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The New Rules of Retail and Creating Shared Value

2011-01-12T09:56:00.001-08:00

My awakening began while reading "Punk Marketing" a while back. The first sentence read "There's a revolution brewing." You wouldn't think it but Sears is at the cutting edge, the peak of the wave, in this revolution in commerce, society and retail. Revolutions begin with hearts and minds. Some are bloody while others border on reactions to external force evolutions.

The evolution of retail also paralleled what many economists cite as one of the most important economic shifts in history: a century long power shift from producers to consumers—from those who make and sell to those who buy.

Three Waves of Evolution of Commerce in America

Wave 1 (1850-1950), known as the "era of producer power" characterized by demand being greater than supply and limited distribution of products and services (production-demand driven markets).

Wave 2 (1950-1980's and 2000), the post WWII era of economic growth of massive product, retail, brand, distribution expansion. This expansion of choice for consumers required businesses to create demand for there offerings marking a shift to a marketing-and-distribution economy from an economy of production and scale.

Wave 3 (now into the future), consumers have unlimited choices and access to goods and services. This has lead to a demand shift from stuff to experiences, customization and personalization of products, immediate availability, and most importantly, product providers who value community interests over self-interest (see shared value creation).

Wave 3 is where we are now. Companies must go beyond simple clear value creation, cost-competitiveness, efficient production, superior supply chain management to clear engagement and rapport with their customers over longer periods of time.

Shared value... Recognizes that societal needs, not just conventional economic needs, define markets.

"The days of trying to get a consumer to come to you are over. You really have to be in the consumer's world, wherever, whenever and however." — Mindy Grossman, HSN

The winners hold two distinctions:

they understand their customers and have systems and processes in place to continually learn about and from them to develop a deeper emotional (empathic) connection with them in the creation of experiences; not just product lines and distribution channels.
they understand how to be there when needed as opposed to attempting to create a need and be there. Context and relevancy are the new content is king mantra.

There are three steps any company should take in attempting to achieve the winning edge:

Define what customers expect and desire beyond the brand or products or services. This is done by continually re-conceiving products and markets.
Develop value from primary, contextual research analysis and synthesis coupled with insights gained from secondary research and analysis. A company not in control of the value chain at all stages will not be able to value from this step. Redefine productivity in the value chain both externally and internally.
Deliver precise and perceptual experiences that form neurological connections with human beings. Creating shared value through local cluster development facilitation. The best companies once took on a broad range of roles in meeting the needs of workers, communities, and supporting businesses.

This is where "Creating Shared Value" comes into play.

Capitalism is an unparalleled vehicle for meeting human needs, improving efficiency, creating jobs, and building wealth.

The competitiveness of a company and the health of the communities around it are closely intertwined. A business needs a successful community, not only to create demand for its products but also to provide critical public assets and a supportive environment. A community needs successful businesses to provide jobs and wealth creation opportunities for its citizens.

A big part of the problem lies with companies themselves, which remain trapped in an outdated approach to value creation that has merged over the past few decades. They continue to view value creation narrowly, optimizing short-term financial performance in a bubble while missing the most important customer needs and ignoring the broader influences that determine their longer-term success.

[For the past two decades] Firms focused on enticing consumers to buy more and more of their products... The results were often commoditization, price competition, little true innovation, slow organic growth, and no clear competitive advantage.

(The New Rules of Retail: Competing in the World's Toughest Marketplace)

The challenge in this revolution is not technology or infrastructure but harnessing both to shift perspectives and cultures within and outside corporations towards longer-term sustainable thinking and human-centered design approaches over short-term growth. This also means that companies must become local as they expand globally through community involvement and outreach that goes beyond sponsorship or fundraising.

A Response to Gestural Interfaces: A Step Backward in Usability

2010-09-28T12:58:00.001-07:00

Gestural Interfaces: A Step Backward in Usability

by Donald Norman and Jakob Nielson

I find the article I just read in Interactions Magazine offensive, if not an example of the ignorance that has held interactive multimedia back for at least 15 or more years:

in the rush to develop gestural (or "natural") interfaces, well-tested and understood standards of interaction design were being overthrown.

If either of the writers would get out of their one-way mirrored focus group "labs" and actually do primary ethnographic observation, much less embrace the revolutions that are happening technology-and-business-wise in the real world (like "Design Thinking"), they would realize that the desktop metaphor is a dead horse we are forced to beat with a mouse and keyboard, that they are antiquated examples of completely non-sustainable and non-scalable interaction "modalities". I can't tell you how much of my design career has been spent working on seemingly "radical" concepts that were shelved in favor of that all-to-familiar personally subjective knee-jerk reaction to something outside the boxes of limited thinking and fear of the new or unprecidented. See the RAZR for example or the iPhone, the cell phone in general, the automobile ("faster horse" would have come out of "HCI" research methods like articulated survey responses and focus groups).

Throughout my career, I had the privilage of working on things that were deemed "too advanced" for the general public (because there were no precidents in the market) and killed before they saw the light of day. I quickly learned that the best reaction from the "stakeholders" when innovating was "WTF!?" because I knew it was something that took these people well outside their comfort zones. Those companies have gone into some seriously painful times as I type this, realizing (too late) that they should have taken some chances in the market and listened to the people with their ears to the ground, who live, breathe and eat design thinking on a 24/7 basis; much less the "end-users" who would have to incorporate these technologies, services, and products into their daily routines.

But the place for such experimentation is in the lab. After all, most new ideas fail, and the more radically they depart from previous best prectices, the more likely they are to fail.

This "HCI" stuff Norman/Nielson cite as gospel is a true example of analytical thinking, data-based engineering, testing that quantifies then qualifies ignorance and limited thinking done in the "lab" as opposed to contextually in the field through "validation." Again, we are not in the age of "technological evolution" but "technological revolution". They are bloody and leave in their wake the obsolete thinkings of "leaders" who hold humanity back in favor of their personal need for predictability and structure. Again, having worked from many perspectives in the design industry, from products to services to education, I cringe when someone comes into a meeting where innovation is supposed to take place citing some Nielson/Norman study about how this "button" should be "here" because "x% of users"... Discussions killed in this way ruin human potential. The "lab" is for "rats". The "lab" should be our world of experience. Hence, life is the lab. Humans are not rats when it comes to how we live and interact with each other and the world around us.

Most progress is made through small and sustained incremental steps.

Since when has any "game changing" innovation been made through "sustained and incremental steps"? Inventions? The iPad? I guess you could say they were incremental in the sense that they have been held back since long before the Xerox Parc days by people who were too scared to take a chance, to fail. Hence the design thinking tact: fail often and fail early. And learn. Or keep it all in the "lab" and release tiny portions of brilliance in favor of maintaining some safe growth position in the books and charts. Meanwhile, short-stick the user, the customer, the human being and ruin growth potential for your organization (differentiation, advantage, unique or core selling point offerings, marketing 101, competition, value to the humans who honor you with their consumption and use of your production...).

The truth is that we actually have more evidence through seeing these "radical new" products come to market (I mean, seriously! In 1997 ubiquity was around the corner and we're still not there yet) now after being locked up in the "lab" for far too long. I can see the safe thinking they employ and profess being useful in high liability contexts like healthcare or voting, where risk to a human is high. But social networking? Gaming? Entertainment? Shopping? Anyone who has lived in Asia or Southeast Asia, travelled to Europe, has seen the future (or the now) that America seems to have ignored for decades.

Why is 3D movie making the "cool thing" again? Why do Hollywood movies seem to be bland, to be safe, to suck? Why do they remake remakes and churn artistically devoid fodder? Um... Let me take a guess: they're based on demographically targeted planning algorythms as opposed to real thinking about empathic connection with real human beings who have emotions and feel through primary experience. Like the book "The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage" by Roger Marin said: "It's like driving forward while looking in your rear view mirror." It's not wrong to look (glance from time to time) in the rear view mirror—one benefits from a 360º view of the situation while driving. But it is wrong to look solely in the rear-view mirror while driving forward, while ignoring the left and right, up and down, for example. And some cars don't have rear view mirrors anymore (like the "image map" quip they inserted to sound like industry old-hats). Some cars can park themselves now. Some can even drive themselves now. How do those offerings and behaviors make the existing principals and standards completely obsolete?

These "funamental principles of interaction design" are pitfalls 9 out of 10 times (I've studied this through living through it). Ignore them or question them religiously and think about context over prescription. More antiquated thinking:

Discoverability: All operations can be dicovered by systematic exploration of menus.

Scalability: The operation should work on all screen sizes, small and large.

Have they read "Mobile Web Design" by Cameron Moll? Have they studied the "experts" in other fields who think about the role context plays in interaction, who study humans as humans and not "nodes" (see Elizabeth Churchill's article "The (Anti)Social Net" in the same publication)? "Menus"? One size fits all? Hence my problem with "HCI" as a relevant approach in this age. It has a place, don't get me wrong (i.e. Engineering, backend, technology; not primary research and not innovation)...

These people remind me of some of the organizations I have worked with and for in the past who laughed hysterically at some ideas or predictions of the future I live with now: like a phone that feels more like playing a game than a tool, like gestures and mind control over pointing devices and some metaphor some nerd applied to something so infinitely free no one can define it: human interaction and rapport.

Stop being safe. Stop listening to these "statistics" and "fundamental principles" and consider the sources, intent and agendas from which they come. They are based on visions of objects much closer than they appear in the rear view mirror, based on older ways of looking at the world that don't really apply anymore. They are like the slow drivers in the left lane. You want to honk at them and wonder how they are still allowed to drive on your road. Then you pass them and realize they are simply oblivious and/or old, drunk, dumb, incompetent, angry... And you fogive them, pass them and breathe a sigh of relief you are no longer at their mercy in terms of time abuse. Explore, inquire, absorb, apply and be human. We're imperfect and standards seldom apply when consciousness is involved.

Hail Halo for Men Chicago (Social Networking Best in Class)

2010-09-17T13:00:00.000-07:00

I'll start with a shameless plug: my friend Deanna is the best stylist in the city. You can see my review on Yelp. I wouldn't normally have taken the time to do this if she wasn't my friend in addition to the fact that Halo for Men openly promotes their rewards points system for doing so in ways that I can understand. If I "check in", if I post a review on Yelp, if I sign up to be a part of their Facebook page, if I twitter about my experience, I get points. When I rack up 450 points, I get a free haircut, a free hand wax (which I decline, yuck!) and a free scalp massage. For posting a review on Yelp, for example, I got 150 points. Sign up for their Facebook page and you get another 150 points. That's 300 right there! 450 points is worth around or more than $50 of personal beauty care and worth many referrals and awareness in channels for them (can you say "free advertising and PR" any louder? Can you say "return and repeat and adopted customer" any louder?).

When you visit their salons in person or walk by them, adjacent to their logo and signage are the Facebook and Twitter logos, Yelp and other social streams through which to find, get information, and participate in your own "brand butlering". Before they jumped on the "bandwagon", they had a website that answered to the real needs of someone interested in getting a haircut via a "book online" feature that would offer opt-ins for notifications and calendar synchronization after a one-time registration (along with the option to do it as a "guest", complete with SMS and email notifications, as well as a way to have them actually call you to remind you beforehand). The receptionist is actively involved in "triggering" and "informing" their customers to participate in social networks and very clearly lets a customer know that participation produces award points towards free stuff or discounts. The incentives are endless - refer friends and get points, share your stuff with Halo for Men and get points... Not only can you go to their website to get information but you may see them syndicated in other places while doing other things in the periphery.

I think I may be getting points for posting this blog. If I don't, I have a strange feeling I could simply mention it and get points. Or at least a mention and a link somewhere, which provides me with as much "social capital" as them because I look like a hip and stylish metrosexual who patronizes "hot" establishments in the name of great style. So if you go to Halo for Men (men only, sorry ladies - this is chock full of pool tables, beer, sports, and video games, comfortable leather recliners, very friendly and stylish hostesses, the ability to have your eyebrows and nose hairs trimmed...) please mention Mike sent you. For your mentioning of my name, I get points. For showing up for your first appointment, you'll get points. Virtually anything you "give" them gets you points, including giving them your birthday. Everyone gets points and everyone is happy in the end.

The only place I don't see awareness of these social channels and incentives is on their website itself. There is a "press" section, and I like the way they show the sources as opposed to a dense table of article threads or links as an entry point, but there is no mention or linking to their Yelp reviews, Facebook or Twitter updates, FourSquare or Groupon or any of the other places they have strategically partnered with. It's hard to account for everything when the ecosystem is so diverse and extensive. However, missing the most simple of inclusions (like their own site) is something to learn from.

Some people may say that it is somewhat unethical to "trigger" a review when clearly the motivation is payment (points) but, other than getting the haircut experience of the century from my old friend Deanna, what incentives would I have to take my time to write a review, friend them on Facebook, follow them on Twitter? They never told me the review had to be positive. In fact, I was told to be honest because they need honest feedback. In this case my rewards are points and the warm fuzzy that comes from promoting a good friend towards her success in a service industry. Hair care is a referral business offering an experience good or service and is perfect for this kind of "social networking" as more and more people use reviews and ratings and other websites when they are researching considerations for providers of a need. By leveraging this insight, Halo for Men responds to and facilitates active streams of "social activity". And I would venture to guess that asking the owner of the salons about the "success" of this effort would produce a response like "invaluable to the growth and retention of customers for our business."

What I learned:

If you offer "points" let me know clearly what their value is towards tangible products or services.

Provide me a clear understanding of how many points each action I could take will net me.

On the Halo for Men side, have a system or platform that will "know" when a customer posts a review, friends Halo for Men on Facebook. They require me to send them a "reminder email" to let them know I posted a review on Yelp for example. From this email, they can assign points to my account.

Again, please book an appointment with Deanna K at the Wicker Park Chicago Halo for Men and tell her or the receptionist that Mike sent you. If you read this post, send them an email telling them this post made you want to check them out. I can't give you some of my points as a gift but can assure you the experience of getting your hair done by Deanna will be a worthwhile expenditure; not to mention a really fun time.

Thoughts About "You Are Not a Gadget" by Jaron Lanier

2010-08-07T13:01:00.000-07:00

It didn't take me very long to read this book as it was like listening to someone articulate many of the issues and concerns floating through my subconscious for the last 15 years. Jaron is referred to as the "Godfather of Virtual Reality" and a very loud voice for what he considers a true "fight for the human spirit" in an age of massive technological innovation and disruption.

Jaron will hate my paraphrasing, the slicing and dicing of extractions from his book, citing his treatises about fragmented knowledge and the promotion of shallow understanding when doing so. Though I agree with him in many respects, where I part ways is when I think about the perils of generalization. In other words, if someone (like myself) reads the entire text as it was meant to be consumed (linearly, sequentially) and then extracted the points of interest, I would not consider this act detrimental to the intent of the author; nor the benefit of the reader in terms of knowledge transfer. If my way of digesting this turgid and massive text about highly abstract social technological issues is to highlight and revisit to extract - which aids in memory and internalization - I fail to see how every case of chunked extraction promotes ADD. Where it may have a detrimental effect is when you, the reader of this blog post, bipass reading his book as linear text (Jenny speaks of "codex"), taking what my interpretations are at face value, don't ever read the source material. As Benjamain speaks to in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", the information is diluted the further it travels from its orgins, the aura is somewhat lost.

Excerpts from the book will be blockquoted with my comments following:

The words in this book are written for people, not computers... You have to be somebody before you share yourself. ix

Kurzweil would argue the above. By 2046, he says we'll be one with computers and technology. Therefore, computers will be "somebody" by then, if not in limited ways now. Turing tests are another counter to this statement. How would the book know it was being read by a human vs a computer? Books are ONE WAY communication nodes.

Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he. — publilus syrus

Articulation is tricky. To be able to verbalize is a skill learned over time through several influences including culture, evolution, etc. Non-verbal communication seems to be the major breaking point in our current efforts to understand customers. I would rephrase this to say "You are what you do, not what you say you do."

[web 2.0] promotes radical freedom on the surface of the web, but that freedom ironically, is more for machines than people. p.3

This is Jaron's introduction to "lock in" where computers define the design constraints as opposed to responding to them. Web 2.0, in favor of some "back end" capabilities as well as enhancements to hardware and channels to move information, has helped design and user experience take a large step back in favor of functionality over form. An entire design vernacular has been introduced and followed by flock-like mentality within the industry. Web 2.0 seems to have driven a wedge between an already widening gap between designer and developer by there mere fact that the markup and languages and systems are evolving quickly enough to warrant specialization.

It is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging I social engineering. p.4

Communications influences. You can't erase it or take it back. Virtual or non-virtual, time keeps on ticking away. When any human "uses" something, s/he/it is being manipulated and exploited, guided through a taxonomy or construct. The internet has never not been social. It was created for human beings to share information via a syntax (markup) via a network scheme. Sharon Poggenpahl was right on ten years ago when she told me "designers of the future will not be stylists but will be designing frameworks and systems that leverage patterns." I see the transition from Web 2.0 introducing an enduring concept that has become somewhat of a mantra of late "content is king". The medium will not be the message (right now it is).

Different media designs stimulate different potentials in human nature. We shouldn't seek to make the pack mentality as efficient as possible. We should instead seek to inspire the phenomenon of individual intelligence. p.5

Individual intelligence comes from empathic connection and engagement with objects and others. I too am concerned with the "pack mentality" found throughout the world of Web 2.0. Sure, conformity makes things easier in terms of management and adoption. But I don't think we're far enough into the evolution of our systems to warrant the abandonment of trying new things. Still, tribe and relationships are human nature in the span of time with or without computers (again, the distinction between on and offline is blurring).

Being a person is not a pat formula, but a quest, a mystery, a leap of faith. p.5

Yes, being a person is trial and error and learning and growing. To what extend there is a will to be an individual... that's another story all together.

We make up extensions to your being, like remote eyes and ears (webcams and mobile phones) and expanded memory (the world of details you can search for online). These become the structures by which you connect to the world and other people. These structures in turn can change how you conceive of yourself and the world. We tinker with your philosophy by direct manipulation of your cognitive experience, not indirectly, through argument. It takes only a tiny group of engineers to create technology that can shape the entire future of human experience with incredible speed. Therefore, crucial arguments about the human relationship with technology should take place between developers and users before such direct manipulations are designed. p.6

This makes me think about libraries and the difference between a physical repository of credited and credible information vs. complete and total trust of a hyper-anonymous ethersphere. What scares me about digital print is the opportunity for revisionism. Jaron goes deeper when stating the above hinting at the influences the interfaces themselves have on human cognition and physical manipulation. The unintended consequences will become more apparent as the technology evolves at exponential rates of change faster than anything anyone alive today can fathom (save for people like Jaron and Kurzweil, et al).

There is a constant confusion between real and ideal computers. p.6

The brittle character of maturing computer programs can cause digital designs to get frozen into place by a process known as lock-in. This happens when many software programs are designed to work with an existing one. p.7

The unintended consequence of lock-in is felt acutely in large organizations with enormous "legacy" issues on their "backends" or "middlewear" systems. The cost/benefit equation is used to justify a lack of upgrading at the expense of the customer or the business in terms of limitations or poor experience offerings. The greatest risks are not to the systems themselves but to the cultures, the people and processes that rely on them. Over time, this lock-in can lead to lapses of vision, perspective, or even the ability to survive in the marketplace.

Software is worse that railroads because it must always adhere with absolute perfection to a boundlessly particular, arbitrary, tangled, intractable messiness. p.8

The process of lock-in is like a wave gradually washing over the rulebook of life, culling the ambiguities of flexible thoughts as more and more thought structures are solidified into effectively permanent reality.

