So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

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Eric Bellm remembers the early days of Facebook in When Facebook was Fun:

And we grew older. The guy who was your buddy in class or in the dorms moved to a different city, and you lost touch with him, except in the weird limbo of Facebook, where you remain capital-F Friends and your seven-year-old inside jokes remain preserved in digital amber. You don’t notice it, as the News Feed pushes your recent history out of sight, but who you were trying to be back then can still be found in your Timeline. What was once a means of creative expression and a connection to a living community has ossified: a hidden record of who you aspired to be, as you became who you are now instead.

Facebook Timeline is a brilliant piece of behavioral design. It encourages people to reminisce constantly about the past in a way that cuts out most of the bad and non-exciting parts. As Matt Haughey pointed out in a widely-circulated post called Why I love Twitter and barely tolerate Facebook:

At Facebook, half the people in my recent feed are defined by the university they attended, even if that was 50 years ago. Their location is mentioned in posts and prominently on their profile, as well as their entire school history. Heck, the whole notion of organization at Facebook is now defining a person as a “Timeline.” I find the new life history Timeline approach to be a way of constantly dredging up the past, to show others how it shaped this person, and it’s not necessarily the best way to define ourselves.

Jason Kottke expanded on Matt’s thoughts in Twitter is a machine for continual self-reinvention:

For a certain type of person, changing oneself might be one of the best ways of feeling free and in control of one’s own destiny. And in the social media world, Twitter feels like continually moving to NYC without knowing anyone whereas Facebook feels like you’re living in your hometown and hanging with everyone you went to high school with. Twitter’s we’re-all-here-in-the-moment thing that Matt talks about is what makes it possible for people to continually reinvent themselves on Twitter. You don’t have any of that Facebook baggage, the peer pressure from a lifetime of friends, holding you back. You are who your last dozen tweets say you are. And what a feeling of freedom that is.

I find Facebook’s deliberate focus on the past such a cunning piece of design, especially since most other social networks feel more focused on what’s happening now. What’s so interesting is that your past as told by Facebook’s Timeline is only a minuscule part of the full story. Yes, there were parties, vacations, and engagements. But there was also heartache, grief, and lots and lots of plain-old boring life.

Obviously Facebook only tells the story it knows, and most of the time it only knows about your happy times. What we sometimes forget is that it’s conflict that makes the story of our life interesting. In his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years Donald Miller puts it this way:

When we watch the news [and stories about violence come on], we grieve all of this, but when we go to the movies, we want more of it. Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are in.

I’m slowly coming around to the idea that if we’re going to embrace public living (in the form of social networks) at all, we should either go all in with the full spectrum of our emotions, or rather not bother. Because if we only share a small, perfect sliver of our lives, we start to create unrealistic expectations for ourselves, and the people who know us.

The best article I read about this stuff in a long time is Leah Reich’s Disconnect:

But sometimes, even now, I think about public mourning rituals. I think about how the Victorians treated grief, how publicly they wore it, how they wore rings made from the hair of their beloved deceased. I recall telling myself I could say something, I could document my grief. It was okay to make it public, even if it felt like a very wrong, obnoxious, and strange thing to do. I remember thinking I needed someone to do something, but I didn’t know what it was and I didn’t know how to ask.

That’s the rub, isn’t it? Under even the most ordinary circumstances, how difficult it is to tell people we feel awful, to ask for a little extra patience, to ask for comfort. So to reach through the emotional distance when the stakes are so much higher, when the cost of rejection is risking further isolation at a time when you are already floating on what seems like the last splinter of wood from the great wreck of your life — well, you know, maybe throwing a thing or two at the internet and seeing what sticks doesn’t seem so crazy.

Yes, I know. We’re already in a culture of over-sharing. So I’m cognisant of the fact that it’s not quite practical from information overload and audience burden perspectives for all of us to suddenly start gushing every time we’re having a rough day. So I don’t really have an answer for how this should work. But I worry that our incomplete, happy pasts will someday come back to haunt us when we realise that by ignoring hard times, we have no idea how to deal with them any more.

Tim Kadlec wrote a very timely post about performance and responsive design called Responsive Responsive Design. He starts off by driving home the importance of well-performing sites:

The reality is that high performance should be a requirement on any web project, not an afterthought. Poor performance has been tied to a decrease in revenue, traffic, conversions, and overall user satisfaction. Case study after case study shows that improving performance, even marginally, will impact the bottom line. The situation is no different on mobile where 71% of people say they expect sites to load as quickly or faster on their phone when compared to the desktop.

And then he breaks down one of the most prevailing and dangerous myths of responsive design:

I adamantly disagree with the belief that poor performance is inherent to responsive design. That’s not a rule – it’s a cop-out. It’s an example of blaming the technique when we should be blaming the implementation. This argument also falls flat because it ignores the fact that the trend of fat sites is increasing on the web in general. While some responsive sites are the worst offenders, it’s hardly an issue resigned to one technique.

