John Thackara‘s new book In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World is, for the most part, a real downer. If you are feeling good about the world or Web 2.0 or whatever, just read the first chapter.

One of Thackara’s main themes is this: the artificial world isn’t sustainable, and most of those problems begin during the design process. It’s not really evil corporations destroying the world, it’s us. We’re doing it in small tiny increments that when added up, result in huge problems. The lightbulb you leave on. The shower you take. The manufacturing of the device that you are using to read this. Letting that device idle. All these small, seemingly harmless, things add up and are slowly destroying the environment. The internet will soon need 200 million or so IT people just to keep it running.

The book is crammed full of such facts, and unfortunately, the answer (or at least Thackara’s answer) to this crushing problem is that designers need to be aware of what they are designing: the materials and the environmental and social impact of even the most discreet thing. Now, I certainly believe most of what he’s saying but this is an awfully large burden for designers to bear. Or at least, bear alone. Our partners in manufacturing, development, and printing need to take on some of this burden as well.

In the Bubble is delightfully Euro-centric, which is refreshing for me as an American, but unfortunately many of the claims Thackara makes, while probably true for European cities, are decidedly not so for American ones. For example, Thackara says at one point that people are starting to buy only produce grown within 50 miles of where they live. Even in San Francisco, where I live, this would be a challenge, but probably nearly impossible in cities like Chicago, New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, where 50 miles out are still city suburbs.

The final chapter of the book, “Flow,” works as an excellent summary of the book’s ideas and of many forward-thinking ideas in Design with a big D right now. Among them:

• From blueprint and plan to sense and respond. Moving away from thinking about design as form and structure.
• From top down design to seeding edge effects. Imagining relationships and connections where none existed previously.
• From blank sheets of paper to smart recombinations. Designers are constrained by the myth they have to reinvent everything. Instead we should search for solutions that have already been created in other fields, industries, and the world at large.
• From designing for to designing with. Open models to create mass participation in the creation of a service or situation.
• From design as project to design as service. My favorite line of the book: “In today’s ultranetworked world, it makes more sense to think of design as a process that continuously defines a system’s rules rather than its outcomes.”

This chapter should be required reading for anyone seriously thinking about design.

As an aside, In the Bubble is really a terrible name for this book. The title refers to a phrase used by air traffic controllers to mean when they are in flow, in control. But It’s more common usage (being trapped in a situation a la the bubble boy or being out of the loop) is far from positive. Who wants to design in a bubble?

All in all, a recommended read, especially the last chapter and for fans of sustainable design.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, my first essay for Adaptive Path, “Persona Non Grata,” is now online.

I have a lingering distrust of consultants. Which is ironic because I work for a design consultancy and have earned my living as one off-and-on for years. But I’ve also been on the other end of the equation, the consultee, and have never forgotten the experiences I’ve had with “experts” from outside the company, people who come in and, based on a few days of poking around, shake up the company (and charge six figures). I’ve worked at places that have taken disastrous turns and hired incompetent idiots based on recommendations from consultants.

This is not to say that there is no value in consultants; there is and I wouldn’t be one if I didn’t think there was. Sometimes, as my old professor Dick Buchanan used to say, “you need person from out of town with a briefcase” to give perspective and tell the truth. And having an outside perspective can be helpful; often the people on the inside are too busy doing their jobs to have any perspective on them. They can’t see the forest for the cubicals. Consultants are also good for supplementing your workforce in areas outside your core competency. But you know this; it’s Business 101.

One problem with consultants is that too many of them have an agenda far outside of making your business better. They are selling their snake-oil cure-all for your company. (“All you need to do is follow our 27-step process and your company will be healthy again!”) You have to buy their agenda before you buy their solution. Your solution is tailored to their agenda, whatever that may be. With too many design firms, this means you have to buy into their exact, rigid method. There is a set way of doing every project, big or small, whether a step makes sense or not. Processes and deliverables aren’t tailored to fit the project or the client.

Another sad fact is that too many consultants don’t care about the success of their clients. Which seems insane, but it’s true. It’s easy, sometimes too easy, for a consultant to just walk away from the mess he just left for the client to clean up. Consultants should recall Raymond Loewy’s story about visiting the factory and realize the success of clients is our success as well. People’s financial and emotional fates are tied to ours, whether we acknowledge it or not.

I’m not implying that I’m immune from any of these criticisms; I’m not. But I’m aware of them. I’m acutely aware that whatever crazy ideas I come up with, someone’s (usually many people’s) jobs will be on the line when implementing them. I’m aware that as a design consultant, I’m an outsider, there for a few days, weeks, or months, not a part of the company, but as anything from an interloper to a savior, sometimes both at once and everything in-between.