The philosopher Karl Popper was correct when he claimed that science is a process that disqualifies thoughts as it proceeds... p.9

Makes me think of that quote hanging at my desk:

"To define is to kill. To suggest is to create." — Stephane Mallarmé

Validity vs analitically based thinking is an age old "friction" between "design" and "business" or "art" and "science" etc... Some processes like to use past data to project future trends, a process I've heard referred to as "driving forward while looking in the rear-view mirror". Art likes to try stuff out, fail early, refine, try again, and is resistent to the quantifiable modelling of analysis in the empiracle or traditional sense. When change in the marketplace was not exponential, analytical thinking (data-based) had a glimmer of hope and relevance. Now, as we are seeing exponential change, validity based thinking will be more the norm (in successful organizations). As some people in the industry have seen, we've transitioned from an economy of scale to an economy of choice.

Lock-in, however, removes design options based on what is easiest to program, what is politically feasible, what is fashionable, or what is created by chance.

If it's important to find the edge of mystery, to ponder the things that can't quite be defined—or rendered into a digital standard—then we will have to perpetually seek out entirely new ideas and objects, abandoning old ones like musical notes... I'll explore whether people are becoming like MIDI notes—overly defined, and restricted to what can be represented by a computer. p.10

The above is the central argument to his book. I once tried to present in 1999 a concept I was working on about computer generated music. I predicted in the presentation, based on the research done by many AI people on player pianos (also a great book by Vonnegut), that within the decade we would have access at the consumer level to software that would allow us to not only compose "MIDI" music but truly incorporate the nuances of tremelo or sustain, tonality, color, tempo, even human error or deviances within a performance. I was laughed at, walked away with my tail between the legs but redeeemed the second Apple released garage band. But that was almost 10 years later and all the people in the room most-likely forgot my weak presentation.

The human organism, meanwhile, is based on continuous sensory, cognitive, and motor processes that have to be synchronized in time. UNIX expresses too large a belief in discrete abstract symbols and not enough of a belief in temporal, continuous, non abstract reality... p.11

The ideas expressed by the file include the notion that human expression comes in severable chunks that can be organized as leaves on an abstract tree—and that the chunks have versions and need to be matched to compatible applications. p.13

"network effect." Every element in the system—every computer, every person, every bit—comes to depend on relentlessly detailed adherence to a common standard, a common point of exchange. p.15

The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful. p.17

humanism in computer science doesn't seem to correlate with any particular cultural style.p.17

the web 2.0 designs actively demand that people define themselves downward. p.19

Again, see the Mallarmé quote.

• Emphasizing the crowd means deemphasizing the individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad moblike behaviors. This leads not only to empowered trolls, but to a generally unfriendly and unconstructive online world.
• Finance was transformed by computing clouds. Success in finance became increasingly about manipulating the cloud at the expense of sound financial principles.
• There are proposals to transform the conduct of science along similar lines. Scientists would then understand less of what they do.
• Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.
• Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.

p.19-20

Someone who has been immersed in orthodoxy needs to experience a figure-ground reversal in order to gain perspective. p.23

The Rapture and the Singularity share one thing in common: they can never be verified by the living. p.26

I think Kurzweil was speaking of Singularity in the sense of a merger; not one or the other. I'll have to check on that.

A computer isn't even there unless a person experiences it. p.26

Guns are real in a way that computers are not. p.27

The first tenet of this new culture [Silicon Valley, et al, sic] is that all of reality, including humans, is one big information system.p.28

...it promotes a new philosophy: that the computer is evolving into a life-form that can understand people better than people can understand themselves. p.28

I say that information doesn't deserve to be free... What if it's even less inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?... there is a technical use of the term "information" that refers to something entirely real. That is the kind of information that is related to entropy... Information is alienated experience. p.28

Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information. p.29

What Kurzweil refers to as the utility of data used as information. And then there's that super dense black hole conversation about knowledge vs information vs data...

What the [Turing] test really shows us, however, even if it's not necessarily what Turning hoped it would say, is that machine intelligence can only be known in a relative sense, in the eyes of a human beholder. p.31

Chess and computers are both direct descendants of the violence that drives evolution in the natural world. p.33

If that is true, then the objective in chess is to make moves that promote more moves for yourself while limiting the options of the opponent. Which would lead someone to refer to the "violence" as more of a disruption or challenge rather than some harmful attack. Unless, of course, the chess game is real survival. But that is for the movies.

In order for a computer to beat the human chess champion, two kinds of progress had to converge: an increase in raw hardware power and an improvement in the sophistication and clarity with which the decisions of chess play are represented in software. p.34

When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful. p.36

Consciousness is situated in time, because you can't experience a lack of time, and you can't experience the future. p.42

Isn't the only way to have a future or a now to have a past? In the case of amnesia... I forgot what I was going to write...

people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. p.47

Yeah. Because we (the consumers and workers, etc) received more access to a wider and deeper range of content in mulitiplied contexts. What's the difference between a card catelogue at a library and a feed aggregator? Little in terms of the "codex" or format. There is an arrangement and structure, and degree of access to information about objects or cards... Since when did we get whole expressions or arguments when engaging with the "media"? For people outside the world of "nerd", computers are largely entertainment centers.

The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable. p.55

The value of a tool is its usefulness in accomplishing a task. p.59

If we are to continue to focus the powers of digital technology on the project of making human affairs less personal and more collective, then we ought to consider how that project might interact with human nature. p.62

FUD—feat, uncertainty, doubt. p.67

Information systems need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality. p.69

What computerized analysis of all the country's school test has done to education is exactly what Facebook has done to friendships. In both cases, life is turned into a database. p.69

The places that work online always turn out to be the beloved projects of individuals, not the automated aggregations of the cloud. p.72

Yeah, but these "individuals" have relationships of opportunity and influence with other people. If they are in a cloud or if they are in a cubicle. This kind of innovation don't happen in a vacuum.

The deep design mystery of how to organize and present multiple threads of conversation on a screen remains as unsolved as ever. p.72

It's the people who make the forum, not the software. p.72

once you have the basics of a given technological leap in place, it's always important to step back and focus on the people for a while. p.72

People will focus on activities other than fighting and killing one another only so long as technologists continue to come up with ways to improve living standards for everyone at once. p.80

If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation that truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless. p.83

Which usually leads to a backlash of "authentic" expression in societies as some art historians would say this is a cyclical pattern in "post-capitalist" societies.

The limitations of organic human memory and calculation used to put a cap on the intricacies of self-delusion. p.96

There are so many layers of abstraction between the new kind of elite investor and actual events on the ground that the investor no longer has any concept of what is actually being done as a result of investments. p.97

Each layer of digital abstraction, no matter how well it is crafted, contributes some degree of error and obfuscation. No abstraction corresponds to reality perfectly. A lot of such layers become a system unto themselves, one that functions apart from the reality that is obscured far below. p.97

Locks are only amulets of inconvenience that remind us of a social contract we ultimately benefit from. p.107

Economics is about how to best mix a set of rules we cannot change with rules that we can change. p.112

The economy is a tool, and there's no reason it has to be as open and wild as the many open and wild things of our experience. But it also doesn't have to be as tied down as some might want. It should and could have an intermediate level of complexity. p.117

cybernetic totalism will ultimately be bad for spirituality, morality, and business. In my view, people have often respected bits too much, resulting in a creeping degradation of their own qualities as human beings. p.119

And if you look at the evolution of the technology closely, the "big ticket" technology bits items seem to be about expression or capture or passive viewing of the human story (TVs, cameras, music, games, etc). So again, Kurzweil may be onto something when he speaks of convergence... We're using VR and gesture and voice to augment the normally tactile activities in our lives so we can spend more time playing, no?

Ideal computers can be experienced when you write a small program. They seem to offer infinite possibilities and an extraordinary sense of freedom. Real computers are experienced when we deal with large programs. They can trap us in tangles of code and make us slaves to legacy. p.119

If each cultural expression is a brand-new tiny program, then they are all aligned on the same starting line. Each one is created using the same resources as every other one. p.120

That's one reason web 2.0 designs strongly favor flatness in cultural expression. p.120

Let's suppose that back in the 1980s I had said, "In a quarter century, when the digital revolution has made great progress and computer chips are millions of times faster than they are now, humanity will finally win the prize of being able to write a new encyclopedia and a new version of UNIX!" It would have sounded utterly pathetic. p.122

Welcome to my world. We've seen it all coming for a while, back in the 1950's there was the Jetpack stuff and Jetsons etc. It's like we're bracing ourselves. Somewhere along the way we forgot to think about the social impacts and emotional impacts of technological disruption and innovation and change on such rapid scales and at such rapid paces.

The distinction between first-order expression and derivative expression is lost on true believers in the hive. First-order expression is when someone presents a whole, a work that integrates its own worldview and aesthetic. It is something genuinely new in the world. Second-order expression is made of fragmentary reactions to first order expression. p.122

Only people can make schlock, after all. A bird can't be schlocky when it sings, but a person can. p.123

I've seen computers make some SERIOUS schlock. I mean, SERIOUS. See Makers by Cory Doctorow.

The decentralized nature of architecture makes it almost impossible to track the nature of the information that is flowing through it. p.123

In more recent eras, ideologies related to privacy and anonymity joined a fascination with emerging systems similar to some conceptions of biological evolution to influence engineers to reinforce the opacity of the design of the internet. Each new layer of code has furthered the cause of deliberate obscurity. p.124

The appeal of deliberate obscurity is an interesting anthropological question... One is a desire to see the internet come alive as a metaorganism: many engineers hope for this eventually, and mystifying the workings of the net makes it easier to imagine it is happening. There is also a revolutionary fantasy: engineers sometimes pretend they are assailing a corrupt existing media order and demand both the covering of tracks and anonymity from all involved in order to enhance this fantasy... the result is that we must now measure the internet as if it were are part of nature, instead of from the inside, as if we were examining books of a financial enterprise. p.124

Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. p.126

pattern exhaustion, a phenomena in which a culture runs out of variations of traditional designs i their pottery and becomes less creative. p.128

Spore addresses an ancient conundrum about causality and deities that was far less expressibly before the advent of computers. It shows that digital simulation can explore ideas in the form of direct experiences, which was impossible with previous art forms.p.132

A HYPOTHESIS LINKS the anomaly in popular music to the characteristics of flat information networks that suppress local contexts in favor global ones. p.133

A digital image of an oil painting is forever a representation not a real thing. p.133

The definition of a digital object is based on assumptions of what aspects of it will turn out to be important. It will be a flat, mute nothing if you ask something of it that exceeds expectations. p.134

Hip-hop is imprisoned within digital tools like the rest of us. But at least it bangs fiercely against the walls of its confinement. p.135

The hive ideology robs musicians and other creative people of the ability to influence the context within which their expressions are perceived, if they are to transition out of the old world of labels and music licensing. p.136

Every artist tries to foresee or even nudge the context in which expression is to be perceived so that the art will make sense. It's not necessarily a matter of overarching ego, or manipulative promotion, but a simple desire for meaning. p.137

Even if a video of a song is seen a million times, it becomes just one dot in a vast pointillist spew of similar songs when it is robbed of its motivating context. Numerical popularity doesn't correlate with intensity of connection in the cloud. p.137

If you grind any information structure up too finely, you can loose the connections of the parts to their local contexts as experienced by the humans who originated them, rendering the structure itself meaningless. p.138

There are two primary strands of cybernetic totalism. In one strand, the computing cloud is supposed to get smart to a superhuman degree on its own, and in the other, a crowd of people connected to the cloud through anonymous, fragementary contact is supposed to the super-human entity that gets smart. p.139

Once organisms became encapsulated, they isolated themselves into distinct species, trading genes only with others of their kind. p.140

you'll generally find for most topics, the Wikipedia entry is the first URL returned by the search engines but not necessarily the best URL returned by search engines but not necessarily the best URL available. p.143

One of the negative aspects of Wikipedia is this: because of how its entities are created, the process can result in a softening of ambition or, more specifically, a substitution of ideology for achievement. p.143

The distinction between understanding and creed, between science and ethics, is subtle. p.151

computationalism. This term is usually used more narrowly to describe a philosophy of mind, but I'll extend it to include something like a culture... the world can be understood as a computational process, with people as subprocesses. p.153

My first priority must be to avoid reducing people to mere devices. The best way to do that is to believe that the gadgets I can provide are inherent tools and are only useful because people have the magical ability to communicate meaning through them. p.154

The whole point of technology, though, is to change the human situation, so it is absurd for humans to aspire to be inconsequential. p.155

Logical positivism is the idea that a sentence or another fragment—something you can put in a computer file—means something in a freestanding way that doesn't require invoking the subjectivity of a human reader... "The meaning of a sentence is the instructions to verify it."... The new version of the idea if that if you have a lot of data you can make logical positivism work on a large-scale statistical basis. The thinking goes that within the cloud there will be no need for the numinous halves of traditional oppositions such as syntax/semantics, quantity/quality, content/context, and knowledge/wisdom. p.155

"realism." The idea is that humans, considered as information systems, weren't designed yesterday, and are not the abstract playthings of some higher being, such as a web 2.0 programmer in the sky or a cosmic spore player. Instead, I believe that humans are the result of billions of years of implicit, evolutionary study in the school of hard knocks. The cybernetic structure of a person has been refined by a very large, very long, and very deep encounter with physical reality... what can make bits have meaning is that their patterns have been hewn out of so many encounters with reality that they aren't really abstractable bits anymore, but are instead a non-abstract continuation of reality... Realism is based on specifics, but we don't yet know—and might never know—the specifics of personhood from a computational point of view. The best we can do right now is engage in the kind of storytelling that evolutionary biologists sometimes indulge in. p.157

Fourier Transform. A Fourier transform detects how much action there is at particular "speeds" (frequencies) in a block of digital information. p.161

Gabor wavelet transform... This mathematical process identifies individual blips of action at particular frequencies in particular places, while the Fourier transform jest tells you what frequencies are present overall. p.161

Odors are completely different, as in the brain's method of sensing them. p.162
The number of distinct odors is limited only by the number of olfactory receptors capable of interacting with them. p.163

There is no way to interpolate between two smell molecules... colors and sounds can be measured with rulers, but odors must be looked up in a dictionary. p.163

smelly chemicals... are tied to the many stages of rotting or ripening of organic materials. As it turns out, there are three major, distinct chemical paths of rotting, each of which appears to define a different stream of entries in the brain's dictionary of smells. p.164

A smell is a synecdoche: a part standing in for them whole. p.164

Olfaction, like language, is built up from entries in a catalog, not from infinitely morphable patterns... the grammar of language is primarily a way of fitting those dictionary words in a larger context. p.165

This is perhaps the most interesting take away from the book. The olfactory as a medium, as a sense, as a channel.

Darwin's most compelling evolutionary speculations was that music might have preceded language. He was intrigued by the fact that many species use song for sexual display and wondered if human vocalizations might have started out that way too. It might follow, then, that vocalizations could have become varied and complex only later, perhaps when song came to represent actions beyond mating and such basics of survival. p.167

The brain's cerebral cortex areas are specialized for particular sensory systems, such as vision. There are also overlapping regions between these parts—the cross-modal areas I mentioned earlier in connection with olfaction. Rama [V.S. Ramachandran] is interested in determining how the cross-modal areas of the brain may give rise to a core element of language and meaning: the metaphor. p.171

conflict that has been at the heart of information science since its inception: Can meaning be described compactly and precisely, or is it something that can emerge only in approximate form based on statistical associations between large numbers of components? p.173

when you deny the specialness of personhood, you elicit confused, inferior results from people. p.177

Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. p.180

software development doesn't necessarily speed up in sync with improvements in hardware. It often instead slows down as computers get bigger because there are more opportunities for errors in bigger programs. Development becomes slower and more conservative when there is more at stake, and that's what is happening. p.181

Some of the greatest speculative investments in human history continue to converge on silly Silicon Valley schemes that seem to have been named by Dr. Seuss. On any given day, one might hear of tens or hundreds or millions of dollars flowing to a start-up company named Ublibudly or MeTickly. These are names I just made up, but they would make great venture capital bait if they existed. At these companies one finds rooms full of MIT PhD engineers not seeking cancer cures or sources of safe drinking water for the underdeveloped world but schemes to send little digital pictures of teddy bears and dragons between adult members of social networks. At the end of the road of the pursuit of technological sophistication appears to lie a playhouse in which humankind regresses to nursery school. p.182

Yes, I agree whole-heartedly that "social networking" is in its infancy—especially when you approach it from a purely technological viewpoint, as we tend to do in every industry that touches a machine or uses one as a mediation device. If we ditch the computer when thinking about these interactions, we'll find there are several disciplines, both professional and academic that have been dealing with many of the issues inherent with social networking on the internet.

For more information about Jaron Lanier, see his website: http://www.jaronlanier.com/

Priority Mapping

2010-07-22T13:02:00.000-07:00

The Digital Innovation Group has been working on evolving a concept introduced by a former colleague of mine named Joseph Dombroski, a User Experience Architect in the Chicago-Area. A priority map traditionally "road maps" various efforts, contingencies and influences, and the hierarchy of importance inherent within the efforts. It is traditionally used for engineering and software design, some business strategy from a tactical and mostly logistical perspective.

Practicing User Experience for many years now, a thread I've found common to much of my endeavors is something some refer to as "parallel industry" examples that may speak to a design problem or issue or challenge in ways that answer questions or provide examples of possible directions we can take to innovate in another "parallel industry". An example of this would be priority mapping as applied to a design and user experience development and production process.

One of the challenges when designing in multi-disciplinary and collaborative teams is dealing with agendas and incentives that drive various "stakeholders" and "players" working towards an "end goal." No matter what the "end goal" is, I've been on many projects where line of sight to the end goal(s) are obfuscated by insertion of agenda as "loudest voice in the room" or personal viewpoint anxiety derailment. What becomes more and more apparent during these moments of distraction, channel noise and argument, is that there needs to be a framework in place to guide and corral the discussions, prioritize efforts from the perspective of the "end goal" (and the business and user needs), focusing all work and conversation around the things that directly address the problems and needs at hand.

Enter priority mapping for user experience. Priority mapping for UX takes into consideration everything from high level strategy to relative proportion of objects, content, functionality, in addition to "progressive disclosure" by answering to "changing modes" within a customer's intent or the system reflecting answers to that intent. Priority mapping for UX does not specify layout or design language. Priority mapping starts with the human need and expectation for value and backs out to gain perspective on a holistic view of an experience captured within modes and states (a "page" for example). Here's the process as it's evolved thus far:

1. through collaboration with all parties involved with the ideation and production of a final deliverable or solution, facilitate alignment with the "end use" goals throughout the team.

2. Based on these goals, do a content audit to see where existing assets can be leveraged and where new ones may need to be created.

3. A user story or scenario helps (but be careful not to stereotype or assume) to provide a structure to demonstrate a "path" through an experience.

4. Coalescing 1-3, "map" out the "high level" content "blocks" within a "mode" (window, browser...). Once the blocks have been identified, providing high level themes for an experience offering, it's time to work collaboratively to identify the "priority" and "proportion" of content, blocks or functionality relative to other content blocks.

5. Using the finite space of a box (4:3 ratio or 16:9 ratio), come up with percentages of importance or "primary focus" vs "peripheral" or "secondary" focus. These percentages can drive the creation of the priority map in the sense that they are represented within the box by the amount of size each takes up. See Smartmoney's "Map of the Market" for an example of how relative proportion can be used to show volume and weight.

The priority map, once "finished" can evolved based on discussions and iterations. It can be used as a way to focus efforts and thinking on the end goals and work actively towards de-scoping, channel noise or irrelevancy. It is also a great resource to convey a solid direction and strategy that answers to the understanding needs of non-UX influences within the production process.

As this is a new process and still evolving, I can show no examples from Sears as the work on the table utilizing this method is proprietary and confidential to Sears internal employees only. If you work at Sears, are interested in priority mapping, please reach out to me so I can walk and talk you through some examples and show the process.

iPad reflections on use (first three months) by a UX grouch

2010-07-05T13:03:00.000-07:00

This post began creation initially using Atomic web browser in a tab holding blogger's posting UI.

