Posts from January 2015

Thanks to a combination of my slow process of re-integrating into the web community and the Year in Review explosion at the end of 2014, I actually have some media appearances to tell you about.  (This is at least four times as weird for me as it is for you.)

Since I love the written word, I’ll start with the fact that I’ve been published at Slate Magazine.  As the whole Year in Review thing was going crazy viral, an editor at Slate emailed to ask if I’d consider republishing “Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty” with them.  I said I’d love to as long as I could revise the piece a bit, to which they readily agreed.  So I reworked the opening to be extra-clear about what had actually happened, gave it a closing that was better attuned to a wider audience than the few hundred web designers I assumed would read the original post, and they ran it.  (The headline was, I have to say, not my idea, but that’s how it goes in most magazines: editors write headlines.  I was at least able to suggest some tweaks.)

Shortly after that piece went live, I was asked to be part of a piece on Huffington Post Live about Year in Review (of course).  I was still in Tennessee when the segment aired, and our hotel’s wifi wasn’t up to the task of streaming video, but thankfully they were willing to have me on by phone.

I saved what I consider to be the best for last.  Jen Simmons just recently had me as a guest on The Web Ahead, where we talked for two hours about what my family has been through in the past two years, designing for crisis, Year in Review, what it’s like to have a story go viral on you, being intentional in the age of social media, new details about my AEA talk “Designing for Crisis”, the Metafilter dot, and a whole lot more.  Parts of it are emotionally difficult, but not too many.  We got pretty deep into what I’m thinking about design and where it should go, and in a few cases Jen posed questions that I couldn’t really answer, because they’re at or beyond the edge of what I’ve figured out so far.

Jen is such a great interviewer.  Not only did she ask great questions and then patiently let me ramble my way to answers, she brought really smart perspectives to everything we were talking about.  Listening to her observations and thoughts gave me several new insights into designing for crisis, and more.  You should listen to the episode, or to any of the shows in her archives, just to hear a master of the craft at work.

So, yeah.  This has all been very interesting for me.  At some point, I’ll probably write something about what it’s like to watch a story about you go viral, but for now, I’m enjoying the return to anonymity.  It’s left me time to think more about empathetic design, and to catch up with work and other people’s thoughts.  That’s the best part of this whole web thing: learning from others.  It’s why I got started with the web in the first place.  It’s why I’m still here.

• Media Queries was published on Friday, January 16th, 2015.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Web categories.
• There have been three replies.

We were driving back home from our impromptu surprise family vacation in Tennessee, winding our way through the Appalachian Mountains, when I pointed out a long, steep ramp to nowhere branching off the side of the highway.  “What do you think it’s for?” I asked the kids.

They made some guesses, some quite clever, but none correct.  So I told them about runaway truck ramps and how they work.  I think they were vaguely interested for a few seconds; I got a well-isn’t-that-interesting grunt, which I’ll take as a win.  We swept on past, the kids went back to whatever they were doing before I’d interrupted them, and I kept my eyes on the road.

But I was still thinking about the runaway truck ramp, and how it’s a perfect physical example of designing for crisis.

I also wondered about the history of runaway ramps — when they were first implemented, and how many runaway vehicles crashed before the need was recognized and a solution found.  After I got home, I looked it up and discovered that ramps didn’t really exist until the 1970s or so.  Even if we assume that no vehicles lost control in the U.S. until the Eisenhower Interstate System was established in the 1950s (just go with it), that’s still two decades of what were probably some pretty horrible crashes, before a solution was implemented.

This is not to say that the ramps are a perfect solution.  A runaway vehicle can certainly crash before reaching the next ramp, and using a ramp is likely to damage the vehicle even under the best of circumstances.  A badly-designed ramp can be almost as dangerous as no ramp at all.  Still, a solution exists.

