure that when they apply to college, they will get in one which will ensure that they will get a high-paying job that will enable to them to work their entire lives so that there will be no uncertainty.
I am also a product of that “Avoid The Void” culture, so I find it hard to imagine what it would mean to design a tool or UI or app that embraced and encouraged The Void. There are some specific mobile apps that support meditation or listening to music or breathing. What of composition though? Whether it is programming, writing, drawing, or creating a business plan, is there a place for The Void to be supported? How would you encourage it? What visual elements or other sensory elements could be used to support it? How would you measure how well you did?
Among other things, I think human beings enjoy making “connections.” That applies to interpersonal connections. It also applies to connections in our own heads. “Oh, you’re the new friend I’ve been hearing so much about.” “Oh! That’s why my omelettes always stick!” “Oh, I can move immediately after I hit the ball! I don’t have to wait and see where my opponent hits it.” In other words, we like to learn. We like to see relationships that we didn’t see before.
I think this is why I find “Echoes” a very beautiful property in architecture, in music, in poetry, and in natural beauty. Echoes need not be perfect duplications. In most cases, it’s better if that’s not overdone. Perfect duplications at the same scale are more evocative of machinery or mass production that natural beauty.
At this point, I am sorely tempted to tangent off on why, when you yell into a canyon, what comes back is not a perfect duplication or the original sound waves you sent out. But I will resist.
Even identical flowers or butterflies, when seen from different angles or distances, can provide a kind of echo effect. Photo by Cindy Gustafson on Pexels.com
When nature, or a designer, puts subtle echoes, it’s delightful because it allows us to make a connection that is “across” or “different from” the main show. For example, in poetry, one typically reads from start to finish. It is a linear experience. At the same time, there are often rhyme schemes so that words “echo” other words in an auditory sense. Poetry often uses metaphor which becomes a kind of “color scheme” for the room that particular poem created.
In social interaction, if it is done skillfully, there are also echoes. Things are hinted at, shown only partially, or suggested. Slowly, a listener may become hooked on an attractive lure and end up swallowing, as they say, hook, line and sinker! If someone came right out and said up front, “Now look, I’d like to become dictator and what I need from you is to send me lots of money and thirdly, swallow any bull-crap I spew and actually, come to think of it, you might have to kill your granny and or your kids. On board?” No. Very few would take that on. Instead, it is hinted, intimated, insinuated that: “Everything that’s bad in your life — that’s not your fault! I know who is to blame and I can help right all those wrongs!”
Echoes aren’t always bad in human interactions. Far from it. One of the most amazing things to observe is how a two or three person team in trivial pursuit or Who Wants to be a Millionaire throw twenty miscellaneous and various possible answers — all wrong!! — into the air and after several minutes of being nowhere close to the answer, someone shouts: “The Mad Hatter!” And that is exactly right.
In music, there are harmonies, themes, motifs, recapitulations, etc. In some musical settings such as cathedrals, the music may produce literal echoes. Regardless, themes are repeated, varied, morphed into something different and so on.
So too, in architecture. If we try to imagine how buildings first came to be, it would be quite natural for them to have “echoes” because the entire building would be constructed of local materials. Stones, reeds, skins, bricks, logs, caves, etc. naturally lead to echoes because it’s all the same “stuff.” In modern skyscrapers however, it’s quite possible to design something with no echoes at all. The only point of the skyscraper is to be as efficient as humanly possible to make as much money as possible. What would be the point of “echoes”? Would it generate more profit? Sure, it might be an interesting experience for those who looked at our building. To which, a likely answer might be: “Who cares?”
Isn’t it interesting that back when most people had next to nothing, they bothered to make cathedrals as beautiful as they knew how. But now that we have much, much more, we can’t spare the cash. (“We may be rich, but we are not yet the richest.”)
Nature is rife with echoes. Here’s one I have the privilege to witness almost every night. As the sun goes down, the light in the garden turns yellow. This means that flowers, trees, and so on will appear in higher contrast and in more golden light. A close up of white roses will look golden in the setting sun and so too will tree branches in the background.
