October 26, 2004
rant – counterrant
file under: thoughts about things
ok, so i just got finished ranting about how design was dead blah blah blah, and then elaine sends me this really cool Web site. this is the kind of thing i'm talking about in terms of what's possible on the Web:
check out Word Count, an example of outstanding information design from the AIGA annual design competition.
Posted: 10.26.04 at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
brain surgery made easy!
file under: technology , thoughts about things
"Yes! You too can be a brain surgeon, with the new Brain-O-Rama surgeon's helper, a revolutionary new tool from the makers of the incredible Gung-Ho knife!! For just $49.45, you get the Brain-O-Rama scalpel, a rubberized dummy to learn your way around the skull, and complete instructions with helpful anatomical diagrams. You'll be taking care of tumors in 30-days or less, or your money back!!!!!"
it seems like i'm being ridiculous. i am. and so are half the people trying to sell the latest [insert noun here] made easy products or books or tools or 12-day-tutorial-magic-or-your-money-back courses.
just because i know where your prefrontal cortex is, or because i've heard of broca's area, you wouldn't want me cutting into your brain with the best scalpel in the world. it wouldn't make any difference, even if i had read the Dummies book and had seen "Extreme Autopsies" on FOX last week.
and yet people keep talking about making hard things easy, and others keep falling for it. books keep selling that demystify the mystical and show how, gosh, well, it turns out that brain surgery is easy after all, and we were just foolin' ya so we could keep the money for ourselves (ha!).
i could make jokes all day long, but i believe this kind of behavior, and the thinking behind it, has consequences. it devalues the effort required to create things of value or utility, or to provide important services. in turn, it reduces the perceived value of the fruits of these labors. it cheapens the world and destroys our appreciation of people and the beauty they often create.
...
i saw a Web site this morning advertising a software product with the tagline, "Web application development made easy" (company and product name withheld, since i'm sure it's a fine product made by nice people). the use of the word "easy" implies that anyone could do it, even my Grandma. if they had used the term "easier," this would have implied that it might actually be hard in the first place, and their tool was here to help, by gum.
even though it was probably just a marketing decision to position their product as they did, it struck me that people often think that things should be easy, could be easy. well, sometimes they are and can be, and we make them harder than we should. sometimes, however, they aren't (easy) and we can't (make them easy), regardless of how we might try.
some people really need to face the music – a lot of things in life are hard and require effort. there are no shortcuts. the people who do these hard things have usually arrived at their skill after taking a long, bumpy road full of toll booths that don't make change. architects, craftspeople, engineers, doctors, teachers – they're all professionals who worked to get where they are (maybe even struggled). society benefits from their skills, and they in turn reap the rewards. they shouldn't give it away for free, because it's worth something.
on the flip side, there shouldn't be an expectation that anybody can pick up a book and suddenly wield the equivalent of a scalpel – it insults the craftspeople or engineers or doctors who do it for a living, and puts the scalpel–wielder in a pretty awkward position.
no one would claim, of course, that "Surgery for Dummies" would ever be a best-seller, and yet the thinking seems to be different when it comes to the digital world. somehow, because it's not tangible or because it's new or because your kids seem pretty good at it, it's something that anyone could just pick up and learn and Presto!, instant Web designer.
i keep working for clients who are under the mistaken impression that building Web sites is easy. while it's my job to disabuse them of this notion, to help them understand the bits and bytes, as it were, there are times when the process becomes frustrating. through it all, the "idea of ease" seems implicit in the hearts of many businesspeople — it's really quite straightforward and will just sort of "work out" in the end. 50-page web site in one week with two developers, one of whom is actually a technical writer in the marketing department? no problem!!!
it is a problem.
and yet companies do this, over and over and over. anyone in marketing who has ever surfed Google is suddenly an expert in online advertising strategy. ever heard of Dreamweaver? hellooooo, Web developer! ever cropped a picture in Photoshop? good – you're our graphic designer. budgets are stretched, and people are forced to "step up," which is just a corporate euphemism for doing a job for which you aren't qualified or trained.
i'm exaggerating slightly, but the scenario i've painted above isn't far from the truth in much of corporate America. people seem to think the Web is different, that it's easy, that no rules apply. wrong – Web design and development are crafts and skills like any other.
the problem is driving away much of the talent from the Web, maybe in the same way that the craftsmen of old were driven away by mass production of (lower quality) goods. based on discussions with friends in the business, the business-view of Web design and development is gradually crushing people under its profit-driven wheels. many people got into the business because they felt the excitement and the potential, because they loved designing and creating new things they believed were useful or cool or interesting. some people were in it for the money, too, but that doesn't negate other motives.
these days it seems that building web sites, in most cases, has very little to do with creativity. it has everything to do with cold, hard business reality, and the incomprehensible short-sightedness that often goes with it.
fine — it's a job. get over it, you say.
you're right, of course. it is just a job. as my friend Gene says, we're not saving lives here.
what we are doing, in my opinion, by falling for the "ideas of ease" described above, is thoroughly commoditizing the process of Web design and development, along with a lot of other things. people are squandering much of the Web's potential and reducing its ultimate value, instead aiming for what's perceived as good enough (the 40% solution, in most cases).
good design (in all of its forms) will hopefully never go away, as long as there are people passionate about practicing it. the stage on which good design plays, however, seems to be getting much, much smaller, on the Web and elsewhere.