I was able to input the title (though I discovered my breath was a command to hide the keypad) but was unable to begin writing these last two sentences due to some incompatibility with my more like a "real" browser and the "open source API schema". Thankfully I was able to switch to evernote to write this post. I'll copy and paste it into the input box and format it using my laptop which is sometimes a desktop. Some parts of my post may happen via SMS or cell. These smaller mobile devices feel so sluggish in the catch up to the capabilities I tend to take for granted in my larger clunkier devices. Five* years ago or so the iPhone just came out. Touch screens prior to it on mobile depended on stylus input and touch screens on larger scale were tap and point and filled with puffy buttons (well suited for vending, service and terminal applications).

This is one of the places where the iPad feels less like a "robust" machine but a toy version of what's to come. Though i like the thinking around multiple orientations and locking (something I wish the iPhone had) I seem to prefer landscape mode over most for reasons of more space for more stuff or breathing room for focus (I tend to use the device on the toilette or in bed horizontal).

I still wish I could fluidly multitask like on a laptop or desktop and feel trapped within the shuffle of transitions that seem and feel redundant when I wait for feed or program loads (sometimes not the fault of the device). My states however are saved, like if I spazzed and accidentally hit the hardware recessed home button and closed evernote without hitting save. But like most novel things that are initially deemed "cool" in an interface can quickly become repetitive nuances hindering or breaking the flow of using a tool or application.

I can't deny that it serves as a great photo frame and music player and portable note taker as well as a sharing device in a show you kind of way. I sense slide shows coming back with it getting easier to wirelessly transfer images instantaneously to several places at once, like flickr, where I can preview and witness the shoot unfold.

Physically, my breath seems to say close keyboard in certain positions while typing. Again I think of the next manifestations of keyboard input like simulated 3D like tactile response inflation of the box so I don't have to scrunch or develop bad typing and spelling habits (it's much like a conversation on a cell phone, you're shown a possibility of how what you said could be interpreted and sometimes you have to repeat yourself several times before the other person can understand, sometimes through a crash or disconnection and others through distortion of my intended or expected input as represented by the device be its voice channel or text input channel).

When I switched to the safari web browser native to the iPad os I encountered the same input problems and again switched back to Evernote. At this point it may be fair to outline the pros and cons experienced thus far in my use of my iPad.

Screen brightness and size compared to the other "mobile" or "micro" devices I use and own (this includes a "netbook" loaded with both WindowsXP and Ubuntu Linux, an iPhone 3GS, a 13" MacBook Pro with a 7200 RPM custom hard drive and maxed out ram, among other gadgets) is impressive, in addition to the resolution. What I can admit is that computers and components are in fact shrinking and becoming more mobile in their use. In my early days of design and computers, a desktop was a necessity if one wanted to produce audio or video or high resolution graphics. Moore's law came faster (and slower - myths here) than many of us professional insiders will admit. The iPad isn't even a year old. All of these "game changing" devices are in their infancy.

Hardware mapping to function: seems like Apple has institutionalized the "home" metaphor through the application of providing a hardware key. It's like the early versions and applications of the esc key as the universal panic button. If I'm disoriented or want to switch to another application I hit the home key. This landing and routing scheme support single-tasking through requiring a user to ass through the gate of home before moving onto a sub-level within the architecture. The screen orientation lock button as hardware and the orientation scheme in general are disorienting. There is a conflict with the lock toggle and the volume controls. Despite owning the device and using it daily for several months, I still require the use of trial and error to discern up from down. Then there is the lock button. While I understand it's dependency for the iPhone (decrease butt dialing) I fail to see the value here. Especially when cases for the iPad are considered in this mix. A case seems essential to the ownership of an iPad if not for protection of a relatively frivolous and expensive gadget in an ecosystem of devices I utilize in my daily life. In my experience the case facilitates easier use via provision of inclined surface for typing on the keyboard or stand for when my iPad is in what I refer to (among others) as "passive viewing mode". What the lock breaks is the principle of on/off expectation. There is a mapping to the unlock in software form yet locking itself is initiated via hardware. There is no software based lock equivalent. Same goes for the screen lock. And volume. Why make these hardware based functions when everything else on the device seems to be software based?

Keyboard: here's where I get overly frustrated. No matter the position I sit, no matter how hard I concentrate, no matter how much practice, my rate of error using a touch pad keyboard is astoundingly high (inefficient). For a while the flashiness of the UI was able to salve my disdain and at first I welcomed auto-correct. What I don't get is that Apple took something that is a universally understood design vernacular and "innovated" it in ways that provide more reliance on acceptance of a learning curve and the limitations of the interaction than on using the input mode to foster more efficient input into the system — like switching "states" between symbolic/numeric input (see screen shot), or hiding and showing the keyboard (again, discovery initiated with a learning curve). Last, haven't figure out how "shift" works...

Oh! That's what the symbolic/numeric toggle button on the keyboard is for. It makes me wonder if apple is trying to change the game not only with platforms and gadgets but how we cognitively map our physical world into a virtual one. I assume they own the rights or patent on this QWERTY keyboard as well as the auto-suggest that I have a love/hate relationship with.

Though I can see the value of ownership locking out (and locking in) competition and fostering advocacy and adoption, I can't forget Sony strategy, among others in the industry deemed to be overly focused on proprietary nuances that made "open" systems closed to everyone not subscribing to a brand. I can't help but think that this is a very carefully planned and executed strategy on Apple's part. Not only are they innovative in terms of platforms, systems and hardware/software but lead the pack in terms of design thinking and business strategy.

That said, how could a closed system be a long term strategy when we are barreling towards a more "open" system? In the short term apple profits from locking out other players pitching their humanness to the public and positioning the perception of their company as the underdog misunderstood creative spirit counter to the business machines land of Microsoft and sun. People who whole-heartedly drink the Jobs punch are ignorant of the fact that non of apples work, position in the market, or focus on being different would be possible without competition. Yet, like most businesses trying to eke out market share, the goal seems to be complete control, monopoly. Like their relationship with AT&T over any other carrier. I've never been able to stomach why a device should control the service I use to make it a communications channel. One of the best ways I could see someone being "different" in this space is through providing customers with options and choices; much less ubiquitously open systems of syndication, access, consumption and management (metadata and content/messaging).

What I am trying to say is that apple isn't as "user friendly" once the surface is peeled back and the motives of their corporation become painfully obvious. Further I would say their lock in and forcing of the user to adopt to shortcomings in thinking or user testing before releasing to the market actually stifles innovation and human evolution. But I represent only .00000000003% of the people who consume these products due to my education, interests, history of use and background in HCI, human-centered design, product interface design. In other words, I have the vernacular to articulate where when and how interfaces fail while 99.000000007% of the population have no clue, live in a world where technology and gadgets take up far less time and space in their lives than mine.

What apple seems to do very well time and time again is to be first to market with technologies that other companies fail to realize at the same pace or same prowess in terms of delivery and value proposition. Perhaps that is where Apple is truly a leader - they are organized in such a way that they are able to produce in timely and efficient manners, products and services that appeal to the average "Jane".

Much of what I have written so far is bout expectations both personal and presented by the brand, the device and the baggage I carry from previous experiences. Yes, I am hard on design and user interfaces. That's because I see the risks involved with what I refer to as "captive audience" when using a "GUI". Periphery disappears and focus on a boxed in context is intense. At that point the device has undivided attention and thus control over both physical and cognitive processes. It would not be impossible to actively work to design user interfaces actually alter some very foundational physical and cognitive processes within us all, including what we say and how we say it (think about truncation these days and abbreviations and the countless reports coming out about the western human's decline of focus, depth or non herd adaption to shortcuts, workarounds, or system failures that actively destroy vital ability. Like Neil Stevenson and Jaron Lanier said in many ways in many forums to date: BEWARE. Be very conscious when using new technologies and note when you are forced to change behavior to adapt to an offering hidden behind messaging like "it's all about you" because it never is when products and services and agendas are involved in the value proposition equation. At the end of the day Apple is a company that is publicly traded and therefore beholden to shareholder buy in. Like all the other businesses out there.

Back to the iPad... These gripes and critiques aside, I do find much pleasure in using my iPad in several areas not initially intended. There has been much debate about the death of print and I am one of those old people stuck in a generation of publishing, of citation of source and the unmitigated/able nature of the printed word. The app I seem to use the most is Kindle. And it is ironic because it integrated with the Amazon product platform and facilitated much spending by me outside of the Apple Store ecosystem. The conduit to this were my lists on an existing platform focused on and somewhat good at a certain kind of product that warrants much of what we deem valuable on the net today and going forward (ubiquitous access to information and experts and social communities of use...).

I am so into the tactile interaction of a "multi-touch" screen. Having designed touch screen interfaces in my past and hating the poke input model, I love seeing stuff from the early days of Flash (called spark) in terms of responsive UI that engages users more subtly, less literally or metaphorically and more "intuitively" through true interaction and communication loops. However, looking through the human interface guidelines document I realize that within their closed development structure, there is little room for variation or defiance of the standard patterns put forth without a great deal of expertise, effort and an extreme amount of patience in a developer. With the rise of HTML5 I hope we'll see a mass exodus from the app store and a flocking towards a more open web that truly captures the advantages of the many channels and devices we use every day.

Some promising applications have been slow to realize like AirDisplay and Mobile Mouse. The lag with screen sharing is prohibitive to use. Lag when in response to input it death for an interface. Still it offers hope in that use case I'm waiting for "token devices" that fluidly share with one other, allowing me to unmoor or shed weight when needed while maintaining a home base or several home bases.

* pieces of the iPhone "GUI" were developed years before the iPhone appeared.

The default keyboard.

From numeric mode, I go to symbol mode. If this is a multitouch device, why not leverage the existing functionality of a multitouch keyboard like I'm used to on a "real" computer?

While in numeric mode, Apple remaps my punctuation keys which is again disorienting and causes much in the way of toggle-based mistakes on input. Where is my standard shift key?

A Response: Natural User Interfaces Are Not Natural

2010-06-02T13:04:00.000-07:00

"I believe we will look back on 2010 as the year we expanded beyond the mouse and keyboard and started incorporating more natural forms of interaction such as touch, speech, gestures, handwriting, and vision--what computer scientists call the "NUI" or natural user interface."

— Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft

That would be an awesome quote were it not for the FACT that all of this NUI stuff was around at Xerox Parc over 20 years ago (as Norman mentions). What is astounding is how slow culture, both in and outside of business, has slowed in terms of evolution while technology steadily increases velocity in terms of evolution (Moore's Law is now wrong, we're at a pace exponentially faster according to people in the know). Why is it taking so long to make GUI's (NUI's) that match the technology progression? My theory is that this stuff is "new" in the sense that it takes time to incorporate it all into the contexts of our lives, that disruptive innovation introductions to the market, even for "early adopters" has increased to a level of overwhelming for even the most spastic of embrace (myself included). As we're in an economy of choice as opposed to pure scale and demand fulfillment, even innovation seems to be a product category calling for discerning consumption.

Don writes:

"As usual, the rhetoric is ahead of reality... Fundamental principles of knowledge of results, feedback, and a good conceptual model still rule. The strength of the graphical user interface (GUI) has little to do with its use of graphics: it has to do with the ease of remembering actions, both in what actions are possible and how to invoke them... The important design rule of a GUI is visibility: through the menus, all possible actions can be made visible and, therefore, easily discoverable."

Menus and the vernaculars he and many people rely on (AKA "patterns" and/or "standards") are direct responses to the constraints inherent in the systems (metaphors, proprietary hardware...) that they service. The "desktop" metaphor has been ripped to shreds and proven to be a culturally-biased manifestation of a group of highly insular engineers; much less detrimental to the development of operating systems that are truly cross-cultural and/or flexible enough to be usable in many contexts. That this metaphor has hurt the industry more than helped it in terms of innovation (see "In the Beginning was the Command Line", an essay by Neil Stevenson). Standards are good... For programming and system-level platform architecture... For sanity... For stability. But standards are often static and mistaken as gospel as opposed to dynamic sets of frameworks driven by the evolution of the marketplace and the demands therein; not to mention context, that human reality. When Norman makes statements like "Systems that avoid these well-known methods suffer," I get angry because statements like that are blatant examples of how ignorant designers can be at times (i.e. generalizing without taking the time to think about the complexities of interactions, the concept of empathic response and emergent technologies). In other words, systems that avoid usable and appropriate (to the user AND the business) methods suffer. Experiences and interfaces should respond to the demands of the content they are trying to service and provide to end users. For example the unique facets of products or services should drive a designer to explore the best "vehicles" through which to drive a particular path down the information superhighway. When we live within our comfort zones in the name of stability and sanity, we miss out, we suffer through a stagnation of evolution culturally, physically, cognitively and socially (human factors, user-centered frameworks). And if you want to speak to "affordances", Norman should perhaps look at advertising agencies or advertising in an of itself, the approaches that speak to the "unique selling points" of products or services as a driver for campain messaging and positioning. The same applies to GUI or NUI: an interaction is a form of exchange, of rapport. There are many many things going on outside of a pure form or system level analysis.

"Because gestures are ephemeral, they do not leave behind any record of their path, which means that if one makes a gesture and either gets no response or the wrong response, there is little information available to help understand why."

Not all contexts are universal. Anthropometrics can apply to two dimensional realities in the form of feedback from input, indication, understanding, response... There are many layers to the arguments Don positions that are ignored in favor of some call to convergence and standardization of thinking in a realm that suffers greatly from any algorythm-based application of solutions without thinking about the problem itself and the humans benefitting from the solution(s). What he speaks of here is handled by the display, the response of the system and not entirely dependent on the mode of input, be it gestural or keyboard, etc. I get the sense that because the keyboard and mouse have been around longer in a consumer context, Norman will find no fault in their use citing "standards". As Jaron Lanier states clearly, we should be extremely angry at the lack of progression of these systems, how we are extremely tolerant of shortcommings, how we alter behavior, much of the time dumbing it down, to facilitate the limitations of systems that should be much more functional.

Norman goes onto talk about standardization of gestures, etc. I assume he's dipping into his "affordances" misinterpretation at that point (or ignoring his own philosophies about that entirely). I mean, non-verbal communications, surfaces of inscription, modes of channel-based communications, have been studied as disciplines for decades prior to the invention of the PC. It scares me to see this foundational knowledge ignored by a so-called "expert" in the field. Going back further, Plato's The Cave would be a great read at this point. It seems that human perception, if not human experience is abandoned in favor of a full-out rant against a disruptive market release (because it calls into question many of his "standards" based on his interpretation of interaction and technology as well as a very obvious need to gain marketshare as an expert in this realm by speaking to the anxieties of his constituency - mostly business and mostly people who work with user experience professionals as opposed to practice it on a daily basis).

As a "design historian" he should also be in touch with what the futurists are predicting, some of which is already here like physical feedback mechanisms triggered by neuro stimulation or holography (3D) or interactions which combine multiple input methods and models like voice/sound as a gesture that influences touch in combination with keyboard or key. Multi-combination input is central to gaming. Mapping new commands to actions is commonplace as a learning curve in many realms, even in non-expert user interfaces. Again, generalizing is appropriate in some cases. These generalizations, assumptions and supposedly credible insights about multi-touch and gestural UI are a tremendous disservice to the design community. Then again, looking through the prism of our current technology and how slowly it is catching up to what he called rhetoric ahead of reality, it's understandable to latch onto what is comfortable and requires little effort and expertise to explain or explore or extend.

Facebook and Privacy Part II

2010-05-26T13:05:00.000-07:00

Attached is a PDF generated from Notable about my thoughts regarding Facebook and Privacy settings. As I've written previously in posts regarding privacy, the landscape is changing, morphing by the millisecond so anything I post in this context will probably be old news before I click the submit button.

Regardless, from an experience and design and business perspective, I noticed many things that fail to provide the (assumed) user with effective ways of not only configuring settings but understanding the configuration(s) and/or setting(s) in and of themselves.

High Level Observations:

- Why does a user have to go to a dashboard or a full-blown state/mode to configure content display models, content access or screen configuration? In other words, it would be so much more understandable and valuable to users if the settings for privacy where accessible in the context of interacting with the content.

- Why does the "preview" state have to be a state? Why can't it be a "resolution model" which shows me a real-time feedback loop of how what I choose or select impacts the "default view" of my profile from

- multiple perspectives. If you're going to force me into the "Only me, friends, and everyone" model of grouping, at least give me the option to define my own groups and ways of naming them/specifying access control. Facebook has always felt more like an application or platform as opposed to a website made of pages and page turns. Yet they insist on staying "simple and elegant" (which means they are too lazy to think about some fundamental design issues).

- Still seeing a lot of fine print, abstraction, and obfuscation burying more fine print behind links in sub or supporting copy blocks. An organization like Facebook is responding to public outcry. The experience in and of itself is a "brand message" and wholly effects "perception". It's not good enough to simply offer access anymore. What is vital if Facebook plans on retaining users or limiting attrition is to be completely transparent in policy and effect/input by the user.

- How do my privacy settings affect the use of my "social graph" in the form of several syndicatable streams, including Facebook? How does OpenID get affected? How can I manage OpenID/FBConnect privacy settings in this context? Can I?

Also stated before is the fact that social networking sites were not built to retain or protect a person's sense of privacy because they are about public (or specified as private) interactions via a channel called the "internet". In the end, these settings are a knee-jerk and quick panic response by what I assume to be c-class and legal fighting some made-up time limitation with the intent to "get something up" as opposed to provide real value (i.e. Clear understanding) to the user. The troubling pattern I am seeing here is that facebook is in a loose-loose situation. They are trying to control something that is at the core of their value proposition both to themselves and the people who use the website. Without the "social graph" and "data trail" people leave, FB diminishes in value returns in terms of relevancy and experience. By answering to public outcry, facebook has abandoned this core value structure capitulating to advertising and revenue streams due to its market position.

We all know that when the user is happy, the company will be too. I wonder when the companies of tomorrow will start realizing that this "game" has changed. That the user is in control now and that the system is expected to provide this control. It's no longer let's build it and let the user figure it out. It's the user dictates everything and I provide the tools to enable him or her or it to do so. Still, I see many companies, even as new as Facebook, holding tightly to old and failed models, repeating mistakes in favor of the business as opposed to listening to customers. This leaves a great gap for opportunity and competition, if not the death of Facebook to come (at least as we know it today).

My prediction for identity and privacy on the web: user beware and user controls. More and more pieces of our online identity have been moving to the "cloud" which means a syndicated and consistently synced identity that the user chooses where and what information is accessible to whom and when and how. We're not there yet. And the war is with the usual suspects who most of the time want to be given information without giving anything other than a bad user experience back. The value to all gets lost in the battle when the solution seems simple to those with experience: be transparent or don't do anything at all when it comes to my data and my privacy and a risk of me being harmed or vulnerable to harm through use or a system. Liability will always be an issue when it comes to privacy because the entire definition and concept of privacy is dependent on multiple people or parties. There are negotiations, norms, implicit and non-implicit rules of behavior. There are also policies in place that can be leveraged if harm does happen. In the end, it's all about personal responsibility and vigilance by the user to manage what data is provided and when and how.

Tomorrowland by Daniel D. Castro

2010-05-19T13:05:00.000-07:00

I can't repeat this enough: your microwave will be speaking to your tires in
the somewhat near future. Sensory input (aka passive influence) into systems
will automate much of what we angst over about "privacy" online. Still, I
can't help but think back to classes in 1998 and prior where my esteemed
professors would speak of such things being common by "2010" (this is when
people scoffed at an "expert" proposition that over half of all households
in the US would have "broadband" access - ADSL within the next five years).
Point is that predicting the future is AIMING an arrow towards a target
while reading factors like wind speed and direction etc. If you focus on the
target, you usually miss, like in pool when you look at the cue ball (a
no-no) when lining up the shot. Businesses seem to think in shorter-term
intervals (like yesterday, I need this yesterday) without considering the
path walk, the journey and perhaps a change, constant change in plans along
the way. That's not to say that some businesses get lucky by blindly
charging forward in knee-jerk reaction ways as second movers or fast
followers or strange (interpretations) ways of "following" via a complete
lack of understanding in regards to stuff like user experience or design or
programming/software engineering...

