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.

I hate nose piercings, and I’ll tell you why. (If you have a pierced nose, I apologize in advance.) The nose, unlike almost every other aspect of the face, is purely functional. No one ever describes someone as having a really beautiful nose. “The rest of her face was so-so, but her nose was gorgeous!” Nope, doesn’t happen. Eyes and mouth, yes. Nose, no. We only notice noses when they are ugly or disproportionate or when they are decorated with a piercing.

I’ve always held the notion that decoration should enhance the best parts of something. Crown molding to emphasize a high ceiling. Inlays to show off a wooden floor. Mascara to highlight the eyes and blush for the cheekbones. Tattoos and piercings on a fetching body part. Why draw attention to a plain or ugly feature? (And lest you think I’ve forgotten about earrings, my theory there is that they aren’t there to decorate the ear (unless they are up high), but rather to emphasize and lengthen the neck.)

I think this principle applies to products as well. Although the trend these days is simple minimalism, if you have a sexy feature, why not decorate it to make it stand out? Does this make eye candy? Yes, but it can also make Delight for the user. Minimalism done poorly can produce some pretty flat, boring designs. I, for one, am really tired of the now-ubiquitious three-column blog-style layouts that are everywhere on the web. There’s no decoration–everything is the same, bland. Nothing is really ugly, but nothing is very sexy or delightful either. I almost long for the days of more experimentation with crazy Flash layouts and such. Sure, there were some ugly sites made that way, but there were also some neat, radical things as well. With the advent of Ajax and new desktop widgets, there’s never been a better time to break out of this homogeny.

Let’s all pull those nose piercings out, shall we, and put decoration in its appropriate places.

Last week’s New Yorker has an unintentional (I think) theme running through a number of its articles: the idea of presence. There’s a Malcolm Gladwell profile of “The Dog Whisperer”, Cesar Millan. There’s another profile of Patrick Leigh Fermor, the English adventurer. A piece on iconoclastic filmmaker Robert Altman in Talk of the Town, and even an interesting view of thrill-seeking molecular biologist (yes, you read that right) Charles Zucker in “The Search for Sweet.”

All of these articles note, either directly or indirectly, about the effect that certain people have on a room, changing its character, making more things possible simply by being there. Gladwell’s article, which he talks about on his blog, is overtly about this, and specifically about the actions that the Dog Whisperer employs to achieve this effect.

Designers, of course, need this exact same sort of presence. My old grad school professor Dick Buchanan would call this the design attitude and note that it is one of the four vectors of organizational change. In Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling also notes the way designers’ presence (being “designerly”) can affect change.

“Being designery is what one does, as a practical measure, in order to overcome the reactionary clinging to the installed base of malformed objects that maul and affront the customer. What cannot be overcome with reason can be subverted with glamor.”

The industrial designers of the mid-20th century knew a lot about this. Raymond Lowey projected an air of bon vivant with his French attitude and water coolers filled with martinis (!). Henry Dreyfuss with his brown suits made to stand out from the standard blues, blacks, and grays.

Knowing a designer needs presence is not the same as a designer having presence, of course. It’s certainly not enough to simply wear a brown suit! But then, what actions can be done to create presence? Dick Buchanan might say it’s how a designer wields rhetoric to make his/her point, how designers present themselves and their work in a persuasive manner. But that bumps into the question of ethos: the character of the designer. Presence, one assumes, is part of a designer’s ethos. Does one become charismatic, or is one born charismatic? If you aren’t born charismatic, are there actions one can take to make yourself moreso?

Obviously, I’m not through puzzling through this.

I’ve published three more interview excerpts from the upcoming (only two months away!) book, all three of them friends and bearers of wisdom: Shelley Evenson on Service Design, Carl DiSalvo on Designing for Robots, and Adam Greenfield on Everyware. I’ve also added a feed to the book site to update those interested in the book to follow its progress: http://www.designingforinteraction.com/index.xml (for you atom fans, it’s http://www.designingforinteraction.com/atom.xml).

Although I’m not listed on the site yet, I’m going to be on a panel at Webvisions 2006: Let go, Jump in: Community Marketing Strategies for Empowered Customers. An unusual topic for me, I know, but I think I have some interesting things to say about it after some recent projects I’ve done.

I’m also doing some talks based on the book at Adaptive Path’s User Experience Week: What is Interaction Design? and The Elements, Laws, and Attributes of Interaction Design. These two 45 minute sessions are a warm-up for this fall’s Designing for Interaction Day, where I present all the stuff in the book in earnest. Tentative places/dates for that are September in San Francisco, October in New York, and December in Chicago, with more locations (London? Austin? Sydney? Bangalore? Tell me where!) in the winter/spring.

But to heck with me. The big news about UX Week this year is the killer line-up of guest speakers: Steven Johnson! Michael Bierut! Shelley Evenson! Jared Spool! and more being announced later! It’s going to be a great event.

…that’s Adaptive Path Blog. Yes, we’re finally eating some of our own dogfood over on the Adaptive path site. Check it out.