Modern Romantics and the Social Graph

I’ve been letting the Facebook Timeline design settle in now for a while. Today a developer friend was showing me the new Open Graph API (described as Facebook’s core), and it reminded me of some thoughts that have been nagging me about the deeper implications of the Timeline user experience.

The Timeline is a wonderful narrative form through which to share your story. I have been a fan of the Feltron Annual Reports for some time. I admire the way that Nicholas visualizes the data from his life, bringing it to a level of art and storytelling that is really fun to look at and digest. But it is a difficult translation into the interaction design of a social network, and I think the timeline misses some of the key areas wherein social media has the most potential.

What makes up the timeline? Fragments of data – tweets, check-ins, snapshots, other people’s videos, and numbers. And these fragments come together to paint a picture of a user. Certainly, the way this data is collected and contextualized makes it interesting and rich from a storytelling standpoint. But it also turns “sharing” into a form of modern romanticism, so focused on the individual and turning the individual into the “core” of the platform. There is something sad about this – and something strange in the conflation of such romantic expression of one’s life with the promise and reach of social media. It feels like the social graph becomes millions of separate emotional projections competing for validation.

Social media at its best – in fact, the promise of the Internet itself – is not simply a canvas on which to publish our stories. Yes, it can do that. And yes, that is an important human function. But the transformational promise of this medium has always been one of interaction, not one of narrative. Interaction is light, not heavy. Interaction is fluid and dynamic – not linear. Interaction is unmanageable and prone to deviate from any course set for it. Interaction creates complex adaptive systems – not memorial walls.

This is why I have come to feel that platforms like Instagram and Twitter are more aligned with the positive potential of the Web. They encourage and empower the lightweight sharing of fragments – but stay focused on that. The content isn’t meant to be so precious – there is no bid for immortality. They remain focused on the stuff you share, without trying to immortalize the content as a grand gesture of its royal author. They simply provide a means to an end, not the end itself. That happens elsewhere. The form is more in tune with the function.

What do you think?

Views expressed here are my own, not my employer’s or anyone else’s for that matter. All rights reserved, (c) Jason Sack 2012. Reproduce freely with link and attribution.

Wabi-sabi and Experience Design

When I was teaching interactive design, I used to try to explain the concept of wabi-sabi to my students. It was a daunting task, and I’m sure I didn’t do justice to the aesthetic ideal and mindset. Nevertheless, I’ve continued to study it, and the more I learn, the more connections emerge between the mindset of wabi-sabi and that of experience design.

Wabi-sabi leaf

On one level, wabi-sabi refers to the innate beauty of simplicity and authenticity without pretense. It is also an expression of imperfection, impermanence, and natural decay. There are no direct translations of this compound Japanese term, but I would suggest that organic is a potential analogue in the Western culture. The aesthetic is intertwined with the history of Zen, Taoism, and has been refined and expressed over the centuries in the Japanese Tea Ceremony. Wabi-sabi is the foundation for the Japanese aesthetic framework, much like Greek ideals underlie Western aesthetics.

Wabi-sabi is articulated through objects that express the passage of time, and denoted by the lack of an absolute form. It rejects ornamentation, and promotes equanimity in thought and interaction. We interact invisibly with our environment because our environment is not separate from us. The visible interactions, those that occur through actions and are registered through perception, are treated with the same attitude of respect in wabi-sabi thinking.

Experience design is similarly concerned with discovering the natural way people interact with things, their environment, and each other. Treating each experience as an extension of core human essence and behavior. Removing the space between the user and his/her intent is one of the primary goals of experience design. Like a great film editor, if they have done the job, the audience doesn’t notice. Bringing oneness to the user, the interaction, and the interface results in effortless, natural experiences. As you may know, this is a difficult concept to sell – especially in a culture where the standard disruption-based messaging model of advertising still lingers in the mainstream culture.

Wabi-sabi is a usable aesthetic, averse to over-curation. It produces small ideas that work exceedingly well within their environment and in concert with the people for whom they are designed. It is reductionist, paring back interactions to core functions and crafting them to become unified within their context. The wabi-sabi approach allows for experience flow through focus, clarity, simplicity, and balance. The wabi-sabi interaction should be natural and intimate, and the interface should only appearing when needed – otherwise it should be transparent, vanishing.

I’m putting a lot of thought into practical ways I can continue to integrate this approach into interactive experiences, and I’d love to hear your ideas and see examples that you think show the wabi-sabi ideal in action. I’ll be starting a little collection, and uploading case studies here and to the blog at Zeus Jones.

Sources:

The Book of Tea (Stone Bridge Classics)

Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers

Update: after writing this post I found a similar observation made by Matt Linderman on 37signals’ Signal vs. Noise blog in 1995. Take a look at his observations, and also at the cool diagram posted in reply by Peter Boersma.

Firefox 3: Microcosmic Innovation

I have recently upgraded to the new Firefox 3 browser, and it shows off some subtle but significant user-centered design innovation. One change in particular I noticed was the default address bar interface, that takes on the microcosmic engagement of the back/forward button. Who would ever question a convention that has become so standard and expected? The organic software creators on the Mozilla team did just that.

The change is based on simple visual hierarchy and task-based prioritization. Think about how often you use your own back button (come on now, you know what I mean) in relation to how often you use the forward button. The design reflects the use of the interaction, rather than vice versa.

Interestingly, a number of developers I’ve talked to about the new interface aren’t thrilled in general. And I am slightly bewildered by the proximity of the history interaction (it’s adjacent to the forward button rather than the back button). It turns out the reason they are turned off is because the display is different that what they are used to. As with any convention, adoption is a complex equation. Whether the button changes the way users feel about the interaction, or the way designers think about it is yet to be seen. But the fact that Firefox itself has built a nearly 20% share of the browser market by using an organic design platform shows that the masses are open to change. Let’s see how the 150 million Firefox users like the new back button.