We used to refer to this as "ubiquitous computing" where you would gain
"peripheral awareness" of activity by and from your servant machines. Isn't
it ironic that in AI and machine learning people are spending tons of money
on understanding concepts of "empathy" over data aggregation or cleansing?
Just some thoughts.

Facebook and Privacy

2010-05-13T13:06:00.000-07:00

(this is a blog post... waiting rooms)

http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/05/infographic-the-history-of-facebooks-default-privacy-settings/

This is very interesting and clearly shows default settings over time. I'd love to see a side by side as well as callouts to policies related to the shifts in their default settings. Regardless it does serve as a metaphor for the fluidity of the policies in place, as witnessed with recent court cases with the FCC and EFF, among other banal acronyms. Harkening to the blog post - expecting privacy in a "social network" without actively learning how to manage it (i.e. spending time and calories) is like getting into a taxi in Chicago and expecting not to pay. There is an implicit understanding implied by the very nature of the website, clearly broadcast in "advertising" often featuring real-time "social graph" threads (posts, photos). What is troubling to me is the belief that regulation is the solution, that our government or someone else can make some very personal and important choices for us when we ourselves have no idea what choice we would make if the situation arose (because we have not experienced it yet).

Defaults (i.e. just in case someone doesn't take the time to review policy, preferences, settings, etc...):

My wallet is private. What I spend my money on is not public knowledge for obvious security reasons. Besides, banks hate fraud and scams and spam (if they are legitimate). When that stuff happens to my money, I can sleep safely (sort of) knowing that my bank wants that info secure as much as I. Mint.com was able to "open up" their platform in ways extremely useful to their core offering without risking even the perception of risk. Why is it so hard to do this on eCommerce sites? How can eCommerce providers reassure their customers that the information collected will not put someone at risk of theft or harm but will enhance their experience through gained understanding (Amazon claims this but I have yet to stop seeing stuff so far out of the realm of what I am interested in getting in the way of what I am that I fail to see the logic working). While my wishlist may reflect what I like and perhaps am able to spend money on, what I own and have purchased from them are not public knowledge unless I "opt-in" to identify and "rate"...

I partake in "social networks" because I want to connect with people (friends or otherwise). Whatever my intentions, it has never been anything other than clear to me that what I do will be shared with a "network" of people. When the network was small and limited to those "inside" (logged into) the platform, I feared little about violations to my privacy. It seems that as the network opened up and the whole world could scrutinize my "data-shadow" I began to worry that, say, some ill-intentioned organization or individual will recontextualize and repurpose my data for evil or harmful means. This has never happened to me or any of the people I know. Sure, there has been "drama" between a friend or former lover or family member, some spam, some spam from me to others I had to apologize for...

Most of the time when I experience harm from being active on a social site it is when I do something that breaks a collective "norm" of behavior. If I post something inappropriate, if I say something shocking, I get a response, negative or positive. Someone I know posted something to the effect of "why would god do such horrible things to a child if he has so much power?" and I was alarmed and checked in because I was concerned. One time I posted some comments about an agency I did work for and later regretted the rant and took it down. All of this stuff is so new (YouTube, for example, turned FIVE YEARS OLD yesterday). And when things are new they are "disruptive".

Ultimately and unfortunately, the harms that people experience through violations of their privacy will result in remediation to address and asses risk. We will come up with new ways of monitoring and managing information rapidly in the coming years due to increased connectivity, higher "bandwidth", better devices and infrastructures... But since humans are using all of this, there are social and cultural (and emotional) considerations and frameworks in place that could help in the development of systems and processes that ensure safety online, even on social networks.

It is not the website, it is the PERSON who is responsible for how s/he/they use the website. When we click those EULAs we agree to this. No social networking site wants people to live in terror or fear when they use their services. If someone gets into a car wreck, the car is seldom to blame (except for Toyota...). In other words, when someone uses information they should not have access to in the first place to cause harm and harm is caused, there is usually a consequence to the action. If the harm is widespread and severe enough, there is usually a policy-level reaction. Maybe I'm naive but I don't know anyone who would maliciously "phreak" someone on a social network and do harm to someone else. Luckily I've not been a victim; nor have I heard about any.

That's not to say sites like Facebook shouldn't be a little more empathetic to the lives of people, more consoling in their response to questions about their policies. No matter the "channel" in communications, there are always structures, vernaculars and syntax. Some are less obvious than others. In addition to various levels of channel noise there are understandings about how to behave or act. Otherwise, there would be no continuity, nothing to engage with. I refer to stuff that is "private" unless asked as an example here. Like who you may be dating and the status of your relationship. Again, it's hard to blame Facebook in my opinion when the "user" has the ability to not fill those fields out. I don't recall, having used Facebook for a long time now, those fields being "required".

In the end, eBay comes to mind the most when it comes to "liability" and "policy" on a "social network" where the risk of harms are many due to that leap of faith humanity must take in any marketplace transaction. "Buyer Beware" was a byline mantra when the site took off. From day one there were reputation management tools that allowed people to flag and file complaints and provide eBay with invaluable feedback to manage changes to their platform before wide-spread disaster or harm struck.

There are all these models outside of their intended use we can draw upon to render "defaults" for how privacy is managed in an increasingly "connected" age. Behavior will be the ultimate judge of how privacy will shape itself in the coming weeks, days, decades. People won't participate in social networks that deprive them of their expected right to security and safety of self and their "data-trails". Those that throw their hands in the air and claim naive when ignorance is more appropriately applied should reconsider why they are participating in a social network or providing information that, no matter what, is at risk of being used in a malicious or harmful manner due to the impossibility of completely securing a "channel" through which information is transmitted.

The coming mantra for 2010-2012 or so will be "User Beware". Not because people or companies are bad but because no one has an answer right now, the stuff is new, we are still shaping it all. Social networks in this sense could be used to share information and awareness about privacy and policy and ways to manage it via the "users" themselves. Which is something we're already seeing.

Thoughts about "The Data Driven Lifesyle" article in the New York Times Weekend Magazine May 2, 2010

2010-05-03T13:07:00.000-07:00

The Data Driven Lifestyle

by GARY WOLF, April 26, 2010

From the Author:

"People are not assembly lines. We cannot be tuned to a known standard, because a universal standard for human experience does not exist."

ME: which is why User Experience professionals tend to get frustrated (and designers, but that is an older story and much richer). Pat Whitney said it well when he spoke to the fact that "user research" and "data" based on behavior and sensor input automation has driven down costs and effort. Further, relying on older models that service older media channels (like television and radio advertising) will not provide the awareness or understanding it would take to create competitive experiences in the very near future (see now).

Comments:

"The map is not the territory." — Alfred Korzybski

ME: Richard Saul Wurman speaks to this. Maps are polical artifacts that speak to policy while the lives of people and culture etc form the basis of communities. We're used to looking at the map and the map is becoming less and less relevant with the rise of what we call "globalism".

"I think the loss of our human-ness is more the result of inadequate tools that make us adapt to them instead of the tools adapting to us.

The philosophical paradigm shift this represents is on a scale with the spread of written language, the development of agriculture, or the Enlightenment. Whether we like it or not, integrating the computer into the minutia of our daily lives means we are changing the game - externalizing the computing power of our own brains. The terror and the excitement people feel at this more and more obvious change is the most convincing evidence I can think of that it's real and it's accelerating."

ME: Jaron Lanier speaks to this in "You Are Not a Gadget". We tend to praise interfaces these days that would have been scoffed at 10 years ago in favor of the flash and glitter of the glint. It still amazes me that wiki is like the bomb these days. Still referred to as radical etc. Seems like we get lost in the end game and end result (or what we want it to be) rather than step back, as Pat Whitney said at AIGA's "The Death of Advertising", and abstract the real problems and human needs, intent, agendas... Further, bad interfaces that we are forced to rely on alter our workflow, our epistemology, our mental constructs; not to mention cause great inefficiency in workflow. The last point is a great one. The fact that its happening and being openly discussed means it's too late to stop it? Do we wish to stop it? Can we slow it down? No. Moore's Law - it applies to us as well as machines.

"I've met people like this.

I usually find them very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very...

BORING."

ME: LMAO!!!! I wonder who wrote that... Anyway, Kurt Vonnegut was asked if he spends most of his time with his writer buddies and communities. His reply was short and sweet: No. When asked why he said something to the effect that it would be extremely boring and he would gain little in terms of the insight and awareness he relies on when he crafts stories for people who are not writers (like most of the world). When I attended graduate school, I always counted my fortunes when my life outside of the campus was not spent with other "human-centered designers". My mom always said "no one is more right or knows more than a graduate student". Not only can they be boring but offensively ignorant of the world outside of their own, specialized realms.

"literacy was once a threat to humanity because of the way it "represented" the vagaries of human life. (I am reminded of the belief in some cultures that photographing the human form is kind of theft of the soul.) I am sure you are right that we will eventually find humanity in data, as we have in the written word.

However, it is not honest or responsible to confidently assert, for example, that early critics of the written word were simply wrong. History does not show that. History shows, rather, that the written word made its wielders more powerful. Don't forget: the written word has often been used to oppress. Think of Martin Luther and the early Protestantism--it was largely a response to the way the Church had used literacy as a tool of oppression. Our idea that literacy liberates is basically a function of the fact that it equalizes the weak with their oppressors, not that it is "inherently" liberating.

Self-tracking will undoubtedly be used to oppress. It will wend its way into mainstream culture, eventually becoming something that employers expect of you as a matter of course. The temporal "productivity gaps" which we use to daydream, think about politics or other non-work related ideas, or simply consolidate memories, will be targeted and eliminated. Also, it is almost inconceivable that self-tracking data will avoid eventually going public.
Only by grasping the subtle seriousness of this issue will we give ourselves a chance at actualizing a future that does not involve blanketing ourselves in highly granular control mechanisms.

It's probably inevitable but that doesn't make it good. Look at it this way: we will never know what the world would be like today if writing hadn't been invented, and conversely, there are an indefinite number of technologies that weren't invented hundreds of years ago, and we will never know what the world would be like today if they had been invented."

ME: Yeah, people's initial reaction to change, usually when it is inevitable and will disrupt current behavior, is to shoot it down. We in the digital innovation group experience this daily. Especially when we're right-on in our response to a problem or thinking about something. I know we've done a great job when the reaction to our work is WTF!? Even if it's wrong the presentation serves as a "probe" to gain insight into what people think would be "right".

Further, what was missing from the comments and the article itself was mentioning about how much of the input AND analysis of the "data" about us will be automated so it won't require a "second life" of "reflection" to make sense, make use or, or find value in the "personal data stream". They also missed the point about personal control and our tendency to not use stuff we can't control - especially when it has to do with our ability to deny or ignore various aspects of our inner lives.

Portioning & Sequencing

2010-04-29T13:08:00.000-07:00

Some people are asking what I mean when I say "portioning and sequencing" when speaking to user experience of interfaces.

Information density is another term usually thrown in there in the buzz or our jargon and argot. A metaphor to use for this could be reporting or journalism, the basics of a scoop, the "who, what where, when and why?" frameworks (in addition to "if it bleeds, it leads..."). All this encapsulated in something referred to as "context" to make a "story". Some writers spin tales that require a lot of thinking from the reader to understand what's going on. Other writers are more direct. Depends on the story, the "vehicle" and other things like the tools of nuance and the beautify of prose. Seems like in all equations there is an audience (of one or many), experiencing it all from various viewpoints or perspectives (person). There is a great deal of consensus out there in the "community" baaaaing "elegance" and "simplicity" that "good" presentations are those that are consice and legible and organized in ways that allow for consumption in ways that allow for digestion, reflection, or enough pause to let something or everything or nothing sink in.

Portioning

When it comes to user experience and interface design, portioning is like a meal: there is an order, even if the order is non-linear or sequential, there is an order. Why? Because of that "time" concept. There are people who speak fast (like me, only sometimes), perhaps bombard you with tons of tangental abstract babble and leave you gasping for a moment to attempt to string together even a remote sense of meaning or value. And there are others you have to probe for reponses, who tend to be on the awkward end of the spectrum or simply quiet... There are rules embedded in language and culture both innate and learned that help us all function interdependently in a world of chaos. These rules are in place to portion the randomization of situation. The structures funnel everyone and the standards allow for exchange and interaction. And each one seems to be in place to hold back the flood of having to experience it all all at once. There are exceptions, like "thrash core" or "speed metal" in terms of music or sound vs. the soaring crescendos of lyric opera.

The Three-Level Interaction Model™

Indication: introduce and orient and notification layer. Example: your phone shows a "1" over the icon, symbolizing that you have a message or a recent call (notice that even micro-symbol semiotics can have states thanks to visual design vernaculars).
Engagement: acknowledgement and response state of indication. Examples: these layers are not cut-and-dry and sometimes there is overlap. Discover modes provide little in the way of indication and use engagement to trigger interaction. "Easter eggs" and games use this. Another example would be, to use the phone metaphor, a "tray" pops out of the phone icon to show the number (and other indicators) of the recent caller and/or other information about the notification/indication of a recent call or message.
Immersion: launch or navigation to full context of indication. Examples: I tap on the phone icon and instead of a tray I go to another context like the "message box" where I can "navigate" my messages and "CRUD" them.

This model allows the design of the experience to focus on concepts like "periphery" and "primary" focus from all perspectives, including "backend" in terms of "latency" of response to "input". Why the ""? I can't help hearing the echo of an article a friend (thanks Ania, as usual) let me know about where the blogger said, in a nutshell, that the stuff we talk and think and blog about only .0000000000000231% of the population cares about, would understand based on the amount of "buzz words" (jargon and argot) and the amount of time it would take to do this that could be spent, say, winning a bingo game, seeing Bon Jovi, or eating Haagen Daas. But it comes down to a true and sincere and passionate advocacy of the audience us "user experience" professionals design "products and services" for. All of these models and diagrams and jargon and argot do have utility and meaning when applied, if not discovery of error and mistake that leads to succes and understanding.

Sequencing

Part of presenting information requires proper sequencing. When you teach photography, design, art, or advertising, there are ways of introducing concepts to students or colleagues and this progression is handed out usually in the beginning of a semester (span of time) in the form of an outline or syllabus or schedule. Browsing or searching for products "online" or via any "interface" can feel like a time-warp lacking any logical sequence of events, information or context. We don't expect much from a computer in the way of empathy or understanding of us. And with shopping sites, we don't expect much difference from what our experiences in stores are like: large warehouses chock full of colorful variety stacked high on shelves. Aisles and shelves and pathways allow for a semblance of "portioning and sequencing" as the customer meanders, pushing cart, filling cart. Online, the information, the products, can come to the customer while s/he sits in a home theater next to a loved one surrounded by a TV and stereo and gaming systems and portable devices. There is no cart other than a symbolic icon and a reflection of purchase or order status (in best cases). Without customer service representatives, there need to be clear indicators of access to "help" but should that be front and center? Part of the joy of shopping online is that you don't have to deal with parking, crowds, lines. Part of the peril of it is not seeing the inventory and being able to instantly gratify the need for the acquisition buzz. Shopping online is like being able to walk into a "store" and wave your hands or snap your fingers while you watch a bunch of "aisles" and "shelves" dynamically and spontaneously reorganize. Real estate wise, it's a minimal investment for a maximum amount of "floor space" with no expansion limitations. Which is a good and a bad thing (depending on how you portion and sequence access to the space).

The Role of Collaboration

2010-03-19T13:09:00.000-07:00

Wireframes should not be "interpreted" - they sould be collaborated upon with the "user experience architect" (as well as all the "stakeholders" and production people involved). Unless, of course, you prefer to the throw it over the wall approach. In other words, an example would be processes in the early stages of MML and with Iga and Rod on the DIG team and with a former creative named "[omitted]" and with some FEDs (talk to [omitted]). Whenever I am tasked with "wireframes" (we could speak about those and their relevancy to Web 2.0 and 3.0 and beyond over a drink or smoke if you want), I do my very best to work on them WITH FED and Design and other people with a "stake" in the "ground".

Why the separation? Contrary to some people's beliefs, I don't think the roles are as siloed or specialized as we tend to treat them. What helps is well-thought out strategy and a team that can develop tactics to meet this strategy. Without solid strategy, with only directives and a timeline, it makes sense that we "divide and conquer" to get the job done. However, working with FED, Design, IT all people involved with the implementation and production, should work together and support one another - especially when faced with a paucity of both strategy or objectives or resources or time.

And if you are finding design-change opportunities within a waterfall approach, I would suggest running them by the "author" of the "wires" and perhaps iterating the wires where value is clear. A "good" UX-er is concerned with the USER and will be open to ideas that promote giving users great experiences.

UX: there is so much we can continue to learn from Design, IT, FED. If you are not inquiring, IMHO, you are not doing UX. Your job is inquiry, asking questions, clarification, interpretation, understanding.

Design: one of the primary jobs of the UX professional is to understand the needs of the customer/user and the objectives of the business. If you are not getting solid input on this from your "UX" friend, something is amiss.

FED/IT: You know everything. Just answer us when we have questions. Help us understand. Lots of us do not.

Privacy and Transparency Part 1 of 3

2009-12-24T13:09:00.001-08:00

Research the concept of "privacy," and you end up with a boat-load of interpretation and legal regulation issues, especially when the United States is concerned. Only recently did Google and Facebook as well as Sears were snared in the web, adding fire to an already boiling public issue. Namely, this is related to what "futurists" and others have called "convergence," which has continued to infringe upon foundational ideas of what privacy means to us today and what it will mean in the near future.

"Privacy" is sometimes regarded as untranslatable by linguists... (in Russian, privacy encompasses several words: уединение - solitude, секретность - secrecy, and частная жизнь - private life)... The term "privacy" means many things indifferent contexts. Different people, cultures, and nations have a wide variety of expectations about how much privacy a person is entitled to or what constitutes an invasion of privacy. (link)

In a most general sense, privacy world-wide is looked at as a human right (to "democratic" nations) that fosters development of self and community, enables artistic creativity and intellectual evolution, and gives us all a relative feeling of security and safety from "outside" forces (like the government or corporations).

There are many forms of privacy, broken down into context-related vernaculars like physical privacy, informational privacy, medical privacy, political privacy and so on. All of these take into account the relative positioning of an individual or group relative to an organization, institution, process, community or person.

Before the information explosion, we relied on cost as the primary protection of privacy: it was too expensive for anyone (except maybe the government) to assemble, store, cross-index and correlate the information.(link)

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." — United Nations Declaration of Human Rights

Internet privacy is the ability to control what information one reveals about oneself over the Internet, and to control who can access that information. These concerns include whether email can be stored or read by third parties without consent, or whether third parties can track the websites someone has visited. Another concern is whether websites collect, store, and possibly share personally identifiable information about users.(link) The FTC is getting heavily involved with Facebook and Google at the level of not just access, security and control (which I will speak to in the next post about "Transparency"). This goes beyond cookies, beacons, spiders and privacy policies.

It currently resides in places like my google dashboard (images), where I have been provided with ways to see and sort of edit or "clear" my personal search and browse history.

Facebook provided many call-outs pointing out their new "features" and "privacy policies" allowing me to control my privacy preferences for over 600 connections.

Too much control leads to less privacy in the end for reasons witnessed throughout history, which is why there are comissions and governments seeing the dangers of this new world so clearly at the moment.

"The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties through the automation, integration, and interconnection of many small, separate record-keeping systems, each of which alone may seem innocuous, even benevolent, and wholly justifiable." — U.S. Privacy Protection Study Commission, 1977

Anyone old enough to have witnessed the birth of the fax machine or "PIN" numbers on their "ATM Cards", the many lawsuits pioneers like AOL and Compuserve went through, SPAM knows that privacy cannot be protected by technology alone. The same holds true for anyone with a rudimentary understanding of the Patriot Act, The Fourth Amendment, or has seen the movie The Conversation, read Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, or is a contributing member of 2600. Privacy rests solely on the "social norms" of the people who will be using the information that they can access.

