n+1 Magazine has a wonderfully-written editorial on the ups and downs of using Twitter, appropriately titled Please RT:

Look at your Twitter feed at the wrong moment, however, or send a dumb tweet yourself, and a bad infinity opens up onto the narcissistical sublime. What tweet is that, flashing, subliminally, behind the others? In exactly 140 characters: “I need to be noticed so badly that I can’t pay attention to you except inasmuch as it calls attention to me. I know for you it’s the same.” In this way, a huge crowd of people”Š””“Š40 percent more users since last year”Š””“Šdevalue one another through mutual self-importance.

They’re referring to other people, of course. You and I are very different! It’s this part that scares me the most though, because the evidence proving their point is starting to pile up all around us:

Soon, if not yet already, it will seem pretentious, elitist, and old-fashioned to write anything, anywhere, with patience and care.

Andre Torrez decided that enough is enough — he will stop getting caught up in the endless complaining and criticizing whenever any new technology is released. From I give up:

But somewhere in between that new iPad, the unserviceable laptop non-story, and that idiotic comment about the new Retina displays something in my brain snapped. I give up. I surrender. The war is over. I can’t care about this stuff anymore. Getting annoyed at the pace of technology is fruitless for me. Being cynical about any new bit of technology that doesn’t fit into my view of how stuff should work has been a dragging anchor in my life.

For some reason, after reading his post I can’t get this related philosophy out of my head:

Jack Cheng takes a shot at defining The Slow Web:

Timely not real-time. Rhythm not random. Moderation not excess. Knowledge not information. These are a few of the many characteristics of the Slow Web. It’s not so much a checklist as a feeling, one of being at greater ease for the web-enabled products and services in our lives.

It’s a very interesting post where he also describes some of the web sites and apps that exemplify this movement. It reminds me of Clay Johnson’s call for healthier information diets.

(link via @retinart)

I urge each and every one of you to seek out projects that leave the world a better place than you found it. We used to design ways to get to the moon; now we design ways to never have to get out of bed. You have the power to change that.

Mike Monteiro, Design Is a Job

We push so much data into the world. Tweets and blog posts and Facebook photos and on and on it goes. I’m worried that the things we say — wait, let me make this personal. I’m worried that the things I say and do and make aren’t always respectful of the limited time and attention that you have at your disposal.

Nothing exemplifies this issue more than automated tweets made by apps like Foursquare, GetGlue, Path, etc. In a post that is now unfortunately password protected, Frank Chimero calls this kind of automated sharing “huffing the exhaust of other peopl’s digital lives”. I can’t think of a better description than that. I know we’re not supposed to tell people how to tweet, but I have to ask: is this kind of automated “content creation” really worth other people’s time? What value does it add to their lives?

I’m increasingly thinking that the things we do and make should aim to take unnecessary stuff away from people, not add more crap to their lives. This is a principle that most web and mobile applications certainly do not subscribe to. We seem almost incapable of saying “no” to shininess and more features, mostly to the detriment of the purpose of the site or application. This description by Garr Reynolds unfortunately sums the situation up too well:

These cluttered and distracting multimedia creations, filled with the superfluous and the nonessential, incorporating seemingly every special effect, color, and font the software had to offer, end up assaulting the brains of anyone who dares to look in the general direction of the screen.

Instead of just adding all the things to the world, I wish we would think more about how we can effectively remove complexities to make life easier for our users and the people who give us their time and attention. After all, the things we design become our legacy:

Great design starts with a problem statement and then proposes a solution. What you design, the way you solve the problem represents your values and ideals — it presents your vision of the good life. In solving a problem, you make certain things easier and other things harder — through intention or by omission. You assume many things about your customers, how they will engage with the solutions you have built and what they will value/the benefits they will enjoy when they use your design. This is true of companies, products and services and in each case thoughtful, detail oriented problem solving that puts the consumer first speaks most clearly.