If you walk (or run, bike, etc.) through a garden or a forest, the experience will typically be full of echoes because you will walk by many individual oaks, beeches, roses, mayapples etc. each of which echoes to an extent all the others. In the same way that a poet puts rhyme, allusions, and other figures of speech to cause echoes both within the poem and with your memories, so too, a walk in nature will remind you of other previous experiences and of other plants and animals that you see earlier in the walk. The actions of walking themselves (or of wheeling, running, biking or cross-country skiing) are a kind of echo in much the same way that a steady rhythm in a poem causes echoes among all the stressed syllables and among all the unstressed syllables.
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Where do echoes occur in user interfaces? One of the few things that I think of are that logos associated with various pieces of software appear in different places and at different scales. For example, I recognize the small version of the Safari logo on my tool bar. To the right are open file locations in that browser. There is a small image of the landing page of each website, but each little icon also has a teeny version of the Safari logo. If I go to the Safari website, I’ll no doubt see other sizes of Safari logos.
To the extent that developers use a common style guide, that also causes a kind of echo effect. I might see something to the right of my writing pane and say to myself: “Ah, under ‘font’ I see a common widget next to ‘11pt’ — a widget consisting of an up and down arrow. I’ve see that before! I’ll bet I can change the font size with it. Clicking on the up arrow will make for larger font; clicking on the down arrow will make a smaller font.”
To the extent that the use of various conventions causes correct patterns to be accessed out of my memory, those echoes seem mildly aesthetic and quite useful. Where else do you see “echoes” in user experience or in user interfaces?
Materials and organisms in the natural world such as wood, rock, clouds, reeds, water, animals, and plants exhibit a degree of roughness. By contrast, mass production ideally produces items that are identical and “sharp” or “smooth” at the boundaries.
Think of the difference between a hand-thrown pot and a cup that is mass produced. Think of the difference between a cottage made of stone and a house made of prefabricated walls. Think of a path with flagstones and gravel versus a “sidewalk.”
A rough path may mean it takes you longer to reach your goal. It may also make the entire journey more enlightening and enjoyable.
Perhaps because our ancestors evolved in a natural world for billions of years, we sense that roughness connotes something natural. To me, the property of “roughness” evokes beauty and comfort while perfectly straight lines and rectangles makes me feel as though I am in a purposefully constructed space. Someone who builds a tower of stones or wooden blocks must be mindful of the whole. Tiny to moderate variations in size, angle and texture mean the constructor must pay careful attention. No two constructions are identical. By contrast, if you and I were to build a plastic rectangular lego tower of a specified size out of specified blocks, the results would be indistinguishable. It is much like cursive script versus printing. It is much like making a stew from scratch versus heating up a TV dinner.
An old house is prone to crumbling, leaks, misalignments, idiosyncrasies, and cracks. If we allow the house to go completely to ruin, it becomes impractical or at least quite inconvenient to live in. On the other hand, a little bit of roughness gives the abode more character. Since glass is actually a fluid, old windows begin to “flow” slightly introducing irregularities in the glass and therefore in what is seen through the glass. A new window, on the other hand, it typically “perfect” and therefore somewhat boring.
As a driveway ages, the effect of nearby life and natural forces begins to produce small cracks. These make the surface more interesting visually. It also requires someone walking to pay more attention to where they are stepping; that is, to be more in the moment. Such cracks encourage further incursions by living forms.
Flowers often exhibit beautiful symmetry. The symmetry, to me, is made more beautiful because of slight variations in the size, angle and color of the individual petals. If instead, you imagine a mathematically perfect flower in which there is zero perceptible difference in the size, angle and color of the petals, do you feel that is more beautiful? Does it make you feel more comfortable?
I don’t mind that your keyboard may be identical to mine. I use the computer as a tool. Sometimes, it is used to produce art of one sort or another. But if the art that everyone produced were as much the same as the keyboards, it would seem sterile, non-living, mechanical. A brand new chair will hopefully be evenly painted and the upholstery will be unworn. Over time, the paint will begin to chip and the upholstery will be threadbare and potentially stained in places.
We have been taught to see such things as flaws, defects, and imperfections. But are they? At some point, the “ravages of time” (or, more accurately, perhaps, the “ravages of entropy”) can make things less than ideally functional. For instance, your tires wear over time and, while they may look more interesting, worn tires are a safety hazard for you, for your passengers, and for everyone else on the road.
