- Jesse James Garrett in Conversation with UX Week Speaker Steven Johnson, Part I
- Listen to Brian Oberkirch’s Podcast Interview with Dan Saffer
- Read the Deal Magazine’s Articles About Adaptive Path
- Keep Up with Indi Young’s Book-In-Progress, Alignment Diagrams
- Single-day Registration is Now Available for UX Week
- A Round of Applause for Our UX Week Sponsors
- 10% Off O’Reilly’s EuroOSCON in Brussels this September
Jesse James Garrett in Conversation with UX Week Speaker Steven Johnson, Part 1
In this first part of his conversation with Adaptive Path’s Jesse James Garrett, bestselling author Steven Johnson talks about his 1997 book Interface Culture and how his thinking on the design of interactive media has evolved since then. Steven Johnson’s keynote kicks off Day One of User Experience Week 2006, August 14-17 in Washington, D.C.
Jesse James Garrett: It’s been nine years since the publication of Interface Culture. In the world of technology, we tend to think of that as a long time. How much do you think has actually changed since then?
Steven Johnson: It seems like a longer stretch of time for me, actually, because I came up with the basic argument for Interface Culture in the summer of 1994, when I was still in grad school and before Stefanie Syman and I started FEED. I wrote a proposal for the book then, and shopped it around to a few publishing houses. But of course, this was before the Web had become a mainstream phenomenon, so I think people were somewhat baffled by the idea. I was a little baffled myself: The original proposal kept referring to this emerging new “medium” called Mosaic.
I think an immense amount has changed, and much of that change has been encouraging to see. The one constant online—which of course supports one of Interface Culture’s main arguments—is that linked text is still central to the medium and its interface innovations. When I was writing the book in 1996-97 there was a sense in the industry that the textual basis of the Web was just this accident of limited bandwidth and processing power, and as soon as those limits disappeared, the Web would become a multimedia experience, and hypertext would go the way of the command line. Obviously, there’s much more audio and video online today, but the medium—and its new interfaces—are still mostly about doing things with words.
JJG: Speaking of hypertext, in Interface Culture you spend some time analyzing the hypertext style of “Suck”, the daily essay site that for many people epitomized the irreverent voice of online writing in the ’90s. You credit much of Suck’s effectiveness to the site’s use of hypertext to suggest hidden connections rather than making those connections explicit. This is almost exactly the same argument you make years later in Everything Bad Is Good For You regarding television narrative in shows like The Sopranos. Do you think the ascending complexity of other media can be attributed to the influence of the Web in our culture, or are both symptoms of some deeper trend?
SJ: I think the ascending complexity that I called the Sleeper Curve is in part attributable to the influence of the Web, or at least to the rise of interactive media in general. All other things being equal, a person who is used to making active choices while consuming media is going to be more receptive to complex media, even if the medium is a passive one, like television. Also, the Web supports complexity because there are so many para-sites (as I called them in IC) annotating and explaining every little detail of The Sopranos or The Simpsons. I think Lost is a show that could only have been made in the Internet age, and from the way the creators have embraced the fan sites, it’s pretty clear that they feel the same way.
JJG: What interface approaches are you excited about these days? If you were writing Interface Culture today, what applications would you point to as examples of where the field of interface design could go?
SJ: Like most of the people reading this, I suspect, I’ve been incredibly energized by all the grassroots Web 2.0 applications that have exploded over the past few years, most of them descendants of Firefly in one way or another. (Someone—and come to think of it, it’s probably me—should go back and track all the core ingredients of today’s Web that were visible at Firefly circa 1996.) So my list is the usual suspects: Blogger, Six Apart, Flickr, Delicious, Technorati, 37signals, Flock, all the GMAP mashups, and so on.
JJG: It’s interesting that you mention Firefly, because I’ve often thought that the Web today might be a really different place—and that we might have reached this stage in its evolution much more quickly—if Firefly had remained an independent company rather than being swallowed and buried by Microsoft. Are there other examples that come to mind of early Web innovations that expired before fulfilling their potential?