These thoughts are all related to intent — the purpose behind the things we do, and the need for us to take responsibility for that intent. This fantastic TED talk by John Hockenberry, below, goes into the idea of intentional design in great depth and with much eloquence. It feels a lot quicker than 20 minutes, so I highly recommend that you watch it:

The point is simply this: when we do things with good intent, we show that we have empathy for our audience/users, and we try to improve their lives in some way.

Now, all of this brings me to the central question I’ve been asking myself the past few weeks. Actually, it’s a question Paul Ford planted in my mind:

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?

I wish I knew the answer to his question. I don’t. But I know this: before I tweet something, before I start writing, and most importantly, before I start a new design project, I will ask myself: am I being a good steward of my audience’s time and attention? Because I’d like to design for those who want to go to the moon, not those who don’t want to get out of bed.

In Technology as Savior, J. D. Bentley tells a great story about flossing (yep, FLOSSING), and technology’s impact on our ability to take responsibility for our actions:

We eschew per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity out of lazi­ness with the expec­ta­tion that, some­how, “tech­nol­ogy” and “sci­ence” has — or will find — a way out, what­ever the cost.

The pull quote doesn’t do it justice, this is a post you have to read in its entirety.

Two articles on company culture caught my eye last week, both about what it’s like to work in organizations with no formal structure and communication. First, from the always excellent Design Staff, Design at Valve: collaborating and innovating in a flat organization is an interview with one of the designers at Valve:

It’s everyon’s job at Valve to recruit peers to help ship an idea. If I’m unable to recruit an engineer to help me ship an idea, it probably means either the idea isn’t solving an important problem, or it’s just not timely given our current priorities and ongoing projects. As individual contributors, w’re each constantly asking ourselves “Where is my time best spent?” The answer changes as projects ship and as new opportunities emerge.

For these self-selecting project teams to work, it’s important that we keep up on the various efforts happening around the company. Ther’s no top-down communication, so this typically happens by chatting with one another over lunch, or checking in with people to learn what’s happening.

Second, Brandon Keepers wrote about what it’s like to work at GitHub, and it struck me as remarkably similar to Valve’s culture:

Anarchy works wonderfully in a small group of individuals with a high level of trust. Everyone at GitHub has full access and permission to do whatever they want. Do great things and you earn respect. Abuse that freedom and you violate everyon’s trust.

Each person at GitHub has the responsibility to sell their ideas to the rest of the company. I quickly learned that if I can’t get anyone else interested in the project that I want to work on, then either I poorly articulated my vision, or more likely, it does not benefit the company. You can still work on it, but you will likely be working alone.

Both posts are worth reading, because they also explore some of the challenges of working in such environments. The teams seem well aware of the downsides of the cultures they’ve created, and they’re working hard to address those because the upsides vastly overshadow the downsides for them. And I guess that’s the key phrase — for them. I don’t think this type of environment will work in every company, but it’s encouraging to see how systems based solely on trust and self-governance can create productive environments and (extremely) happy employees.

For both companies, the measure of success is the quality and value of the products they ship to customers. That is fantastic, and could be the beginnings of a new era of true user-centered organizations. We need more experimentation that does away with conventional hierarchies and corporate structures so that we can find new ways to create value for our users.

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.

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.

I came across Piotr Czerski’s essay We, the Web Kids through a great collection of quotes on James Bridle’s site. It’s the kind of essay that I think everyone who does anything on the Internet should read. It’s a pitch-perfect collection of thoughts on what it means to live here, now, on the Internet. For example:

We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not “˜surf’ and the internet to us is not a “˜plac’ or “˜virtual spac’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it. If we were to tell our bildungsroman to you, the analog, we could say there was a natural Internet aspect to every single experience that has shaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared cribs for tests online, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we fell in love and broke up online. The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn and which we managed to get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming before our eyes; with us and through us. Technologies appear and then dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web; we, communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.

