David Foster Wallace and the Failure of Zen

February 24, 2010 – 12:56 am

David Foster Wallace, giving the commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005, among many other things, said:

I submit that this is what the real, no-bullshit value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

and:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

and:

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us…

He expressed, in a painfully coherent way, a sharp dilemma that he saw: between his own strong drives, needs and desires, and an awareness and compassion of others that could detach him from the fact that he would never be able to satisfy those drives or desires. What he argues for is a recognizably Buddhist approach; compassion and awareness, but you hear the despair in how it’s described.

There’s a good deal of evidence from an excerpt from his unfinished book, The Pale King (about a man that works for the I.R.S.) that he was thinking along these lines:

Lane Dean, Jr., with his green rubber pinkie finger, sat at his Tingle table in his chalk’s row in the rotes group’s wiggle room and did two more returns, then another one, then flexed his buttocks and held to a count of ten and imagined a warm pretty beach with mellow surf, as instructed in orientation the previous month. Then he did two more returns, checked the clock real quick, then two more, then bore down and did three in a row, then flexed and visualized and bore way down and did four without looking up once, except to put the completed files and memos in the two Out trays side by side up in the top tier of trays, where the cart boys could get them when they came by.

What is this other than a painful attempt at meditative practice? And when he says the below in a manuscript note, it’s even more explicit:

Bliss — a second-by- second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious — lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.

Of course, Wallace calls such awareness and compassion ‘unimaginably difficult’ in his commencement address, and when he says he is not claiming any special knowledge or authority on how to do it, he’s not being modest. He is talking about his own struggle, a struggle that few are conscious or smart enough to try, and almost no one (especially not these smug Zen monks) would be able to express in such clear and heartbreaking terms.

Those who practice Zen, I think, would say they strive to achieve a “mind as the mind that faces life like a small child, full of curiosity and wonder and amazement. ‘I wonder what this is? I wonder what that is? I wonder what this means?’ Without approaching things with a fixed point of view or a prior judgement, just asking ‘what is it?’” Undoubtedly, this is a wonderful way to exist, and I would myself very much like to live that way.

But imagine Mr. Wallace, bristling with talent, supremely gifted with words, aching to wrestle with a good chunk of what people have done with literature. Could he actually do any of that while detaching himself in that way? It would be like cutting off an arm, or at least a finger. Buddhism seems to offer one track of fulfillment, but it doesn’t seem like it encompasses enough for someone like him. Maybe he needed two tracks, one for his life and one for writing, each with different rules. I wish he was still around, so I could see what he would undoubtedly have figured out.

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design and agile

October 6, 2009 – 3:15 pm

New methods for managing people making Web sites are big these days, with the most popular being Agile. Basically it boils down to making a small team of builders completely responsible for a project, and enforcing constant communication as people work on it in well-defined chunks. There are many engineer/programmer proponents for this, but few designers seem to have adopted the approach (though there some, but others are skeptical or downright hostile to it).

The difference is another example of Aristotle vs. Plato, the scientific, evolutionary approach vs. the aspirational large vision. Design wants to create a beautiful vision up-front for what a new world would be, but divorced from the deeper and more meaningful design that engineers do.

Without going into the problems and tensions that have been common in these projects, I think it’s safe to say that no one has developed a great ‘best practice’ for how it can actually work (and I’ve worked within dozens of Agile teams and read quite a bit about it, so anyone who claims to have it solved I can say is probably pulling your leg). So what could work better, at least?

Just Start

Often there is the assumption that designers need time to develop separate deliverables and have their ideas specified out before they can talk to builders. This is a breeding-ground for mistrust, and more importantly the designers shouldn’t be working without an intimate knowledge of the technical design–what information is gathered, how it moves around, and what’s done to it. Designers should get into the project at the very start, talk through the project in detail with the whole team, and make decisions with the team. They should be making sketches or prototypes the first day.