SJ: It really is interesting about Firefly, isn’t it? I’m curious how you imagine that non-Microsoft scenario playing out. I was and am very good friends with some of the key people behind Firefly, and lived through a lot of that period side-by-side with them, since I was doing FEED at the same time. But I’ve never asked them if they think about alternate scenarios, and what they would have meant. It was just a little too early, I think: They were very Web 2.0 in the whole user experience—it was all architecture of participation / wisdom of crowds stuff. But at the same time, they had a more proprietary relationship to the data they were collecting. If they’d opened the system up—followed the del.icio.us model—it would have gone some other way, for sure. I’m just not sure what way it would have been.
As for the lost arts of the early Web, I wrote a piece a while back about the John Snow archive that’s been collated by a wonderful UCLA professor named Ralph Frerichs. I’ve spent a lot of time there because Snow is the hero of my new book: It’s filled with old maps, original documents, quotes, pictures, bibliographies, links. It’s a great resource, and it’s the kind of thing that academics first started doing in the early days, but then the whole genre kind of died out. I suppose this is the kind of thing that Wikipedia could eventually evolve into, but right now the experience is completely different. It’s the difference between an encyclopedia and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project…
Connecting virtual space to real space is clearly the most exciting area right now, though in a funny way I think we’re living through another phase of being too literal with our spatial metaphors—mapping tools are amazing, and incredibly useful for some applications, but they’re not always the best way to represent physical places. I’m actually working on a project that deals directly with some of these issues, and not to get too dramatic about it, but I’m hoping to be able to show some screens from it in D.C. this August .
Look for Part II of this conversation in an upcoming Adaptive Path newsletter.
Listen to Brian Oberkirch’s Podcast Interview with Dan Saffer
Dan Saffer and Brian Oberkirch have a great talk about what makes for excellent interaction design, how to allow for hackability in your design, and much more. Brian and Dan are on a panel together with Kit Seeborg and Jeremiah Owyang this week at WebVisions in Portland. If you haven’t heard Brian Oberkirch’s series of podcasts before, you’ll want to listen to those as well.
Click here to listen to the podcast interview and here to read about Dan’s panel at WebVisions 2006.
Read The Deal Magazine’s Articles About Adaptive Path
TheDeal.com, an online news resource for global corporate and financial dealmakers, recently wrote two articles based on interviews with Janice Fraser and Lane Becker. The first article Site Sense describes a project Adaptive Path worked on with Princess Cruises. The second article Don’t Show Me the Money looks at Adaptive Path’s New Ventures program, which is designed to provide product design and development services for seed and early-stage startups in exchange for equity.
Keep Up with Indi Young’s Book-In-Progress, Alignment Diagrams
Adaptive Path Partner Emeritus Indi Young has announced that she is writing a book called, Alignment Diagrams: Product Designs for Real Life Activities. You can preview her book online as she writes it and receive RSS alerts as she adds content.
Single-day Registration is Now Available for UX Week
We have opened up single-day registration for UX Week, so if you can’t get away for the full fabulous week, you can join us for a day or two. To register, click here.
A Round of Applause for Our UX Week Sponsors
Adaptive Path is delighted to welcome UX Week sponsors Google, Microsoft, Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design, AIGA D.C., and The O’Reilly OSCON Conference. Google will host our Monday evening networking event. Additionally, Dr. Vijay Kumar from IIT and David Shadle from Microsoft will host special breakfast sessions before the day’s program begins. Thanks to all these organizations for their support of UX Week. For more details, stay tuned to the UX Week agenda.
10% Off O’Reilly’s EuroOSCON in Brussels this September
The O’Reilly European Open Source Convention (EuroOSCON) in Brussels, Belgium, September 18-21, offers business people, coders, decision makers, entrepreneurs, artists, and policy makers who use, create, and manage free and open projects a place to learn about best practices, strategic issues, and up and coming changes. EuroOSCON will be filled to the brim with mind-bending demos, provocative keynotes, hands-on practical tutorials, and lots of two-way interactivity. Open technology is at the core of the conference but the real fun starts when we look at the applications, interactions, and ultimately the disruptions that open technology and communication facilitates.
When registering, use discount code euos06adpth and save 10% on the convention fees.
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