Paul Ford gave the closing keynote at the 2012 MFA Interaction Design Festival, and published the text in a fantastic piece called 10 Timeframes. He spends most of the talk discussing units of time, using rich and provocative stories like this:

I can never remember if we are supposed to live each day as it were our last, or if it’s the first day of the rest of our lives. It’s hard to tell sometimes. We make movies about it over and over again. The Bucket List and Terms of Endearment and so on. Or even zombie movies. And the core assumption of those movies is usually that your life is kind of inconsequential up until that moment, that now you’re going to learn what really matters. Of course these movies are made by people who are totally dedicated to making films. They give up their lives and neglect their children to make movies about the value of family.

He ends up reframing the way we view our time to think more about how the things that we do affect other people’s time:

If we are going to ask people, in the form of our products, in the form of the things we make, to spend their heartbeats on us, on our ideas, how can we be sure, far more sure than we are now, that they spend those heartbeats wisely?

We have a responsibility to make sure that we create things that help others spend their time wisely. It’s a sobering thought. This is my favorite article of the week — so well written.

I wrote a new article for Smashing Magazine called Design Patterns: When Breaking The Rules Is OK:

W’d like to believe that we use established design patterns for common elements on the Web. We know what buttons should look like, how they should behave and how to design the Web forms that rely on those buttons. And yet, broken forms, buttons that look nothing like buttons, confusing navigation elements and more are rampant on the Web. It’s a boulevard of broken patterns out there.

I go on to the discuss the history of design patterns, and under what circumstances it’s ok to go off the beaten track and try something new. Enjoy!

This is not a good week to be calling yourself a curator. (Um, please don’t read the description of this site in the left column.) I’m fully aware of the irony of posting a pull quote from Mitch Goldstein’s Formally Concerned, but here goes anyway:

The result of this are blogs full of nothing but other people’s stuff. Pages and pages of other peoples photographs, designs, videos, etc. This is not inherently bad, but what I get curious about is how this affects how people go about making their own work — is there room to think about something new if your mind is filled with everything else? Probably, but I would not discount the distraction of seeing an endless stream of externalized, decontextualized imagery.

I imagine the natural reaction to my opinion of this is that these Tumblr blogs act as inspiration, as a scrapbook of ideas. I question this as well, since I think true inspiration comes from the questions you ask yourself, not from constantly looking at how other people answered their own questions. I hope that the reblogging and reposting of other peoples’ work — and reblogging other peoples’ rebloggings, ad infinitum — does not take the place of actual creativity. I mean, finding cool stuff and posting it sort of feels like you are making something, right? Tumblr can provide an illusion of creation — I wonder what people would make if they were not busy making this illusion?

I’ve actually written about this before as well in the context of the “post-literate society”:

I believe [sites like Pinterest and Instagram] give users the illusion that they’re creating something without the necessary work that is required to make something good. Sharing pictures is effortless. And if we know anything about online behavior, it’s that people hate doing actual work when they can just click a button instead.

This, of course, comes off the back of Choire Sicha’s rant against people who use the word ‘curation’:

You are no different from some teen in Indiana with a LiveJournal about cutting. Sorry folks! You’re in this nasty fray with the rest of us. And your metaphor is all wrong. More likely you’re a low-grade collector, not a curator. You’re buying (in the attention economy at least! If not in the actual advertising economy of websites!) what someone else is selling””and you’re then reselling it on your blog. You’re nothing but a secondary market for someone els’s work.

I’m obviously conflicted about this, because a lot of what I do on this site is what’s considered link-blogging, adding a little bit of context and additional thought when needed. I certainly won’t call that “creating”, but I also don’t understand why there’s such a big backlash against this type of activity.

The first advice writers always give other writers is, read more. So I am comfortable with my approximately 70/30 split between posting links and writing longer, original pieces. I don’t think I’d be able to write the 30% if I didn’t spend the other 70% finding and reading great content — and why shouldn’t I share that with you? As long as the 70/30 split doesn’t become a 100/0 split, I’ll keep doing this.

On this particular issue I’m much more in agreement with Erin Kissane’s viewpoint in Bloggers and Bowerbirds:

We should stop treating the web like it’s zero-sum and start treating each other like colleagues. When people like Popova and Roth-Eisenberg show up and offer a standard, our response should not be to freak out about them wanting in on “our” cultural capital. Respecting the work of discovery doesn’t detract from respect for the work of creators. There is not a limited supply of civility and respect, so let’s stop being dicks about this stuff.

Preach it, Erin.

Nicholas Carr looks at the differences between customers who buy/share books vs those who buy/share music, specifically within the context of piracy. In Books ain’t music he notes:

The unauthorized copying of songs and albums did not begin with the arrival of the web or of MP3s or of Napster. It has been a part of the culture of pop music since the 1960s. There has been no such tradition with books. Xeroxing a book was not an easy task, and it was fairly expensive, too. Nobody did it, except, maybe, for the occasional oddball. So, even though the large-scale trading of bootlegged songs made possible by the net had radically different implications for the music business than the small-scale trading that had taken place previously, digital copying and trading didn’t feel particularly different from making and exchanging tapes. It seemed like a new variation on an old practice.

His observations are fascinating. It shows that even though record labels certainly deserve their share of the blame when it comes to the dismal state of the commercial music industry, the history and context of music sharing has an enormous part to play in the rise of modern-day music piracy. The publishing industry has a very different historical context, so we can’t just apply the “lessons” from the music industry to the challenges introduced by digital books.

Very true words from Peter Rojas in Generosity, empathy, and disruption:

I just don’t think it’s possible to build an amazing product or app or whatever without being able to empathize with and understand the person who is supposed to be using it. On some fundamental level great design is able to get into the mindset of a user and anticipate, guide, and delight. None of that is possible without empathy.