His views on the idea that we don’t want to pay for things are also spot-on:

This does not mean that we demand that all products of culture be available to us without charge, although when we create something, we usually just give it back for circulation. We understand that, despite the increasing accessibility of technologies which make the quality of movie or sound files so far reserved for professionals available to everyone, creativity requires effort and investment. We are prepared to pay, but the giant commission that distributors ask for seems to us to be obviously overestimated. Why should we pay for the distribution of information that can be easily and perfectly copied without any loss of the original quality? If we are only getting the information alone, we want the price to be proportional to it. We are willing to pay more, but then we expect to receive some added value: an interesting packaging, a gadget, a higher quality, the option of watching here and now, without waiting for the file to download. We are capable of showing appreciation and we do want to reward the artist, but the sales goals of corporations are of no interest to us whatsoever.

I know I probably say this too much, but this is a must-read.

A couple of weeks ago I read this quote by John Cage in The Art of Looking Sideways:

I have nothing to say and I’m saying it. Is your mind racing about all the ways that statement applies to life on the Internet? Yeah, me too. In fact, the phrase immediately made me think of a joke I could make on Twitter, which I wrote down right away. But I wanted to get my facts right, so I started reading up on John Cage - as you do when you’re on vacation. This is where I ask you to please stick with me as we go on a brief detour about the nature of criticism.

My rabbit-hole journey into the world of John Cage led me to a great 2004 essay by Joe Dacey called John Cage Defined in the 1950s. It outlines how the phrase “I have nothing to say and I’m saying it” comes from his “Lecture on Nothing”:

In this lecture, he outright tells the listener that the lecture has no point and will go nowhere, “I am here and there is nothing to say. If among you are those who wish to get somewhere, let them leave at any moment”. He implores the audience to enjoy each and every moment of the lecture even though he admits that it is pointless. He advocates that, “Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not possess it) and thus need not fear its loss” and “It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else”.

It’s not just you - that is a weird thing to do. What fascinates me most about Cage is that he never bothered to reflect on any criticism of his work. Ever.

Cage mostly ignored criticism he received believing that most people didn’t understand why he composed the music he composed. In fact, he saw society as “one of the greatest impediments an artist can possibly have” to creating good art. After receiving a review for a concert he gave in Seattle that stated the performance was “ridiculous,” Cage’s responded that he had no interest in the review because he “knew perfectly well it wasn’t.”

Knowing when to ignore criticism and when to listen to it is one of the hardest skills to learn, and so easy to get wrong. On the one extreme is the John Cage approach, where you view all criticism as bogus or not worthy of your attention. On the other extreme there are people (and companies) who change course with every little piece of feedback they get, regardless of its merit.

But somewhere in between is a happy medium where you use criticism as a springboard to ask yourself tough questions. If you’re a designer, those questions might be things like, “Why did I put this button here?” or “Why might someone find this interface confusing?”. Those are excellent questions to ask yourself. If you can answer them, and defend the decisions you made, you can move on to the next thing. If your questions lead you to make some changes, well, that’s great too because your end result is going to be a better product.

I like the way The 99 Percent approaches the process of finding this middle ground in their article On Criticism, Cynicism & Sharpening Your Gut Instinct:

Criticism is doubt informed by curiosity and a deep knowledge of a discipline related to your work. Whether the criticism you receive is constructive or not, it comes from knowledge. Informed insights like “I’m not sure someone would ever pay that much” or “you may not want to outsource that given the high-touch required” may cause you to question your approach.

By contrast, cynicism is a form of doubt resulting from ignorance and antiquated ways. Industry experts will often express doubt based on an ingrained muscle memory of past experiences that handicaps their vision for the future. Cynical statements like, “People will never read a book on a computer” or “Why would anyone want to put their rolodex online?” are famous doubts expressed by experts with handicapped vision.

Their advice is simple: Savor criticism, shun cynicism. That seems like a sound approach to me.

Anyway, I mention all of this to ensure you of the accuracy of the joke I ended up making:

“I have nothing to say and I am saying it” - John Cage in his 1949 lecture on posting Foursquare check-ins to Twitter

— Rian van der Merwe (@RianVDM) May 14, 2012

You are, of course, welcome to disagree and send me your criticism.