In the next part of this series I will dive into examples of tactics and strategies employed currently by corporations and organizations with a particular focus on what I see as a promising leader. Transparency, when applied with consideration and human participation on a global scale, can allow for security and free speech at the same time. Transparency can work in harmony ... (sing along with me) with privacy.

Thoughts about Mobile and Open Source

2009-12-24T12:07:00.000-08:00

"No carrier wants geeks. Geeks use up a lot of network resources, try to find ways around rules, and create problems for tech support. Every time a carrier has flirted with geeks, it has backed away. Helio was originally conceived as a "power user's carrier," but it did an unexplained about-face and decided to go for the social-networking youth when it launched. T-Mobile did a similar thing a few years ago, changing its theme from "get more" to "stick together.""

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2356603,00.asp

The bottom line is that while Linux the OS, the kernel, and the memory manager are attractive to phone manufacturers, Linux the philosophy — and users banding together ad hoc to create new things — is anathema to wireless carriers.

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/12/04/2327204/Why-Open-Source-Phones-Still-Fail

The debate reminds me of this "data" issue mentioned above, citing other articles that state data is not the issue from a bandwidth or usage perspective. The issue(s) are due to restrictions placed years ago by the carriers based on their current network and infrastructure limitations (of them being adaptable expansion and ownership/liability issues) + the device attributes like size and capabilities (screen brightness, battery power, etc).

Besides, the iPhone, and many "smartphones" like the Android utilize home or business wireless networks and not 3G or 4G the majority of the time I would venture. Talk time used to be the price point before all the madness of SMS/MMS/MMM... And doesn't the "cloud" address problems with physical storage and bandwidth in and of itself? It's almost pointless to try and watch a "high definition" youTube video if you're not on a "high bandwidth" network, unless you're multitasking or desperate, on an iPhone I've found.

One reality remains for all of this: Apple beat everyone to the market and cornered it before the "open source" folks did (though many would argue Apple's iPhone was borne from years of work by many teams of open and closed source developers long before it was released to the market). Sometimes speed to market matters when it comes to "game changers". Helio was too quick. Sidekick almost made it. Palm got business. And Microsoft, IBM, etc still control through IE6, enterprise software...

uxSEARS - The $50 Billion Startup Revolution

2009-12-06T10:09:00.000-08:00

Punk Marketing (review and takeaways)

2009-07-28T18:44:00.000-07:00

There’s a revolution brewing

The relationship that consumers have with brands has gone through a seismic shift over the past few years, and a new approach to marketing is long overdue.
The assumptions that established marketing methods are based on have been proven invalid, and while many marketers instinctively feel things aren’t quite right, no new approach to doing things differently has emerged... Smart marketers and all of us businesspeople who rely on marketing realized with a jolt that all was not right in this ever-branded world we paid mightily to live in. The thinking and methods that once worked so effectively to influence the behavior of consumers were simply not cutting it anymore.
Changing Brandscape: It’s difficult to exaggerate how much has changed in terms of consumers’ relationships with brands in the last few years... from how brands are viewed, to the mechanisms through which we find out about them.

Marketers and their advisors are largely still thinking and working in the same way that they always have: buying media and creating messages that interrupt, rather than connect with, consumers.

Intense media fragmentation has made it difficult to reach the target consumer in any number; consumers find it convenient and desirable to avoid marketing messages and are paralyzed by too many similar choices and too little time to choose.

Never has the need been greater for a cohesive new approach to marketing based on some radically revised assumptions on the way consumers interact with brands.

1995
it took a commercial just
3 measly times
to reach 80% of
eighteen to forty-nine-year-old-ladies.

2000
it took a commercial
97 times
to reach the
same demographic.

“The consumer is not a moron: she is your wife.”
— David Ogilvy

Maybe the biggest assumption this revolution needs to destroy is that consumers are happy being bombarded with ill-conceived marketing messages that treat them as idiots.

Marketing has reached a point at which a groundswell from the consumer is engulfing the established industry thinking.

This is a revolution.

A fundamental shift in power from big to small: from top-down to bottom-up.

The days when dull marketing could be pushed at passive consumers are gone.

Consumers have been slapped out of their obedient stupor and, now dazed but enthused, are armed to the tits and ready with remote controls, TiVos, self-made blogs, and Googley sites in which to choose what to consumer and to play a godlike part in its creation.

“Web 2.0 is a new generation of Internet software tecnologies that... Plug together, much like Lego blocks, in new and unexpected ways.”
— John Markoff, NYT July 2006

Now is the time of Collusion among three worlds that up till now have stuck to traditional roles and respected self-appointed boundaries: those of Commerce, Content, and Consumers.

1 Commerce has till now been the world of business that makes products and sells them to Consumers through marketing; this often relies upon attaching itself to
2 Content is all the news and entertainment created by media companies Consumers seek out and into which Commerce has been piggybacking itself to reach them.
3 Consumers are the people—all of us—who hold purse strings but who have until recently been treated less like individuals and more like a giant mass.
Note that these roles are no longer so clear-cut—or even that interesting.

In all revolutions—risk is a necessity for anyone who wishes to come out from behind the barricades as the winner.

So what’s a calculated risk in these days of careful conglomeration? Not necessarily one checked out with consumers... But one that has properly been thought through and discussed with those people involved with actually creating the thing. This is where sharing among the risk-taking stakeholders group is most needed.

Anything you assume is usually a half-truth or a generalization that once served a useful purpose but now hinders truly creative solutions.

Take a Strong Stand
Trying to be all things to everyone inevitably results in meaning little to anybody.

Deciding what you want your brand to stand for must come from a firm set of well-thought-out beliefs you are prepared to defend on any battleground.

So what if not everyone likes you?

Most people don’t like you anyway... Make those who do your loyal friends forever, and if you still need to be loved by newcomers, go out and start a new brand with equally strong but different positioning for those other wannabe lovers.

Don’t Pander
Customers are important but they are not necessarily right.

The really good news about being resolute is that people respect you for it even if they don’t admit it. Respect for those who buy things is tough to get. Let us tell you a little secret: consumers like to be told what to do.

What they don’t like is being asked what they want—because they don’t know!

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have told me, ‘a faster horse.’”
—Henry Ford

Of course people like to be given choices, but that’s different from coming off as being desperate to please everyone... Distress marketing makes consumers think there’s something wrong, pure and simple. Avoid it and folks will respect you again.

Any marketer needs to make its message as enjoyable as the content it funds and consumers will choose rather than just endure it.

Expose Yourself

A relationship of trust between brand and consumer, like that between two people, is built upon honesty... Honesty, once a way to stand out, is now the point of entry!.. Marketer[s] can earn the trust of cynical consumers and show you are open to feedback from them.

It may seem counterintuitive but having an enemy is a good thing for a brand.

Leaving Them Wanting More

Avoid temptation to reveal all of your assets at once... The temptation is for marketers to shout out all the brand’s strengths rather than let consumers discover them over time. This always foresakes one of the most powerful marketing tools... The tease!.. Reveal bits and pieces of who you are over time and leave some to the imagination.

Outthink the Competition

Having a huge budget to play with merely tempts marketers to do two things they shouldn’t: take only tried and tested (and, truthfully, dull) approaches; and treat consumers as a mass rather than a collection of individuals with tough-to-attend-to tastes.

Don’t Be Seduced by Technology

The media is not the message anymore. The message is the message is the message.

Technology is the catylist for the shift of power from commerce and content providers to consumers... The content is always most important and not the medium by which it is delivered.

The power of a blog is only as strong as the credibility of its content and the intake of its participants. If content is created by a marketer, for instance, it is no more believable than a pathetic ad. Just because the format is new doesn’t mean the cynicism is withheld.

Know Who You Are

If you don’t understand what it is you are good at, you might be tempted to try to be something you are plainly not.

No More Marketing Bullsh*t

Get to the point. Express it clearly and simply.

“Things should be as simple as possible, but not any simpler.”
—Albert Einstein

Our duty to consumers (and to our makers) is to cut through and make sense of an increasingly complex world before choice paralysis sets in.

PUNK An attitude of rebellion against tradition
MARKETING the practice of encouraging consumers to buy products.
PUNK MARKETING a new form of marketing that rejects the status quo and recognizes the shift in power from corporations to consumers.
PRODUCT something a marketer is trying to sell.
BRAND something a consumer buys into. In other words, the brand is how consumers perceive the product.
CONVERGENCE increasing the blurring of the lines among commerce, content, and consumers.
STAKEHOLDER those who should share the marketing problem and its inherent solution.
CREATIVITY part of marketing mistakenly reserved for the end of a process but that is better used from the very start.

Don’t Let Others Set the Standards

Sorry to tell you this, but good no longer means anything, while mediocre does more harm than doing nothing.

Use the Tools of the Revolution

Punk is...

Introducing some managed chaos into the workplace to unshackle people’s thinking.
Taking a day out of the office (with the CrackBerry off please!) to do something completely different but stimulating—an art gallery, a movie, a hike—and let your mind make creative connections to go at problems in a new way.
As is often the case, companies find after a crisis that rather than pretend that negative opinions expressed in blogs do not exist, they are better used as tools for learning what consumers think...

Of course, consumer content is not necessarily good content. If it doesn’t engage others and translate into sales, the consumer-driven content will evaporate. It’s a process of elimination; only the best will remain on the island.

If what teenagers are doing is any indication of where the media are headed, then online social networks are going to be the Viacoms and Time Warners of the future.

Here in cyber-village, real brands—the ones you can actually buy—exist alongside human selections.

Smart marketing means giving consumers whatever they want to make loud voices heard rather than simply placing ads in a jar with existing content.

Social Networks grant younger consumers online social identities or, better put, their own individual brands. Marketers that share these same values without lying about it (hire a kid) will reach them through highly-focused campaigns.

Cut the middleperson out and save your ass. They are not as valuable as the need to get your customers to love the new flexible you.

Punk is...

Bringing in an expert from a completely different field—a cabinetmaker, a tree surgeon, or a sushi chef—to talk to your team and learn from the experience.
Hiring people not just based on the amount of relevant experience they have in your industry but on how some unique skills they have will help the organization to grow.

Start with the bad: it’s becoming increasingly difficult to cut through the white noise of me-too products and the incessant marketing that appears as something new. The good stuff is that the rewards for being among those few that make it through all that clutter are huge and worthwhile.

Marketing that takes a step backward from all the fuss and gives our consumer something to entice them in, works.

“There’s an effort to turn every square inch of this country into a billboard. When you have so much cognitive pollution,m it’s hard for people to get some peace and quiet... What’s wrong with taking every opportunity to, uh, inform consumers about the one thing they might not even know they want until they cannot help themselves and just have to have a new one?”
— Gary Ruskin (Exec Dir of Commercial Alert)

Design is the new black... Design works in even mundane categories to develop product must-haves.

“Back then we were saying, ‘Here’s the features and the technology,’ then put a wrapper around it. Now the starting point is ‘What does the consumer want?’ and then apply the technology to that.”
—Jim Wicks, Sony Corporation

Dull product categories are often overlooked in design standards. Yet Eric Ryan, co-founder of Method Home, the San Francisco maker of home-cleaning products, proclaims with pride, “There is no such thing as dull product categories, only dull brands."

Breaking away from the clutter of too many products and too much marketing does not mean you have to use dated stealth-marketing tactics to catch consumers in places where they were least expecting you. What this clearly demands is finding ways to make the brand stand out.

Excellent design will add an emotional appeal and, when combined with fantastic functionality, can make a product in even the most boring market desirable.

Marketers must take risks and make a few damning errors when attempting to create something distinctive to chuck into the marketplace. Bombing is only a true failure if we don’t gain from it.

stealth marketing is also known as undercover marketing. This is when consumers do not know they are being marketed to. We call it underhanded marketing.

A true capitalist will tell you the definition of business is someone out there waiting to steal your customers.

A punk marketer learns to keep looking over his shoulder for the competitor who wants to eat his meal and is constantly seeking ways to do things better, so the customer’s eventual choice is his brand over the monster’s.

Regardless of whether a company is gigantic or puny, it pays to act small while continuing to think in the biggest possible way... Consumers want to feel the company they buy from has their, and only their absolute best interests at heart; so for them that means being treated respectfully as sole human beings and not unites in some amorphous lump.

In the past, mass production was appealing to consumers because they knew the product they bought was identical to all others from a factory. A brand name represented consistency and predictable quality assurance.

Consumers no longer choose based on qualifications—they assume that competing products will perform flawlessly and they’re right; they expect swift action if somehow a manufacturer or a distributor screws up. Mass production has lost its competitive edge and being big for big’s sake got tossed away.

When it comes to food and beverage brands, consumers often want the same experience wherever they go around the world, and in a networked age where we carry our load with us, this counts for a lot.

But Big has a bad connotation that most companies should wish to run from. Big means “big business.” Big Business is bad because it is faceless. Big business is in it to make money at any cost, even sickness or in some cases death to the consumer.

Small companies... Turn profits by keeping up strong appeal for their products from what is really a small group of loyal consumers... A brand may grow beyond a core of local buyers. Once reaching beyond first movers, a company loses its distinctive positioning as it attempts to appeal to a group that is far outside its original company values.

MOBILE Sell-Phone

It’s not surprising that an annual MIT study found the mobile is the device we hate most but cannot live without.
(2004 – 30% of those polled chose this response)

Businesses across different industries are hungrily eying the mobile device as the conduit to our other portable companion, our wallet.
(Wireless Networks: Exploring New Brand Connections (2005, BBDO and Proximity) - revealed 26% of those polled would go home to fetch a forgotten cellphone than for forgotten wallets.)

We need to feel connected with others in stressful situations or ones where we feel alone or anonymous... Any smarty knows it’s less a need to be in touch and more fear of having silence anywhere.

More than with TV or the PC, the relationship we have with the Third Screen makes it a potentially powerful means for marketers to get to us, as anybody born after 1990 knows. Oh, but it is frought with danger. Annoy the cell phone user with unwanted advertising messages, and you’ve ruined a beautiful relationship with your brand before it begins.

Use this portal into personal space with great caution.

Americans learn from others... South Koreans because their government badly wants the country to become a world leader in all forms of connectivity.

Texting throught the Short Messaging System (SMS) has been a big deal in most European countries since the early part of this decade, for it is a communication method of choice for teens and young adults.

Key to mobile marketing campaigns is—as in anything decent—to make them permission-based. Text-message spam has been a problem fir years in Europe (and soon to be the U.S.), where 80% of cell phone users polled said they had received it.

Time will tell if GPS-located messages to consumers’ mobiles will be a terrific panacea for marketers or just piss everyone off, making us feel hounded more as usual.

We all know a tiny screen, no matter how brilliant the image or sound quality, will not be able to compete with a fifty-inch plasma when it comes to viewing Spider-Man 7, nor a Bose system for tune appeal, nor an Xbox 360 for game playing, no matter how much the manufacturers might hype the newest version on the street... As we spend our lives as pseudo-road-warriors, sheer convenience is what we seek.

The plan is that before too long people will be able to buy the things they see on their tiny screens by paying for them there and then. Stores? Who needs them?

How long before ad-skipping devices for mobiles?

The cell phone or mobile phone is something consumers rely on not just for commuication but as a means of staying connected with the rest of the world, thus meeting deep psychological needs unfulfilled since the crib. It offers a world of possibilities for marketers, and more than any other medium represents a massive risk: consumers rejecting unwelcome marketing, and the brands they are associated with, forever more.

Campaigns that use texting to engage consumers and reward them with prizes or offers are effective only if strictly permission-based. Give the participants something relevant to them that attaches them to the brand completely.

Despite that new handsets host endless new features, people just don’t care. Consumers mostly want fewer dropped calls and clearer voice communication.

Before long cell phones with RFID reading abilities will enable consumers to find out a ton of new information about the products by scanning codes or print ads and downloading short videos onto their phones, giving new opportunities to engages consumers through compelling content.

Marketing should not stop when a consumer has taken out his wallet. That should be the beginning of one hell of a friendship. A business needs to ensure that its customers never want to leave and have a strong emotional attachment towards the brand and the brand’s attributes! As marketers we will never have as much opportunity to connect with people.

Sales growth looks good but masks the growing dissatisfaction most customers feel about the way they are treated by providers.

All businesses have costs of acquiring... A new customer.

If buyers do not like one’s offering once they’ve tried it, don’t they have a G-d-given right to go elsewhere? It is the duty of any concern to make a customer want to—not feel obligated to—stay.

An inordinate number of businesses make a mistake of saying to themselves that what they offer is so appealing that they—people who pay their salaries by buying from them—wouldn’t dare go elsewhere.

Punk is...

Saying something in a meeting at work that jars groupthink away from the safe, tried-and-trusted routes—need we say more?
Putting yourself in others’ shoes to see in a more objective way if what you’re doing makes sense to the outside world or whether you’re just talking to yourself.

“Every brand has a story to tell.”
—Tom Cotton (co-founder of LA agency Conductor)

Campaigns that map out the many twists and turns that may/can/will unfold draw consumers into them in a way no one will forget, not the least of which is the marketer, and represent a refreshing antidote to dull, old linear marketing.

A story doesn’t have to demo a product front and center so long as its meaning and its principles are conveyed to a target audience.

Narratives with many layers create buzz with those first-at-bat and leverage money spent on paid media with gobs of earned free media.

Take liberally from other industries. Use their techniques to create impact-filled marketing campaigns that make you feel good about the job you do daily.

Only do stories you believe in.

Punk is...

Being a greedy consumer of knowledge from every single source on earth and discovering ways to apply that info to your own business at times when you least expect it to come through.
Finding ways to be happy in your work, knowing that happiness is good for creativity and creativity is good for more creativity, which is good for business, which makes you happy, which gets you more sex.
Consumers are hit over the head with so many choices they end up with a quizzical look on their faces. Not a happy look.

Welcome to the wonderful world of consumerism in which unlimited choice is available and spending power means freedom to having to pick just one.

The average U.S. Consumer is bombarded by three thousand marketing messages a day, representing over $2,000 spent to attract the attention of each man, woman, and child a year... Have you asked for your money back?

Sixty one percent of Americans feel the amount of marketing and advertising they are subjected to is out of control, and 65 percent say they are constantly bombarded. They want a divorce.

Most people haven’t got time to stand at the supermarket shelves staring at hundreds of different choices, undecided what to sacrifice, and certainly don’t have the will to seek out the information on a corporate site (and if they do, we want to avoid them at a party). We would personally rather use twigs to clean our teeth and spend the time saved rearranging the sock drawer.

It’s a dilemma begun by giant-making committees inside conglomerates where the proclamation was made at one of 3 billion meetings: “As G-d as my whiteness, er, witness, we at [company name] had better have covered every single base, or darn it, we will lose them.” Then they debate who this “them” are that will no doubt win.

We have other research that says too much of a good thing is killing consumers’ desire to shop! Once shopping was the only therapy that could cure a blue day; now it’s producing anxiety.

Too much choice anesthetizes or paralyzes the consumer. In the case of over-choice, we’re standing there with our thumb up our ass when, if we could find our favorite brand in its natural state, we would be home in our pj’s already.

“Ironically, the people of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice, but by a paralyzing surfeit of it. They may turn out to be the victims of that peculiar super-industrial dilemma: over-choice.”
— Alvin Toffler, “Future Choice”

“The ideology of consumption and consumer choice have washed across the globe. In today’s developed economies there is an ever-increasing amount of buying, amidst an ever-increasing amount of purchase options, amidst an ever-increasing amount of stress, amidst and ever-decreasing amount of discretionary time.”
— Mick, Broniarczyk, and Haidt “Choose, Choose, Choose, Choose, Choose, Choose, Choose: Emerging and Prospective Research on the Deleterious Effects of Living in Consumer Hyperchoice”

“It’s a widely-held belief that unless you constantly introduce new products, you cannot stay in the game.”
— Michaela Draganska, Stanford Graduate School of Business

You make more money with fewer offerings. Many of us are learning this now.

