Ninakix's Posterous

The approach ignores the magic and the soul. I understand the value of data and a rational approach to things like engineering. I would like someone who is designing an airplane to use a rational, data-driven, scientific, rigorous approach to understand how much weight that plane can hold. But in the same example, we find an obvious illustration of what happens when we only use an analytical approach. Flying sucks, and it sucks because it’s been engineered to death. Using Google is starting to be a lot like flying, probably because it’s being engineered to death. An emotional approach has value, because it provides things that are unexpected, sensual, poetic, and things that feel magical.

A/B Testing Ourselves To Death | Austin Center for Design

While I'm on the subject of EQ and IQ, this captures what I mean perfectly. The thing about engineering in general is that, when it comes to interfacing with real-world phenomena, we are creating models - effectively minimizing the guesswork of the physical world into something that works as a reasonable heuristic for behavior of manufactured artifacts. 

I hear too often about designing products, the idea that the virtual world allows us to shed some of these constraints, as code is a unique thing in that the production environment is the same as the idealized world. This may be true, but, the minute we begin to interface with humans, we face a problem that requires heuristics and mystery. 

This is all well and good... until we realize that anytime we find ourselves innovating, there is no algorithm, and probably not a heuristic either. 

So, pivots are a curious thing. The problem with pivots is that we can't measure everything. Emotion is not measurable. But even left with the things we can measure, we don't know what to measure (i.e., what counts) - and figuring out where to look is part of this process. And to figure out where to look, we have to watch and observe something for long enough to really gain some new knowledge from it. 

I accidentally ended up in the comments of Chris Dixon's post on this and produced this giant wall of text that basically sums up my problem with all those arguing that a bubble couldn't possibly be happening, so, I will copy pasta it here because, as I said there, THIS. 

I'm just having a hard time with this argument - I don't think he (or anyone else I've seen) is arguing about large, established companies. Some people are questionable about the later-stage *startups* (different from *established companies*), but I think there has been consistent concern about the issues in early stage startups.

We are spending a lot of time comparing this bubble to 1999, but I'm pretty certain that they are not similar in any way. The comparison between the two is useful and accurate in the same way that say, the Great Depression is useful for understanding the Great Recession. Which is to say, in limited, critical doses.

Furthermore, a bubble is one of those things that is ridiculously hard to prove the existence of during it's growth period. The entire point is that we won't see failures until we see them start happening at an alarming rate. I suspect that if we see that occur here, it won't be companies that are failing spectacularly, but investors.
Again, all these points are related: bubbles happen most frequently when the value of the goods is not clearly discernable. This is a period of uncertainty - no one really knows how the social internet will play out, just like no one knew how big search or e-commerce would be in the 90's. Now these quantities are a bit more known, so it's harder for these companies' values to inflate as much.

chris dixon raises the point in this thread that startups are now being seen as a viable career path, and I suspect that these things are fairly related. However, it makes a certain amount of sense that during a bubble, accompanying the over investment of [monetary] capital into a space is the over investment of human capital into the space. My concern is that being geared towards a career in *startups* is as worrisome as a career in *finance.* Both do certain crucial things, but more important than either of these things is a commitment to certain types of work. I am far more interested in a generation of people that have educated themselves to create, build and innovate - whatever institutional vehicle that facilitates it best for the skills that they acquire.

Still, as painful as bubbles and bubble bursts can be, they're crucial to innovation - the cyclical nature of Silicon Valley is that they take on industries with high uncertainties, whose value is as of yet undetermined. And it takes that exploration to determine what works, and what those values are - I compare it to the periods of boom and bust in evolution, that result in diversity and efficiency in turn. (I once tried to write an ill-fated college paper on this).

