Last year’s German IA Conference had a great vibe and a wonderful group of people, I’m looking forward to more of the same in Amsterdam.

• People are basically good at heart; they are fundamentally trustworthy. Only workplaces that give their members the chance to learn and add value through their work will succeed in the long run.
• Aim for quality of work, and money will follow.
• Industrial growth is not always desirable. Sometimes it can be destructive.
• Predictions and forecasts are mechanistic substitutes for awareness, and substitutes for awareness lead to bad decisions.
• There is no such thing as “just business, nothing personal.” Business is always personal, even if it isn’t supposed to be. And we are better off recognizing that.
• Everything in business is connected to everything else. Business is a complex living system with many interconnections. No one can control the system; one can only learn to influence it.

• we give them numbers or letters. “You see the change in materiality here in concept 2…” or “Clearly Concept C is a total paradigm shift…” But this kinda sucks. It’s hard to remember how the concepts map to numbers or letters, and that makes it hard for people to reference the concept. “Um, you know, I think it was the second one, the one with the thingie…” And if people can’t reference it, they can’t talk about it, much less buy it.
• we only have one concept, so we name it after ourselves. “Our idea is to…” or “The Bixby Canyon Software System, from Bixby Canyon Inc., gives your plants just the right amount of water…” This feels good at first because you can publicize your company and concept name at the same time, and it avoids those messy, expensive naming exercises. But it falls apart when concepts grow up into products. Say when…
  1. you want to change the product or the product name, but people keep referring to it by your company name. You’re stuck, or you change it and risk lose brand recognition.
  2. you introduce a second product which means you now need three names, two product names and a company name, that need different identities. For a long time Symantec was synonymous with anti-virus software, and they had to work hard to be a company known for more than that.

An exception is when you (intentionally or not) have a naming system. Let’s say your company and your first product name is Super Fantastic. When the next product arrives, you name it Super Amazing, then Super Stupendous, and so on.

Just as you wouldn’t have a baby (or a company) without naming it, don’t birth a concept without naming it either.

The first comes from Nigel Cross of Open University, UK, who seems to have studied designers and their processes more than anyone I’ve come across. In his Expertise in Design (pdf) he says (emphasis mine)…

Novice behaviour is usually associated with a ‘depth-first’ approach to problem solving, i.e. sequentially identifying and exploring sub-solutions in depth, whereas the strategies of experts are usually regarded as being predominantly top-down and breadth-first approaches.

This explains for me why I see so little concept design these days. Both product developers and designers have a tendency to jump on the first great idea they generate and head down one path, instead of patiently exploring the space of possible solutions. The pain is only felt far down the line when development makes it obvious what doesn’t work and what could have been.

The other big idea comes from How Designers Work, Henrik Gedenryd’s Ph.D dissertation. In the third section (pdf), he observes how designers go about defining the problem to be solved, the most difficult part of the project. How the problem is defined can determine the success of the succeeding design task…

…the two contrasting attitudes make the whole difference between frustration and progress: Quist literally makes his problem solvable, whereas Petra finds herself stuck. The bottom line is that Quist who is the “expert” is acting as a pragmatist, whereas Petra, the “novice”, acts as a realist. And as we have seen, this accounts for a great deal of his superior performance. The choice of either position is not merely a matter of ideology, but has important consequences.

In short, experts are pragmatists, they re-set or re-frame the problem to make it solvable. Novices are realists, they take the problem as a given and get stuck.

Yet, this made it past the thesis committee.

Why bring it up? One, because if Ohio University doesn’t take the ethical path here I’d like the Internet archive to show what happened.

Two, I want to gloat a little that large established institutions with extensive accreditations don’t necessarily provide any better quality — and sometimes much, much worse — than my little Smart Experience.

Just for decoration, here’s some graphs from my thesis I drew by hand circa 1994, probably in MacDraw, with proper references.

…By mid-2005 the system worked, but spam was becoming more prevalent and caused the matching results to deteriorate, e.g., too much junk clogging the output. Around the same time we started to dig into natural language processing and the statistical processing of text, thinking that this might be a better way to address the spam issue and to get more targeted, relevant results. This prompted us to not push version 1.0, instead wanting to see if we could come up with a more powerful release using NLP to mark the kick-off. In retrospect, this was a big mistake. Mistake #5, to be precise. We should have gotten it out there, been kicked in the head by tough customers, and iterated like crazy to address their needs. Woulda, shoulda, coulda. Didn’t.

