Author: Robin

I recently submitted the following comment to MoveOn.org.

I care deeply about both the environment and reversing climate change. But I think these two issues must be relentlessly separated in public discourse in order to achieve the momentum we need on climate change. Here’s why.

There is a vocal minority of people, many of whom are involved in MoveOn, who really care about the environment. Cutting down trees and losing species and polluting the air really hurt them personally. I am in this minority, but most people are not. Most people care a lot more about healthcare and defending the homeland and keeping their friends. They see environmentalists as getting in the way of their dreams of health and prosperity. They can’t understand why environmentalists care so much about trees. And fish!

But the implication of climate change is not about the environment. It is not about trees and it is not about fish. It is about the future of humanity. It is about good long-term thinking that will save tremendous amounts of money and prevent countless deaths and wars. This is an issue that I believe many, many people can get excited about, and indeed are already excited about – you’ve sent me the poll numbers. But when climate change has all this environment baggage attached, the majority are hesitant to take a stand. They don’t want to be labeled as the sissy treehuggers that our culture has carefully shoehorned environmentalists into (with the help of oil company propaganda).

Leaders like Al Gore and groups like MoveOn are understandably cautious about alienating their strong, vocal environmentalist supporters. But I fear that if we do not separate climate change from environmental issues, we will not be able to engage the majority. The problem is that environmentalists support climate policy for the wrong reasons. It will save coral reefs, it will maintain ecosystems. Most people hear that and think, well I don’t really care much about that mumbo jumbo, so I guess I don’t care much about climate change.

You marveled last week that Fox News had asked more questions about climate change than the other networks. I have a guess why: they are just trying to cement further the connection to sissy environmental causes. They probably asked, “What is your stance on global warming and other environmental issues?” As if it’s just the latest thing those treehuggers are worried about. I cringe when I hear such questions even on well-intentioned NPR.

Let us remember that halting climate change is not a progressive stance. On the contrary, it is the only way we know how to protect the status quo. People need to see the connection not to coral reefs, not to glacier loss, not even to sea level rise, but to war, famine, immigration, and commerce. So far, these have been sidenotes to the environmental story. I believe they must become the very center of the campaign. Otherwise, most people will just not be interested.

We need to go on the offensive, and accuse Republicans of proposing to ruin the global economy, and therefore our own economy, by refusing to limit carbon emissions. We need to accuse them of starting new wars and provoking new waves of illegal immigrants by supporting the carbon-induced climate changes that forces these people off once-fertile land.

Of course, addressing climate change is equally good for preserving the environment and preserving human livelihoods. What I am saying is that we need to remove the environmental rhetoric so that people can instead see clearly the connections to all the things that they personally care about.

I first saw this video at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, and it floored me.  It provides a really visceral way to understand the population explosion and exponential growth in general.

Start at the 45-second point to skip the talking ’90s man.  Be patient – it’s only a few minutes long and the amazing part is at the end.

I recently read Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini, which was fascinating.  I just want to keep a list here of the influence tactics he describes:

• Perceptual contrast (starting high)
• Reciprocation (uninvited debts, unequal exchanges)
• Maintaining consistency (due to public commitment)
• Social proof (going along with the crowd)
• Likability (attractiveness, similarity, compliments, familiarity, and cooperation)
• Authority (or seeming authority)
• Scarcity (of quantity or time – making it a competitive situation)

Really important stuff to know, both as a marketer and an everyday citizen.

I just want to make sure it is noted that a tenet of design in the internet age is letting users do things for themselves.  Replacing human and physical infrastructure with computer+user infrastructure.  This is mostly obvious; it’s just worth keeping in mind as a way to frame new technologies.

Examples: online shopping, checking in online for flights, internet-mediated ride sharing.

Who needs congressmen in the age of the Internet?

If the people can write their own Wikipedia, why not write their own bills and then vote them into law? When popular opinion is so out of sync with congress and the president, it makes you wonder why this hasn’t already happened. When everyone has easy access to the internet, everyone can participate. If the software is open source and the audit trail is well documented, it can be made tamper-proof. George Washington feared the “tyranny of the majority,” but when everyone is a minority, compromise bills will be crafted.

The congressmen and -women who refuse to vote for the people-supported bills will be ousted. Those who remain will generally stick with the popular vote and will win elections primarily on personal appearance.

I bet it will happen. Just you wait.

I recently read that Wikipedia is planning to pay people to make illustrations for some articles. To justify paying for graphics but not article text, the interviewee claimed that “volunteers apparently don’t find it rewarding” to make illustrations.

But I ask: is this because of some inherent property of illustrating (as she seems to be implying), or is it because no good tools currently exist for collaborative, online image editing? If it were as easy to collaboratively make illustrations as it is to write wiki text, my guess is that lots of people would do it for free. It sure sounds fun to me!

Two of my colleagues at MIT are working on separate research projects which I think could greatly contribute to making such a tool practical. But I can’t disclose those projects here without their permission.

My friend “emax” had some words of wisdom to share today:

…But the thing that really made Warhol awesome was that he /was/
rejected. If the MoMA had taken his Shoe painting, adopted it into
their collection (and started selling postcards and scarves with his
design), he probably would have done something drastic, like
committed suicide or something. Or at least done something very
different. Being rejected gave him a very reason to exist; other
people didn’t get it, in the sense that they didn’t understand him or
why he was doing it. And that if anything was the biggest reason he
had to do it.