xposted

“So, let’s call attention to the one key area where Apple didn’t beat estimates: iPad sales. Analysts were estimating about 13 million units sold, although the range seemed to go from about 9 million to about 15 million units. Turns out that apple sold 11.9 million iPads in the last quarter. That’s a ton of tablets and it’s a massive year-over-year increase, but we’ve been talking about iPads as if they were *the* future of computing. Yet in a quarter with a new iPad launch, Apple managed to sell 12 million units worldwide. I don’t want to overpredict based on one number, but I’ve had a nagging sense from my own spotty iPad usage that the devices may remain a luxury. They don’t quite replace your computer and they’re not as mobile as your phone. What if the incredibly enthusiastic, urban, travel-all-the-time iPad early adopters actually have very different needs from the broader mobile computing market? What if beyond the perfect world travelers, the price is just too high for what you get? What if the upgrade cycle is going to be much, much slower than for phones?”

— The One Fly in the Apple-Earnings Ointment: iPad Sales - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

This is precisely what I’ve always felt - I feel like the needs we have from our computers, and the expectations that we’ve come to develop from our computing devices, make the iPad a bit of a luxury device.

Multitasking is a big part of that: I think less and less, as I’ve said before, are we looking at activities as isolated. As we do one thing, we may be taking data from that thing over to another thing, wanting to refer back and forth between things, etc. Our way of thinking is networked and associative, not linear and single tracked. The iOS computing interface, compared to the “paper on a desktop” model of the traditional OS, isn’t quite natural for computing tasks that increasingly reflect the way we approach content.

I think as we move forward, more and more people will want this from their computers, as creators or otherwise - and that that isn’t just a luxury of power users, but rather the other way around.

So I wrote about "looking at your fish."

Tossing it around, it reminded me of one of my other obsessions recently: this idea of meta-fandom.

What is meta-fandom?

Mostly something I made up, but I'd define it as the practice of fannish activities over fannish activities. <internet snobbishness> I'd define "fannish," and I understand that not all of you are from the internet, but really, you should educate yourself if you don't what fandom is. </internet snobbishness>

• Fanhistory - fandom
• Ohinternet - fandom
• Wayback Machine finds a post about fandom
• YaB posts tagged with fandom

Why is meta-fandom so important?

To me, meta-fandom is utterly fascinating because it holds in one package a peek at a future where social media and media are one and the same.

Fandom, I think, is one of the few social institutions on the web today which really encourage obsessive behavior. Fannish media is an odd sort of art, one that requires both obsession and social in equal doses.

Fannish media is similar to traditional media in that it is some sort of artifact, usually created to celebrate or explore some beloved thing. It is this behavior that strikes me as extremely "look at your fish"-ish. These are the ways that individuals challenge themselves to look differently at this thing, a sort of prism with which to look at an object in many different lights. It is similar to design in the way that building prototypes help us understand the world in new ways.

But it's not similar to traditional media in that fannish media is very much a social activity. The aesthetic of fandom is not a lonely fan, sitting in their basement among figurines and posters. The aesthetic of fandom is that of a participant in a cacophony of voices, all exploring this subject. There is no sense of being part of a "fandom" without participating in some social element of that fandom. There isn't really a sense of the fan artist, working in some isolated studio producing beautiful works - because that person isn't contributing to this global, passionate culture of fandom. The rise of fandom, in many ways, is utterly inseparable from the rise of the internet.

So fannish media is really one of these great, solid examples, to me, of a new type of media: a media that explores the things that we love, but does so with the intention of participating in a conversation. If there is a tone to the act of creation itself, fans seem to have one of the strongest. What that means is probably harder to dissect, but suffice it to say that there is a different feel to it, perhaps in the odd blend of collectivist versus individualist values that fandom has that the traditional media maybe lacks.

This is, of course, very much different from the social media we see today - yes, while it is meant to spur conversation, very little of that social media addresses true obsessions, and as such, very rarely builds one on the other in any meaningful way.

Why is obsession so important?

Dan W. emailed me the following question on the first day of 2012: "I wonder what the boundary between passion and obsession is?" to which I could only respond that I wasn't sure that there was one without the other.

Following in that vein, Dan sent over two links that I absolutely adored.