Visual and Interaction Design Comes Last

Many sprints I’ve worked on have tried to have design done a sprint ahead of implementation, or a week, etc. This is sadistic. When engineers are iterating and improving as they go but designers get one shot at it before they’ve seen any working code, everyone is set up to fail. Rough interaction design and pages should be done collaboratively with engineers as they work, and detailed interaction design and visual design should come last, as a refinement of that.

Actual Alignment

Much of the attempts at collaboration between designers and engineers in Agile projects have put the designer in a rough spot, between the product owner and their team. The designer makes mocks/comps/boards to should how the thing could look, and the product person signs off on that before the sprint starts. The documents for what will be built, however (e.g. the stories, acceptance criteria, etc.), doesn’t include the designs. Inevitably, the team makes changes to the designs as they implement, and the designer is either out of the loop (working on a different part, or not part of the team), or has to redesign on the fly in mid-sprint. Designers and engineers should put aside time for ‘alignment’ tasks, where they discuss and agree on what they will build, either as part of the pre-sprint tasks or the sprint itself. This is similar to ‘engineering-only’ sprints, which focus on the ‘plumbing’ of a project and not what users see.

The alternative to having these kinds of deep integration of designers into Agile teams, I believe, is mediocre work, or a lot of additional work to fix the inevitable breakdowns that happen when talented people work together. This is actually much more simple human nature stuff that’s been going on in offices everywhere, for a long time, probably since cave-people first called a meeting.

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Republican House Districts Emit More Carbon per Capita

August 26, 2009 – 9:44 pm
Shown are U.S. House districts (average population of 650,000 people), red for Republican and blue for Democrats, with districts that emitted more carbon per capita last year shown in darker colors.


I discovered project “Vulcan” at Purdue University, which is mapping carbon emissions on a detailed level in the US; very cool. I wondered whether there is a difference in emissions between parts of the country that lean Democrat or Republican. Fortunately the wonderful Vulcan project people made it very easy to find out by publishing their data (I used the simplified data set showing emissions per capita change over about 8 months, and binned the counties by predominant House district). I did a fast and sloppy job, so this map is just approximate. To me it shows that there is a pronounced difference between the parties in likelihood to emit carbon, but (as the Vulcan project found) geography is a larger factor.

UPDATE: Kate Sherwood, who has an extremely intimidating amount of expertise and knows what she’s doing, points out that the method I’m using to map county data to congressional districts is flawed (I used centroids of counties to centroids of districts) and inaccurate so it really should be taken as only approximate (I removed the percentage thing from the title, that sounded too specific)! She pointed me to a better resource for mapping counties to districts and I am going to re-do it with that…
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data as interface: flow

July 16, 2009 – 11:31 pm

I believe that there are two kinds of ideas in the world: those that divide things into two types, and those that don’t… and then there’s a third, which tries to wriggle out of either. This is one of those.

The basic idea: a better interface to data would be to turn the data itself into the interface, as a flow between an overview and actual experience.
What is an ‘overview’?

  • visual language of overview: parallel
  • movie trailer, menu, signage
  • graphs, piles, sorts, maps, matrices
  • optimizes attention
  • optimizes action
  • browsing, analysis, editing, outlining, listing
  • powerpoint, excel

What is ‘experience’?

  • visual language of experience: serial
  • long, slow changes
  • reading content
  • still photos
  • based on important details
  • narrative
  • based on sustained attention
  • email & twitter

This is false duality of course; the actual value of either references the other, and both are necessary and interesting and have been around since the dawn of time. The reason this is an interesting thing to revisit is that there is a huge advantage in new media and social contexts: you can jump between them quickly and continuously, so that they start to merge into a ‘flow.’ This flow is an interface, perhaps a good one.
In basic terms, the flow interface resembles a lot of existing interfaces:

  • a list of emails > reading an email
  • table of contents > page
  • map > walking

But the differences that would be possible include:

  • use content itself in the overview, not a label/symbol/sign
  • browse and refine both the overview and the experience
  • interact with one through the other
  • interaction with an overview element shows an experience
  • interaction with an experience element references an overview

Now speed things up, so that the interface can offer:

  • “you can sort this stuff into piles three ways, which one works the best?”
  • “we have these three prototypes that show how the product could work”
  • “have a taste of 12 dishes before you pick your meal, then change your mind halfway through”

And of course, this can benefit from the language of data visualization, but we need a framework for overviews and a framework for experiences, not just one, and the ability to pick the framework itself should be content-based and usable through familiar conventions:

  • show proportional distances instead of vertices or measurements
  • make maps
  • show size relation, piles
  • show a tree graph
  • show nodes and edges

And here is where I sketch some actual designs for the very vague concepts I’m throwing around, but of course I haven’t got there yet. But I think it would be easy to show new interfaces for twitter, netflix, and digg that work this way.

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Generation M: an Unmanifesto

July 14, 2009 – 10:44 am

The below is my attempt to remove the frothy and breathless tone from “Generation M manifesto” by Umair Haque, because I liked it in many ways. It is definitely more boring, but I hope more real as well. I don’t believe any manifesto can express the right amount of humility towards these questions, but it can emphasize belief in the possibility for something better, so I focused on that.
Dear gradualists, ideologues, and partisans,
We are in a time of large differences between groups, young and old, east and west, rich and poor, but one where many of the traditional ideologies seem to have been scrambled both by a global economy and crisis and fundamental changes in how information is shared through technology.
Everyday, we see the costs of doing the same things. It looks like some big, new, and huge problems are looming, but the solutions that are talked about are old, timeworn, and plain unambitious.
Old ideas of generational shift and left/right politics no longer seem to work. We can’t use simple terms in this new, hypercomplex and interdependent world. We need a new way of seeing and strengthening the relationships we have, not a manifesto of ideas.
These times demand not single solutions, but systems of solutions, involving less large-scale business and more individual opportunity. Less ideology, and more practicality.
Businesses and governments must get connected to and become responsive to a public that is comfortable using social tools to express themselves in massive ways. The hyper-connected “sea of green” in Tehran is the model for a new, speeded-up politics.
Much of this new world no longer requires massive capital or leverage to work, and banks should play a smaller and more supporting role. A smaller role for finance means less focus on lucrative return.
The huge accumulation of risk and the massive gaming of global markets resulted in crisis. This should drive a lot of wealth away from financial instruments and towards tangible, collective works and accomplishments that everyone can benefit from.
Growth as a goal incentivizes distortion. We should prize flexibility and agility, so that no matter which way the markets go, business can prosper and act to benefit everyone.
Rather than nurturing a few elites (or even oligarchs), the new economy should be a huge number of distributed markets. It wouldn’t be entirely controllable, and those that would want to profit from it will have to compete for influence just like everyone else.
We’ve seen the consequences of short-term thinking in spending and debt and felt the pain; now we should start working on ideas that are built to last a generation, not 5 years.
Our sense of ourselves has moved too far towards what we can do as individuals; it’s time to nurture some shared beliefs, projects, and experiences.

Our culture should connect us to our shared past, and remind us that when it comes to the most meaningful things for human beings, there’s usually nothing new under the sun.
In order to provide some label for what’s needed, let’s call it Generation “M.”
This is not a movement in the traditional sense (our society is too distributed one manifesto, one protest, one set of ideas). It’s more the recognition that a new set of norms is needed for a new time, the recognition of a shift. It’s the belief that we can come up with practical ways to live and work together that do a better job at caring for each other.
Ideologies and manifestos will always run up against their own logical extremes. Gen M is the belief that innovative ideas married with historical consciousness and brutal practicality can be vastly more powerful, and meaningful.
Big changes will be necessary. The institutions and norms that we’ve lived within for a long time are too fragile to pass on to our children.
Since the end of the Cold War, we’ve lived with cheap, easy, expensive lifestyle, but one that was empty of meaning and for which we have little to show. Every age has a large responsibility, and this, I think, is ours: to foot the bill for yesterday’s profligacy — and to create, instead, an authentically, sustainably shared prosperity.
Anyone — young or old — can answer it. Generation M is more about what you do and who you are than when you were born. So the question is this: do you want to build the new relationships, businesses, and systems we need? Or do you want to keep repeating the same old ideologies, marching in protests, or clinging to dying institutions?

