Pissing me off is one of the best ways to convince me to write something.

Take, for example, the following.

The setup

We humans have a tendency to want to see in black and white. That concept is nothing new, referred to any time there's some kind of moral dilemma, or religious war, yadda yadda ad whatever.

But you'd think that designers and other "creatives," being the spectrum nerds that we are, would embrace more shades of grey—and more often. But no.

And if there's one thing I can't stand, it's narrow, fuzzy thinking.

This bit of sand I found in my oyster

I came across a piece today that was so narrow it was almost two-dimensional, and so fuzzy that I had to get all Dust Devil on its ass.

This dude, Randy Nakamura, hates steampunk. He has penned an article that was one long, drawn-out dance around the fact, without actually once uttering the phrase the phrase "I hate steampunk!" Although that didn't stop it from coming through nice and clear:

Dissatisfied with their out of the box Dells or Apples, Steampunkers have declared war on mass production. Their solution? Nineteenth-century Victorian England. A strange choice to say the least. Recalling an era that is the ground zero of mass production, the cultural inflection point from the artisan to the manufactured is an odd way to escape the evils of silicon chips, instant obsolescence and homogeneous design, devoid of the human hand.

—Randy Nakamura, "Steampunk'd, Or Humbug by Design", Design Observer (July 2, 2008)

I wouldn't care if Randy was an everyday narrow-minded wanker, but alas, he's a narrow-minded wanker with the bullhorn of Design Observer at his disposal. Which is something I have to take a little more seriously.

Aside from the issues of how badly written the article is, and how specious the arguments are, the whole principle pisses me off.

Here's why.

The pearl

The great philosopher-novelist-yeoman Alain de Botton has written a sweeping overview of architecture called The Architecture of Happiness. It's not a history, although it contains history; it's about the way that architecture affects us, and we affect architecture—how styles come and go, and why, and why they come and go at all. And more.

Referring to the rise of the Modernists (Le Corbusier etc.) in the late 1800's, de Botton writes:

The principles of engineering may have brutally contradicted those of architecture, but a vocal minority of nineteenth-century architects nevertheless perceived that the engineers were capable of providing them with a critical key to their salvation—for what these men had, and they so sorely lacked, was certainty. The engineers had landed on an apparently impregnable method of evaluating the wisdom of a design: they felt confidently able to declare that a structure was correct and honest in so far as it performed its mechanical functions efficiently; and false and immoral in so far as it was burdened with non-supporting pillars, decorative statues, frescos or carvings.

Exchanging discussions of beauty for considerations of function promised to move architecture away from a morass of perplexing, insoluble disputes about aesthetics towards an uncontentious pursuit of technological truth, ensuring that it might be as peculiar to argue about the appearance of a building as it would be to argue about the answer to a simple algebraic equation.

—Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness, p51 (referring to changes in the late 1800s)

Needless to say, the promise was a false one: for most things, there is no pure level of function. Especially not something as intimately related to our daily, messy lives like a home.

You could call this design puritanism, but that's such a loaded word—and it's not just a question of "purity" or eschewing adornment that's at play. The real issue here is the pretense that science can give us a perfect, platonic answer to a question of design. That there is a perfect set of functions that can be ascertained in their entirety and then reduced to rules and equations.

I've decided to call that attitude "engineerism," simply because it is the way that many people interpret engineering as having One True Answer.

With that in mind, let's look at Nakamura's article once again:

If one gets past the patina, the quaintly burnished woodwork, the problem is that Steampunk is far too enamored of the look, the surface skin of an derivatively small chunk of the Victorian era filtered through Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Jules Verne, whose illustrated “scientific romances” seem to have formed the ur-aesthetic for Steampunk.

—Randy Nakamura, "Steampunk'd, Or Humbug by Design", Design Observer (July 2, 2008)

And what, exactly, is wrong with that?

From the 1800's (and probably before) to the present day. Nothing has changed.

Of almost any building, we ask not only that it do a certain thing but that it look a certain way, that it contribute to a given mood: of religiosity or scholarship, rusticity or modernity, commerce or domesticity. We may require it to generate a feeling of reassurance or of excitement, of harmony or of containment. We may hope that it will connect us to the past or stand as a symbol of the future, and we would complain, no less than we would about a malfunctioning bathroom, if this second, aesthetic, expressive level of function were left unattended.

—Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness, p62

Replace the word "building" with "design" and you can see that the issues are the same. And just as idiotic today.

(I would love to quote "The Substance of Style" here, but alas, my copy is in a box somewhere.)

The preachers are in what they preach

When you read a unilateral polemic, whether by Le Corbusier or some (not steam)punk on Design Observer, beware.

Typically such frothing attempts to hide some deficiency in the author.

Look for the hidden chip on the shoulder. The author may be suffering—knowingly or unknowingly—from an inability to understand or succeed in a certain aspect of work or life (e.g. aesthetics, or personal relationships), the value of which becomes the target of his attack. She may be afraid of uncertainty, and thus promote formulas. Or maybe he just knows that people vote, with their attention and their money, for the comfort of exactitude—regardless of whether the exactitude is scientific or even useful.

That goes for you and for me, too.

Two perspectives.

Clay Shirky, writing on A Brief Message:

Design is arrogance.

