Thoughts From Eric Archive

I’m afraid there will be a cure for cancer.

Except no, that’s not really it.  In truth, I’m afraid of what a cure for cancer will do to me, and to Kat.

After my mom died of breast cancer in 2003, I gritted my teeth at news stories of promising new cancer treatments.  I’d think to myself, If a cure is coming soon, why couldn’t it have come sooner?  As, I’m sure, the parents of polio victims asked themselves, when the vaccine came into being.

Word came recently that the FDA is fast-tracking a novel treatment for glioblastoma, based on genetically modified polio virus.  Initial trials have been so effective, they’re opening it up to as many as possible.

And I remember reading about this treatment, which had worked in a single case, two years ago, as our daughter was treated for glioblastoma.  We tried to get access to the treatment, tried to get into a study or just be given a sample to administer, and were denied.  Twice.  They wouldn’t let us try it on a little girl with multiple tumors, when it had only been successfully tried on an adult with a single tumor.  That door was closed to us.

So the experimental treatment we tried wasn’t a modified polio virus.  It was something else.  It was something promising.  It didn’t work.

I know this polio treatment, as much as we wanted it then and as promising as it looks now, may come to nothing.  So many other treatments have before.  I remember the every-other-year drumbeat of “Is This The Cure For Cancer?” headlines and magazine covers — all about novel, promising approaches that nobody remembers now, because they didn’t work as it seemed like they might.

“A cure for cancer is the next great breakthrough in medicine, and it always will be,” I sometimes joke, a little bleakly.  But then, that’s what they used to say about polio itself.  About smallpox.  About wound infections.

I read that story about the treatment we’d begged them to let us try, and how it looked like it might cure the cancer we could not, and sick grief ached anew in my chest.  I thought, What if this really works, and we failed to get it for her?  What if I could have called that doctor again, begged and pleaded, and somehow gotten him to say yes that time, and saved Rebecca’s life?  Will I ever forgive myself if the cure was there all along, and I was too weak or blind to force it into our hands?

I still don’t know the answer.

I don’t want brain cancer to remain uncured.  I don’t want any cancer to remain uncured.  I don’t want other families to suffer what we and so many other families have suffered.  There is much I would give to bring about that day, even though it comes too late for my mother, and for my daughter.  There is much I have given, in many senses, to try to bring about that day.

When that day comes, if it ever comes, even if it’s just for one type of cancer, celebrate all the lives that will be saved.  Feel that joy and relief.  But also spare a moment of compassion for all the lives that were lost, and all the lives that were broken.  Especially for the ones who died just before the cure came, the ones who mourn both their absence and the could-have-been that came so close.

Until that day comes, if it ever comes, spare a thought for those who live sick with dread and desperate hope, wishing and praying for a breakthrough to save their loved ones.

Spare another for those who live in dread of that day, and hate that they do.

• Fearing The Cure was published on Friday, June 3rd, 2016.
• It was assigned to the Cancer, Commentary, and Personal categories.
• There have been seven replies.

I’ve started playing an occasional game with my iPhone, where I type in a word to start a message, and then repeatedly accept whatever autocorrect suggests as the next word.  If I’ve understood the terms correctly, I’m manually accepting iOS’s Markov chain output.

I’m inclined to post the results to a Twitter account, sort of like I did for Excuse of the Day, but I’m stuck on the most prosaic of roadblocks: I’m having trouble thinking of a good name for it.  (Here, ‘autosuggest’ will not help me.)  Anyone have a winning name they’re willing to contribute?  Full credit to the winner in the Twitter bio, not to mention here, plus a percentage of the multi-million-dollar royalties from the inevitable book and movie deals.

Update 10 May 16: thanks to everyone who made (auto)suggestions!  The final winner is @markovmywords, as suggested by Jonathan Schofield (@schofeld).

• Name Suggestion was published on Friday, May 6th, 2016.
• It was assigned to the General and Projects categories.
• There have been twenty-eight replies.

All of a sudden, I’m on three different podcasts that released within the last week.  Check ‘em out:

• The Web Ahead #115  —  recorded LIVE! at An Event Apart Nashville, I joined Rachel Andrew, Jeffrey Zeldman, and host Jen Simmons for an hour-plus look at the present and future of web design and web design technologies, featuring a number of really sharp questions submitted by the audience as we talked.  We got Nostradamic with this one, so warm up the claim chowder pots!
• User Defenders #20  —  Sara and I talked with host Jason Ogle for just over an hour about Design for Real Life, digging deep into the themes and our intentions.  Jason really brought great questions from having just read the book, and I feel like Sara and I kept our answers focused and compact.
• The Big Web Show #144  —  Jeffrey and I talked for just under an hour about Design for Real Life and the themes of my AEA talk this year.  This one’s more of a ramble between two friends and colleagues, so if you prefer conversation a little looser, this one’s for you.

Share and enjoy!

• Invisible Airwaves was published on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2016.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, Interviews, and Web categories.
• There have been no replies.

Sara and I are guests on the most recent Shop Talk Show, espiode #212, where we talked with Chris and Dave about Design for Real Life, Google Mic Drop, and more.  We had a good time with it, and hope you will too.

In a moment of slight coincidence, the episode was released almost exactly a year after my first appearance on Shop Talk (espisode #161), where I covered similar topics.  At that point, Sara and I were still researching and tossing ideas for the book back and forth.  Now here we are, a year later, with the book out.  It’s a little wild to contemplate, honestly.  It was a lot of work in a pretty short time frame… but so very much worth it.