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sharable media design convergence

April 21, 2009 – 9:38 am

Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook have seemingly converged on what has become the major reason to be connected to others on a social network: sharing short updates, links, photos, etc. A concept for mozilla’s Firefox also looks similar, and lifts ideas from iTunes to help organize things. The designs share some major elements:

  1. Publisher an area to enter some text, a url, or other media, to publish it out to friends or the public.
  2. Items an area where items are listed, either most popular or latest items, or some subset of items
  3. Sets an area where the set of items to show is chosen; it can be all items, items from certain friends or other sources, or user-created sets
  4. Notifications two of the designs have an area to surface notifications, recommendations, alerts, or otherwise push to the user stuff that might be interesting

I like this design convergence, if only because establishing a vernacular for these kinds of sharable media apps will lead to more familiarity with the interface as more people start to use them, and form the basis for the next leap towards an interface that supports more sophisticated forms of sharing and publishing.

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don’t hate the designers

March 21, 2009 – 8:17 pm

Douglas Bowman had to quit Google, and Valleywag explains it all for you (to hell with Owen!). I had a similar experience at Yahoo, so I’m only surprised Douglas lasted this long. The comments on Valleywag are really sad though; a palpable hostility towards “precious,” “childish,” “short-sighted” designers (you can look for yourself, I’m not linkin’). A lot of product design is really bad, sometimes the designers get a chance to do something really good with a job, but not often.
Jared Spool, an Extremely Important Person, once told me over Pad Thai that “visual designers are just failed artists.” I took that personally, being a failed artist (heh), but didn’t understand why the “visual” distinction was necessary… I guess he would have to be a failed artist as well if he just said “designers”? Or he has to get the frustration of just speaking at conferences out somehow.
Facebook’s redesign inspires widespread unhappiness and derision. On Techcrunch, incredible bile is thrown at the designers. I can’t say I like it, but why does anyone think that Facebook is anything other than an ongoing experiment? Facebook users are not “customers,” they are collaborators in inventing new ways of being connected, and much is required of them sometimes. The new Facebook stuff is not very good, but at least they haven’t given up like Irene Au and the crew at Google.
I have attempted to be useful as a designer, and had enough failures and successes to know a good deal of humility. There’s no research method, process, innovation technique, conference presentation, or even extra-talented designer that magically makes good stuff.
UPDATE: Another comment thread at an article about designers quitting Google, filled with ignorant stuff. It really does seem that there is a cultural lack of understanding about design and what it is. I suppose the only real solution is to increase the overall cutlure’s understanding and ability to parse visual and experiential elements; then (and probably only then) will people want a specialist to make the choices about those things instead…

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charity fraud

March 15, 2009 – 6:20 pm

Our house gets calls at least once a week on behalf of several different charities, each with familiar-sounding names:

  • Breast Cancer Society
  • Cancer Fund of America
  • Children’s Cancer Fund Of America
  • Children’s Charitable Foundation
  • Detectives Benevolent Association
  • Disabled Veterans Services
  • Firefighters Assistance Fund
  • Foundation For American Veterans
  • Law Enforcement Alliance of America
  • National Children’s Leukemia Foundation
  • United States Navy Veterans Association