…We talked about “release early/release often,” but were scared of looking like idiots in front of major Wall Street and hedge fund clients.

And now, eight years later, I’m finally getting around to working on my storytelling skills. Barry McWilliams wrote a great set of guidelines for storytelling in his Effective Storytelling: A manual for beginners…

Characteristics of a good story:

• A single theme, clearly defined
• A well developed plot
• Style: vivid word pictures, pleasing sounds and rhythm
• Characterization
• Faithful to source
• Dramatic appeal
• Appropriateness to listeners

Adapting to our audiences:

1. Take the story as close to them as you can.
2. Keep it brief and simple
3. Stimulate their senses so they feel, smell, touch and listen and see vivid pictures.
4. Describe the characters and settings, and help them sympathize with the character’s feelings.
5. Aim your story at the less experienced when telling to a mixed audience

Preparation:

Once you settle on a story, you will want to spend plenty of time with it. It will take a considerable period of time and a number of tellings before a new story becomes your own.

1. Read the story several times, first for pleasure, then with concentration.
2. Analyze its appeal, the word pictures you want your listeners to see, and the mood you wish to create.
3. Research its background and cultural meanings.
4. Live with your story until the characters and setting become as real to you as people and places you know.
5. Visualize it! Imagine sounds, tastes, scents, colors. Only when you see the story vividly yourself can you make your audience see it!

Learning the Story

• Learn the story as a whole rather than in fragments. Master, and then simplify, its structure to a simple outline of scenes. Don’t try to memorize it, though you should always know your first and last lines by heart!
• Map out the story line: The Beginning, which sets the stage and introduces the characters and conflict; the Body, in which the conflict builds up to the Climax; and the Resolution of the conflict. Observe how the action starts, how it accelerates, repetitions in actions and how and where the transitions occur.
• Absorb the style of the story: To retain the original flavor and vigor, learn the characteristic phrases which recur throughout the story. Observe the sentence structure, phrases, unusual words and expressions.
• Practice the story often - to the mirror, your cat, driving in the car, with friends, or anyone who will listen. Even when telling an old and familiar story, you must use imagination and all the storyteller’s skills to make it come alive. Use your imagination to make the story come alive as you prepare.

Delivery

1. Delivery elements: Sincerity and whole heartedness (Be earnest!),
2. Enthusiasm (This does not mean artificial or noisy excitement),
3. Animation (in your gestures, voice, facial expressions)

Particular Oral Storytelling Skills:

A Storyteller’s skills include: emphasis, repetition, transition, pause and proportion.

1. Dialog should make use of different voices for different characters and using the Storytelling “V” - where you will shift your facing (or posture) as the dialog switches from character to character.

1. Use your voice to create the atmosphere or tension as the story progresses.

1. Use gestures and facial expressions add much to the visualization of the story. Be sure they are appropriate and natural. Practice them!

1. Pacing involves both the volume and rate at which you speak, and the progression of the action in the story. Dialog slows a story’s pace down, while narrating action speeds it up.

1. Repetition and Exaggeration have always been basic elements of story telling.

Some attention keepers:

Many factors affect the attention of your listeners. A storyteller always needs to be sensitive to his audience and may need to regain their attention before continuing.

1. Involvement or participation. Use volunteer(s) from the audience in your story. Or have the audience participate in hand motions or making sound effects. Or responding with “chants” or refrains
2. A distinct change in your pace, voice, or mood.
3. An unusual or unexpected twist in the narration.
4. Throw-away lines or asides work well as does comic relief.

Here’s a short preview of a service I’ll be launching at Smart Experience to try and address this need. They’re short, inexpensive videos to teach design skills. This one is on the rather fundamental topic of direct manipulation, but I plan to cover design in the widest sense.

I’m happy with what I have as a first pass, but it clearly needs iteration. I’d love to hear what you think. If you wanted to build this sort of skill, would you pay for a 20 minute video on this topic that you could watch online or download any time you like?

Why can’t we draw blog posts? Or emails? We have so much to say, but only a keyboard to help us say it.

We’re rediscovering sketching, a wonderful thing. But our tools have to help us sketch and communicate our sketches. We spend an awful lot of time inside email, word processing, blogging, and instant messaging software, wouldn’t it be nice if these had drawing tools? Perhaps they will as touch screens become more common, but I’d rather see us actively widen our means of expression rather than wait.

Lazy web?