Designing shouldn’t be taken lightly, and people’s careers and livelihoods shouldn’t be either. Consultants are called in to make things better, not worse. We should adopt the physician’s creed as our own: First do no harm.

Business and design. Design and business. It seems you can’t open up a business or design magazine these days without seeing the pairing of these words somewhere. Whole companies are starting up around it. We get presentations where designers are “emotional and non-linear” and business people are “rational and linear.” We hear the buzzwords “Design Thinking” bandied about without any definition of what that really is. Design is the new savior of business, and business people need to think more like designers. Business is from Mars, Design is from Venus.

Stop. Just stop.

Look, I’m happy that design is getting a lot of press in magazines other than I.D. I’m glad business people (who are these generic folks in their suits?) are understanding what design can do for them and their business. But I think there’s a fundamental disconnect going on, and it’s not between design and business: it’s between perception and reality.

Talking about design and business as two separate entities sets up a false dichotomy where there is actually none. Design has always been about business, and business has always been about design. Perhaps not good design or good business, but they’ve always been intertwined. Incessantly breaking them apart for the purpose of selling magazines or services does a disservice to both. I’ll say it again: design is business and business is design.

Yes, they are distinct subject areas with distinct points of view. Yes, the people who are in them have some different skills. Yes, one person might wear a tie, the other funny eyeglasses. And yes, you can see how quickly this argument dissolves into stereotypes.

Ever since it became a profession (which I’d say happened in the 1930s with industrial designers like Raymond Loewy), design has been linked to companies. Industrial means “a product of industry” after all. Designers don’t work for themselves; we’re not artists; we design things for people, for companies, for use (often by or in companies). In all but a handful of cases, designers aren’t the ones doing the final making, the production of their designs. Other people (read: other companies) do that; most of the time, we just do the prototypes. We need the collective resources that usually only companies can provide to make our designs realities.

Designers work with, and often in, companies. Without companies and thus business, we’d be a sorry lot. There’s so much talk about what designers can do for business, we forget what businesses does for us, namely give us money, jobs, and projects. It borders on arrogance for us to be seen as the saviors of business when it is so often business saving us. In the marketplace, we rescue each other.

But Dan, I hear you saying, what about the users? Surely design is about them? Business is about filthy lucre, while design is about people! We serve users, while businesses look after the almighty dollar. Right. Businesses hate the people who use and buy their products and services and all designers work for free.

I’m not saying that businesses are something honorable and admirable; sometimes they are, but sometimes they are horribly not. What I am saying is that businesses are what they are: products that are created, staffed, and, yes, designed by humans. And because they are, they are flawed, some more than others. I’ve yet to work at or for the perfect company, and I’m sure I never will. The things businesses have to do and endure are far too complex for anyone to ever design a perfect company. And frankly, I’m not sure you’d want to. Things that are perfect are no longer human.

Make no mistake: businesses are designed, and not usually by designers. Indeed, 99.99 percent of all design isn’t done by designers. It’s a human activity–perhaps the human activity. (See, more design arrogance!) Businesses just don’t spring into being: they are created by people in order to accomplish goals they otherwise couldn’t. They are designed products.

The long and short of it is that business and design together solve problems (and in the process make money). We can apply design thinking with a trough and fill up rooms with our prototypes, but until someone says, “Yeah, go do that,” designers are a powerless lot, actors without a play. Some of the artificial cleaving of design and business is the design community’s response to this powerlessness, of wanting “a place at the table,” not realizing that the table itself was designed. You can go design your own table, you know. You might discover you might not like the big table after all. Designers have become like my four-year-old, throwing a fit because she’s not an adult yet, not realizing that being an adult is damn hard too.

So enough with the business and design jibberjabber. Let’s just get down to business already, the business of design.

Pac Man turns 25 this month. Hard to believe. On my Atari 2600, I definitely had Pac-Man Fever.

As the CNN tribute rightly points out,

“This was the first time a player took on a persona in the game. Instead of controlling inanimate objects like tanks, paddles and missile bases, players now controlled a ‘living’ creature,” says Leonard Herman, author of “Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of Videogames.” “It was something that people could identify, like a hero.”