Here's one of my favorite quotes from some interviews I did with various fandom participants:

“The dedication to the fandom is completely correlated to the time spent on it. Time is precious, so in giving time one is creating its personal worth. If I’m not reading fic at 3 am, I’m not really into it.”

What are some examples of meta-fandom?

The general idea of fanon is one that strongly reeks of meta-fandom. While most of the ideas on that page have some sense of acceptance by the large fandom community of ideas from particular fans or evolved out of the fandom itself, there is also the idea of fanon wikis, which are purely all about creating a new type of canon completely - accepted or not. This Star Wars fanon wiki has a great description of what it is, exactly, that they do. Equally impressive is the community established around Club Penguin fanon (I never knew there was so much that was fascinating about a kids' game, but there you go!). Even Wikipedia acknowledges the presence of fanon.

One of my favorites and oldest example of meta-fandom is the cultish behavior that arose around a Harry Potter fanfic called "The Shoebox Project." If you want to know how popular and influential this fanfic has become in the HP fandom, all you have to do is search Tumblr to get sense of it. All people still reading and talking about the fic, even though it's been a good five years since it's been updated.
Related: if this fic is ever updated again, pretty sure the internet will explode. In the meantime, the whole episode leaves us to wonder when fanfic and profic will slowly collide, and what the values of one might do to the other.

Another one from my younger years was an adorable little web comic, which upon remembering I will probably have to go back and re-read all of it, iharthdarth. This isn't Darth Vader repainted realistically. This is Darth Vader entirely reimagined, and people apparently loved it (and for the interested, there's apparently a LOST-inspired comic by the same author now).

The bronies (don't know who they are? EDUCATE, EDUCATE, EDUCATE, seriously, GO GO GO) continue to show their status as the best fandom in the internet right now with large doses of meta-fandom (one could even say it was born as a meta-fandom, because how else do you explain /pony?). Yes, they seem to have comics whose fandoms have been super-charged by Tumblr. But even better is the fan-created Derpy Hooves. Derpy Hooves was born of an animation error, and when fans of the show noticed her in the background, all googly eyed, they promptly named her Derpy Hooves. The show even eventually acknowledged Derpy Hooves, which ended up in somewhat of a controversy. That Save Derpy Tumblr describes the meta-fandom of Derpy best, so revered even the show's creators began to participate:

Who is Derpy Hooves? Only the awesomest, most amazing, ditzy little pony this side of Equestria. Derpy Hooves was born as an animation error (or hidden joke) in the first episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. The fans saw her, and adopted her as one of their own. She was given a name, personality, a backstory, a job, and even a family, all created by fans of the show. The creators saw the response and acknowledged it, they began to hide her in episodes for fans to find, and occasionally she would appear in a comical scene or two.

Anyways, so, uh, this:

What does meta-fandom teach us about the future of media?

When I look at this, I can't help but feel that while some forms of media are classic and eternal - the novel, the song, painting and sculpture - we may start new forms of media that begin to adapt to this world. This isn't a world where things are consumed passively, this is a world where consumption, and particularly consumption of the more intense, serious type of works, will be active, and interacting in some manner with consumers. So what will media that is designed for active consumption look like? I don't know. But it may shed many of the assumptions brought forth from the static medium of the page - linearity, permanence, timeliness (or the lack thereof). It may encourage a rethinking of what it means to consume media, and it's audience may change drastically, landing closer to these rabid super fans than the casual consumer. The role of author may turn to that of conversation starter and moderator, guiding this mass of ideas through a process of collective creation.

Newspapers and other digital mediums feel stuck, powerless, and undervalued. But perhaps it is time to stop, examine the new world, and start creating again. Perhaps it is time to stop thinking of how to squeeze value from our old models, and begin thinking about how to serve a new kind of consumer, and how we might build experiences that are meant to be social, to be built on and created along with. Like Robin's idea of "looking at your fish," the act of creation is a great way to see, and in that sense, fandom and meta-fandom may involve more time spent with media - characters, ideas, story lines - that we love, and less time with "new" and "different" media. So, the works that actually encourage this new sort of reaction may very well be the next great media form, as much about the UGC that exists around it as the thing itself.