Posted: 10.26.04 at 7:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
October 21, 2004
the perils of faith-directed leadership
file under: thoughts about things
the following entry was spawned by Ron Suskind's New York Times article, Without a Doubt. in my opinion, it's an important and terrifying piece depicting a president possessed by evangelical certainty.
***
faith and religious belief are important in the lives of most people. they take as many shapes as do the people who practice them. our Constitution and our law have enshrined the freedom of religious practice; it is a central tenet of our government to protect these rights. it is also a central principle that religious practice is separate from the practice of government. our founding fathers were wise to legislate this separation, because the practice of religion, based on faith, should not be commingled with the practices of state, which have their feet firmly rooted in the empirical realities of the world in which we all live.
president clinton was a man of faith, as have been many other presidents, and yet i never felt his faith caused him to suspend rational consideration of empirical facts. indeed, there are some who would say that faith (or intuition) and rationality complete a circle, that they balance and inform each other. in this sense, a faith-informed leadership is natural, even expected. however, a president's faith should never supercede or dominate the choices of government, and this is where i believe we have gone astray.
in short, we seem to have veered into murky territory where faith is being improperly used as a weapon in the war of ideas. if i criticize the president for being a religious zealot who claims himself to be the right hand of God, i am certain people would complain that i am denying the president's right to his religion. it is natural, after all, that as a religious man, his faith will inform his thinking. as stated above, i couldn't agree more.
however, when faced with challenging questions or facts that oppose his vision, Bush dismisses them based on his gut instinct. his certainty, driven by his faith, destroys the possibility for dialogue and demands unflagging devotion in his followers. there is no dialogue with George Bush – only dissent or agreement, my way or the highway, black or white. in my mind, this is faith-directed leadership – faith and the certainty it provides have taken the driver's seat from dialogue, and are leading us on a white–knuckle crusade.
there is a name for democracy without dialogue and dissent – it is dictatorship.
as our democracy suffocates under Bush's faith-directed leadership, Suskind's ideas will probably only serve to polarize the electorate even more. the president's detractors will voraciously consume the article and see it as a ray of light in an ever-darkening room. his supporters will read the first four paragraphs and dismiss it, seeing a biased, left-wing journalist with an agenda to unseat a man making the world safe for freedom.
the most disheartening quote in the article for me was not anythinig said by Bush, but something said by one of his supporters and aides in Washington:
And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. "You think he's an idiot, don't you?" I said, no, I didn't. "No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!" In this instance, the final "you," of course, meant the entire reality-based community.
this is the division our nation faces. my faith in our electorate is waning – nothing can bridge this kind of gap.
faith-directed leadership is a perilous course, a dark and windy road that America has pursued these past four years. if george bush is re-elected, the consequences of following this road will be broad; they will echo across our futures, not as trumpets celebrating triumph, but as righteous drums of war, paranoia, and fear.
Posted: 10.21.04 at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
October 18, 2004
p2p politics
file under: thoughts about things
lawrence lessig is one of my heroes. read his blog. think about his ideas. or, if that's too much effort, check out his his p2p politics site. he put it together as a simple tool to allow people to share political content by emailing links to an archive of political ads.
visit lessig's p2p politics site
it's supposedly a non-partisan forum; he has invited kerry, bush and nader to make content available on the site. at present, content has been contributed by moveon.org and the kerry campaign; the bush campaign has yet to contribute anything. one commenter notes that the libertarian candidate was not, apparently, invited.
regardless of my own political leanings, i think it's important to have access to all of this content. for example, i'm probably one of the few people in the US who hasn't seen any political ads, most notably any of the bush campaign's provocative ads. lessig's site could provide a single archive for all of this information, allowing people to share it and think about it as we come down the home stretch....hopefully, bush will make his ads available.
Posted: 10.18.04 at 8:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
October 13, 2004
look ma, no tables!
file under: technology
exclamations of the general form, "look ma, no [insert noun here]" are invariably followed by disasters of one variety or another (e.g., broken limbs, scraped knees, poked out eyes, hindenburg-style vapor cloud explosions). they indicate a certain hubris on the part of the utterer, and mother nature is not one to let these sorts of things slip by unchecked.