It was the first time most of us had ever adopted a digital persona, primitive as it was. But perhaps its primitiveness was part of its power, allowing for easier identification (see the great Understanding Comics). In the years following, game heroes took on more distinct forms, imbibed with more and more personality: Link, Mario, Gordon Freeman, et al. Part of the fun of playing these games–and really, part of the fun (and I suppose danger) of the digital world itself–is this taking on and playing different roles. I can be one persona on my blog, another on Everquest, a third on IM. In a broader sense, I suppose we play different roles nearly everywhere we go online (and maybe even in all life). I’m a shopper on Amazon, a stock trader on Ameritrade, a searcher on Google. (I think there’s a lot to explore in this sort of role-directed design.)

But what Pac Man and his ilk can teach us is that we’ll follow and identify with these digital beings, these pixel versions of the self, in all sorts of unfamiliar, alien settings that really don’t even make much sense (You mean I eat that big dot and then I can eat those ghosts?). Imagine applying the game-like principles of pac-man to something that does make sense, like stock trading.

Twenty-five years of the little yellow pie-chart guy and we still haven’t come to terms with what games are all about and how we can use their parts in things that aren’t games per se. We’re still like pac-man, running frantically around a maze, pursued by phantoms.

Want to be an interaction designer? Spend some quality time playing video games and watching TV.

I just finished reading Steven Johnson‘s latest book, Everything Bad is Good for You. It’s a great, provocative read and makes me feel much better about the hours I’ve wasted spent productively on Lost, Survivor and Medal of Honor. The book posits a number of concepts that are interesting to think about as a designer.

Johnson’s basic premise is that over the last twenty years, popular culture has gotten more complex and is making people smarter. He calls this the Sleeper Curve, after the Woody Allen “sci-fi” movie Sleeper where scientists from 2029 are astounded that people in the 1970s didn’t know the nutritional merits of cream pies and hot fudge. The type of intelligence that pop culture is training us in is the same sort of intelligence I use every day as a designer: pattern recognition, decision-making, and the ability to assess and respond appropriately to emotional signals. Television, video games, and the internet have all conspired to make us smarter in specific ways.

Johnson gives names to two types of activities that interaction designers not only engage in, but also observe all the time with users: probing and telescoping. Probing involves the discovery of the rules of the system through exploration, through playing with it. You discover not just rules, but the physics of the system: the patterns and tendencies. Probing can take the form of testing the limits of a system, pushing it until its artificiality (the seams) show. Telescoping is about the nesting of objectives inside each other like a collapsed telescope. It’s about focusing on immediate tasks while keeping in mind the ultimate goals, something both designers and users often need to do.

“Telescoping is about order, not chaos; it’s about constructing the proper hierarchy of tasks and moving through the tasks in the correct sequence. It’s about perceiving relationships and determining priorities.”

Johnson argues that the heightened probing and telescoping that we’re seeing is a result of complex forms (e.g. video games, the internet, etc.) that “encourage participatory thinking and analysis” and that “challenge the mind to make sense of the environment.” Johnson has a lot of interesting things to say about form, and about learning new digital forms. “Learning the intricacies of a new interface can be a genuine pleasure,” he writes. “I’ve often found certain applications more fun to explore the first time than to use.”

It’s an interesting, quick read, right up there with his other books, Interface Culture (a must for interaction designers), Emergence, and Mind Wide Open. I recommend it.

I usually don’t like books, movies, or TV shows about Hollywood: they seem too self-serving. The one exception to this is the reality show Project Greenlight, where industry neophytes get to make a movie. One thing that’s great about it is that it shows like nothing else I’ve ever seen the effect of business decision on the creative process. Only have three million dollars? Ok, well, the monsters are going to look terrible and we need to rewrite half the movie. CEO doesn’t like the movie? It only opens in three theaters. The effect of these types of business decisions upon what gets made is something that is seldom shown.

This season of Project Greenlight was particularly interesting because of the director they chose: John Gulager. Gulager was a very untraditional choice: introverted, older, and uncommunicative. And yet very talented. What was so interesting was watching him grow into the role of director, having to actually tell people his vision of the movie they were making. The producers and crew assumed he had a vision, but had no idea what that was, and so there was chaos until he learned how to talk to people like a director.

In a collaborative field like filmmaking or interaction design, all the vision and all the talent in the world doesn’t matter if you can’t communicate it to the team you are working with. And not just communicate it, communicate it like a designer, with a design attitude. You need the right ethos (the authority of a designer) to meet the expectations of the audience (that you know what you are doing). You are crafting an argument, after all: an argument of what the product should be.

Like many of the intangibles of our field, I’m not sure this can be taught, only learned.