Tim then shares some very good strategies and techniques for making sure responsive sites don’t become too bloated. Read Responsive Responsive Design.

Related post on Elezea: Why Google might just be right about responsive design in Africa.

Dmitri Fadeyev wrote a good critique of the recent design trend we see in redesigns of sites like The Next Web, Mashable, and ReadWrite. From Redesign Trend in Tech News Sites: Big, Responsive and Content Heavy:

While I like the style direction, I think these sites are trying a little too hard to work like apps, and in doing so, they surrender the strengths of the plain website, namely: simple, responsive navigation mechanisms. Simple sites don’t lag and don’t have any ambiguous navigation elements. They behave like a page, which, while being a constraint, is not necessarily a bad thing. The new wave of responsive redesigns in tech news sites certainly look good with their nice typography and healthy use of whitespace, but they feel heavy, they don’t feel right in the browser. They look more like apps but the speed and responsiveness of a native app just isn’t there.

I think we’re in a period of enthusiastic over-reaching as more and more content sites discover the power of good typography and responsive design. It’s great to see major sites taking risks and experimenting with this stuff. The enthusiasm is fantastic. But I hope that we’ll eventually get through the flashy phase to reach a maturity level in responsive design where the text can truly speak for itself without relying on fancy gimmicks to draw attention to itself.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art currently has a great exhibition of 200 photographs from the 1840s to early 1990s called Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop. From the description:

The urge to modify camera images is as old as photography itself—only the methods have changed. Nearly every type of manipulation we now associate with digital photography was also part of the medium’s pre-digital repertoire: smoothing away wrinkles, slimming waistlines, adding people to a scene (or removing them)—even fabricating events that never took place.

Here’s an example, with more at the bottom of this post:

The Pond - Moonrise (technique: multiple printing)

The exhibition is split up into different themes, and I was particularly interested in the section they call Artifice In the Name of Art:

The tradition of fine-art photography continued with Pictorialism, a movement that began in Europe in the 1880s and soon took hold in the United States. The Pictorialists sought to intensify photography’s expressive potential through the use of soft-focus lenses, textured printing papers, and processes that allowed the surface of the print to be modified by hand. In many cases, photographers composed their pictures from two or more negatives. Other artists, swept up in the currents of mysticism that captivated bohemian circles around the turn of the twentieth century, relied on staging and multiple exposure to reconcile the camera’s clear-eyed factuality with the ethereal realm of myths, dreams, and visions.

Soft-focus lenses… Textured printing papers… And we thought Instagram is a new idea. The outcome is the same — the difference is that the effects that we now get with the tap of a filter button used to take a very long time to do and was, in fact, part of a rebellion against the masses who took up photography as a hobby. The essay Pictorialism in America goes into more detail on this:

As an army of weekend “snapshooters” invaded the photographic realm, a small but persistent group of photographers staked their medium’s claim to membership among the fine arts. They rejected the point-and-shoot approach to photography and embraced labor-intensive processes such as gum bichromate printing, which involved hand-coating artist papers with homemade emulsions and pigments, or they made platinum prints, which yielded rich, tonally subtle images. Such photographs emphasized the role of the photographer as craftsman and countered the argument that photography was an entirely mechanical medium.

I find it fascinating how history repeats itself all jumbled up sometimes. As photography became popular in the 1880s, “real photographers” turned to labor-intensive manual methods for adding filters and effects to their photos to show that they are artists and craftspeople. Now that it’s easy to add those effects, the “real photographers” are rebelling again. Here’s Jaap Grolleman in Why I hate Instagram and why you should too:

I can understand people are trying to be cute but just because it looks ‘vintage’ and ‘antique’ it doesn’t mean a picture of your cat is cool. Pictures of clear-blue skies, light poles, bus stations, office chairs and even paving stones, they all look ‘aaamaazing’. Suddenly it’s all fashionable and presumingly ‘artsy’. I often see good photos being ruined by this ridiculous filter. There’s nothing artsy about it. Applying Instagram’s filters is just ‘clever-clever’, a bad attempt to fake authenticity.

And here is Rebecca Greenfield in Rich Kids of Instagram Epitomize Everything Wrong with Instagram:

The very basis of Instagram is not just to show off, but to feign talent we don’t have, starting with the filters themselves. The reason we associate the look with “cool” in the first place is that many of these pretty hazes originated from processes coveted either for their artistic or unique merits, as photographer and blogger Ming Thein explains: “Originally, these styles were either conscious artistic decisions, or the consequences of not enough money and using expired film. They were chosen precisely because they looked unique-either because it was a difficult thing to execute well (using tilt-shift lenses, for instance) or because nobody else did it (cross-processing),” he writes. Instagram, however, has made such techniques easy and available, taking away that original value.

