Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed is a punch-in-the-gut piece by David Cain. Consider this paragraph:

We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.

Feeling indignant that he would insinuate that you of all people have been indoctrinated by a consumerist culture? Before you close your laptop in disgust, hear the man out. Haters gonna make some good points sometimes…

Josh Emerson offers some words of advice that we should all take to heart:

But perhaps the most important thing I want to highlight here, is that the answer to most questions is it depends, and very often in the grey area between black and white. Try not to take extreme views on things, and perhaps see that there is always another level of complexity to be discovered in any decision you make.

We just came out of a season of arguing whether or not Flat Design is the answer to everything. We also heard proclamations that wireframes are dead, designers do in fact need to code, and Photoshop is on its last legs.

But you know what? Screw that. We have to remind ourselves that the vast majority of design is done by people who don’t have Twitter accounts and large public followings. Out there in the trenches they shouldn’t have to worry about what’s cool or what styles they’re allowed to like. They should only care about getting the job done, and using whatever tools they have at their disposal to do the right thing.

Doing the right thing is complex, and messy. Sometimes it has the luxury of involving a content-first approach with interactive prototypes, but other times it involves having to make static wireframes and designing before any content is available. It’s not ideal, but who are we to judge a designer based on what we perceive as the quality of their process? What do we know about the complexity of the project, the relationships they are trying to navigate, and the users they are designing for?

My advice is this. Yes, follow the design zeitgeist. Study the big ideas and explore the edges where the industry is being pushed forward. But don’t get caught up in whatever the cool viewpoint is about any methodology or style. Only you know what your project needs. So be confident, ignore the extreme viewpoints, and use whatever tool will be most effective to help you do the right thing.

In The Guardian Tom Meltzer asks, Are our household appliances getting too complicated? Despite violating Betteridge’s law of headlines he makes some good points:

“The innovation is obviously being driven by manufacturers’ desire to add value and to differentiate themselves,” says analyst Neil Mason, head of retail research at market research company Mintel. “But from a consumer’s point of view, what they want is convenience and simplicity. When you run into trouble is when you add all these extra functions and consumers just get perplexed as to how to actually use them.”

He cites some classic examples of technology-driven innovation — asking “What more can we do with this technology?” as opposed to “What goals do our customers want to accomplish with our product?”

Figuring out what to read (and what to believe) about Big Data is becoming a Big Data problem in and of itself¹. I wrote The hype, benefits, and dangers of Big Data a while ago to give an overview of what’s out there, but there are two more interesting articles from the last week that I’d like to highlight as well.

First, on the HBR blog Jake Porway talks about Big Data and social entrepreneurship and makes the point that You Can’t Just Hack Your Way to Social Change:

Any data scientist worth their salary will tell you that you should start with a question, NOT the data. Unfortunately, data hackathons often lack clear problem definitions. Most companies think that if you can just get hackers, pizza, and data together in a room, magic will happen. This is the same as if Habitat for Humanity gathered its volunteers around a pile of wood and said, “Have at it!” By the end of the day you’d be left with half of a sunroom with 14 outlets in it.

And on Wired, Does ‘Big Data’ Mean the Demise of the Expert — And Intuition? is a very interesting excerpt from Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier’s new book on the topic:

In the same spirit, the biggest impact of big data will be that data-driven decisions are poised to augment or overrule human judgment.

The subject-area expert, the substantive specialist, will lose some of his or her luster compared with the statistician and data analyst, who are unfettered by the old ways of doing things and let the data speak. This new cadre will rely on correlations without prejudgments and prejudice. To be sure, subject-area experts won’t die out, but their supremacy will ebb. From now on, they must share the podium with the big-data geeks, just as princely causation must share the limelight with humble correlation.

It seems like an obvious conclusion, but everything I’ve read so far about Big Data confirms that if we think cutting the “messiness” of human decision-making out of data analysis will result in better decisions, we’re sorely mistaken.

I just came across this great interview with Edward Tufte from 2011. I love his description of bad information design, and how it’s not the data’s fault:

Overload, clutter, and confusion are not attributes of information, they are failures of design. So if something is cluttered, fix your design, don’t throw out information. If something is confusing, don’t blame your victim — the audience — instead, fix the design. And if the numbers are boring, get better numbers. Chartoons can’t add interest, which is a content property. Chartoons are disinformation design, designed to distract rather than inform. Thus they reduce the credibility of your presentation. To distract, hire a magician instead of a chartoonist, for magicians are honest liars.

Chartoons. Heh.

