The Chronicle of Higher Education has a long but interesting review of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Entitled Shift Happens, the article goes through all the misinterpretations of Kuhn’s work, as well as some of the major criticisms his ideas have received over the years. I found this part particularly interesting:

Scientific revolutions, according to [Kuhn’s book], don’t occur when an apple happens to find the head of a genius, or when enough facts have slowly painted a new picture. Rather, in yet another of Kuhn’s inversions, new paradigms emerge to explain the accumulation of anomalies: findings that do not make sense within the current paradigm. For example, if your paradigm tells you that fire consists of the release of phlogiston embedded in flammable materials, then the fact that some metals gain weight when burned is an anomaly. When a new paradigm is conceived that makes sense of the anomalies, science is in for a revolutionary shift.

There is a definite parallel with design work here. We often try to shift users to a new interaction paradigm because we think it works better. That’s fine, and can be successful - tab-based browsing comes to mind. But these are incremental changes/improvements, and they happen whenever designers approach an existing problem in a new way. They’re worthy pursuits, but rarely essential for an application to still fulfill its purpose.

By contrast some interaction changes are absolutely essential, and we need to keep our eyes open to recognize those elusive circumstances. Essential interaction changes need to happen when existing paradigms can’t cope any more, and new ones are needed. For example, clicking with a mouse isn’t a thing on touch devices, so that particular interaction became an anomaly that couldn’t be “explained” by existing paradigms any more. Therefore we are legitimately creating new paradigms for mobile design to accommodate the change from mouse to touch. We’re still navigating our way through this change, as apps like Path and Clear emerge to challenge our views on what we consider good design.

We often spend our time trying to improve existing designs, and we need to do that. But there is always the danger of hitting a local maximum - “a point [where] you’ve hit the limit of the current design”. To fight this danger, let’s remember that our energy is sometimes best spent identifying areas where existing paradigms are bursting at the seams in their ability to accommodate the design status quo. That’s where the opportunities for design revolution truly lie.

Matt Gemmell posted some interesting reflections on the difficulties of translating paper-based media to digital devices. It includes another reason (not that we need any more reasons, mind you) why skeuomorphic design practices are so problematic. From Augmented Paper:

It’s so easy to saturate electronic representations of paper with what I call “digital artifice”; the gratuitous and ultimately heavy and objectionable skeuomorphisms and decorations that betray a simplistic thinking process: let’s just make this look the same. That’s a damaging frame of mind, because it enforces a false dichotomy between the real and the virtual. Software should be an enhancement, not a replication.

Paul Ford wrote the best article I’ve seen so far on the Facebook/Instagram deal. When Your Favorite App Sells Out includes gems like this:

Unfortunately everything about Facebook defies logic. In terms of user experience, Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever ”” a chaotic mess of products designed to burrow into every facet of your life. The company is also technologically weird. For example, much of the code that runs the site is written in a horrible computer language called PHP, which stands for nothing you care about. Millions of websites are built with PHP, because it works and it’s cheap to run, but PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat. Imagine eating two pounds of scrapple every day for the rest of your life ”” that’s what Facebook does, programming-wise. Which is just to say that Facebook has its own way of doing things that looks very suspect from the outside world ”” but man, does it work.

Anyway, he goes on to explain why he thinks people are so upset about the deal. Just go ahead and read the thing - it’s worth it.

Jon Mitchell in Websites Have to Get Better:

Read-later apps are competition for noisy, ad-ridden websites. They represent a simple fact: Users hate our sites.

Websites should think of Instapaper as competition. People are spending their reader-experience (RX?) dollars elsewhere, period. They don’t want to pay publisher sites with impressions on ads they don’t value, so they pay Marco Arment for a better reading experience. If publishers want to get those RX dollars, they have to deliver a great experience Instapaper can’t provide. It’s pure and simple competition.

I agree with the conclusion that web sites have to provide better reading experiences. But I don’t agree with the causal relationship being drawn with Read Later apps.

First, the main purpose of Read Later apps is revealed right there in the name: they’re for reading things”¦ later. So even though some people probably use the Instapaper web view to read articles immediately without ads, my guess is that most people use it to save articles for later reading.

