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The “Heat Death” of Design and Technology

June 10, 2015 by Ian Leave a Comment

The universe passes around an awful lot of information – an awful lot of energy – all the time.

Go for a run? Bleed calories as heat into the air. Sun’s warm today! It’s shedding its worth into the ambient area at quite literally the speed of light. Atomic bombs? Self-explanatory.

The mechanics are all the same – physics is wonderfully complex but it’s not complicated. Which brings us to tech and design, weirdly.

It feels like every site on the web (including mine, for which I make little apology) features the same elements – because they’re popular and effective – all at the same time. Hero sliders, big images, stunning typography, literally the entire Material Design playbook in action – on every website it can be – 24/7 this year. Homogeneity at its best.

Why? It’s effective. We know what to expect. We know what a clickable link looks like on a desktop, and we can make simple guesses on mobile as to which regions are touch ready. It’s not bad in and of itself, but it will cause exhaustion, and go out of fashion.

Now tech is doing it too! This should not be a surprise.

This morning, Wired had a piece about everyone having the same plans for tech that’s damned accurate – and damning by way of its accuracy. From the article;

You can prefer one design or another, but that will be the only thing separating iOS from Android and Android from Windows. They’re just skins at this point. You’ll have access to all the same apps, all the same services.

Sounds great, right? And we can admit there’s less animosity between Mac users and PC users lately, just as there’s less ague in consumers over which phone to pick. As Wired says, “There are a few differentiators left, sure […] but they don’t matter to most users. A phone is a phone is a phone.”

Heat Death is at hand.

This is where we get back to physics. The idea of heat death centers on the passing of energies – that, and I’m paraphrasing a really large number of ideas here for the sake of demonstration – eventually, given enough passing, all of that energy will become homogenized. It’ll become the same. Momentum will be lost, among the many processes involved, and we’ll suffer the final doom of the universe; a lack of differentiation across all matter and energy, because there’s nowhere to go that hasn’t been gone before.

I feel like design, and tech, might spiral into a premature heat death situation by way of the hegemony of homogeneity.

Or I could be over thinking it. Maybe, as Wired says, this is what we need. Adoption is hard, and getting people on board with new systems is a challenge. Perhaps – going back to Clay Shirky – all of this stuff will become socially interesting as it becomes technologically boring.

Still, who wants to be bored by design items? Not me. How about you?

The New-Clear Option – Scrapping my Google Reader

November 1, 2011 by Ian 2 Comments

I’ve done it, people. I’ve nuked my Google Reader. I just deleted 238 feeds, in less than six clicks.

Why?

Because I was tired of the noise.

Blogging often calls for a delicate balance of signal and noise. With more and more diverse bodies broadcasting, I’ve collected a long list of subscriptions over the years; from educational blogs to business feeds, web comics, architectural blogs, and more. Diversity, I’ve always thought, is important. After all, the secret of the universally interesting person is that they are universally interested.

I’m no longer sure this diversity serves me.

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been absent from my blog for most of the summer. A lot of things contributed to this – a move, a change in family situation, focus on my work and health over personal interest. But as the lions of summer calm, and I get back to the pace I’m comfortable producing at, I’m finding there’s very little to comment on any longer. Nothing in the feeds, as I’ve been working my way back into them, has inspired me to action. It’s not that everything is being said already – I’m slowly conquering my imposter syndrome – it’s that so many people are speaking so much, and saying so little.

Google Reader used to be my haven, my arc of knowledge. I dedicated fifteen to twenty minutes twice per day – on the commute to and from work – to chewing through every article I possibly could, skimming or starring for later reading between three and four hundred items. I’ve always been a voracious reader; this is what happens when you come from a highly cerebral family.

Unfortunately, with the shift in attitude the year has brought me, I’m now seeing the old list of rags as a hindrance. The noise has killed the signal.

So, where Read It All Week failed me (twice) – because I was working from a subtract-off model – I figure going blank slate on my Google Reader might save the experience. It’s fortuitous happenstance that I’m doing this the same week Google announced they’ve removed the social aspect of Reader. I’m hoping to treat the product the way I treat anything new I engage in; with measured optimism.

