- Jesse James Garrett in Conversation with Steven Johnson, Part 2
- Meet Jeremy Alexis and Kathan Brown, Featured UX Week Speakers
- Check Out BusinessWeek’s Interview with Dan Saffer
- Adaptive Path Editor Margaret Mason’s First Book: No One Cares What You Had for Lunch
Jesse James Garrett in Conversation with Steven Johnson, Part 2
In part two of Jesse James Garrett’s interview with author Steven Johnson, we look at cultural attitudes and innovation in interface design. Steven Johnson’s keynote kicks off UX Week 2006, August 14-17 in Washington, D.C.
Jesse James Garrett: One implicit aim of Interface Culture seems to have been to encourage people to view software as a cultural artifact, both influencing and influenced by cultural trends. To what extent do you think this view has taken hold?
Steven Johnson: I think it has completely taken hold, though people don’t always use the word interface when they express the view. Google is an interface for exploring the Web. Blogger (and Typepad, WordPress, et cetera) are interfaces for publishing to the Web. They are both runaway successes because their interfaces let you do something that previous interfaces weren’t very good at doing. I think it’s fair to say that Google and blogs are widely seen as influencing and being influenced by cultural trends.
The part where it gets a little trickier with Interface Culture is where I talk about the interface as a new art form. Certainly, there are more instances of genuine interface art out there today than there were when I was writing the book. (I think of the great stuff that Jonah Peretti and the Eyebeam folks do, or Rhizome over the years.) But I don’t think it’s quite right to say that interface design became an expressive artistic medium, in the way I described it. But hey, nine years isn’t *that* long. There’s still a lot of evolution ahead of us.
JJG: Do you still consider interfaces a means by which people understand the world? Do you see designers applying that perspective in the interfaces they create?
SJ: Clearly interfaces are tools for understanding the world. So many of the most interesting debates in the “new media” space revolve precisely around the question of how specific interfaces will shape the user’s view of the world. And those debates play back into the design decisions that shape the next generation of software.
A great example of this is the power law / long tail discussion that’s been percolating over the past few years (and is likely to hit the best-seller lists in the next few weeks, when Chris Anderson’s book comes out). Think back to the debate that swarmed around Clay Shirky’s “Weblogs, Power Laws, And Inequality.” That was effectively a debate about whether the combined interfaces of blogs, blogrolls, Google, and Technorati (not to mention the original linking interface of HTML) was creating a skewed perception of the entire community of blogging voices online, in that some A-listers had a thousand times the traffic of other, potentially equally worthy, blogs. (The “long tail” debate, not surprisingly, is a mirror image of this: emphasizing the army of Davids, and not the A-list Goliaths.)
But this wasn’t purely a theoretical debate. It involved some academics, but it also involved the people designing the interfaces in question. And it shaped a whole generation of tools aimed at amplifying those voices out on the tail. I just went back and tracked down my own blogged response to Clay and his critics / admirers, and what I wrote then is probably a better answer to the question than anything I could write now:
“The most interesting thing to me about Clay’s essay—and the subsequent response—is that the active participants in the power-law system are having a conversation about the distribution and what it means, and whether they want their little ecosystem to look like that.
Most systems that display this kind of behavior 1) don’t have component parts with that level of self-awareness, and 2) don’t have the opportunity to change the dynamics of the system if they choose. We hear a lot about architecture being destiny in the digital world, but the fact is that architecture has never been more flexible, and there have never been so many connected, smart people interested in flexing its joints for good causes. A few years ago, when I was writing in Emergence about the limitations of the one-way linking built into the Web, there were very few practical applications out there that attempted to remedy this flaw. Now the Web is teeming with them (Trackbacks, various Google hacks, Blogdex.) To a certain extent, the increased feedback of two-way linking may have amplified the scale-free phenomena that Clay describes. But the key point is that the one-way architecture isn’t necessarily our destiny anymore, partially because some very smart people started to think that two-way links would be better for the system as a whole, and they set out to add them to mix.”
JJG: In Interface Culture you hold high hopes for the possibilities of 3-D interfaces for information access and visualization. This hasn’t really materialized. Is the transition to 3-D interfaces just taking longer than you thought, or did something happen in the interim that you didn’t expect?
SJ: Do you think it reads like that? That’s interesting. I guess the way I would describe it is that I spend more time writing about 3-D information visualization interfaces than I would were I writing the book today, but almost all the examples I look at—Magic Cap, Bob, et cetera—are pretty much slammed. This is the whole section of the book that starts with the line: “The failings of the present day come from taking that [desktop] metaphor too literally.” Were I writing Interface Culture today, I probably wouldn’t have bothered talking about them at all. (At least as information visualization tools; games and online communities are another matter altogether.) So I suppose the attention was a form of “high hopes.” But to me, the chapters of IC where I’m really bullish on the future are the text, links, and agent’s chapters, which are not about 3-D at all.
JJG: Since the rise and fall of VRML, using 3-D for non-game applications has pretty much been considered a dead-end—at least until Second Life came along. Do you think the success of Second Life will lead designers to reconsider the possibilities for 3-D environments beyond gaming? Or is Second Life’s success attributable to some other aspect of its design?