What the DVR does for TV shows, Instapaper does for articles. And just like with a DVR, you get to skip the ads - but that’s just a wonderful, added bonus. The real benefit is having a place to store and watch/read all the things you want to get to without being bound to the time and place where you first discovered it. This means that if major ad-supported sites start to provide better reading experiences, I won’t suddenly stop using Instapaper. The need to save articles for later reading would remain. This brings me to my second point.

The reason web sites have to provide a better reading experience is not because Read Later apps are their competition, but because it’s the right thing to do. It’s how you show that you value and respect your readers.

Ok, so this has to change:

The vulnerability in Java that Flashback exploits was patched in February by Oracle. But Apple waited nearly two months to update OS X with that patched version.

This is the single biggest security issue for Macs. OS X includes a number of software components from third-party vendors and the Open Source software community, and Apple has a terrible track record in updating those components. When a vulnerability becomes publicly known because it’s been patched on another platform, but it isn’t patched on another, the bad guys have a straight-line roadmap to compromising that unpatched system.

It’s a fair, well-written article about the virus. Worth reading.

Gruber already linked to this, but I can’t help myself - I have to do the same. Craig Mod wrote one of my favorite essays of the year so far in The Digital↔Physical: On building Flipboard for iPhone and Finding Edges for Our Digital Narratives. It’s an essay that makes me elated and jealous at the same time - which is what all great writing makes me feel like. Elated that someone was able to capture an emotion we all feel on a subconscious level, but no-one has been able to describe accurately - until now. And jealous, because damn - I wish I wrote this:

Ther’s a feeling of thinness that I believe many of us grapple with working digitally. It’s a product of the ethereality inherent to computer work. The more the entirety of the creation process lives in bits, the less solid the things w’re creating feel in our minds. Put in more concrete terms: a folder with one item looks just like a folder with a billion items. Feels just like a folder with a billion items. And even then, when open, with most of our current interfaces, we see at best only a screenful of information, a handful of items at a time.

He goes on to describe some of the unintended consequences of digital work:

When all the correspondence, designing, thinking, sketching ”” the entirety of the creative process ”” happens in bits, we lose a connection. It’s as if all that process is conceptually reduced to a single point ”” something weightless and unbounded. Compounded over time, the understanding of where one is as a creative in a digital landscape collapses to the just-a-little-while-ago, the now, and maybe the tomorrow.

I won’t spoil the solution he came up with. Just go read the story.

James Hague in Don’t Fall in Love With Your Technology:

Don’t fall in love with your technology the way some Forth and Linux advocates have. If it gives you an edge, if it lets you get things done faster, then by all means use it. Use it to build what you’ve always wanted to build, then fall in love with that.

I know I’m in danger of that with iOS, Mac OS X, and my new-found love affair with text files and Markdown. Hoping that knowing I have a problem is indeed half the battle.

How mankind will cope with the avalanche of information and entertainment about to descend upon it from the skies, only the future can show. Once again science, with its usual cheerful irresponsibility, has left another squalling infant on civilization’s doorstep.

- Arthur C. Clarke in 1962

Alan Mitchell on the problems with Big Data and the value of what he calls Very Small Data:

So there are two classes of data which help solve different types of problem. Big Data is statistical and deals with general trends and patterns; Very Small Data is specific and deals with getting things done: gathering the information needed to make a decision, to make an arrangement, or to get some administrative chore done. Because it’s Very Small and rather mundane and specific, it doesn’t seem as glamorous and important as Big Data. But it is.

He goes on to discuss four major problems with Big Data, and the enormous opportunities that exist in the area of Very Small Data. It’s an essay well worth your time.

Nick Carr on the belief that remembering facts becomes less and less important with the increased accessibility of information online:

But this idea that knowledge can be separated from facts - that we can know without knowing - really needs to be challenged before it gains any further currency. It’s wonderful beyond words that we humans can look things up, whether in books or from the web, but that doesn’t mean that the contents of our memory doesn’t matter. Understanding comes from context, and context comes from knowing stuff. Facts become most meaningful when, thanks to the miracle of memory, we weave them together in our minds into something much greater: personal knowledge and, if we’re lucky, wisdom.

Perhaps this is the kernel of truth in the “Google makes you stupid” argument. The field of Information Science teaches that wisdom comes from knowledge, which comes from information, which comes from data. If we can’t hold enough pieces of data in our heads for at least a little while, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.