The average consumer, exposed to three thousand or more marketing messages per day, makes no connection to anything, and the consumer is left bereft of your message.

The assumption by marketers is that as long as you break through a consumer’s consciousness, you’ve won the battle. But to be made aware of something—whether a new or existing product or an ad or a shouting toilet—is not enough anymore. In fact, when humans are bombarded with competing possibilities for our limited attention, time, and money, we feel overwhelmed and do nothing.

“As an industry, our prime goal is to discover ever more annoying, repetitive, and unwelcome ways to immerse our unfortunate target segment and the rest of the population on the brand. Our response to clutter is more clutter.”
— Mark Ritson, London Business School

Some brilliant businesses have recognized the consumers’ need to simplify by removing clutter and obstacles so they can make choices that are undoubtedly good for them.

Technologies to make fine use of data aggregated from numbers of us to guide individual choice. Collaborative filtering was begun by those dot-com deadbeats in the nineties and now waltzes into our inbox regularly through Amazon and everybody else.

Online social hangouts... Use this principle of connecting folks through what turns them on... As it has become pertinent for marketers to find these groups of like-minded individuals... These types of massively joined networks are the only choice.

Marketers, simplify a consumer’s life!

Consumers are looking to us to help simplify their lives so we will do our utmost to help them get simple.

Consumers have a right to expect a clear education about products being offered to enable them to make informed choices. That is our duty. Labeling should make it easy for consumers to quickly grasp what the product does and what it contains.

Me-too products that copy competitor items without trying to offer a distinct point of differentiation represent lazy thinking.

We need to use our marketing prowess responsibly and only when we have something meaningful to say.

Less than a quarter of consumers think companies tell the truth when they market.

Ten percent think advertising practicioners are honest.

“Research shows that younger people are more likely to believe a stranger in an internet chat room than a TV advertisement.”
— Roisin Donnelly (Dir of Mktg for P&G UK/Ireland)

“The notion that the board must somehow balance the interests of stockholders against the interests of other stakeholders fundamentally misconstrues the role of directors.”

“The Customer may be king and the employees may be the corporation’s greatest asset. But the CEO’s only real responsibility is to serve the interests of shareholders.”
— 1997 Business Roundtable Discussion

Consumers are cynical; no wonder. They have experienced firsthand a focus on profit at the expense of everything including the death of customer service... Consumers have wised up to the way corporations behave and increasingly use trust, or lack of it, as a guide to purchasing choices.

A focus on profit at the expense of all else has left employees feeling disloyal and consumers cynical.

Punk is...

Making creativity a part of everyone’s jobs, not just the domain of the department named after it.

As always, irrefutable research forces change, even though gut instinct and common sense told us how to solve this long ago.

Punk is...

Questioning colleagues on assumptions—to their faces.
Setting yourself impossibly high goals and thinking of crazy ways to get there. This will free your mind to bigger possibiities.

One’s media planning better be totally in sync with the creative that is put forth. A media plan can’t be developed in isolation of ideas; one must feed seamlessly into the other, and in an era when planning and buying agencies are so often separated—usually at birth—this is not a simple matter.

Notions that are strong and gorgeous are developed using a different process from what the traditional—dinosaur—ad firms are wont to use.

Collaborative processes are in direct opposition to competitive processes where ideas are thought up and subsequently killed by a committee. Yet it is the best way to work, according to research.

Over the years, creativity has been assigned a limited role in business in general and marketing in particular.

Big corporations aren’t organized so that people with ideas are respected for them. Recommendation is to bring in outsiders, whose businesses revolve around being an Idea Factory.

Advertising is Dead

2009-04-08T09:24:00.000-07:00

Advertising is Dead

View more presentations from Stefan Kolle.

Video: spherical Touch Screen (Microsoft)

2008-08-05T11:31:00.000-07:00

The Laws of Simplicity Book Review & Thoughts

2008-05-11T18:34:00.000-07:00

This book review will be simple to honor the simple wisdom of John Maeda. "Sometimes you have to repeat yourself. Sometimes." It will also pose some questions that came to me when I revisited the text for the fifth time in the last year...

10 Laws of Simplicity

Reduce

Hide. Show less. Think iPod shuffle vs. iPod Touch in terms of interface and options. Shuffle is like a radio except there are no commercials when you want to channel hop. Many of the problems inherent with a touch-based GUI anthropometrically as well as visually don't even need to be solved when one thinks of the core functions an audio player (this was written before popular use of portable video players) needs or is expected to provide.
- When devices merge core functions (clocks/phones/calendars/audio/video/games/data storage/sms/mms/microwave control/...) how can we reduce GUI overload?
Another point comes to mind about information age vs. knowledge age — that knowledge is the ability to construct information, access information parts, when needed, in context (coming in a later law). Information is structured data...
Organize

Meada's diagrams show what many people refer to as "paper prototypes" or "card sorting".
Whatever the method, it's usually the simplification of complex processes we're after.

Sequence implies a linearity while we seem to be entering that ubiquitous space in our use of the internet. Systems and structured content access on an enterprise/participatory model have begun to hold strong weight in the market (CMS, Social Networking...).

More and more we are thinking about dynamic systems that are sensitive to (anticipated/assumed) context.

Another example would be the aggregation of social tagging and rating systems like Digg or Mixx in the form of consolidation-like portals or bookmarklets-that post your stuff to multiple sites. Differential of services happens through methods or protocol, process when it comes down to it.

Like small devices merging, web services are merging. Inputs and outputs between users and their products and services will need to aggregate to stay alive or valid. Whoever does this efficiently will be king of the distribution world
Time

Savings in time feel like simplicity.
Time is perceived unless observed.
Finding ways to cut time creates more time for other things.
Length has little to do with volume when it comes to time or the impact of moments.

Efficiency in progress is ours once a'more... (Jello Biafara, Dead Kennedys)
Learn

Learning is a realm that sparks infinite discussions. Necessity and ultimately relevance to the end-user or the client. It is the motis operandi of all of us in design, programming, IA, UX, strategy... In the end, it is not surprising how nature is the new symbol of purity and simplicity and that is considered ultimate good in today's society. Clutter, garbage, the anxiety of pollution are much like some of the annoyances found throughout any process of learning, large or small.

RTFM rings solidly throughout the reading of this chapter. As does I — I can't, won't, refuse to, get in ACRONYM LAND but this references another one: B R A I N (Meada is creative).
Anyway, I stands for inspiration. We all need it. Wherever we can find and hold onto that inspiration is important to the learning process. Inspiration is great with it comes from Inside

Don't stop believing
hold onto that feeling
Streetlights, people, whoa
Differences

Can complex problems be scaled back to just monochrome black and white only?

Complexity implies the feeling of being lost <---> Simplicity implies the feeling of being found

Transitioning from simple to complex is a good area of focus to avoid panic or confusion.
One of the ways we see this in life is through rhythm in music. Music is complex and full of contrasts yet most of it holds together.
Context

The periphery is not irrelevant. Seems to be a trigger point these days in the turf wars blazing throughout the online advertising world.

How directionless can I afford to be? <-------> How directed can I stand to feel?

Waypoints: References cartography and direction-finding as a metaphor for navigating web content. The common problem with maps is that they are 2D while we navigate (familiar) spaces through established familiarity that can't show in diagrammatic format.

If your GPS device grabbed the wheel would it be alright with you?

Extremes are those differences Meada speaks about.

Balance is simplicity. The challenges communications channels continually face always include channel noise. Successful experiences are usually ones that find the right balance between leading and showing and hinting and total hands-off.
Emotion

Aichaku — Japanese term for emotional attachment to artifacts.
Without engagement of an audience or listener, a connection will not be formed. Without a connection, communication could be lost in a shuffle of other messaging. Emotional intelligence is considered a good trait (in the US) for leaders.
- This implies empathy. Do you Understand?
Trust

Omakase — Japanese for I leave it up to you.

Goes back to that iPod shuffle vs Zume debate as well as context.

We trust simplicity, In Simplicity We Trust. Intuitive is easily accessible to even the dumbest of users, yes. But most times this concept is backed by tracking the perceived effort it takes for a user to get to know a system as opposed to the number of times a user has to go back to re-learn a new system. Repetition can lead to "intuition".

Affordances (Cameron F) — using real world processes and UI stuff in this virtual world.

How much do you need to know about a system <-------> How much does the system need to know about you?
Failure

Law 4: Learn has to do with failure; Learn from mistakes. Make them within an (2) Organized (3) timeframe in (6) Context to (1) reduce the clutter of the problem...
The One.

Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.

Don't try all 10 of these at home or at once. Like other things simple or that value simplicity as a great "good" (Zen), this book is a definite one to grow on, one to have in the library, for anyone actively involved professionally in a design, programming, strategy, etc career.

Also mentioned in the book was a video by a former roommate and friend Mike Norse that showcased at Rezfest. Please check it out if you haven't already seen it:

Projection Information

2008-05-11T18:17:00.000-07:00

Lumen

A quantity measurement of light illumination from a light source. The original measurement was made using a "standard candle" placed at the center of a 1-foot radius hollow sphere. The light spread over a 1-square foot area of the sphere was 1 lumen. The surface area of the sphere is 12.57 sq. ft., so the candle is said to produce 12.57 lumens. One-foot lumen is equal to 1-footcandle (fc).

Lux

A metric quantity measurement of light illumination from a light source.

1 lux = .093 lumens
1 footcandle = 10.76 lux

Inverse Square Law

Mathematically, illumination from a light source varies inversely with the square of the distance from the measuring point. As an example, a light source produces 6000 lumens. At a distance of 10 feet, the light density would be 60 footcandles, and at 20 feet the light density would be 15 footcandles.

CALCULATION

a) @ 10 feet = 6000 ÷ (10)(10) = 60 footcandles
b) @ 20 feet = 6000 ÷ (20)(20) = 15 footcandles

Footcandle (fc)
A measure of lumens per square foot. As an example, a 6' x 8' screen receives 800 lumens from a projection lamp/lens. The average light density on the screen is 20 foodcandles.

CALCULATION

a) 6' x 8' = 48 sq. feet screen size
b) 800 lumens ÷ 48 sq. feet = 20fc

Color Temperature

Measured in degrees Kelvin (ºK). Lamps rated at 3200ºK produce clear white light. Lower temperatures will tend to give yellowish light. Color temperatures above 3200ºK with prolonged exposure may cause ultraviolet irritation to skin and eyes.

Electrical Formulas

Basic electrical calculations can be made for

VOLTS (E), E = W÷I: Amperes (I), I = W÷E: Watts (W), W = E•I. As an example, 10 fixtures with 500 watt, 120 volt lamps will require a 41.6 ampere current service.

CALCULATION: 10 fixtures @ 500 watts = 5000 watts

Using Amperes formula: I = W÷E, I = 500÷120, I = 41.6

Sufficient Brightness

"Sufficiently bright" has been defined by Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) in standard 196M as 12-22 footlamberts (41 - 75 cd/m2), though often 16 footlamberts is taken as the nominal goal.

However, this standard was developed for movie theaters with full light control. In a room with ambient light (i.e. light "leakage" from windows or adjacent areas), this level of brightness may be insufficient. As a comparison, a CRT TV measures approximately 50 footlamberts (200 cd/m2) [and peak luminance can be much higher], a LCD TV approximately 117 footlamberts (400 cd/m2), and many Plasma TVs approximately 175 footlamberts (600 cd/m2). A cloudy day outdoors is about 100 - 300 footlamberts.

It should also be noted that the eye's sensitivity to colors is strongly correleated to brightness, and a dark image is experienced as being washed out ("grayish"). This is because the eye's color receptors are less sensitive to light than the luminance receptors. Hence, increasing the brightness of the image gives it a more vibrant look, thanks to the better perceived color saturation.

Curved Screens

The purpose of a curved screen is to direct all the light that is projected to the screen back to the viewer. With a flat screen you will get light that bounces off the screen and bounces around the room. With a curved screen the vast majority of the light is bounced back to the source which results in a very bright image. Curved screens tend to have a very high gain value, i.e. a gain of 13 is common. A curved screen can get away with such a high gain because it essentially turns the entire screen into a giant hot spot so there is no visible hot spot. Curved screens are extremely bright and work very well.

Foot Lamberts

Foot lamberts relates to how bright the screen actually is. The ideal measurement is 11 fL with 10-11 fL good. For reference a direct view TV measures between 25-35 fL. You can get a good idea of the foot lamberts of a projector/screen combo using some simple math. Take the number of ANSI Lumens of your projector and divide it by the screen size in square feet (area), then multiply that by the screen's gain. For example a projector with an output of 400 ANSI lumens matched with a 100" screen (60" by 80" which is 33.34 square feet) with a gain of 1.3 will produce an image with a brightness of 15.6 fL.

REAR-PROJECTION SCREEN SURFACES

The fundamental difference between front- and rear-projection screens is that the front-projection screen reflects as much of the light shined on its surface as possible, whereas a rear-projection screen allows light to pass through its surface while reflecting as little light as possible in either direction. There is no reference standard for rear projection as there is in front projection with the matte white surface, so a little more research is required to determine the best surface type for your application. The following information will give you a good understanding of the basic elements and principles involved to aid you in making the right selection.

Common Formats and Their Aspect Ratios

Format
Aspect Ratio (Width/Height)

NTSC video
1.33

PAL video
1.33

HDTV video
1.78

Letterbox video
1.85

Cinemascope
2.35

35 mm filmstrip
1.32

2×2 standard 35 mm double-frame slides
1.50

SXGA
1.25

The most common method of reflecting light through a rear-projection screen is by applying a Fresnel lens surface to the back of the screen. The Fresnel lens was invented by Augustine Fresnel (pronounced fray-nell but most often mispronounced as frez-nel) in France in 1822. The lens is basically a prism with thousands of reflective surfaces that serve to focus and redirect the projected image. This lens was first used in lighthouse towers to increase the strength of the light shining out to sea. In the video projection application, the Fresnel lens technology consists of thousands of horizontal grooves, or angles, usually with a dot pitch of around 0.5 mm. This surface amplifies the light source (video) by redirecting the light rays and transmits the image forward through the actual screen material.

Transmission should not be confused with gain. Gain is controlled by the diffusion and governs the degree to which light from the projector is scattered. Transmission is reduced by the quantity of darkening pigment in the screen material and governs the total amount of light that gets through the screen. Obviously, the balance between diffusion and pigmentation is a delicate one, which is why such a wide selection of diffusions screens is available.

In addition to diffusion coatings, there are also “profiled” screens that are composed of lenticulations (geometric embossed patterns) or Fresnels. Lenticulations have no particular influence on uniformity of light distribution as Fresnels do. Although they are lenses, their only function is to scatter light about its angle of incidence. The difference, of course, is that lenticulations restrict their dispersion to the horizontal axis only. That results in excellent horizontal viewing angles but does not result in reducing brightness discrepancies between an image's center and its corners. The Fresnel lens is the only screen element that can improve uniformity.

Of the billions of light rays that come out of a projector at any instant, you can illustrate the function of a Fresnel lens by examining the path of just three rays. First, there is the on-axis ray, the one that is going to pass exactly through the middle of a screen. Then there are the outermost light rays on the left and right.

The angular direction of left and right rays are aimed far away from the direction of the on-axis ray. Therefore, as you sit in front of this projection beam, it will be particularly difficult to detect much brightness at all from these rays because they are not aimed anywhere near your eyes. The angles through which those outer rays would have to be bent in order to reach your eyes are called bend angles.

A Fresnel lens reduces these bend angles so that each light ray emitted by the projector is bent back just enough to be parallel with the on-axis ray. At the center of the projection beam, the Fresnel is not doing much work. But by the time you move out to the edges of the beam, the Fresnel is bending the rays through ever larger angles until you get right out to the “edge” rays where the bend angle is maximum. Notice that a Fresnel has its greatest effect at the very places you need it most: at the extremities of the image.

The original purpose of a Fresnel lens was to increase screen gain. Although it still does that, it's no longer the major consideration, because higher-brightness projectors are now available. The real value in a Fresnel lens today is its ability to make the corners and edges of an image less dim, which significantly reduces the brightness falloff from the center and thereby serves to increase overall uniformity. The process by which divergent light rays from the projector are bent so that they are all parallel is called collimation. No other rear screen property is more important to the critical question of image uniformity.

SOLID SCREEN OR PERFORATED?

All of these screen types, both front and rear projection, can be perforated to allow sound to pass through them. In movie-theater applications, it is common to have the majority of sound reinforcement coming from behind the screen. In smaller surround-sound applications and in some rear-projection applications, it is also common to locate the center-channel loudspeaker behind the screen. Many of the manufacturers mentioned in this article already have “acoustically transparent” versions of their screens available, and some of them offer custom perforating to suit your needs. Bear in mind that acoustically transparent is a vaguely defined term. Any solid matter placed in front of a loudspeaker will attenuate the signal to some degree, at certain frequencies more than others. It's important to find out what the attenuation level is for the screen you are using so that your audio system can be balanced accordingly, although these specifications are sometimes difficult to come by. Note also that any less screen material will affect reflectivity to some degree; that is why some cinemas prefer solid (nonperforated) screens, placing speakers outside the screen perimeter.

The selection of the most appropriate projection screen requires that you know many (if not all) details about the installation or application beforehand. Visit the Web sites of the manufacturers who produce video projection screens; you'll find much useful information that goes beyond the scope of what is provided here. Just as is the case with sound systems, consider the whole system in your decision making — remember that the room, the projector, the program material, and your customer's preferences and budget all play a role in these important decisions.
Screen Size Conversion Charts

Use the following charts to convert an existing NTSC video format screen size to either an HDTV or a letterbox format size.

Calculated using existing height

NTSC (1.33)
VIEWING AREA
HDTV (1.78)
VIEWING AREA
LETTERBOX (1.85)
VIEWING AREA

Height × Width
Height × Width
Height × Width

43" × 57"
43" × 77"
43" × 80"

50" × 67"
50" × 89"
50" × 92.5"

57" × 77"
57" × 102"
57" × 105"

60" × 80"
60" × 107"
60" × 111"

69" × 92"
69" × 123"
69" × 128"

87" × 116"
87" × 155"
87" × 161"

105" × 140"
105" × 187"
105" × 194"

Calculated using existing width

NTSC (1.33)
VIEWING AREA
HDTV (1.78)
VIEWING AREA
LETTERBOX (1.85)
VIEWING AREA

Height × Width
Height × Width
Height × Width

43" × 57"
32" × 57"
31" × 57"

50" × 67"
38" × 67"
36" × 67"

57" × 77"
43" × 77"
42" × 77"

60" × 80"
45" × 80"
43" × 80"

69" × 92"
52" × 92"
50" × 92"

87" × 116"
65" × 116"
63" × 116"

105" × 140"
79" × 140"
76" × 140"

A Screen With a View-Through: Transparent Screens

One of the most unusual and futuristic types of video screens are transparent screens — so-called holo-screens because they appear to produce holographic images. If you saw the Steven Spielberg film Minority Report, you saw Tom Cruise directing and selecting his precrime images on them. Certain attractions at the Disney theme parks also use this type of screen. They can be used in either front- or rear-projection applications, using special coatings to diffuse and reflect light from the video source. Glass or Plexiglas screens can be mounted, hung, or freestanding and are becoming a common sight at trade shows and in retail displays. Some manufacturers even offer a transparent screen material that can be applied to an existing glass surface, such as a storefront window.

One such manufacturer is the German company G+B pronova GmbH, which makes the HoloPro Holographic projection screen, which is a transparent projection surface for rear projection that can be used in any environment, regardless of ambient light conditions. In the absence of a projected image, the HoloPro appears to be just a pane of clear glass. The projection is directed onto the screen from a specially calculated angle and directed toward the observer by “holographic optical” elements. The company also offers the HoloPro Holographic Mirror screen, which allows front projection. Both are available in screens in sizes up to 67 inches diagonal.
How to Calculate a Custom Screen Size

Use the following formulas to calculate a custom size. The formulas will assist you in finding the viewing area only.