If history is indeed a sign of things to come, the obvious question is: how will professional photographers rebel against Instagram’s easy filter manipulation? Will they go back to historical techniques? Invent some new, more difficult ways to manipulate photos? Or perhaps (gasp!) just take a photo and not retouch it at all? My money is on the rebellion spurring on some new innovation in art photography, and I look forward to seeing what comes out of it.

Anyway, now that the tangent is out of the way, below are some of my favorite photos from the exhibition. You can view the full collection here. These photos were all manipulated in some physical way — usually part of a very painstaking process.

Untitled (technique: combination printing)

Cape Horn, Columbia River, Oregon (technique: wet plate negative process)

The Other Series (After Kertész) (technique: altering with bleach, dyes, and airbrush)

Étude de nuages, clair-obscur (technique: multiple printing)

17 Rio Pesaro, Venice (technique: cerulean wash)

Last night Cennydd Bowles tweeted something that really resonated with me:

Never ascribe to stupidity that which is adequately explained by complexity.

— Cennydd Bowles (@Cennydd) December 3, 2012

It reminded me of Erin Kissane’s contribution to the A List Apart article What I Learned About the Web in 2011:

If a single idea has followed me around this year, from politics to art and work to friendships, it’s been this one: “it’s more complicated than that.”

It’s centrally important to seek simplicity, and especially to avoid making things hard to use or understand. But if we want to make things that are usefully simple without being truncated or simplistic, we have to recognize and respect complexity—both in the design problems we address, and in the way we do our work.

I don’t know the flow of events that led Cennydd and Erin to their respective statements, but I know why it struck a chord with me. It feels like the number of tweets and blog posts that are written to ridicule and obliterate new products/apps/redesigns are on the rise. It’s like people don’t like anything any more — unless their friends made it. I think we can do better.

It’s easy to write a few paragraphs about how much something sucks. You know what’s difficult? Recognizing and respecting complexity. Giving people the benefit of the doubt and trying to understand why they made the decisions they made — whether it’s related to business, design, development, or anything else.

What’s really difficult is starting your argument from an assumption that other people are deliberate and thoughtful, and then working through each of your criticisms methodically. You’ll either realize that they made the right decisions, or arrive at the conclusion that they made some mistakes. Even if they did make mistakes — and we all have — by starting from a different baseline you’ll end up with a solid (and respectful) critique that the person can use to do things better.

For a creative person, the difference between reading “You suck!” and reading “Here’s where I think you made some wrong decisions” is the difference between being shamed into crawling under the covers and never putting their work out there ever again, and being encouraged to make their product better. We should always, always aim to do the latter.

Giorgio Baresi wrote a long and very interesting post on how designers have an opportunity (and responsibility) to go beyond usability to build meaningful products that enrich people’s lives. From Designing Life-Changing Solutions :

The spread of widely available technology, such as sensors, smartphones, and high-speed mobile networks, puts us on top of a mountain of data and allows designers to tackle problems in ways that were unimaginable even a few years ago. By making sense of this abundance of data, designers are able to create life-changing products and services that help people achieve goals and objectives in relevant, meaningful, and actionable ways.  This ability moves design beyond the “A to B” scenario to embrace whole new solutions in which the starting point is known but the destination and the path to get there cannot be precisely defined upfront. Clear goals with clear paths have broadened, becoming as vague as “taking good care of yourself,” “living a healthy lifestyle,” or “managing your personal finances.”

This creates the opportunity for designers to work together with psychologists, as well as other subject matter experts, to better define how these broad challenges can be translated into meaningful products and services that are able to become true life companions.

Giorgio shares some great examples, as well as three design principles to help turn these goals into reality. It’s definitely worth making time for this one.

I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with the reverse-chronological order on this site (and most blogs, for that matter). For me, the problem is that the latest few posts on the home page aren’t necessarily the most important posts I’d like readers to see. In addition to that, if a new reader visits an article through a link from elsewhere, and then checks out the home page, they won’t immediately get an idea of what the site is about.

That’s why I’m so excited about Ben Brown’s concept of Reader Aware Design. He begins with a question:

Presenting everything as a reverse chronological stream of posts made sense when we knew our readers were sitting at a desk, hitting reload on 30 tabs all day long at work. Does it still make sense when content arrives on an e-paper watch, an Xbox or a tiny slip of paper?

Ben says no, and he provides some recommendations as well as a proof-of-concept they’ve been working on. Read his post for the detail. Exciting stuff!