Similarly, if you must undergo surgery, there’s a good reason for your surgeon to use a machine-tooled scalpel with a “perfect” edge. Railroad cars and railroad tracks that were too diverse from each other might look more interesting, but they would be less safe.
In many cases, however, roughness does not negatively impact functionality. It looks better without negatively impacting functionality. A chair, baseball glove, or pair of shoes that is slightly worn still works. Perhaps it even works better.
Roughness in the body of a living things often allows local adaptation. The muscles in your body, for example, are not of a “pre-specified” and precise size. If you exercise a muscle, it will get stronger and grow larger. That allows you to adapt to your circumstances. Your skin is also capable of growing stronger in places where it needs to be. Your bones grow stronger if they are required to bear a greater load.
Roughness also exists across individuals within a species. Unlike items that come off the assembly line, items that come from life have slight variations from each other. Some seeds are smaller; some are larger; some are stickier; some are smoother. In some cases, these differences will have no impact on the viability of the seed. But sometimes they might. Life is always trying little “experiments” of small variations to see whether one might be better than another. And, by the way, that is not some minor feature of life: in many ways, that is life: the balance between repetition and variation.
To me, the roughness of stucco adds to its beauty.
It’s ironic that our minds, which sprung from this balance, often strive for imbalance. To make things “simpler” we like to over-regularize and over-specify. Sometimes, you can go a rather long ways in one particular direction if you take such a drastic step. But if you’ve miscalculated in any way, or if your data were inaccurate, or if conditions changed after your data were collected, you’ll be stuck speeding down a railroad track toward what is now obvious disaster. Trying to impose an absolute pre-specification of action for every set of circumstances is impossible. To achieve something like it, people sometimes ignore the complexities (the roughness) in real life, and throw things into a small number of buckets. Making decisions on the basis of what bucket something is in, is a lot like judging a book by its cover. Such a process takes things which are, in fact, rough and treats them as though they were mathematically perfect.
Because of the “roughness” of circumstances, many societies have found that putting in place the human judgement of many with countervailing interests often works best. In America, for instance, there are three branches of federal government. The judge conducts a trial, with different people advocating for the two sides. In many cases, a jury of twelve decides guilt or innocence.
Living systems are robust to various changes in circumstances. A conventional car engine, for instance, is designed to use gasoline or diesel. Put in the wrong fuel and you might ruin the engine. But what about a human being? You can use a tremendous number of different kinds of fuel in the form of food. Once actually working inside your body, it’s actually one of a much smaller number of types of fuels: carbohydrates, sugars, proteins, fats. This is just one of the many millions of ways that various life forms show resilience and robustness. Because life endlessly plays; because it exhibits roughness; because it is diverse; because of this, it adapts and it evolves.
Meanwhile, as we look at things, we feel intuitively that “Roughness” is conducive to life and is also one of the quintessential aspects of life.
“One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” — Robert Frost, Birches
If you have ever swung on birches, or tried to climb any other kind of tree, you know that each is shaped and branched a little differently. From the ground, it’s easy to glance at a tree and think the branches are all basically the same. They are not. And if you are a kid who actually spends a lot of time climbing trees, you pay attention to the peculiarities of specific trees and specific branches on those trees. Why? So as not to kill yourself, or worse, hear your parents say “I told you so!” after you break your arm swinging from a tree, say. But the miracle is that, although you are not immortal, you can heal your broken arm. In order for that to happen, obviously, some parts of your body have to do things differently than they have been doing. The “Roughness” of life isn’t only a visual characteristic. It’s also a characteristic of the processes of life. It’s also characteristic of a the processes of a healthy organization.
As a kid, I would have learned every branch of this tree. Noticing “Roughness” is being mindful and sometimes noticing “Roughness” saves lives.
When it comes to the elements of a User Interface, in most cases, the elements are modeled after machines, not natural phenomena or living things. Is that necessary? Perhaps designs that project “Roughness” would be harder to program, harder to maintain, and may be even confusing to users? What do you think?
In physical objects, usage often creates or exacerbates “Roughness.” Could it be advantageous for this to happen with UI elements as well? Would window edges that looked “handmade” or “rough hewn” be more beautiful? More comforting? More usable? Less usable? Right now, conventional systems would make it harder to “calculate” the edges of a rough window than a conventional, straight-edged window. Must it be so? Or, could different architectures make roughness easier to calculate and require fewer resources?