• Talking Shop was published on Wednesday, April 20th, 2016.
• It was assigned to the Design and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

I’m honored to be included in Issue 5 of The Manual, doubly so because it may well be the last issue of The Manual, triply so because I spoke at the very first Build Conference, the event that gave birth to The Manual.

I have two pieces, as is traditional for The Manual: an article titled “We Are What We Build”, and a short, untitled ‘life lesson’ about a whiny 12-year-old me and my grandfather’s quiet wisdom.

A quote from “We Are What We Build”:

The challenge now is in how those fragments of our lives are treated. This is as much a social question as a technological problem, but the two are not separable. What Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and every other at-scale social network does now — everything they make possible or impossible, everything they make easier or harder — will shape what we think of as normal in a decade or two.

Past readers may recognize this sentiment (as well as the title) from my talk at XOXO 2015, which was heavily intertwined with the article for The Manual.  One led to the other, in fact.  I proposed the talk, which Andy B. accepted, and then Andy M. asked me if I’d write it for The Manual.  So I did.

I was glad to write both, and I hope you enjoy them… and more importantly, I hope they provoke some reflection.

• In The Manual: “We Are What We Build” was published on Tuesday, April 19th, 2016.
• It was assigned to the Design and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

Sara and I wrote an article for UX Booth, “Compassionate UX”, and it was published last week.  Two quotes (out of a ~1,750-word article):

When we get laser-focused on positive outcomes, we often fail to notice how things might go terribly wrong. But whether you’re working on something as complex as artificial intelligence or as simple as a line of microcopy, you’ll create the best products when you intentionally set aside your goals of “delight” or “engagement,” and make time to think critically about where your product might break.

It’s easy to see this as an uncomfortable restriction on the creative process, and that’s actually a pretty accurate description. Of course thinking about users’ varied identities and emotional states creates limiting factors. But that’s what design is: it is a creative solution to a set of constraints.

Read the whole thing over at UX Booth.

• New Article: “Compassionate UX” was published on Monday, April 18th, 2016.
• It was assigned to the Design and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

This is a thing I’ve been trying to figure out in my spare time, mostly noodling about in my head with various ideas when I have some down time, and now I want to know if there’s a formal answer of some sort.  It goes like this: in a lot of situations, ranging from airplane autopilots to self-driving cars (I think) to videogames, there are times when you want a moving object to get itself as precisely as possible with a known path.  For example, having the autopilot line up with the approach path for a runway.

So how is that done?  What’s the general approach to programming a moving thing to find, with decent efficiency, its way onto a given path in 3D space?  Or in 2D space, if that’s easier to understand?  I can think of a few naïve approaches, but none of them seem anywhere near robust enough to be trusted.

• Pathfinding was published on Monday, March 28th, 2016.
• It was assigned to the Questions category.
• There have been fourteen replies.

Available as of this morning from A Book Apart in both digital and paper formats: Design for Real Life, the book Sara Wachter-Boettcher and I started writing not quite a year ago.

Anil Dash was kind enough to write a wonderful foreword for the book, in which he perfectly describes the background we were working against:

Two billion people now have some kind of access to internet technologies, and almost all of them are spending more and more time with their thumbs flicking across their phones. And the technology they’re using has a real impact on their lives. They don’t use an app to “share photos”; they use it to maintain a relationship with distant family. They don’t need to do “online banking”; they need to lend a friend money to help them out of a jam. Nobody wants to learn a complicated set of privacy controls; they just want to be able to express themselves without antagonizing bosses or in-laws.

Our thesis, against that, was to say, “As personal and digital lives become closer and effectively merge, the things we design will have to work harder and harder to deal with real people in all their messy complexity.  How can we start people thinking about this, and what tools can we give them?”  That’s what we strove to create, and now you can judge for yourself whether we succeeded.

I’ll be honest: we were pretty scared as we wrote it.  This is not a topic area that’s gotten a ton of attention, and in a lot of ways we were breaking new ground — but, at the same time, we were very aware that there was existing research and knowledge in related areas, so we wanted to be sure we were inclusive or, and respectful of, that work.  We talked to a lot of people in a variety of disciplines, trying to make sure we brought in information that would help the reader and not flying in the face of things that were already known.

So you can imagine our relief and gratitude as we’ve heard glowing reactions from people who read preview drafts — among them Kim Goodwin, Indi Young, Sara Soueidan, Caren Litherland, and Karen McGrane.  Paul Ford said, “Anyone who aspires to build global products that people love should read this book now,” and Kate Kiefer Lee said, “It will be required reading on my team.”

You might think cover blurbs like those are pure marketing fluff, and maybe in some genres they are.  For us, they serve double duty: to let you know that people who know what they’re talking about believe we know what we’re talking about, and also to let us know that.  There were days we weren’t entirely certain.

To be clear, this isn’t a book about forever treating people with kid gloves.  We say “compassion isn’t coddling”, and that’s absolutely the case.  An error message still needs to convey the error; an account lockout still needs to keep the account locked.  But how we convey errors or lockouts, and how we make people aware of the possible ramifications of their actions, is critical.  Just as there are good ways and bad ways to commiserate with a grieving friend or handle a difficult work situation, there are good ways and bad ways to approach people in our designs.

As I said before, we need to deal with real people, in all their messy complexity.  We hope Design for Real Life is the start of a whole new conversation within our field, one that will teach Sara and me just as much as anyone else about how we can be more thoughtful and humane in what we create.

• Design For Real Life Now Available was published on Tuesday, March 8th, 2016.
• It was assigned to the Books, Design, Projects, and Writing categories.
• There have been two replies.