...
yesterday, i said "look ma, no tables!" after i had built a nice, standards-compliant web page without the use of tables. today i experienced the concomitant disaster (although digital disasters are usually not as nasty as broken arms, at least not for the coder).
as my template was reviewed by those who needed to use it (read: the client), it became obvious that the tool with which it was going to be modified, Dreamweaver MX (read: lousy piece of @#$*), has a bad rendering engine (read: an old version of Opera) that fails to properly parse a lot of CSS. tricksy rendering engines - we hates them! we hates them all!!
and so, tail between legs and nice separation of structure and content out the window, i proceeded to soil my pretty page with tables to create the proper layout in DW MX so that it could be modified by the client's overworked, understaffed, laterally skilled web development collective.
my apologies to jeffrey zeldman. i didn't have the time (or software) required to debug my page in a "browser" that's not even a browser.
i can hardly wait for the day when i can say, "look ma, no browser!," but i know mother nature will be waiting for me...
Posted: 10.13.04 at 5:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
October 8, 2004
OCDN
file under: thoughts about things
OCDN – Obsessive Compulsive Desktop Noodling (n. or v.t.): From the forthcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – Volume 5 (subsection 'Computer-related issues'). The process of incessantly rearranging and/or resizing computer desktop windows in a (largely futile) effort to optimize the use of on-screen real-estate. Common sufferers include graphic designers, information architects, web developers, or those who are just generally anal retentive. See also procrastination, boredom.
Posted: 10.08.04 at 3:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
October 3, 2004
rashomon and the frailty of human perception
file under: thoughts about things
akira kurosawa's rashomon is a masterful piece of film-making. it recounts a set of heinous events from several different perspectives, and in the process tells a story about the subjectivity of human experience, and the way that truth is usually in the eye of the beholder.
as i've consumed the presidential and vice-presidential debates over the last few days, along with the exhaustive media analysis and punditry, i've had the distinct feeling i was reliving kurosawa's film.
...
the first presidential debate seemed a clear win for kerry, from my perspective. i felt that the President was inarticulate, peevish, and off balance. kerry, on the other hand, seemed polished and unflappable – his positions on the issues, while rehearsed, were at least coherent with some world-view based on the planet earth in 2004.
and then i watched the subsequent analysis on NPR. one conservative commentator (whose name escapes me) sat directly opposite donna brazile after the debate and shared his opinions. in his opinion, president bush was clearly more articulate, more poised, and generally won, without a doubt.
are we on the same planet?
i read a fair amount of commentary after the debate, and most conservatives went so far as to concede that this might not have been the president's best outing and that kerry did 'ok.' but to say that bush was articulate and poised, in all sincerity, on national television?
it boggles the mind, not that he would say these things, but that our points of view on the same set of events could be so radically different.
my girlfriend elaine put her finger on it quite well – when it comes to watching these debates, we've all got our filters on. we see, to some degree, what we want to see and what fits with our world view. if someone thinks dick cheney is a pitchfork-wielding pit viper from the 7th plane of hell (and a grumpy one, at that), then that's what they'll see, whereas others might see a solid, devoted defender of national security with a wealth of experience and knowledge. is john kerry a flip-flopper, or someone who sees complex issues from all sides, and who does his best to rationalize competing points of view? probably depends who you ask.
i think the debates are an important part of national elections, rules and rehearsed points of view and image contests included. they provide an opportunity to hear and see things slightly less canned than what you'll see at a press conference or in a scripted performance.
is there an objective truth about the debates? are there clear winners and losers? does it really make a difference in the end?
again, i guess it depends who you ask.
Posted: 10.03.04 at 2:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
i used a pen
file under: thoughts about things
as amazing as it sounds, i actually used an entire pen recently. i don't mean i threw it away once it started sputtering and splotching and misfiring. i mean i was writing, ink was flowing and the words were filling the page, bold as day, and then the ink just stopped (followed by the words, naturally).
...
this never happens to me.
i've got a small army of half-used pens floating around the house. they lie on the desk. they sit on shelves. they sleep on the floor, just out of reach under the bookcase. they hide in cabinets and drawers. they're everywhere, and somehow they never get used up, because i always buy new ones before i throw them away (fighting the tension between waste and actually being able to read what i write).
most of the pens i have floating around are woefully inadequate – strictly second-string in the world of writing implements (barely keeping the bench warm). you can feel the metal scraping across the page as you try to write, and there's as much paper showing through your ink as there is ink covering paper. pretty sad, actually, but i keep these pens because they sort of work; if i needed to scrawl my dying words, they might just do.
pen manufacturers probably build their pens this way intentionally – decrepitude by design. it fits right in with the american modus operandi of consumption: everything is disposable, even if it's still useful. well i for one am glad that the people who made that pen i used up don't buy into that whole negative attitude towards properly engineered pens.
now, i just wish i had written down what kind of pen it was...i must not have been able to find anything decent to write with.
Posted: 10.03.04 at 2:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