Anyway, I find this particularly poignant in our current infographic age, where Mashable recently posted — without irony — an infographic on infographics. Here are some of my other favorite infographic takedowns:

• Ending the Infographic Plague (The Atlantic)
• Data Art vs. Data Visualization: Why Does a Distinction Matter? (Stephen Few)
• How Infographics Are Ruining The Web (SplatF)

(link via @ericatjader)

In Students to e-textbooks: no thanks Nicholas Carr reflects on a recent study (PDF link) out of Ryerson University in Toronto which shows that students still prefer paper textbooks over electronic textbooks:

What’s most revealing about this study is that, like earlier research, it suggests that students’ preference for printed textbooks reflects the real pedagogical advantages they experience in using the format: fewer distractions, deeper engagement, better comprehension and retention, and greater flexibility to accommodating idiosyncratic study habits. Electronic textbooks will certainly get better, and will certainly have advantages of their own, but they won’t replicate the particular advantages inherent to the tangible form of the printed book.

What makes this interesting is that it’s not the usual “I want to smell the pages” argument we see in most stories about the yearning for paper books. This study shows that paper textbooks help students learn better. That’s not to say that electronic textbooks won’t eventually catch up — they will — but it’s a reminder that in some spaces, e-books still have a long way to go.

I recently had a long conversation about coffee with the manager at the flagship TRUTH.coffeecult retail store. Talking to people who have a passion for their craft — regardless of what that craft is — always invigorates me in my own work as well. One of the things Dominic told me is that since they’re a roaster that supplies coffee to other businesses, TRUTH’s retail coffee shops aren’t their most lucrative business opportunity. So why do they even bother with retail spaces? His answer really got me thinking:

We want to give people the tools they need to tell that our coffee is better than others.

TRUTH realizes that for most people, coffee is just coffee. Whether it’s Starbucks, Denny’s, or Ricoffy doesn’t really matter, as long as it has caffeine in it. But people like Dominic and the team at TRUTH aren’t ok with that. They see a city full of people who are losing out on the joys of an artisan coffee experience, and they want to change that.

But they also know that in order to accomplish their goal, they can’t just give people a cup of TRUTH and leave them to it. They have to teach them why it’s better. They have to explain the roasting process, show the care and precision that goes into pulling an espresso shot, and provide guidance on the flavours they need to look for. Only then will their customers be able to appreciate why TRUTH is better than other coffees.

This is not unlike the work we do in web design. When we work with clients or internal teams who are not aesthetically inclined, or don’t immediately see the value in prototyping and user research, we can’t just yell, “BUT OUR WAY IS BETTER!” and storm off in a fit of righteous anger. Instead, we have to give clients and teams the tools they need to tell that an iterative, research-led approach is better than just pumping out some PSDs real quick. We have to show case studies, and we have to explain how the investment will result in major returns for the business. We need to show passion for our craft, we need to speak confidently about what we do and why we do it, and we need to communicate the benefits to them in a clear and concise way.

Dominic went on to tell me how one person came into TRUTH earlier that day and asked to see how they make a cappuccino. The barista brought her around, showed her how the machine works, and she ended up pulling her own shot and steaming her own milk. The barista didn’t care about sharing secrets, or letting some “lesser being” touch his espresso machine. Because his goal isn’t to show people how good he is. His goal is to get people to love coffee. And if that means letting someone pull their own shot — imperfect as it may be — then so be it.

Our role as designers isn’t to show people how good we are, either. It also shouldn’t be our primary goal to win industry awards. Our goal should be to get the people we work with to fall in love with the design process, and to utilize that passion in them and ourselves to design great solutions. And the only way we’re going to be successful at that is if we invite our clients and teams to step behind the counter to see how and why we do what we do.

Jeff J. Lin looked at the life of director Ang Lee and pulled out some insights on what it takes to be successful. This part from Ang Lee and the uncertainty of success talks about the long periods of non-success that often occur:

If you’re an aspiring author, director, musician, startup founder, these long stretches of nothing are a huge reason why it’s important to pick something personally meaningful, something that you actually love to do. When external rewards and validation are nonexistent; when you suffer through bouts of jealousy, wondering “How come so-and-so got signed/is successful/got a deal/etc?”; when every new development seems like a kick in the stomach, the love of what you are doing gives you something to hang onto.

Much is made of genius and talent, but the foundation of any life where you get to realize your ambitions is simply being able to out-last everyone through the tough, crappy times — whether through sheer determination, a strong support network, or simply a lack of options.

Related, Paul Tough’s thesis on how children succeed:

Noncognitive skills, like persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence, are more crucial than sheer brainpower to achieving success.