When I think about the broader User Experience in terms of Roughness, what I imagine is that a system that has “Roughness” might mean that there is flexibility in the order in which subtasks are carried out. Perhaps, it means that you offer the user of a word processing application different options in terms of font, style, documents. etc. Perhaps it even means that the user can design their own font or create their own document type. What do you think “Roughness” means in terms of User Experience?
My first conscious memory of thinking about “gradients” was in college biology. Gradients of chemicals make a difference in terms of cell differentiation, our professor explained.
For the past few days, I’ve been walking the garden on the lookout for “gradients.” As an experiment, I’m going to break up the discussion of gradients into sub-categories.
Visually, all the various gradients look similar. I am categorizing them by the cause of the gradient.
So, first, we have “Perspective Gradient” … as we look at identical or nearly identical items at different distances, they will obviously appear to have different sizes and different distances between those items.
Second, we have “Light Gradient.” For example, a series of spheres or cylinders lit by a single source, the three-dimensional shape will result in a gradient of light and dark from most angles.
Third, there are often “Color Gradients” for both animals and plants.
Fourth, there are “Growth Gradients.” Color Gradients, are often a specific example of Growth Gradients. However, there are other types of Growth Gradients. For example, in many plants new growth is at the distal end and is smaller. Old growth is more central or more toward the roots; it is older, and is larger.
Growth Gradients not apply to many plants and animals. They often apply to organizations as well. Imagine a multi-national distributor with field offices in half the countries in the world. If they move into a new country, at first, there will only be a few
Conversely, Color Gradients can be quite intentionally added by the artist! Here’s a detail from a John Lennon lithograph. Note that “Boundaries” and “Gradients” reinforce each other. The Gradient makes the Boundary Stronger and vice versa.
There are also “Force Gradients” that appear in response to water, wind, gravity, magnetism, etc. One could argue that “Growth Gradients” are due to forces as well. Historically, gradients can arise from evolutionary pressures. These, in turn, are instantiated, in many cases, by chemical gradients of hormones that control growth. However, there are also many non-living cases of gradients.
Finally, there are “Intentional Gradients” that are put in by artists, architects, landscape gardeners, designers, and UX designers.
Although the examples above are visual, there are also gradients in music. There are gradients in activity.
Gradients are also present in narrative. Think of the rising passion between two lovers or the increasing tension and suspense in a mystery or horror film scene.
Are there gradients in User Interfaces? One example that springs to mind was in the “Audio Distribution System” and “Olympic Message System.” These were audio messaging systems from IBM that allowed subscribers to the service to leave an audio message to a person or distribution list “on a person’s phone.” (Of course, the message was really on a server and played upon demand.) The UI’s only visual elements were an ordinary touch tone key pad circa 1980 and possibly a small booklet or template with the various command options. Primarily, the user was meant to hear Prompts for actions.
The gradient part came in the fact that the user could speed up the audio more and more as they became more and more familiar with it. That variable speed applied to prompts and also to messages. A typical user would experience slow messages, then faster messages, then, still faster messages, and so on.
In another IBM project, we built a “Personalized Education System” that would allow IT personnel to build a “Custom Course” for on-line learning that could vary continuously in length and difficulty. However, while each individual user could choose length and difficulty, they typically did not experience a gradient in that regard. By analogy, some insects may prefer to chew on new growth while others may like more mature leaves. An individual insect only experiences one “size & tenderness” yet the plant taken as a whole provides a gradient. Similarly, if your fellow citizens ever get there act together enough for you to have a barbecue party again, you might offer up a range of options on how done you cook the burgers. In this case, we might say the BBQ service offers gradations though an individual burger is not a gradient. This isn’t strictly true. A well-done burger is fairly consistent throughout but a rare burger may be much more rare in the middle and charred on the edges. So, for that choice, there is a gradient of experience.
Compared to the natural environment around me, which is positively thick with gradients, I don’t see (or feel) many gradients in any of the UI’s I interact with (games aside). The fisheye lens provides one way of introducing gradient into the UI. It produces, a kind of “Perspective Gradient.”
It would be possible to put gradients into many of the visual elements of a UI. Would it make the interface look more like nature? Would it be more beautiful? Would it be distracting?
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Here’s a poem that illustrates a gradient of love.
petersironwood 