Meagan Fallone wrote a great article on social entrepreneurship for Fast Company. From Technology Is Useless If It Doesn’t Address A Human Need:

We in turn can teach Silicon Valley about the human link between the design function and the impact for a human being’s quality of life. We do not regard the users of technology as “customers,” but as human beings whose lives must be improved by the demystification of and access to technology. Otherwise, technology has no place in the basic human needs we see in the developing world. Sustainable design of technology must address real challenges; this is non-negotiable for us. Social enterprise stands alone in its responsibility to ensuring sustainability and impact in every possible aspect of our work.

There is much we can learn from this approach. Even in the consumer space, we need to replace some “customer” thinking with “human” thinking and look for ways to improve people’s lives, not just get more money from them.

In another great article on social entrepreneurship, David Bornstein quotes Sally Osberg, president and chief executive of the Skoll Foundation:

“I’ve come to see how the ‘social’ that characterizes their purpose also characterizes their way of working. In other words, social entrepreneurs don’t just pursue a social end, they pursue that end in a fundamentally communal way.” This approach is badly needed at a time of extreme factionalism, she adds: “Regardless of whether you call it teamwork, collaboration or consensus-building, we need it, and we need it now.”

I’ve seen this first-hand in our work with Praekelt Foundation. Their passion for their work, clarity of purpose, and relentless pursuit of working together to create the best possible experience, is teaching me so much about how powerful design can be — in any context.

Look at your feature roadmap right now. Are there major initiatives and ideas that were generated directly from your designer or design team? If yes, was design in the room when the other items were created and prioritized? Congratulations, you’re design-driven.

— Cap Watkins, Building a Design-Driven Culture

Phillip Kruger argues that responsive design shouldn’t be used in Africa in a Memeburn article called Why Google might just be wrong about responsive design in Africa. He lays out his argument in two parts. First:

Responsive design only works on smartphones. So by default you are already ignoring 80+% of users in Africa. You are also reaching the 20% of users that possibly have internet access at home or work.

This is an argument I see a lot, but it’s valid only in the context of target audience and use cases. If the target market for your service primarily uses low-end phones, then by all means don’t bother with responsive design. But let’s say you’re building a site to order take-out food and deliver in major cities, the situation changes dramatically. Now you’re most likely looking at a target market that sits squarely in the 20% of people who have smartphone access (and who don’t want to get off their couches and walk to their PCs to place an order).

This is why personas, scenarios, and use cases are so important. If you’re building a service for ALL THE PEOPLE (which isn’t advisable), then averages are appropriate. And those averages will rightly guide you to focusing on the 80% of people who do not have smartphones. But in most cases, the analytics that matter are not the averages of all users, but the specifics of the market you’re going after. Don’t dismiss responsive design in Africa because of averages. Dismiss it if it doesn’t make sense for your target market.

Phillip continues:

Responsive design is not lightweight. When using responsive design, the size of the download to the browser is still very big (in fact it’s very similar to what the webpage would be). All the HTML is still being downloaded (even parts that are hidden on a smartphone if you use media queries to set display:none in your CSS). Sure, you can have rules to download separate images for separate display sizes and that should help a bit.

Tim Lind wrote a comment on the article that addresses the problem with this logic:

Responsive design does not mean you can’t do server side optimisations. In fact it can help you to do these, and encourages a more efficient design process. You can design the content for the feature phones, and responsive media queries allows you to upgrade the design with a single stylesheet file for the smartphone or desktop (which server side optimisation could exclude).

One of the many good things about responsive design is that it forces designers and developers to spend a lot of time on optimisation to ensure light, fast pages. This is just good practice for web development in general — not just for mobile. Page bloat is a huge problem, with the average web page now being more than 1 MB big.

Page speed optimisation is just good web citizenship, and it should be a requirement regardless of whether or not a responsive design approach is taken. The other point to remember is that mobile networks already do a lot of compression on served images (see How should we handle responsive images?).

What worries me about this debate is that there appears to be no room for nuance. Responsive design is either the answer to all of Africa’s problems, or we shouldn’t do it at all. But as with most things, the appropriate approach is to say “it depends.” A mobile strategy shouldn’t be a decision between a native app or a separate mobile site. A mobile strategy should form part of a larger web strategy, and it needs to include a discussion about the appropriateness of responsive design. It might not be the right thing for your project, but it should be on the table.

I keep reminding myself of Ben Callahan’s statement in The Responsive Dip: “Just because you can’t, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.” Just because this is a difficult problem that we haven’t quite figured out, doesn’t mean we should throw it away and go back to how we’ve always done things. What we need to do now is push through and find elegant ways to apply responsive design in Africa. Where it makes sense, of course.

Update 2012/11/26: Phillip responded to all the feedback on his Memeburn post. See Google might be wrong - part 2. It’s good to get additional clarification on the Google talk that formed the backdrop for his original post. This isn’t the last discussion we’ll have about RWD in Africa, and that’s a good thing. We need to figure this out…