It turns out that the charities are very bad at what they do, handing out little money and paying a lot for fund raising to a telemarketing company called Associated Community Services. This means that only a small portion of the money donated goes to help anyone — ACS keeps the rest. For just the State of Washington, ACS raised $1,152,000, but was only able to pass $353,000 of that to its 14 client ‘charities’; the “Breast Cancer Society,” operating in several states, manages to devote just 3% of the money it raises to actual services, “Cancer Fund of America” manages 9%, and “Firefighters Assistance Fund” manages to spend just 5% of the money it raises on assistance. ACS has even harassed people while soliciting donations, it seems. While all of this is sounds like it should be illegal, it isn’t. The most that Attorneys General in Kentucky, Iowa, Conneticut, and Michigan have been able to do is make public warnings about the fundrasing.

Many sites have noted the suspicious nature of ACS or the charities, and amazingly representatives from ACS seem to be posting rebuttals and misinformation on some of them to try to obfuscate what they are doing. There’s a special circle of hell reserved for this company and its ilk.

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Meal Ticket

March 15, 2009 – 12:59 pm

Meal Ticket is a nice-sized breakfast and lunch place, with good food and comfortable tables. It’s on the pricey side, running about $10 per person (with a drink). There’s usually a wait for a table, then a line to order food and pay up-front (make sure you bring cash or a check, no cards accepted). But after that the staff is very conscientious and sweet in making sure you’re in good shape.

The food is a mix of home-style usuals and fancy takes on standard fare; omelets and other eggs, burgers, rich soups, and sandwiches, usually with one nice spicy twist or another. The blackboard near the entrance has a lot more choices and specials. It was hard to pick, everything looked good. I did wish mightily for a kid’s menu (or at least a kid’s portion; my four year-old can’t eat two pancakes!).

People like the patio out back with a nice mix of sun and shade in the summer, and I like the cooper-top tables inside (and the quirky collection of asian artifacts and local painting on the walls). The artichoke omelette was a good mix of strong tastes, but a little heavy. The shrimp po’ boy was great — perfectly cooked and just the right amount of spiciness. The buckwheat pancakes were too moist for me (but my little girl liked them just fine). Our cappuccinos were just okay. The cranberry lemonade was delicious.

I really liked the lived-in feel and personality of the place, but the prices make it more of a choice for taking guests out than a regular, home-style favorite.

Meal Ticket

Menu, from sporq.com, main dishes are $6-10

1235 San Pablo Ave (just north of Gilman, on the east side of the street)
Berkeley, CA 94706, 510-526-6325

Open Wednesday through Friday 7am-3pm, Saturday and Sunday 8am-2pm, closed Mondays and Tuesdays

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make news like the cable tv business, please

February 26, 2009 – 11:52 am

It seems like there is a fairly straightforward deal possible to save the business of putting out newspapers (the news is fine, doesn’t need to change!). Make it a much cheaper version of the cable business, where subscribers buy into a much-enhanced version of something they get a basic version of for free. Major ISPs like AT&T, Comcast, etc. could create a open news consortium that users could buy into by adding $2 to their monthly bill (this has nothing to do with network neutrality, by the way, just creating the same mechanism that supports free pop music radio).

Assuming that only 5% of broadband customers of the top 5 U.S. ISPs agree to that, that’s $120 million each year. If even just newspapers banded together for this, ISPs would have a strong business incentive to offer the surcharge to their subscribers. Any content provider with a certain level of traffic could offer their content only to subscribers of the consortium, splitting that dollar 50/50. This money would be paid out to content providers on a strict traffic basis. Providing content this way would be much more efficient than via paper, and the writers, editors, and photographers would be responsible to their audiences first, as it should be (with advertising revenue on top of that). And they could continue to provide news summaries and headlines to news aggregators like Google News.

It wouldn’t be the 40% margin of years-ago, but it would be a going concern. All that it would require would be placing the needs of the business as a whole above the fantasy that there is something basically wrong with journalism, Web sites, any particular newspaper, or an attachment to paper as media. And also the willingness to take action instead of letting things slide further towards… nothing.

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