And he did do it with great intensity. Andy and his “Factory” worked
like mad, refining their image and experimenting with various media
to see what would be the most “fun”. indeed they had a closing
window of opportunity as the factory quickly gained visibility in the
city — especially tahnks to andy’s antics and appearances. And if
the public knew, the MoMA was soon to follow. Then it would all be
over.

so moral of this short story . how to do interaction design like Andy:

– if you’re doing something that gets immediately accepted, it’s not
that exciting. you might want to consider doing something different.

– if you’re on to something really far out there, it will almost
surely not be appreciated immediately. do you believe in it? If
not, do something else. But if you DO, you have a reason to exist!
hooray! now you have some time to execute it. But not long…

…

So… stick with what you believe, and work hard and fast before the
world catches up. And form a close knit group that you can use to
pierce through the glass shell of the present into the future!

I think there’s a lot of truth there. Most importantly: Believe in what you’re doing.

I want to start compiling a list of user interface design principles. Not necessarily things that I’ve read, but things that I’ve gleaned from working on Graph Sketcher and looking at other UI design work. Also, these include the business side of product design.

1. Make your interface easier/faster than what users can do with their current tools. It’s surprisingly difficult to beat paper and pencil.

2. Constraints: understand what your users do and do not need to edit. Just because the underlying representation is very flexible does not mean the user need be exposed to that full power – the complexities and options could slow them down considerably. Whenever possible, make design choices so your users don’t have to.

3. As I think I detailed in a previous post, good design means inventing good abstractions. Good abstractions ideally have all – and only – the functionality that your users need.

That’s all for the moment.

It’s much easier to add new features to programming languages and command-line interfaces than it is to add new features to graphical user interfaces.

I think that is profound, but I’ll have to muse it over to be sure.

For example, to add a new editing command (say, superscript) to emacs, just choose a name or keyboard shortcut for the command. But to add it to a graphical text editor, you need a new button or menu item. It has to be worked into the layout of the graphical interface. Other interface components might have to get moved or kicked out. If you’re Microsoft, you just add it onto the end of a quickly growing toolbar or menu or preference window.

Maybe this helps to explain why wikis are still based on wiki-text rather than WYSIWYG editing. If you want to add a new feature to a wiki (say, superscript), just define some new language tag for the wiki-text, e.g.: ““. But if you want to add that to a WYSIWYG wiki (let’s call it a wizziwiki), you have to design. Put the button somewhere. Decide which features are most important. This is hard! And it is especially hard for open source communities where a vocal minority will get upset at the removal of a feature that they particularly like (or programmed). That’s probably part of why brand new open source projects have to continually get started.

Here’s one solution. A wiki which lets you do the most basic editing (bold, italic, lists, links) as WYSIWYG, but has an “advanced editing” mode which is text-based and allows all those other features. The problem with adding this to current wikis lies in getting a “handle” on the text entry point; that is, mapping back from the graphics into the source. Right now it’s a one-way street: wiki-text to html/DOM. It’s hard to go in the other direction. (The same is true for LaTex.) So maybe we need a completely html-based wiki. Is someone working on this?

I read somewhere (maybe Everything is Miscellaneous?) that the concept of “game” is hard to define; we have prototypical examples of games in our minds – chess, soccer, solitaire – but it’s difficult to draw boundaries based on attributes (does solitaire have any of the same features as improv games?). The point was that we categorize based on prototypical examples, not by inherent properties of the category.

But I’m going to go out on a limb and posit that games are defined by a player making choices. In chess or solitaire, choosing your moves; in soccer, precise motor sequences to maneuver the ball. There are certainly activities that fall outside this boundary – passive activities like reading or sitting in lecture. But it seems like every activity involving at least one active participant has been referred to as a game – from soccer up through stock trading, having a conversation, or living life!

What makes prototypical games more “gamey” may be that they don’t have significant consequences in the “real world”. They allow us to practice our decision-making skills in a safe environment, so that we can see the outcomes of a decision without having to worry too much about it – and thus, learn. By “decision-making”, I mean everything from instinctive muscle reactions to complex, deliberated thought processes.

What does this mean for interface design? Games are fun. If what I am claiming is correct, games are all about if-then scenarios. Interfaces involve the user making decisions in the form of input. In order to complete the if-then, so the user can see the outcomes of their decisions, we should design interfaces that respond to input with feedback about the outcome. As soon as a decision is made, the consequences should be shown. This is what I call “user-generated animation” and it’s all over Graph Sketcher and Mac OS X in general. Basic drag and drop. Colors and widths changing as you drag the sliders. The dock resizing as you run your mouse along. The new album “skimming” feature in iPhoto. Bill Moggridge was on to something when he encouraged us to draw inspiration from games.

Going even further, maybe this helps explain my dislike of both games and decision-making (compared to the average person). I’m most comfortable making decisions in a very emotionally safe context; and most games and aspects of life do not fall under that category. I tend to approach decision-making as a chore, in which case games are not fun unless they have some other outcome such as getting to know the other players or learning some useful skill.