I feel like web design is at the pre-ramp phase.  We’ve created a huge, sprawling system that amplifies commerce and communication, but we haven’t yet figured out how to build in some worst-case-scenario features that don’t interfere with the main functioning of the system.  We’ve laid down the paths and made some of them look pretty or even breathtaking, but we’re still not dealing with the crashes that happen when an edge case comes onto our stretch of the road.

I’m trying really hard to avoid “information superhighway” clichés here, by the way.

I’ve been pondering whether to incorporate this particular example into my 2015 talk, “Designing for Crisis” — much will depend on how the talk stands after I go back through it one more time to tighten it up, and start rehearsing again.  If there’s room and a good hook, I’ll add it in as a brief illustration.  If not, that’s okay too.  It’s still given me another way to look at designing for crisis, and how that topic fits into the broader theme that the Facebook imbroglio brought to light.

I’m still trying to get a good handle on what the broader theme is, exactly.  “Designing for Crisis” is a part of it, but just a part.  Several people have told me I should turn that talk into a book, but it never quite felt like a book.  Sure, I could have stretched it to fill a book, but something was missing, and I knew it.  I thought there was a hole in the idea that I needed to identify and fill; instead, the idea was filling a hole in a context I hadn’t seen.

Now I have.  It will take some time to see all of it, or even just more of it, but at least now I know it’s there and waiting to be explored and shared.

• Ramping Up was published on Tuesday, January 6th, 2015.
• It was assigned to the Observations and Web categories.
• There have been nine replies.

Everything begins, and everything ends.  Sometimes the beginnings are hard to define, and the endings are hard to accept.  Other times the beginnings are clear, and the endings are welcome.

We have a lot of beginnings and endings in our lives.  Beginnings are usually easier than endings.  In fact, some of us dislike endings so much that we avoid them by any means possible.  How many projects have you started, and then let fade from attention, denying them a proper finish?  I’ve done that so many times, I should be ashamed.

This is so common to our industry, though.  Plenty of projects and even programming languages get launched, gain favor, start a buzz, and then gradually fall by the wayside, but they never really end.  There are still people making a living writing COBOL.  There are so few of them left, in fact, they’re probably making a better living than you and me.  COBOL will only die when the last machine shuts down, or else when the last COBOL programmer does.

We see the same dynamics at play in design.  Remember drop shadows?  Some day, we’ll say the same thing about flat design, even responsive design as we now understand it.  Something will build from them, whether as a reaction or an evolution, be given a snappy new name (snappy names are critical to the adoption of design trends), and we’ll look back and say, “Remember…?”

But there is no standard definition of what constitutes the end of a trend.  It’s probably just as well, since in the absence of such a definition, we can support a thriving industry of thinkpieces on The Death Of whatever the thinkpiecer wants to declare dead.  They’re never definitive, but they do generate traffic, which generates ad revenue, which generates higher stock prices for Google.

That is, until some confluence of factors causes Google’s stock to drop, which will in turn launch a thousand breathless thinkpieces on The Death of Google.  They’ll sail off toward the intellectual horizon, questionable axioms and unquestioned assumptions fluttering gaily in the hot air, following in the wakes of the fleets of thinkpieces on The Death of Apple, The Death of Microsoft, The Death of Dell, The Death of IBM, The Death of Kodak, and The Death of Digital Equipment Corporation.

If you live long enough, you start to get a sense that it’s all just a little bit of history repeating, as Shirley Bassey once put it.  The towering crises of youth, both the personal and global, are eventually seen to be iterations on a long-running theme.  When our elders say that youth is wasted on the young, a big part of that observation is the realization that the time of life at which you are the most energetic is also the time in which you’re most likely to expend all that energy taking everything so damn seriously, as if the world is coming to an end.

Which it will, at some point.  Everything does.

The best we can hope for is that an ending comes at the right time, for the right reasons.  We don’t always have the ability to make that happen.  Other times, we do.

Here’s to the last year of The Pastry Box.

This article was originally published at The Pastry Box Project on 2 January 2015.

• Sunrise, Sunset was published on Friday, January 2nd, 2015.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, Tech, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.