I’ve missed reading, and writing, in a significant way. While it may seem unfortunate that coming back to both means stress and adjustment, I can’t help but see this as a sharp opportunity to examine a habit I took as read for so long, and build better practices out of the work.

The questions then become; How are our habits serving us? What are we getting from them? How can we do things better with the tools we have?

What do you think?

Facebook Timelines – First Look

September 27, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

From the site that brought you eight different news feeds in six months, comes a wonderful new toy. A profile dedicated not to what you are, but everything you have ever been. Timelines, introduced last week through developer beta, have been getting a lot of press – but what might they actually mean for your profile?

Here’s what my Timeline looks like at the moment:

It’s fairly spartan for now – I’ve put in some extra information, but largely, the moment you activate your Timeline, the magic… Doesn’t exist. I’ll admit, for the first few minutes, I didn’t see what the big deal was.

What do Timelines do that Profiles didn’t?

One of the biggest features the new profile system enables is called Milestones – you can set one for just about anything. A birth, a marriage, a death – the new system allows you to go back through your life and mark out the things you want to communicate as important to you.

First thing I did? Marked the birth of my son, Liam. Pretty important event in my world.

I’m sure I’ll get around to finding a picture for my own birth in 1982 eventually – but there’s no rush. Milestones aren’t time-sensitive the way status updates are. I can wait until I’ve got access to all the slide shows from the year my family spent in Australia before adding the marker in my profile that says I went there. Next time I travel, I can build a Milestone out of the trip as it happens – and use one of the photos from the trip’s album to do so.

But that’s not all – with the Timelines system, Facebook’s changed how their entire update methodology works.

It’s not listed specifically as a feature, and it’s certainly not obvious, but Facebook seems to be moving away from the pure “timely updates” theory of social networking, toward creating a full life record within their system.

The box you’ll see on your Timeline (and it’s not clear whether this will look similar on your Home screen) does the common Status/Photo/Place combination as usual – but the kinds of milestones you can add seem to suggest a much broader scope to the site.

Sure, we can mention we had a child or got married… But adding a pet? Losing a loved one? Achievements, awards, and health and wellness goals? This isn’t the usual profile-hygiene fare here – it’s a pretty big deal. When combined with the marked difference in how Facebook is now displaying news on your home feed – thanks to this month’s News Feed revamp – it’s clear the network is putting some thought into the kinds of news people want to read.

The same people who religiously review the Obituaries in their local paper might, for example, might be the kind to mark only Milestones in their family’s Timelines as top news, and train the system only to promote big events.

The people who are most interested in music culture may de-prioritize their friends’ news in favor of a particular set of band and artist pages.

Relentless business people? We know what they’ll mark as important, don’t we?

How Timelines might affect your personal brand.

Facebook has never really been good for a personal brand directly from the profile side of the site. Pages, sure – we can optimize them to work with a marketing strategy… But now? Imagine tailoring your milestones and life events to only highlight your professional life. Conferences, speaking engagements, promotions, job changes – the list is endless. You can build your Timeline to reflect a single aspect of your life, and go for as much completionism as you can stomach.

Again, it’s a case of choose your own level of involvement. I’m sure we’ll see a whack of personal branding guides over the coming weeks from some very opinionated voices.

Has privacy on Facebook changed?

Naturally, the changeover to Timelines – and associated App-level permission changes – is causing some concern over privacy. But, then, every change the social network makes to its system and capabilities seems to have that effect. This time, particularly, there’s some concern over apps gaining permission to automatically share what you’re doing. For example, if you authorize the New York Times as an app, you may find mentions of every page you view on that site in your timeline.

This persistent auto-sharing may not be a big deal for some people, but imagine seeing 75 to 100 updates in your stream, from one avid news reader.

Yeah. Not a privacy concern. But I imagine a lot of people will either get annoyed, or immediately shunt these kinds of updates off their feeds – thus destroying any value for the app-makers. Once again, it’s an opportunity for thoughtless publicity (not a bad thing) to turn into obsessive annoyance (a very bad thing). And only your friends list can determine which you’ll end up receiving.

I’m not concerned about privacy on social networks…

Because that’s not what they’re for. By their very nature, social networks are sharing platforms – you don’t share privacy. That’s not the point. Any assumption going against this grain is fundamentally flawed – so why worry about it?