The designer says, “I know what you want better than you. Here it is.” A designer offers judgment as superior; as Henry Ford said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”

Design is humility.

Users are experts in their own lives, lives the designer will see only if she understands their wants and needs. Design is recognition that “good” only makes sense in that context.

And Peter Denning, as the voice of "a user" in an article that featured fictional, representative voices from across the world of IT:

I love using computers. I'm not a computer scientist, and I don't want to be. I just love using the stuff computer scientists make. Awesome! I get some really spiffy things done with your tools even though I am an amateur. Most of the time, your stuff does not bankrupt me, waste my time, or kill me... I am so grateful to have all this computer stuff. My wants and needs determine what computer scientists can sell, so they often listen to me very carefully. Without those wants and needs, in fact, I'd be a nobody.

Honestly, I'm speechless.

Awesome!

Alex and I ran failcamp fast & loose and it worked. (Alex's writeup is here.)

Our guiding idea was to discuss failure, in all its guises. We wanted to hold a forum where it was not only OK to admit to not being glossy & perfect, but actually required. We wanted to discuss things practical and philosophical.

And we achieved those ends, so we're really pleased with how it turned out!

Lots of positive things were said about failure. A number of negative things, too. We talked about how failure had helped us or hurt us, and whether failure is required in life, and whether failure can be avoided. All types of failure were fair game. Lively conversation was had; debates were held; help and advice were given. Everyone opened up and participated at least some.

I've learned that running an event is a lot different than writing an essay, giving a talk (even an interactive one) or participating in a roundtable. (This probably sounds obvious, but it's different when you think you know it, and when you actually experience it.) The event had a life of its own. Alex and I had a vision for how we'd like to guide things, but we didn't try to force it. It went places we weren't expecting, which is both frustrating and really cool.

Alex has described the details of the day really well, and I won't try to duplicate his effort. But I will say that starting off with the anonymous stories in the first half of the day worked really well. Specific stories are a great starting point.

We didn't return the focus to stories again after lunch and the post-lunch slump combined with the lack of concrete details and resulted in a conversation much more abstract and argumentative.

From then on (thanks to Blake & Christine), we moved to a "current problem / current advice" format—anyone who wanted it had 10 minutes of focus on their current issue. Some of these were delightfully philosophic, others very concrete and businessy.

Things I learned about running this kind of event that would inform/change the way I'd run a second one:

• start with / focus on something concrete (e.g. specific fail stories)
• without concrete reference points, the conversation can very easily became too abstract and heated
• without prompting, a lot of the stories will be about money and business (which is, I think, a barrier to getting to the philosophical heart of the matter of failures)
• with a group of 20, a moderator is a really good idea; either break into smaller groups or moderate to keep the volume & talking order in check

Things that were amazing and have pleased and inspired me to *no* end:

• how open, sharing and understanding everyone was
• how thoughtful people are about their own & others' situations
• what great ideas people had for how to steer failcamp back on track & future meetings
• how successful and—dare I say it?—painless an ad hoc day can be (we're really pleased how it turned out, & must thank the wonderful participants for this one)
• holy crap, we made it to 6:30pm (everyone was exhausted by this point, but wow! we never expected it to actually happen)
• nobody actually complained that I talked too much (other than me)

I've got more to say on the topic of failure in general and failcamp in specific, but I'm exhausted.

Major props once again to Tara "Miss Rogue" Hunt, whose idea of LoserCamp spawned our very own failcamp, and who we know attended in spirit.

NB: Want to run your own failcamp? Alex and I are going to work up some materials for anyone who wants to—suggestions of course. It may be a few days, since we're quite busy, but feel free to contact us thru the Google Group with any questions or announcements!

A good in-depth article on information hoarding:

Linder argues that as we become squeezed for consumption time, we’ll consume more expensive things over cheaper things when possible to make use of more goods on a total-cost basis. But when the cost of goods is zero, what happens then? As behavioral economists (most vociferously, Dan Ariely) have pointed out, we find the promise of free things hard to resist (even when a little thinking reveals that the free-ness is illusory). So when with very little effort we can accumulate massive amounts of “free” stuff from various places on the internet, we can easily end up with 46 days (and counting) worth of unplayed music on a hard drive. We end up with a permanent 1,000+ unread posts in our RSS reader, and a lingering, unshakable feeling that we’ll never catch up, never be truly informed, never feel comfortable with what we’ve managed to take in, which is always in the process of being undermined by the free information feeds we’ve set up for ourselves. We end up haunted by the potential of the free stuff we accumulate, and our enjoyment of any of it becomes severely impinged.

Linder being the author of The Harried Leisure Class, apparently. A book I haven't read and probably won't.

There's also this rather insightful essay by Nicholas Carr. Which I did read through to the end, finding myself agreeing with him, at least on the effects of too much information on my own person. (Whether Google's 20% time is engineered purposefully for evil is another question. I hear from many "Googlers" that it's 20% after your requisite 80-hour week, and David Hansson recently pointed out that it's supposed to be 20% more time doing the exact same things only with a different name, and that getting away from the computer sometimes might be a good idea.)

There is this counterpoint, if you can call it that, by John Batelle but I found it a little too "rah rah INFORMATION AGE!" for my liking.