NTSC (1.33)
Video Format
HDTV (1.78)
Video Format
Letterbox (1.85)
Video Format
SXGA (1.25)
Video Format

Diagonal ÷ 1.667 = Height
Diagonal × 0.49091 = Height
Diagonal × 0.4762 = Height
Diagonal × 0.625 = Height

Height × 1.33 = Width
Diagonal × 0.87247 = Width
Diagonal × 0.88 = Width
Diagonal × 0.78125 = Width

Width ÷ 1.33 = Height
Height × 2.0395 = Diagonal
Height × 2.10 = Diagonal
Height × 1.60 = Diagonal

Height × 1.667 = Diagonal
Width × 1.14585 = Diagonal
Width × 1.135 = Diagonal
Width × 1.28 = Diagonal

Height × 1.78 = Width
Height × 1.85 = Width
Height × 1.25 = Width

Width × 0.561837 = Height
Width × 0.5405 = Height
Width × 0.80 = Height

Example 1

Calculate screen brightness when a 1000 lumens projector is used to project on a 6ft wide, 16:9 screen with a gain of 1.

The screen height is 9/16 * 6 = 3.375ft.
The area of the screen is 3.375 * 6 = 20.25 sq. ft.
The brightness can be estimated to be 1000 / 20.25 = 49.4 footlamberts.

Is 49.4 footlamberts sufficiently bright? To see how "sufficient brightness" can be estimated, click here.

Example 2

Assuming the 16:9 screen with a gain of 1, what is the screen size limit for a 1000 lumens projector?

We want to achieve 16 footlamberts, i.e. 16 = 1000 / screen area. This implies that screen area = 1000/16 = 62.5 square foot.
The width of a 16:9 screen = 1.33 * square root of area = 1.33 * 7.9 = approximately 10.5 feet.

In other words, to achieve 16 footlamberts with a 1000 lumens projector the screen should be no wider than 10.5 feet (corresponding to a diagonal of approximately 12 feet = 124 inch).

Images

Another Great Video Library

2008-04-16T10:31:00.000-07:00

Modulus

Art

2008-04-10T09:29:00.001-07:00

DIZZIA, Gregory M. -PDF by *dizzia

Periodic Elements of Branding

2008-04-10T08:47:00.001-07:00

iTunes UI Blunder #1,854

2008-04-08T12:39:00.000-07:00

So if I hit Repeat 1 song only AND shuffle I apparently shuffle one song randomly. Makes sense to whoever invented that horrendous rainbow cursor (if you are reading this, please stop trying to design things).

post me

2008-04-07T11:28:00.001-07:00

Submit to Social Websites

Cool Video News Microbrowser

2008-04-04T11:47:00.001-07:00

My New Avatar - Thanks Daniel Peck!

2008-03-30T11:38:00.001-07:00

20080301074533751_E000008_Ga.jpg (JPEG Image, 705x467 pixels)

Personality DNA

2008-03-28T20:14:00.001-07:00

STEREO SUE | The New Yorker [Publication Date: 19-JUN-06]

2008-03-02T19:47:00.000-08:00

When Galen, in the second century, and Leonardo, thirteen centuries later, observed that the images received by the two eyes were slightly different, neither of them appreciated the full significance of these differences. It was not until the early eighteen-thirties that the English scientist and inventor Charles Wheatstone began to suspect that the disparities between the two retinal images were in fact crucial to the brain's mysterious ability to generate a sensation of depth—and that the brain somehow fused these images automatically and unconsciously.
Wheatstone confirmed the truth of his conjecture by an experimental method as simple as it was brilliant. He made pairs of drawings of a solid object as seen from the slightly different perspectives of the two eyes, and then designed an instrument that used mirrors to insure that each eye saw only its own drawing. He called it a stereoscope, from the Greek for "solid vision." If one looked into the stereoscope, the two flat drawings would fuse to produce a single three-dimensional drawing poised in space.

(One does not need a stereoscope to see stereo depth; it is relatively easy for most people to learn how to "free-fuse" such drawings, simply by diverging [also this] or converging [convergence] the eyes. So it is strange that stereopsis was not discovered centuries before: Euclid or Archimedes could have drawn stereo diagrams in the sand, as David Hubel has remarked, and discovered stereopsis in the third century B.C. But they did not, as far as we know.)

A few years after Wheatstone's discovery came the invention of photography, and stereophotographs, with their magical illusion of depth, became immensely popular. Queen Victoria herself was presented with a stereoscope after admiring one at the 1851 Great Exhibition, at the Crystal Palace, and soon no Victorian drawing room was complete without one. With the development of smaller, cheaper stereoscopes, easier photographic printing, and even stereo parlors, there were few people in Europe or America who did not have access to stereo viewers by the end of the nineteenth century.

With stereophotographs, viewers could see the monuments of Paris and London, or great sights of nature like Niagara Falls or the Alps, in all their majesty and depth—with an uncanny verisimilitude that made them feel as if they were hovering over the actual scenes. (By the mid-eighteen-fifties, a subspecialty of stereophotography, stereopornography, was already well established, though this was of a rather static type, because the photographic processes used at the time required lengthy exposures.)

In 1861, Oliver Wendell Holmes (who invented the popular handheld Holmes Stereo Viewer), in one of several Atlantic Monthly articles on stereoscopes, remarked on the special pleasure people seemed to derive from this magical illusion of depth:

The shutting out of surrounding objects, and the concentration of the whole attention . . . produces a dream-like exaltation . . . in which we seem to leave the body behind us and sail into one strange scene after another, like disembodied spirits.

There are, of course, many other ways of judging depth: occlusion of distant objects by closer objects, perspective (the fact that distant objects appear smaller), shading (which delineates the shape of objects), "aerial" perspective (the blurring and bluing of more distant objects by the intervening air), and, most important, motion parallax--the change of spatial relationships as we move our heads. All these cues, acting in tandem, can give a vivid sense of reality and space and depth. But the only way to actually perceive depth rather than judge it is with binocular stereoscopy.

In my boyhood home, in London, during the nineteen-thirties, we had two stereoscopes: a large, old-fashioned wooden one, which took glass slides, and a smaller, handheld one, which took cardboard stereophotographs. We also had books of bicolor anaglyphs —stereophotographs printed in different colors, which had to be viewed with a pair of red-and-green glasses that effectively restricted each eye to seeing only one of the images.
So when I developed a passion for photography, at the age of ten, I wanted, of course, to make my own pairs of stereophotos. This was easy to do, by moving the camera horizontally about two and a half inches between exposures, mimicking the distance between the two eyes. (I did not yet have a double-lens stereocamera, which would take simultaneous stereo pairs.)
I started taking pictures with greater and greater separations between them, and then, using a cardboard tube about a yard long and four little mirrors, I made a hyperstereoscope--turning myself, in effect, into a creature with eyes a yard apart. With this, I could look at even a very distant object, like the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, which normally appeared as a flat semicircle on the horizon, and see it in its full rotundity, projecting toward me. I also experimented with the opposite of this by making a pseudoscope (another device invented by Wheatstone), which transposed the views of the two eyes. This reversed the stereo effect to some extent, making distant objects appear closer than near ones, and turning faces into hollow masks, even though this contradicted common sense, and contradicted all the other depth cues of perspective and occlusion--a bizarre and disorienting experience as the brain struggled to reconcile two opposite conclusions, and alternated rapidly between rival hypotheses.
After the Second World War, new techniques and forms of stereoscopy became popular. The View-Master, a little stereoscope made of plastic, took reels of tiny Kodachrome transparencies that one flicked through by pressing a lever. I fell in love with faraway America at this time, partly through such View-Master reels of the grand scenery of the West and the Southwest.

One could also get Polaroid Vectographs, in which the stereo images were polarized at right angles to one another; these were viewed through a special pair of Polaroid glasses, with the polarization of the lenses also at right angles, insuring that each eye saw only its own image. Such Vectographs, unlike the red-and-green anaglyphs, could be in full color, which gave them a special appeal.

Then there were lenticular stereograms, in which the two images were printed in alternating narrow vertical bands covered by clear ridged plastic. The ridges served to transmit each set of images to the proper eye, eliminating the need for any special glasses. I first saw a lenticular stereogram just after the war, in the London Tube—an advertisement, as it happened, for Maidenform bras. I wrote to Maidenform, asking if I could have one of their advertisements, but got no reply; they must have imagined I was a sex-obsessed teen-ager, rather than a simple stereophile.

Finally, there was a slew of 3-D films (like the Madame Tussauds horror film, "House of Wax"), which one would look at through red-and-green or Polaroid glasses. As cinema, most of these were awful--but some, like "Inferno," were very beautiful, and used stereophotography in an exquisite, delicate, unintrusive way.

Over the years, I amassed a collection of stereograms and books about stereoscopy. I am an active member of the New York Stereoscopic Society, and at their meetings I encounter other stereo buffs. Unlike most, we do not take stereoscopy for granted but revel in it. While most people may not notice any great change if they close one eye, we stereophiles are sharply conscious of the change, as our world suddenly loses its spaciousness and depth. Perhaps we rely more on stereoscopy, or perhaps we are simply more aware of it. We want to understand how it works. The problem is not a trivial one, for if one can understand stereoscopy, one can understand not only a simple and brilliant visual stratagem but something of the nature of visual awareness, and of consciousness itself.

Some people, losing binocular vision for a long period, find the experience very disturbing. In a recent issue of Binocular Vision & Strabismus Quarterly, Paul Romano, a sixty-eight-year-old retired pediatric ophthalmologist, recounted his own story of losing nearly all sight in one eye, following a massive ocular hemorrhage. After one day of monocular vision, he noted, "I see items but I often don't recognize them: I have lost my physical localization memory. . . . My office is a mess. . . . Now that I have been reduced to a two-dimensional world I don't know where anything is."

The next day, he wrote, "Things are not the same object at all monocularly as they were binocularly. . . . Cutting meat on the plate--it is difficult to see fat and gristle that you want to cut away. . . . I just don't recognize it as fat and gristle when it only has two dimensions."
After almost a month, though Dr. Romano was becoming less clumsy, he still had a sense of great loss:

Although driving at normal speed replaces the loss of depth perception with motion stereopsis, I have lost my spatial orientation. There is no longer the feeling I used to have of knowing exactly where I am in space and the world. North was over here before--now I don't know where it is. . . . I am sure my dead reckoning is gone.

His conclusion, after thirty-five days, was that "even though I adapt better to monocularity every day, I can't see spending the rest of my life in this way. . . . Binocular stereoscopic depth perception is not just a visual phenomenon. It is a way of life. . . . Life in a two-dimensional world is very different from that in a three-dimensional world and very inferior." As the weeks passed, Dr. Romano became more at home in his monocular world, but it was with enormous relief that, after nine months, he finally recovered his stereo vision.

In the nineteen-seventies, I had my own experience with losing stereoscopy when, following surgery for a ruptured quadriceps, I was put in a tiny windowless room in a London hospital. The room was scarcely bigger than a prison cell, and visitors complained of it, but I soon accommodated, and even enjoyed it. The effects of its limited horizon did not become apparent to me until later, as I described in "A Leg to Stand On":

I was moved into a new room, a new spacious room, after twenty days in my tiny cell. I was settling myself, with delight, when I suddenly noticed something most strange. Everything close to me had its proper solidity, spaciousness, dept--but everything farther away was totally flat. Beyond my open door was the door of the ward opposite; beyond this a patient seated in a wheelchair; beyond him, on the windowsill, a vase of flowers; and beyond this, over the road, the gabled windows of the house opposite--and all this, two hundred feet perhaps . . . seemed to lie like a giant Kodachrome in the air, exquisitely colored and detailed, but perfectly flat.
I had never realized that stereoscopy and spatial judgment could be so changed after a mere three weeks in a small space. My own stereoscopy had returned, jerkily, after about two hours, but I wondered what happened to prisoners, confined for much longer periods. I had heard stories of people living in rain forests so dense that their far point was only six or seven feet away. If they were taken out of the forest, it was said, they might have so little idea or perception of space and distance beyond a few feet that they would try to touch distant mountaintops with their outstretched hands.

When I was a neurology resident, in the early nineteen-sixties, I read the papers of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, who later received a Nobel Prize for their work. They revolutionized our understanding of how mammals learn to see, in particular of how early visual experience is critical for the development of special cells or mechanisms in the brain needed for normal vision. Among these are the binocular cells in the visual cortex that are necessary to construct a sense of depth from retinal disparities. Hubel and Wiesel showed that if normal binocular vision was rendered impossible by a congenital condition (as in Siamese cats, often born cross-eyed) or by experiment (cutting one of the muscles to the eyeballs, so that the subjects became wall-eyed), these binocular cells would fail to develop, and the animals would permanently lack stereoscopy. A significant number of people are born with similar conditions--collectively known as strabismus, or squint--a misalignment sometimes too subtle to attract notice but sufficient to interfere with the development of stereo vision.
Yet there are many accounts of stereo-blind people who achieve remarkable feats of visuomotor coordination. Wiley Post, the first person to fly solo around the world, as famous in the nineteen-thirties as Charles Lindbergh, did so after losing an eye in his mid-twenties (he went on to become a pioneer of high-altitude flight, and invented a pressurized flight suit). A number of professional athletes have been blind in one eye, and so was at least one eminent ophthalmic surgeon.

There are many others--perhaps five or ten per cent of the population--who, for one reason or another, have little or no stereo vision, though often they are not aware of this, and may learn it only after careful examination by an ophthalmologist or optometrist. They may not all be pilots or world-class athletes, but many of them have no sense of visual impairment, either. Most manage to get along very well using only monocular cues, though some do have difficulty judging depth, threading needles, or playing sports.

There may even be certain advantages to monocular vision, as when photographers and
cinematographers deliberately renounce their binocularity and stereoscopy by confining themselves to a one-eye, one-lens view, the better to frame and compose their pictures. And those who have never had stereopsis but manage well without it may be hard put to understand why anyone should pay much attention to it. Errol Morris, the filmmaker, was born with strabismus, and subsequently lost almost all the vision in one eye, but feels he gets along perfectly well. "I see things in 3-D," he said. "I move my head when I need to--parallax is enough. I don't see the world as a plane." He joked that he considered stereopsis no more than a "gimmick" and found my interest in it "bizarre."

I tried to argue with him, to expatiate on the special character and beauty of stereopsis. But one cannot convey to the stereo-blind what stereopsis is like; the subjective quality, the quale, of stereopsis is unique and no less remarkable than that of color. However brilliantly a person with monocular vision may function, he or she is, in this one sense, totally lacking.

And stereopsis, as a biological strategy, is crucial to a diverse array of animals. Predators, in general, have forwardfacing eyes, with much overlap of the two visual fields and, presumably, stereoscopic vision; prey animals, by contrast, tend to have eyes at the sides of their heads, which gives them panoramic vision, helping them spot danger even if it comes from behind. An astonishing strategy is found in cuttlefish, whose wide-set eyes normally permit a large degree of panoramic vision but can be rotated forward by a special muscular mechanism when the animal is about to attack, giving it the binocular vision it needs for shooting out its tentacles with deadly aim.

In primates like ourselves, forward-facing eyes have other functions. The huge, close-set eyes of many types of lemurs serve to clarify the complexity of dark, dense close-up foliage, which, if the head is kept still, is almost impossible to sort out without stereoscopic vision--and in a jungle full of illusion and deceit, stereopsis is indispensable in breaking camouflage. On the more exuberant side, aerial acrobats like gibbons might find it very difficult to swing from branch to branch without the special powers conferred by stereoscopy. A one-eyed gibbon might not fare too well--and the same might be true of a one-eyed lemur or cuttlefish.

Stereoscopy is highly conserved in such animals, despite its costs—the sacrifice of panoramic vision, the need for special neural and muscular mechanisms for coordinating and aligning the eyes, and, not least, for special brain mechanisms to compute depth from the disparities of the two visual images. Thus, in nature, stereoscopy is anything but a gimmick, even if some human beings manage, and may even do better, without it.

In December of 2004, I received an unexpected letter from a woman named Sue Barry. She reminded me how we had met, in 1996, at a shuttle-launch party in Cape Canaveral (her husband, Dan, was then an astronaut). We had been talking about different ways of experiencing the world--how, for example, Dan and other astronauts lost their sense of "up" and "down" in the near-zero-gravity conditions of outer space and had to find ways of adapting. Sue had then told me of her own visual world: she had been born cross-eyed, and so viewed the world with one eye at a time, her eyes rapidly and unconsciously alternating. I had asked if this was any disadvantage to her. No, she said, she got along perfectly well--she drove a car, she could play softball, she could do whatever anyone else could. She might not be able to see depth directly, as other people could, but she could judge it as well as anybody, using other cues.

I had asked Sue if she could imagine what the world would look like if viewed stereoscopically. Sue said she thought she could--after all, she was a professor of neurobiology, and she had read plenty of papers on visual processing, binocular vision, and stereopsis. She felt this knowledge had given her some special insight into what she was missing--she knew what stereopsis must be like, even if she had never experienced it.

But now, nine years after our initial conversation, she felt compelled to write to me about this question:

You asked me if I could imagine what the world would look like when viewed with two eyes. I told you that I thought I could. . . . But I was wrong.
She went on to give me details of her visual history, starting with her parents noticing that she was cross-eyed a few months after she was born.

The doctors told them that I would probably outgrow the condition. This may have been the best advice at the time. The year was 1954, eleven years before David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel published their pivotal papers on visual development, critical periods, and cross-eyed kittens. Today, a surgeon would realign the eyes of a cross-eyed child during the "critical period" . . . in order to preserve binocular vision and stereopsis. Binocular vision depends on good alignment between the two eyes. The general dogma states that the eyes must be realigned in the first year or two. If surgery is performed later than that, the brain will have already rewired itself in a way that prevents binocular vision.

Sue did have operations to correct her strabismus, first on the muscles of the right eye, when she was two, and then of the left eye, and finally of both eyes, when she was seven. When she was nine, her surgeon told her that she could now "do anything a person with normal vision could do except fly an airplane." (Wiley Post, apparently, had already been forgotten by the nineteen-sixties.)

She no longer looked cross-eyed to a casual observer, but she was half aware that her eyes were still not working together, that there was still something amiss, though she could not specify what it was. "No one mentioned to me that I lacked binocular vision, and I remained happily ignorant of the fact until I was a junior in college," she wrote. Then she took a course in neurophysiology:

The professor described the development of the visual cortex, ocular dominance columns, monocular and binocular vision, and experiments done on kittens reared with artificial strabismus. He mentioned that these cats probably lacked binocular vision and stereopsis. I was completely floored. I had no idea that there was a way of seeing the world that I lacked.

After her initial astonishment, Sue began to investigate her own stereo vision:

I went to the library and struggled through the scientific papers. I tried every stereo vision test that I could find and flunked them all. I even learned that one was supposed to see a three-dimensional image through the View-Master, the toy stereo viewer that I had been given after my third operation. I found the old toy in my parents' home, but could not see a three-dimensional image with it. Everyone else who tried the toy could.

At this point, Sue wondered whether there might be any therapy by which she could acquire binocular vision, but "the doctors told me that it would be a waste of my time and money to attempt vision therapy. It was simply too late. I could only have developed binocular vision if my eyes had been properly aligned by age two. Since I had read Hubel and Wiesel's work on visual development and early critical periods, I accepted their advice."

Twenty-five years passed—years in which Sue married and raised a family while pursuing an academic career in neurobiology. She had not tried to fly an airplane, but she had found she could do almost everything else, with her other, monocular ways of judging space and distance. Occasionally, she enjoyed showing off these special abilities:

I took some tennis lessons with an accomplished pro. One day, I asked him to wear an eye patch so that he had to hit the ball using only one eye. I hit a ball to him high in the air and watched this superb athlete miss the ball entirely. Frustrated, he ripped off the eye patch and threw it away. I am ashamed to admit it, but I enjoyed watching him flounder, a sort of revenge against all two-eyed athletes.