We’re still not very good at dividing our personal and professional lives, or our online and offline lives, or our family lives and public lives. So rather than being concerned that Facebook and other social networks are “stealing our privacy” we need to get better at self-censoring. If you don’t feel comfortable sharing something with the world – it may not be a good idea to put it online. While privacy and restricting options do exist, assuming they’re solid is not a good idea.

In the end, it’s all a game of “Choose Your Poison” anyway.

How you present yourself online is closer to your choice of haircut, than it is your choice of friends. There will be bad hair days on your social networks, and times when it’s so fantastic you worry about being narcissistic. Learn to live with that, and you’ll be fine.

We used to think of Facebook as another photo sharing service. Then it was a microblog alongside. Then it became ten thousand other little parts of our lives.

But now…

What do we call Facebook now, I wonder?

Proximity

August 3, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

We want to think outside the box – but then end up being too far from the box to be recognizable.

Being too close to the work gets us in trouble for different reasons; it means we limit ourselves and don’t take advantage of opportunities others see for innovation.
Measuring your proximity takes a particular skill, not only with your awareness of the needs of others, but your awareness of self.
Proximity doesn’t end with physical control, such as managing a task, etc. It ends much like personal space does – people have differing amounts of necessary personal space they must maintain for their own sanity. But how do we adjust for this? How can we ensure we’re the right distance from the box without being too close to the work?

We can’t. And perhaps we shouldn’t.

There are benefits to working closely with a subject – domain knowledge, an understanding of purpose, shared belief and the idea of why.

Similarly, there are benefits to being detached. Clinical examination, the agility that comes with sitting out the siege of new ideas. Awareness of a broader landscape.

It may be impossible to navigate between the two for every job – but this is yet another awareness trap we can avoid if we school our process, and think about our work differently.

After all, before knowing what the right proximity is comes knowing how close – or far – from an ideal you are. That, actually, may be far more important.

After This, Therefore From This

August 2, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

We’ve all heard the classic form of this problem – correlation does not necessarily imply causation. But, even knowing this, how often do we fall for it?

The internet followed where ARPANET began.

The internet became a craze in the late nineties.

LiveJournal followed on the text-file blogging craze of the mid-nineties.

Facebook followed on the heels of LiveJournal, and other networking platforms.

Twitter followed Facebook.

These are some really appealing matches to make, because they appeal to our immediate, emotional logic. Of course Twitter followed Facebook – it was a stripped down version of the same thing, for basically the same purpose. But was it? Similarly, did Facebook follow any other social network before it, or was it something new, bred from similar stock?

Take it a step further – if you tweet this post, share it to your Facebook stream, or give it a +1 or a share on Google+ – does it immediately follow that my traffic will increase? Further still – if I hadn’t posted this entry, would my site be getting any traffic today at all? Not necessarily – while I’ve been on an unintentional blogging hiatus for most of July, my traffic has only dipped a small amount, and my posts have been getting shared without my involvement. I’m not the only one to see this kind of behavior – Justin Kownacki did some forensics on his blog traffic when he got back into the blogging game, finding that traffic still happened.

So why do we post new articles? Why write on blogs at all if traffic does not necessarily follow?

Because there’s no black or white; new blog articles might mean immediate explosions of traffic.

They might get shared immediately, strike a nerve, and go viral. They might also take some time to gain uptake, and become search placement assets instead of social communications assets. We might also remix them eventually, with enough input from eventual comments, and build books or education pieces or seminars out of them. There’s no end to the usefulness of a large library of media assets sitting behind your domain. This applies whether you’re a well-meaning private person, or a multinational corporation. There is always potential, when information exists, that would not have existed if the information had remained unpublished or unused.

It’s so easy to trap ourselves into thinking either post hoc ergo propter hoc never applies, or always does; never anywhere in between.

After all, if I hadn’t a very large bank of past posts – nearly 400 at the moment – the natural search traffic and subscribers I have been gaining in absentia of new writing would not have existed. The ongoing interest in the history on my site wouldn’t have spurred me into thinking it was worth taking up the torch again – and I’m betting you might be in the same situation.

It’s about taking a long view, and in some cases ignoring the immediacy of natural steps to find the roots of current situations.

Post ARPANET, ergo propter Twitter.