SJ: That’s a great question, and I’m not sure I have an answer, except that I feel like something very interesting is happening over there. I suspect part of it stems from the way Second Lifers subtly integrate gaming elements, without making them explicit. Edward Castronova and Julian Dibbell figured this out before any of us: What’s addictive initially about these environments is scarcity—resources, land, objects, talents. Introduce scarcity, and game play naturally develops, as people compete to gather as many resources as they can, or invent new ways of sharing. (The real estate markets in Second Life are fascinating.) The genius of Second Life is to keep those game elements in the background; it’s a social system first, and a game second.
JJG: A lot of people have been asking me lately what I think about Nintendo’s upcoming Wii console—specifically the gestural controller designed to appeal to people who don’t currently play games. Nintendo’s strategy seems to run counter to the argument you make in Everything Bad Is Good For You that audiences are seeking ever more complex experiences. What do you think of Wii’s prospects?
SJ: It seems pretty smart to me. There’s such a huge gap in the gaming world: There are people who play a *ton* of games, and there are people who barely spend any time with them. It seems logical that that distribution should even out a little.
JJG: Nintendo says a key part of their strategy for Wii is the design of the controller. They’ve found that typical console controllers are intimidating to a non-gamer audience, so they deliberately made this one something you would hold like a remote control—in fact, they actually call it a “remote” rather than a controller. In other words, their hypothesis is that the interface is the obstacle to the growth of the gaming market. Meanwhile, interaction designers are constantly bemoaning the limitations of the hardware interfaces we design for. We’re dying to be able to support more complex interactions than point-and-click can get you. So you have two opposing trends: Nintendo saying the hardware is too complex, and designers saying it’s too simple. Who’s right?
SJ: I tend to fall in the camp that the hardware should be as simple as possible, and the complexity should all be on the screen. I’m not some kind of one-button-mouse purist or anything, but I certainly don’t want my mouse looking like my Xbox 360 controller. I *loved* those graphics showing Apple’s Front Row remote to the Windows Media Center remotes, where the Apple remote has literally six buttons and the other remotes have forty. Granted, the Front Row software doesn’t do nearly as much as Media Center—you’re going to need numbers on the Front Row remote if they ever do a DVR—but still the idea is a profound one: people are much more likely to figure out what they need to do if their options are up on a big screen, and not on a tiny device in their hands.
Steven Johnson is the best-selling author of four books on the intersection of science, technology, and personal experience. In addition to his books, Steven is a contributing editor for Wired magazine and a monthly columnist for Discover magazine. He was the cofounder and editor-in-chief of FEED, and Newsweek named him one of the “Fifty People Who Matter Most on the Internet.” In addition to his columns, he’s published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and many other periodicals.
Jesse James Garrett is the Director of User Experience Strategy and a founding partner of Adaptive Path. He is author of The Elements of User Experience (New Riders), and is recognized as a pioneer in the field of information architecture. Jesse’s clients include AT&T, Intel, Crayola, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, and National Public Radio.
Meet Jeremy Alexis and Kathan Brown, Featured UX Week Speakers
This year’s UX Week conference features some erudite and entertaining guest speakers, presenters, artists, designers, and fellow practitioners. Among them are Jeremy Alexis and Kathan Brown.
Jeremy Alexis hails from the renowned Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago where he is an assistant professor. As an instructor and researcher, Jeremy focuses on the application of design thinking, methods, and skills; issues of competitiveness; and organic growth. He has worked with clients such as Unilever, Motorola, Citibank, Pfizer, American Express, and Target Corporation.
With a Bachelor of Architecture and Master of Design degree, Jeremy offers a unique perspective on how design can aid innovation and organic growth, as well as a designer’s strategic value in a corporate setting. Join him as he discusses these topics at this year’s UX Week conference. For more information, visit Jeremy’s bio page.
Kathan Brown is an author, artist, instructor, and the founder of Crown Point Press, the renowned San Francisco Bay Area art gallery and workshop. Kathan recently published Ink, Paper, Metal, Wood: Painters and Sculptors at Crown Point Press (Chronicle Books, 1996), which includes technical data and a recollection of her life as a print publisher.
With a staff of eight, Crown Point currently publishes etchings by five or six invited artists a year, and, in 1987 the Museum of Modern Art in New York honored Crown Point Press with a 25th anniversary exhibition. We are thrilled to have Kathan joining us for UX Week where she will discuss creative thinking in a session hosted by Adaptive Path’s Janice Fraser. For more information on Crown Point Press, visit their website.
Check Out BusinessWeek’s Interview with Dan Saffer
In case you missed it, Liz Danzico of BusinessWeek recently interviewed Adaptive Path’s Dan Saffer. Their Q&A session on interaction design appears in this week’s online edition of the publication.
This interview coincides with the completion of Dan’s his first book, Designing for Interaction. The book was just released this month, and is already garnering attention. UIE Principal Jared Spool calls it, “a bookshelf must-have for anyone thinking of creating new designs.” If the BusinessWeek interview piques your interest, pick up a copy of Designing for Interaction to learn more.
Adaptive Path Editor Margaret Mason Publishes Her First Book: No One Cares What You Had for Lunch
Margaret Mason, Adaptive Path’s long time editor and friend, has just published her first book and we couldn’t be prouder. It’s called No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog (New Riders), and it will be available in just a few days. Each page has a new project that will help any blogger overcome writer’s block. Maggie has helped us express our ideas for years; now it’s your turn.
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