But when Sue was in her late forties new problems began:

It became increasingly difficult to see things at a distance. Not only did my eye muscles fatigue more quickly, but the world appeared to shimmer when I looked in the distance. It was hard to focus on the letters on street signs or distinguish whether a person was walking toward or away from me. . . . At the same time, my glasses, used for distance vision, made me far-sighted. In the classroom, I could not read my lecture notes and see the students at the same time. . . . I decided it was time to get bifocals or progressive lenses. I was determined to find an eye doctor who would give me both progressive lenses to improve my visual acuity and eye exercises to strengthen my eye muscles.

She consulted Dr. Theresa Ruggiero, an optometrist, who found that Sue's eyes were developing various forms of imbalance--this sometimes happens after surgery for strabismus—and that the reasonable vision she had enjoyed for decades was now being undermined.

Dr. Ruggiero confirmed that I saw the world monocularly. I only used two eyes together when looking within two inches of my face. She told me that I consistently misjudged the location of objects when viewing them solely with my left eye. She explained that the shimmering, the difficulty in focusing on distant objects, resulted from binocular rivalry. I was constantly switching eyes. Most importantly, she discovered that my two eyes were misaligned vertically. The visual field of my left eye was about three degrees above that of my right. Dr. Ruggiero placed a prism in front of my right lens that shifted the entire visual field of the right eye upward. . . . Without the prism, I had trouble reading the eye chart on a computer screen across the room because the letters appeared to shimmer. With the prism, the shimmer was greatly reduced.

("Shimmer," Sue later explained, was perhaps too mild a term, for it was not like the shimmer one might see with a heat haze on a summer day--it was, rather, a rapid alternation of the misaligned images from each eye, so that whatever she was seeing seemed to jump up and down eight or ten times a second, in a dizzying way.)

Sue got her new eyeglasses, complete with the prism, on February 12, 2002. Two days later, she had her first vision-therapy session with Dr. Ruggiero--a long session in which, using Polaroid glasses to allow a different image to be presented to each eye, she attempted to fuse the two pictures. At first, she did not understand what "fusion" meant--how it was possible to bring the two images together--but after trying for several minutes she found she was able to do this, though only for a second at a time. Although she was looking at a pair of stereo images, she had no perception of depth--but nevertheless she had made the first step, achieving "flat fusion," as Dr. Ruggiero called it.

Sue wondered whether, if she could hold the eyes aligned for longer, this would allow not just flat fusion but stereo fusion, too. Dr. Ruggiero gave her further exercises to stabilize her tracking and hold her gaze, and she worked on these exercises diligently at home. Three days later, something odd occurred:

I noticed today that the light fixture that hangs down from our kitchen ceiling looks different. It seems to occupy some space between myself and the ceiling. The edges are also more rounded. It's a subtle effect but noticeable.

In her second session with Dr. Ruggiero, on February 21st, Sue repeated the Polaroid exercise and tried a new one, using colored beads at different distances on a string. This exercise, known as the Brock string, taught Sue to fixate both eyes on the same point in space, so that her visual system would not suppress the images from one eye or the other but would fuse them together. The effect of this session was immediate:

I went back to my car and happened to glance at the steering wheel. It had "popped out" from the dashboard. I closed one eye, then the other, then looked with both eyes again, and the steering wheel looked different. I decided that the light from the setting sun was playing tricks on me and drove home. But the next day I got up, did the eye exercises, and got into the car to drive to work. When I looked at the rear-view mirror, it had popped out from the windshield.

Her new vision was "absolutely delightful," Sue wrote. "I had no idea what I had been missing." As she put it, "Ordinary things looked extraordinary. Light fixtures floated and water faucets stuck way out into space." But it was "also a bit confusing. I don't know how far one object should 'pop out' in front of another for a given distance between the two objects. . . . It is . . . a bit like I am in a fun house or high on drugs. I keep staring at things. . . . The world really does look different." She included some excerpts from her diary:

February 22: I noticed the edge of the open door to my office seemed to stick out toward me. Now, I always knew that the door was sticking out toward me when it was open because of the shape of the door, perspective and other monocular cues, but I had never seen it in depth. It made me do a double take and look at it with one eye and then the other in order to convince myself that it looked different. It was definitely out there., When I was eating lunch, I looked down at my fork over the bowl of rice and the fork was poised in the air in front of the bowl. There was space between the fork and the bowl. I had never seen that before. . . . I kept looking at a grape poised at the edge of my fork. I could see it in depth.

March 1: Today, I was walking by the complete horse skeleton in the basement of the building where I work, when I saw the horse's skull sticking out so much, that I actually jumped back and cried out., March 4: While I was running this morning with the dog, I noticed that the bushes looked different. Every leaf seemed to stand out in its own little 3-D space. The leaves didn't just overlap with each other as I used to see them. I could see the SPACE between the leaves. The same is true for twigs on trees, pebbles on the road, stones in a stone wall. Everything has more texture. Sue's letter continued in this lyrical vein, describing experiences utterly novel for her, beyond anything she could have imagined or inferred before. She had discovered for herself that there is no substitute for experience, that there is an unbridgeable gulf between what Bertrand Russell called "knowledge by description" and actual "knowledge by acquaintance," and no way of going from one to the other.

One would think that the sudden appearance of an entirely new quality of sensation or perception might be confusing or frightening, but Sue seemed to adapt to her new world with remarkable ease. She was startled and disoriented at first, but for the most part she felt entirely, and increasingly, at home with stereoscopy. Though she continues to be conscious of the novelty of stereo vision, and indeed rejoices in it, she also feels now that it is "natural"--that she is seeing the world as it really is, as it should be. Flowers, she says, seem "intensely real, inflated," where they were "flat" before.

Sue's acquisition of stereoscopy after almost half a century of being stereo-blind has been a constant source of delight, and a great practical benefit. Driving is easier, threading a needle, too, and when she looks down into her binocular microscope at work she can see paramecia swimming at different levels, and see this directly, rather than inferring it by refocussing the microscope up or down.

At seminars . . . my attention is completely captivated by the way an empty chair displays itself in space, and a whole row of empty chairs occupies my attention for minutes. I would like to take a whole day just to walk around and LOOK. I did escape today for an hour to the college greenhouse just to look at the plants and flowers from all angles.

Most of the phone calls and letters I receive are about mishaps, problems, losses of various sorts. Sue's letter, though, was a story not of loss and lamentation but of the sudden gaining of a new sense and sensibility, and, with this, a sense of delight and jubilation. Yet her letter also sounded a note of bewilderment and reservation: she did not know of any experience or story like her own, and was perplexed to find, in all that she had read, that the achievement of stereoscopy in adult life was "impossible." Had she always had binocular cells in her visual cortex, she wondered, just waiting for the right input? Was it possible that the critical period in early life was less critical than generally thought? What did I make of all this?

I mulled over Sue's letter for a few days, and discussed it with several colleagues, including Bob Wasserman, an ophthalmologist, and Ralph Siegel, a vision physiologist. A few weeks later, in February of 2005, the three of us went to see Sue at her home in Massachusetts, bringing along ophthalmological equipment and various stereoscopes and stereograms.

Sue welcomed us and, as we chatted, showed us some childhood photos, since we were interested in trying to reconstruct her early visual history. Her childhood strabismus, prior to surgery, was quite clear in the photographs. Had she ever been able to see in three dimensions, we asked? Sue thought for a moment, and answered yes, perhaps--very occasionally, as a child, lying in the grass, she might suddenly see a blade of grass stand out from its background. The grass would have to be very close to her eyes, within inches, to do this, and the standing out would last just a second or two--she had almost forgotten about this until we quizzed her. So there was a suggestion (if her memory was not playing her false) that Sue may have had a few brief and rare stereo experiences in early life, but there was no way to be certain of this.
Sue had written, in her letter, "I think, all my life, I have desired to see things in greater depth, even before I knew I had poor depth perception." Was it possible that the intensity of this wish had made her believe that she was seeing in stereo when she actually was not? It was important to test her with special stereograms that had no cues or clues as to depth--no perspective or occlusion, for example. I had brought one stereogram with lines of print--unrelated words and short phrases--that, if viewed stereoscopically, appeared to be on seven different planes of depth, but, if viewed with one eye, or without true stereo vision, appeared to be on the same plane. Sue looked at this picture through the stereoscope and saw it as a flat plane. It was only when I prompted her by telling her that some of the print was at different levels that she looked again, and said, "Oh, now I see." After this, she was able to distinguish all seven levels and put them in the correct order.

Given enough time, Sue might have been able to see all seven levels on her own, but such "top-down" factors--knowing or remembering or having an idea of what one should see--are crucial in many aspects of perception. A special attention, a special searching, may be necessary to reinforce a relatively weak physiological faculty. It seems likely that such factors are strongly operative with Sue, especially in this type of test situation. Her difficulties in real life are much less, because every other factor here--knowledge, context, and expectation no less than perspective, occlusion, and motion parallax--helps her experience the three-dimensional reality around her.

Sue was able to see depth in the red-and-green drawings I had brought. One of these images--an impossible three-pronged tuning fork such as M. C. Escher might have drawn, with three tines of increasing heights--Sue found "spectacular"; she saw the top of the uppermost prong as three or four centimetres above the plane of the paper. Bob and Ralph, by comparison, saw it as twelve centimetres above, and I saw it as fifteen centimetres above.

I found this surprising, because we were all the same distance from the drawing, and I had imagined that a given disparity would be perceived, invariantly, as a constant depth. Puzzled by this, I wrote to several neuroscientists, including Shinsuke Shimojo, at Caltech, an expert in many aspects of visual perception. He brought out, in his reply, that when one looks at a stereogram the computational process in the brain is based not solely on the binocular cue of disparity but also on monocular cues such as size, occlusion, and motion parallax. With a stereoscopic illusion, these cues conflict, the monocular ones working against the binocular ones. The brain must therefore balance one set of cues against the other, and arrive at a weighted average. This final result will be different in different individuals, because there is huge variation, even in the normal population: some people rely predominantly on binocular cues, others on monocular cues, and still others use both. In looking at a stereo illusion such as the tuning fork, a strongly binocular person will see unusual stereo depth; a monocularly oriented person will see much less depth; and others, relying more equally on both binocular and monocular cues, will see something in between.

Later in the day, we paid a visit to Sue's optometrist, Dr. Theresa Ruggiero, who described how Sue had first consulted her, in 2001. Sue had complained then of eyestrain, especially when driving, impaired clarity, and a disconcerting jumping or flickering of images—but had not mentioned her lack of stereoscopy.

Dr. Ruggiero herself was greatly surprised, she said, when, immediately after achieving flat fusion, Sue experienced stereoscopy. She speculated that Sue must have had some binocular vision and stereoscopy, even if very briefly, during the critical childhood period, or it would not have been possible for her to have stereo vision now. What was so remarkable about Sue, Ruggiero said, over and above the initial achievement of stereoscopy, was her adventurous and positive reaction to it, and her fierce determination to hold on to it and enhance it, however much work this might entail.

And it did indeed entail, and still entails, a great deal of work--taxing fusion exercises for at least twenty minutes every day. With these exercises, Sue found that she was starting to perceive depth at greater and greater distances, where at first she had seen depth only close up, as with the steering wheel. She continued to have jumps of improvement in her stereo acuity, so that she was able to see depth with smaller and smaller disparities--but when she stopped therapy for six months she quickly regressed. This upset her deeply, and she resumed the eye exercises by herself, working on them every day. Three years later, she still does them, "religiously."
Sue has continued to work very hard on her stereo perception and stereo acuity in the months since our visit, and her perception of stereo depth has continued to increase measurably. Moreover, she has developed a skill she did not have when we initially visited her: the ability to see random-dot stereograms. Unlike conventional stereo pictures, these are constellations of dots with no images that can be seen monocularly, but which reveal images or shapes when viewed with both eyes. This illusion may take some practice, and many people, even with normal binocular vision, are not able to get it. But often, as one continues to gaze, a strange sort of turbulence appears among the dots, and then a startling illusion--an image, a shape, whatever--will suddenly appear far above, or far below, the plane of the paper. Getting
these illusions is the purest test of stereoscopic vision. It is unfakable, for there are no monocular cues whatever; it is only by stereoscopically fusing thousands of seemingly random points as seen by the two different eyes that the brain can construct a three-dimensional image.
Though a theoretical understanding of random-dot stereograms came only in the nineteen-sixties, they are akin to the stereo illusions described by David Brewster, the inventor of another early stereo viewer, as early as 1844. Gazing at wallpaper with small repetitive motifs, he observed that the patterns might quiver or shift, and then jump into startling stereoscopic relief, especially if these patterns were offset in relation to one another. Such "autostereograms" have probably been experienced for millennia, with the repetitive patterns of Islamic art, Celtic art, the art of many other cultures. Medieval manuscripts such as the Book of Kells or the Lindisfarne Gospels, for example, contain exquisitely intricate designs done so exactly that whole pages can be seen, with the unaided eye, as stereoscopic illusions. (John Cisne, a paleobiologist at Cornell, has suggested that such stereograms may have been "something of a trade secret among the educated elite of the seventh and eighth century British Isles.")
In the past decade and a half, elaborate autostereograms have been widely published as "Magic Eye" books. These have added another dimension to Sue's newfound stereoscopic powers: "I find these wallpaper autostereograms easy (and quite thrilling)," she recently wrote, "probably because I practice convergent and divergent fusion regularly."

In the summer of 2005, Bob and I paid Sue another visit, in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where she was running a fellowship program in neurobiology. She had mentioned to me that the bay there was sometimes full of luminous organisms, mostly tiny dinoflagellates, and that she enjoyed swimming among them. When we arrived, in the middle of August, we found that our timing was perfect--the water was aflame with the luminous creatures ("Noctiluca scintillans—I love the name," said Sue). After dark, we went down to the beach, armed with masks and snorkels. We could see the water sparkling from the shore, as if fireflies were in it, and when we immersed ourselves and moved our arms and legs in the water, clouds of miniature fireworks lit up around our limbs. When we swam, the night lights rushed past our eyes like the stars streaking past the Enterprise as it reaches warp speed. In one area, where the noctiluca were particularly dense, Bob said, "It's like swimming into a galaxy, a globular cluster." Sue, overhearing this, said, "Now I see them in 3-D--they all seemed to twinkle in a flat plane before." Here there were no contours, no boundaries, no large objects to occlude or give perspective. There was no context whatsoever--it was like being immersed in a giant random-dot stereogram, and yet Sue now saw the noctiluca at different depths and distances, in three-dimensional space. If she could do this, we mused, perhaps she could now do even better on the random-dot stereogram tests. But Sue, normally eager to talk about stereo vision, was mesmerized by the beauty of the scintillating organisms. "Enough thinking!" she said. "Give yourself to the noctiluca."

Struggling to find an analogy for her experience, Sue had suggested, in her original letter to me, that her experience might be akin to that of someone born totally color-blind, able to see only in shades of gray, who is suddenly given the ability to see in full color. Such a person, she wrote, "would probably be overwhelmed by the beauty of the world. Could they stop looking?" While I liked the poetry of Sue's analogy, I disagreed with the thought, for I suspect that someone who has grown up in a completely colorless world would find it confusing, or even impossible, to integrate a new "sense" such as color with an already complete visual world. Color, for such a person, would have no associations, no meaning.

But Sue's experience of stereoscopy was clearly not a gratuitous or meaningless addition to her visual world. After a brief confusion, she embraced the new experience, and felt it not as an arbitrary add-on but as an enrichment, a natural and delicious deepening of her existing vision. Perhaps this was because a three-dimensional world was already a perceptual reality for her, even though she had relied on non-stereoscopic means to achieve it. With color, there is no precursor--we either see a world of color or we do not—but all of us live and move in a three-dimensional world.

David Hubel has followed Sue's case with interest, and has corresponded with her and with me about it. He has pointed out that we are still quite ignorant of the cellular basis of stereoscopy. We do not know, even in animals, whether disparity-sensitive cells (the binocular cells specialized for stereoscopy) are present at birth (though Hubel suspects they are); what happens to these cells if there is strabismus and lack of binocular experience in early life; and, most crucially, whether they can recover if the strabismus is repaired. With regard to Sue, he wrote, "It seems to me that [her regaining of stereopsis] occurred too quickly for it to be due to a reestablishment of connections, and I rather would guess that the apparatus was there all along, and just required reestablishment of fusion to be brought out." But, he added, "that's just a guess!"

Whether the cells and mechanisms that enable binocular stereoscopy are present at birth or form soon thereafter, the notion of a critical period of maximum sensitivity to environmental stimuli still stands fast. Without early binocular experiences, these cellular mechanisms either die out or fail to develop. But if there is any binocular vision at all during the critical period--and with strabismus there may still be some overlap of the visual fields of each eye and thus a small area of fusion--then the essential apparatus for stereopsis may be established.

What emerges from Sue's experience is that there seems to be sufficient plasticity in the adult brain for these binocular cells and circuits, if some have survived the critical period, to be reactivated later. In such a situation, though a person may have had little or no stereo vision that she can remember, the potential for stereopsis is nonetheless present and may spring to life--most unexpectedly--if good alignment of the eyes can be obtained. That this seems to have happened with Sue after a dormant period of almost fifty years is very striking.
Though Sue originally thought her own case unique, she has found, on the Internet, accounts by a number of other people with strabismus and related problems who have unexpectedly achieved stereo vision through vision therapy.

And a report that has just been published in the journal Nature described the case of S.K., a twenty-nine-year-old man who was born without lenses in his eyes. Though functionally blind for his entire life (he could sense little more than light and dark), he was able to acquire competent vision after being given a pair of glasses. Such an acquisition, long after the critical period, would traditionally have been considered extremely improbable. But S.K.'s case, like Sue's, suggests that if there are even small islands of function in the visual cortex, there may be a fair chance of reactivating and expanding them in later life, even after a lapse of decades, if vision can be made optically possible. Cases like these may offer new hope for those once considered incorrigibly blind or stereo-blind.

Whatever its neurological basis, the augmentation of Sue's visual world has effectively granted her an added sense, a circumstance that the rest of us can scarcely imagine. For her, stereopsis continues to have a quality of revelation.

"After almost three years," she wrote, "my new vision continues to surprise and delight me. One winter day, I was racing from the classroom to the deli for a quick lunch. After taking only a few steps from the classroom building, I stopped short. The snow was falling lazily around me in large, wet flakes. I could see the space between each flake, and all the flakes together produced a beautiful three-dimensional dance. In the past, the snow would have appeared to fall in a flat sheet in one plane slightly in front of me. I would have felt like I was looking in on the snowfall. But now, I felt myself within the snowfall, among the snowflakes. Lunch forgotten, I watched the snow fall for several minutes, and, as I watched, I was overcome with a deep sense of joy. A snowfall can be quite beautiful--especially when you see it for the first time."

Another Version

My Facebook Friends Cloud

2008-01-15T07:35:00.001-08:00

519630069-bd0dbb8138596a05a77dff7f147096a0.png (PNG Image, 1600x1200 pixels)

Blogged with Flock

The Great Influenza (p14 and p15)

2007-12-25T16:17:00.000-08:00

The two most important questions in science are "What can I know?" and "How can I know it?"

Science and religion part ways over the first question, what each can know. Religion, and to some extent, philosophy, believes it can know, or at least address the question, "Why?"

For most religions the answers to this question ultimately comes down to the way -od ordered it. Religion is inherently conservative, even one proposing a new -od only creates a new order.

The question "why" is too deep for science. Science instead believes it can only learn "how" something occurs.

(pp 14, 15)

wandereye: the value of mis-spelled tags in a social bookmarking taxonomy is aggregation of similar personality traits demontrated by patterns, per ...

2007-12-23T18:34:00.001-08:00

the value of mis-spelled tags in a social bookmarking taxonomy is aggregation of similar personality traits demontrated by patterns, per ...