He also sums up why companies who make complex, ugly, and bloated enterprise software should be very scared — their competitors are going to come out of nowhere:

Generosity and empathy are becoming the big blind spots not only for many big companies, but often for entire industries (like financial services) which have drifted so far from any human-centric principles that they feel ripe for real competition from companies that decide to play the game differently. You can see it in the basic lack of respect in the way customers are often treated, and you can see it in so many of the sub-par products that are being produced because no one cares enough about the end user to make them better.

The social media manager at my friend Paul Cartmel’s company needs to track 3 different Twitter accounts on Klout, so he sent an email to their support team to find out how to log out of their iPhone app. This was the response, which Paul kindly forwarded to me:

Yep. You have to delete the app to log out of it. This example reminds me of what Adaptive Path calls the cake model of product strategy. Watch this short video about it before you continue reading:

What Klout did with their iPhone app is a classic “Dry Cake” approach. Even though they probably have additional functionality planned to make the app tasty with filling and icing, the current iteration is dry and not very exciting since key functionality is missing. You can’t do anything except see the Klout scores of yourself and a few other people connected to you — there is no way to search for other users.

What they should have done is build a cupcake first — an iteration that feels complete, even if it doesn’t have an entire roadmap’s functionality built out yet. It should support basic actions like logging out and searching for other users. And despite not having all the features of the web site, it should be an app that can stand on its own, one that is engaging and desirable with the functionality it does have. It’s so much fun to go from cupcake to cake to wedding cake if that first iteration is something that users are excited about.

So when you think about building your own product, remember to make your minimum viable product a tasty cupcake, not a dry cake with some vague promise of filling and icing somewhere down the line.

In The Great Big Opportunity Matt Salisbury talks about subsidiarity — the idea that decisions are better made where they have immediate effect:

There has been a lot of talk about the advent of the “information age.” For the first time since the industrial revolution, we have experienced a real disruptive change in business context. The age of communication is now, but if you pay too much attention to the technology, you’ll miss what’s really happening.

What’s “really happening” is that we now have the chance to work like humans instead of machines.  Communication and information’s advance is restoring subsidiarity to our brave new world.

I like his conclusion:

Ultimately, the information age is not about the information. It’s about human dignity and happiness informing how, where, and why we work.

In Facebook threatens to ‘Zuck up’ the human race, Andrew Keen makes the following observation:

Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, tells us there’s a shift from an analog world in which our identities are generated from within, to a digital world in which our sense of self is intimately tied to our social media presence.

In other words, on Twitter and Facebook, we become who we follow. Or perhaps more accurately, we envy who we follow. The big problem with this is that none of us are really who we portray ourselves to be online. We are all the better, happier, more successful versions of ourselves:

(Source: Comical Concept)

But even though we take in all this information from people who we know aren’t real (and sometimes don’t even like), we are incapable of stopping. There is always more to know, more to discover, another person to compare ourselves to. In Noise and Signal, Nassim Taleb explains why this is so counterproductive:

The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part called the signal); hence the higher the noise to signal ratio. And there is a confusion, that is not psychological at all, but inherent in the data itself. Say you look at information on a yearly basis, for stock prices or the fertilizer sales of your father-in-law’s factory, or inflation numbers in Vladivostock. Assume further that for what you are observing, at the yearly frequency the ratio of signal to noise is about one to one (say half noise, half signal) “” it means that about half of changes are real improvements or degradations, the other half comes from randomness. This ratio is what you get from yearly observations.

But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95% noise, 5% signal. And if you observe data on an hourly basis, as people immersed in the news and markets price variations do, the split becomes 99.5% noise to .5% signal. That is two hundred times more noise than signal “” which is why anyone who listens to news (except when very, very significant events take place) is one step below sucker.

Most of the information we get on social media is not just noise, it also makes us less likely to discern between what’s important and what’s not. Greg McKeown explains in The Unimportance of Practically Everything:

Social media did not create the problem of distraction, but it is clearly an amplifier. Indeed, a study [PDF] by Clifford Nass et al. at Stanford showed that heavy media multitaskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli than light media multitaskers. Heavy multitasking may encourage even heavier multitasking because it leads to a “reduced ability to filter out interference.” Could the part of our brain that is processing deeper cogitative thought actually be atrophying in the process?

None of this would matter if activity and reward were linearly related. But we live in a world where almost everything is worthless and a very few things are exceptionally valuable. This is a counterintuitive idea. After all, the idea that 50% of results come from 50% effort is appealing. It seems fair. Yet, research across many fields paints a very different picture.

As I read through these articles it became clear to me that most of us are not being very good stewards of our time and attention. We are seduced by the lure of constant affirmation that social media promises, and blind to the reality that what we mostly get from it is a sense that we’re not as good, happy, and successful as those around us.

We have a responsibility to ourselves to follow and interact with those who support us and want to make the world a better place. And we have an obligation to cull and surrender the people and the information that make us feel inferior and stunt our growth. This is difficult, because we’ll never get rid of our fear that we might be missing out on something. But it’s necessary if we want to hang on to our sanity and our ability to tell the vital from the trivial — so that we can continue to do good work.

Of course I can’t tell you what to do. But for myself, I’m going to start ignoring constant negativity, unimportant noise, and empty criticism. I’m actively going to seek out positive, driven people and honest critique. Nassim Taleb says it well at the end of his article:

To conclude, the best way to mitigate interventionism is to ration the supply of information, as naturalistically as possible. This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what’s going on, and the more iatrogenics (“an inadvertent adverse effect or complication resulting from medical treatment or advice”) you will cause.

Be careful who you listen to, because sooner or later, they end up defining you.