I am in love with Robin Sloan's new "tap essay," which you should all download.

(And yes, that means I consumed it multiple times and do want to return to it.)

But what struck me is something that was on the fine line between implicit and explicit in the essay itself - the idea that, while we have created the like and fave buttons across a variety of services for one-time consumption of content, we have not created a truly compelling experience for the things we love, not just like.

What would such an experience look like?

To me, it seems Robin is on the right path - the idea that we want to create a space that allows you to "look at your fish." I'm going to push that even further, with the idea that "looking at your fish" means not just saving things for a return to later, but building tools that encourage the activities that cause us to return. The "looking" means not just consuming multiple times, but using that consumption to drive a deeper understanding of the content we're seeing.

I have some ideas, which I am going to let sit and percolate a bit, so do share if you have any ideas.

One of the things I've been asked about recently is why Facebook's product releases have been much more experimental and diverse than Twitter's. And the thing that's stuck out to me most is how both companies seem to view what they're doing. Facebook views their mission to help people connect. So, as a Facebook designer, there is an incredible amount of leeway one can take, as there are many different ways to help people connect. Twitter, on the other hand, is a bit more oblique. Their mission is to allow people to send out public messages of 140 characters or less. With that definition, there really isn't a lot of room for innovation: the product has already been built. With that mission, there really isn't a whole lot of places to go.

I think this gets at something fundamental that we often ignore in the tech scene: there is a fundamental difference between having a conceptually simple product, and a simple product to use. Yes, Facebook's product is incredibly complex - I remember a friend turning to me and saying, "there is no way any designer would have designed and okay'ed that homepage!" But that's not true - if it's true that Facebook thinks of themselves as building a toolkit for social connection, then that design absolutely makes sense. Users come to the site, and they seem to have some sense of how to use it and what to do there, driven by the very clear goal that they use Facebook for connecting to their friends. Twitter, on the other hand, has a comparatively simple product in terms of usage. But conceptually? It's not only completely obscured, it seems to have multiple use cases as well! I've got to imagine thousands of commentaries have been written on what exactly Twitter is and how you should use it. One wonders if Twitter's lack of complexity has more to do with a fear of toppling any one of these conceptual use cases users have, both by limiting use through product, but also committing to any of these use cases from an organizational perspective.

It seems like conceptual simplicity transforms flurries of links and navigation into a variety of affordances. I'd argue that many of us simply cannot use a tool that doesn't have these kind of affordances subtly suggesting what we could do next. It is easy to know what everything does on a Twitter page, but it's difficult to figure out what you should be doing.

This whole affair with the Curator's Code has been uh, quite interesting. I'm not going to document it here at the moment but, suffice it to say as I was reading through the content related to it with a pretty gleeful look on my face. It was only when I stopped for a second and thought to myself, "Wait, wait a second, what is this feeling? It's damn familiar... What is it, what is it, what is it? OH RIGHT, I DO REMEMBER THIS! This is the feeling of pure gossipy enjoyment of a good, old fashioned Internet drama!"

Okay, seriously guys. I adore the tech community, but I can usually expect most of you to follow a pretty simple rule for avoiding Internet drama: if you don't like someone, you don't have to follow them. It's the Internet. Close the tab, avoid their links, they go away. It'smagic, I swear! The Curater's Code is helpfully contained in one simple website, easy to ignore and avoid. 

But really, the golden rule of Internet wank is that it's always there because someone's sensibilities have been offended. And I guess I just didn't see that pure indignation spelled out, just a lot of rationalizing attempting to make logical a set of feelings. 

Yes, even techies have them. Feelings. Never logical. Annoying. In the way. 

These are the things of fabulous Internet drama. 

So naturally, I couldn't help but be endlessly fascinated. 

Why did everyone feel this way? What was the thing that wasn't being spelled out? 

