Many of the designers I know (or at least know of) have greedily downloaded a bunch of the TED conference talks. And while some reviews are mixed, most have been the sort of glow-y, OMFG, you have to listen to this! sort–the type of hype I feel like I’ve spent my whole life avoiding.

Why is this? And I don’t mean, why am I a crank, but rather how come some things that we should like, we simply don’t (or simply don’t care to take the recommendation)? Amazon offers me up stuff all the time that I can’t stand, despite having nearly a decade’s worth of purchases to make recommendations from. Tivo, after several years of data, is hopeless when recommending television shows. Music has traditionally had the worst recommendations for me. Celebrated bands that I really should love leave me cold.

I don’t think that I’m that particular–ok, I am–but not so much that a ton of data couldn’t overcome it. Or is it that the nuance simply isn’t there yet? That there aren’t enough data points for entertainment content yet for predictions to be more accurate? Steven Johnson has a great example from one of his books: searching for a popular alternative Seattle band with crunchy guitars and a passionate lead singer from 1990-1994 will get me both Pearl Jam and Nirvana, and there’s a significant difference between the two: to humans, anyway.

But even human recommendations can be faulty. Most of the people I know who like similar music to me love Neutral Milk Hotel and are always shocked when I’m indifferent. I’m the kind of pretentious jerk who would like the British version of “The Office” better than the US one, but actually it is the opposite.

As I’ve said in the past, recommendations don’t take into account whim. I might download an Ashlee Simpson song (“Autobiography” say), but that doesn’t mean I want all her songs. Sometimes off-beat stuff you’d never otherwise like, you do. For me lately, it’s the ridiculously catchy song “Crazy” by Gnarles Barkley. “Crazy” would likely never be recommended to me, but I dig it nonetheless. How do we account for that?

Most of my “recommendations” lately come from unplanned encounters–flipping TV channels, radio, co-workers’ networked music, books my wife has bought and I picked up. How do we–or should we?–design for that?

Bizarro World Senator Ted Stevens last week had this to say about the internet:

“They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand that those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material…”

Now, I did my master’s thesis (340k pdf) on metaphor, but these are new ones for me. “The internet isn’t a truck. The internet is a series of tubes.” Huh. Does he mean like pneumatic tubes?

Now obviously, Stevens doesn’t know the internet from his elbow and needs to spend a few minutes learning how the internet works. But it is interesting the odd view his choice of metaphors give us on how the internet can be perceived by people who know very little about it.

Most tech-savvy folks (yes, that’s probably you) are used to thinking of the internet in a few different ways: as a web (which relates to the underlying structure as much as anything: it is and it isn’t a series of tubes) or as an ocean, upon which we “surf.” Even though we’ve probably heard the metaphor “information superhighway,” I guarantee few of us have ever compared the internet to a truck!

Human beings use metaphor as a way of grasping unfamiliar, abstract concepts by comparing them to familiar, tangible items, just as Stevens did here with the abstract internet and the more concrete tubes and truck. Even metaphors that don’t make much sense (such as the truck metaphor here) can reveal things about the target of the metaphor. For example, before this, I hadn’t really given much thought to one thing the internet does quite well: haul stuff long distances. Like, well, a truck. The internet is exactly like a truck. Of course, with this “truck” there’s no engine, or driver, unless you extended the metaphor to say that http is one of those.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, except to say that we should remember that not everyone has the same metaphors in their head as to how abstract things work. For Stevens and those with only a vague notion of the internet, a series of tubes sounds about right. I probably have similar, misguided metaphors about how, say, government works. I somehow think that senators should be leaders, not embarrassments, say.

The first Designing for Interaction workshop based off my book will take place in San Francisco on September 20 at the Adaptive Path offices. Registration for this event is now open.

And for those of you Down Under: the following week is the Designing for Interaction workshop in Sydney at Web Directions!

One of the books that changed the way I think about generations was, well, Generations by William Strauss and Neil Howe. It’s a fascinating book and I highly recommend it to everyone. I was reminded of it when reading the news about Bill Gates stepping away from Microsoft. What struck me about the news (besides the news itself of course) was the ages of the four men involved. Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Ray Ozzie are all 50. Craig Mundie is 57. Baby Boomers, in other words, all of whom, from the looks of it, did their most innovative work back in the 1980s–before the commercial internet.

This isn’t saying they aren’t smart guys (yes, they all men, no surprise). But it will be interesting to see if they can rise out of the mindset that they and their generation helped form, that of the Personal Computer, not the networked computer that Ballmer and Gates have, for the most part, fought strongly against.

Aside from this individual case, I was thinking that each generation builds off of the technology and creations of the previous. How this roughly breaks down:

• Greatest Generation (1940s-50s): ENIAC and mainframes.
• Silent Generation (1960s-early 70s): Ethernet, input devices (mouse), Xerox PARC innovations.
• Baby Boomers (1970s-1980s): Personal computer, commercial GUI, internet protocols.
• Generation X (1990s-2000s): Commercial internet, web browsers.
• Generation Y (2000s-2015?): Mobile, social networking, ???
• Millenials (2015?-2030?): Ubicomp? robots?

It’s not a clear division, of course. Humans are messy, and there are always visionaries that see (and start) the next technology revolution far in advance of their generation (e.g. Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay).

What would be interesting to me would be to map the characteristics that Strauss and Howe attribute to each generation and see if the technology (and products based off that technology) that they produced reflect those generational characteristics. For example, is the baby boomer’s self-centeredness reflected in the idea of a personal computer? Is the angst and irony of Gen X reflected in the web browser?

It’s been nearly two years since designer John Rheinfrank passed away. I thought about him the other day when this quote was the centering thought at my unUsUal church:

Trickster is a boundary-crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of an in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. -Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World

(An aside: The last time I saw John was his funeral service at the UU Church in Pittsburgh, the church I started attending after being exposed to it at John’s funeral. And now this appears at my SF UU church. Coincidence? Maybe…)

I once asked John how he described himself, and his answer was “trickster.” He said he tricked companies into doing the right thing. Now that I am a consultant again, often for some large companies, I now have a better understanding and appreciation of his answer. Sometimes to do the right thing, organizations have to be tricked into doing it.

I often feel, coming in to a company from the outside, that I am crossing boundaries, bringing things from “the outside” in with me. It’s one of the traits that makes designers powerful, I guess, because we do work in many different industries and our discipline has so many sister disciplines that we get exposed to a lot of different methods, organizations, and ideas, which designers then, like viruses, “infect” their host organisms (the companies they work for) with. In this way, the companies learn new tricks and make money. Tricksters “make sure there is commerce.”

John, of course, did this trickster business really well. He was a persuasive fellow, and was able to make you feel smart by agreeing with him. This is a trait designers should cultivate.