And then it hit me: Popova has offended a few of our fundamental beliefs about the Internet and how it should behave, what it represents - our sensibilities, if you will. 

(I was equally annoyed by the Curator's Code, but maybe I've spent too much time with trolls because honestly? I wasn't so outraged as to remove my default status of "idgaf" that I apply to most things.)

Anyways, it's two-fold really.

The first is, the Internet isn't a place for top down governing. We are a mass for whom culture is not passed down from some producer or other media mogul, culture is simply decided on by some fortuitous and synchronous mass behavior. 

Think about this: Would everyone have been so offended if Popova started using her crazy Unicode symbols on her own site, at the bottom of her own posts? 

My guess is, probably not. 

What if, then, some of her followers started using these short forms as well? 

Nope, probably not. 

What if a lot of other people then picked up the habit? What if the majority of the Internet was using it? 

My guess is, we would probably not care, not seeing it any more or less offensive as using "via," or "hat tip," or "~" (but seriously guys, a tilde? I don't understand where that came from, I've never seen it before, but, whatever, apparently that's a thing).

In short, the Internet has an authority problem. We just don't like to be told how to behave or what to do. 

(No wonder I've always loved the Internet so much - I just cannot STAND being told what to do. It makes my skin crawl. Issues with authority indeed.)

And the second way Papova has offended us is a little bit more subtle, and maybe I'm imagining it, but I don't think I'm entirely wrong. 

For those of us who've spent time on the Internet before this Web 2.0 kerfluffle, before every entrepreneur in the valley started wearing ugly grey hoodies and flipflops, there was, I think, an understanding built. 

The Internet, it is true, is just a mass of wires and routers and servers and what have you. Papova seems to acknowledge this, and believe that there is something special about the way the web behaves today. That there is a fundamental difference between THAT web, the old web, and the wonderful enlightened world of us social web users. The Internet at large has rightly acknowledged that this attitude is a crock of shit. 

Because if you spent time on the old web, you knew that this was not, in fact, true. The Internet was similarly social back then too, we just didn't have tools that were so instantaneous or feedback-generous (who else sat around watching their "hit counter" go up?!) or pretty. 

To some degree, all information is social. All information is built by humans, and the implications of our social minds are built into it - remember when everyone thought the earth was flat? Or, for that matter, when everyone thought the earth was round? These were, after all, simply social memes that spread from person to person, no? 

But the Internet has always made us acutely aware of that connected state of information - the way most people see Wikipedia these days, as a place to get lost in the serendipitous links between information, is a reflection of that. And whether these links be displayed on a Geocities page or a cutting edge Storify page, these links have been made by humans.

Papova seems to have pronounced that her bold wanderings into the depths of, eww, old school information sharing imbues her with the bravery and commendableness of an Indiana Jones-type explorer. That is a foreign world out there!

But information is social. And just as we created links freely before and after, we believe we should be able to create links freely now. There is nothing separating the analog and the digital world as idea spaces, there is nothing separating a world of static HTML pages from the world of dynamically generated ones. 

These principles of accessibility, equality, and a slight anarchy is the ethos the web was built on. Somehow, the Curator's Code has managed to cut right into these hallowed values, and we probably just expected more from people who had used this very structure to create a name for themselves. 

No wonder everyone's offended. 

“His was a chariot of pure intent in a city out of control,” Hockenberry remembers. “Design blew it all away for a moment.” And this matters, he adds, because “an object imbued with intent has power. It’s treasure; we’re drawn to it. An object devoid of intent is random, imitative, it repels us. It is junkmail to be thrown away. This is what we must demand of our lives, of our objects, of our things, our circumstances: living with intent.”

- John Hockenberry's TED talk

I think this was one of my favorite TED talks from last week, and I have a feeling it may be an odd one. Hockenberry brought up a really interesting point: that we are all, in some ways, designers, that "intent is an essential part of humanity." This rang true to me, this was interesting and exciting to me, this idea that I wasn't the only one with the tendency to be repelled by things that just sort of, happened to be, and fascinated by objects created through passion and intent. 

It seemed to bring to mind one of the perplexities of the design field: that it is so varied, that there are so many forms of it, and marked by a huge diversity of technical skills, educations, processes, end results, and just about everything you could think of. There are graphic designers, type designers, interior designers, architects, product designers, web designers, UI designers, UX designers, fashion designers, systems designers... This is a fact that I think many design researchers have struggled with. But then it gets complicated - I took a class in my senior year at Stanford, Mechanical Engineering 112: Mechanical Systems Design. There is software design that is done, and software architects, and chip design, and just generally all sorts of design that goes into the problems faced by engineers. There is organization design, and the design of scientific experiments, and art, and many other things that confuse the designer if they think too hard about it. The general approach is just to ignore it - but maybe this is just reinforcing the power of design and intent, reinforcing the fact that this is one of those things that fundamentally matters to humankind.

I previously posted a blog entry on the fact that what differentiates designers from many of these other fields is our process around finding and formulating the right problem to solve. This is true - while many people can, once given an intent, design something that fits that intent, it's really hard to understand what intent should be when you start to get into fuzzier areas. As Facebook thinks about a redesign, what should their intent be? The broadest and least useful answer is, "the redesign should make money," but the need for something a tad more useful is obvious. Maybe something like, "the redesign should make it easy to stay apprised of the activities of a few close friends." These are the kinds of things that are generally referred to as design principles, actually - intent that has a point of view, an opinion about what works and what doesn't work. And that was why I was sort of jolted by Bret Victor's recent talk: 

"His principle was a specific nugget of insight… He divided the world to right and wrong in this fairly objective way." 

- Bret Victor's "Inventing on Principle"

Victor is, of course, talking about establishing a general principle, a general design principle, for all your life projects. Victor's is that "the object should provice creators with an immediate connection with what they're creating" - Victor phrases this more as a needs statement: "Creators need an immediate connection with what they're creating." But this isn't the only lexical coincidence: the words "nugget" and "insights" are actually exactly the words used when I have my own introduction to needfinding back in school. What Victor is talking about is so like the process of design - the process of discovering a principle which we can use to move towards bigger, better ideals (such as Victor's ideal that "Ideas are important."). 

And that's because what Victor is talking about is the process of design. Maybe that's what I'm getting at: that the real skill of product designers such as myself is that it doesn't take us years to discover insights, but rather that we have institutionalized this process of finding principles for new things based on insights. That we are students of process when it comes to designing, that we are constantly searching for that insight, that we refuse to build without it. Intentionality in objects comes as much from the fact that they've been designed to fulfill an intent, but also from the fact that that intent itself was designed. On the other hand, each of us is a designer at heart - and that's why, when we find principles on which to design, we feel a bit more satisfied, a bit more human. It is why designers take so much time and struggle to explain their principles to other stakeholders in a project. It is why 'evolution' is not design as evolution has no intent, and 'intelligent design' includes the word design in its name. It is probably why I cringe slightly at the idea of evolutionary design, as that seems a bit of an oxymoron to me. 

This weekend, a friend and I watched the movie Hugo, which really resonated with this idea of intent - the all-too-human connection with our principles, our beliefs and insights, as well as the work we put out into the world. That work, after all, encapsulates our intent.

Alright, as I said before, I would post the booklist from 2011. Confession, I didn't proofread these little notes, so uhm, tell me if there's anything horrible? 

And links to previous booklists:

• 2009
• 2010

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So, I was going to post this uhm, last year, but then I just kind of forgot about it, and then I discovered that I had literally lost my booklist from 2010 somewhere in the cloud. I couldn't find it in Evernote or Google Docs, I had no idea where I'd saved it. I guess that's what you get for adopting too many services? Anyways, A few months ago I discovered it hidden in the depths of my old Livejournal account (no, I have no idea why I chose to save it there), and decided that I would post both the 2010 and 2011 booklists together at the end of the year. So. I'm posting them both, starting with 2010. 

Also, link to Booklist 2009.

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