Blog posts from March 2010

[Above: Natalie Jeremijenko’s LiveWire – one of the ur-objects of physical computing & calm technology]

If you have a daughter, or a younger sister – or a female family member at the age where they make choices about what they want to do when they grow up – then please, do us a favour – in fact – do us all a favour, and sit them down to read Natalie Jeremijenko’s resume.

Then, once they have, simply ask them – “doesn’t that sound like an insane amount of fun?”

Happy Ada Lovelace Day.

I’m writing these notes late. Really it’s week 250 already — we had our All Hands at noon. Opening it I said “it’s week 250. Halfway through!” I don’t know what made me say that. We’ll see!

I’m on the Central Line on my way to White City for a consultancy gig with the BBC. For a day a week, I’m helping write a short design roadmap.

A minute ago I was reading a book that friend-of-BERG (and friend-of-mine) Mark Hall sent me in the post, and for which I realise now I never thanked him. Thank you, Mark! It’s Beyond the hundred meridian by Wallace Stegner, and the section I’ve just finished is about John Wesley Powell’s epic journey down the Colorado River through canyon after canyon.

In the narrative I encounter names that make my heart flutter. Kanab! This is also the name of a project about which we are currently in negotiation. Escalante! This is also the name of the era of the studio before the current one, which is called Scenario 4.

You may remember that I give names to periods of time of the studio. It helps us understand what what we’re doing now fits into bigger things, and is not the same as what came before or what we will after. Also it adds Mythic Resonance.

I would say we are no longer in Scenario 4. That was the period of somewhat uncontrolled growth we’ve been in for these past two months. I think we’re through the worst of it. We’ve figured out how to ride that particular crocodile. There’s a lot broken (our contracts are a shambles; we need better ways of recording expenses; we need to figure out how to bring more discipline to our own projects). But knowing what’s broken is 50% of making fixes. So: we’re coming out the other side of Scenario 4. It didn’t kill us, at least not outright. What next?

There’s a feeling of high potential. An impatience for projects to go public and for whatever they cause to be caused. A knowledge that something will happen. Projects on the verge of coming in, and with them a new set of abilities, and room. But there’s an alienness to all of this. An unfamiliarity with scale, but an excited trepidation.

In the back of my mind I’ve been calling it Jupiter Space.

There’s a bit in the film 2001 where the ship Discovery has made its long voyage across the solar system, from Earth space across deep space and into Jupiter space, and it’s just there. The ship is the same as during the journey, maybe a bit battered. Nothing’s happened yet. But there’s Jupiter, lofty and looming, reminding you where you are. A long way from home. Who knows where you’ve got to, but you’ve gotten there. Holy shit, Jupiter.

If you were standing on Ganymede, Jupiter would hang in the sky about four palms-widths wide, holding your hands at arm’s length. The Moon, from Earth, is a thumbs-width.

So that’s what it feels like and that’s what I see, in my mind’s eye. We built a ship, we took a journey, holy shit there’s an enormous gas giant right there out the window, what now? Who knows, let’s figure it out. Jupiter Space.

(We worked on El Morro all week 249. Nick, Lei and I went to Stockholm at the weekend. Intense deadlines swoop down every three days and knock us sideways. Kendrick was stalled because testing threw up data problems, and because our client was checking legal. Ashdown has produced enough to start building out the product itself, I hope, but its progress is still making me a little nervous. Service+ is producing a little more documentation to get final sign-off. Weminuche is assembling questions to start a proof of concept stage. Kari made super tasty cupcakes today. I’m feeling a bit spaced out. We’ve all been working too hard for too many weeks. But it’s worth it.)

What the studio looks like at almost 4pm on Friday 12 March:

Campbell is in the small room at the end, working on editorial layouts and user interface assets, both part of the El Morro project.

Also in the small room is Timo. He’s working on editorial in InDesign and how to encode this in XML, in the file format we’ve created. Sitting with him is Lei, who is working on a software renderer which does layout. The pages don’t look quite right and we’re chasing towards a demo app, so Lei and Timo are working together to iron out bugs in both the renderer and the XML.

Nick is crouched by their desk. He and Lei are talking about a bug in the way XML is imported into the database that the renderer uses. This is all for El Morro.

In the larger room, Matt B has his headphones in and is working on page designs for Ashdown. Yesterday evening, he, Tom and I drew out a system for how the main Ashdown webpage should behave, in great detail. Using this detailed system, Matt is able to work on the visual and information design.

Tom would usually be working on Ashdown too, but today he’s busy with the Authoring Tool for El Morro. Eventually this tool will create the XML for El Morro automatically from InDesign, so Timo doesn’t have to do it by hand, but not yet: that’s what Tom is working on.

James has a day off. Phil and Tom T, who have worked with us for odd days recently, are away. Kari is with us Tuesdays and Thursdays so she’s not here today. The room feels a little empty. Sparse not airy.

Jack and Matt J went out a little before noon for a meeting. They’re still out.

What the studio looks like at 8.30pm, same day:

Campbell and Timo are in the smaller room. Matt J is at his desk in the main room, working on a project plan. Jack bought us all pizza and left just recently. Nick and Lei are working still. I feel guilty that we’re all still here. My responsibility to the people is that we all should have left by now; to the project, it’s that we wind up with a great looking build tonight. I’m going to stand up now, and insist that we start bringing this thing in to land.

It’s 1am.

We all left a little before midnight. My guilty feelings got washed away once I saw how pretty it’d become, what we’re making. I’m up still, at home now, chewing over the day.

I chew over a lot of things, late at night.

I read yesterday about the origin of Windows and on page 3 of the article, Tandy Trower describes the four jobs in designing Windows 3.0: hands-on interface design; establishing usability testing processes; creating guidelines; prototyping. And so I think about the systems around design that are necessary for organisational change and success, and the necessity of explaining them in break-downs like this.

And this lunchtime I read Warren Buffett’s letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. which is his thing, you know, 98% of his fortune, and it has crispy clarity and deep insight, so I think about that.

I’m thinking about some glum, or concerned, or tense faces I’ve glimpsed at any given moment in the studio over the week, what the related factors are or were, and what I can do. Happy ones too, and what’s working well. There’s a project that is proving tough despite its apparent simplicity, and I’m trying to put my finger on why. I’m thinking about how intellectual property functions, and the legal and descriptive frameworks by which it becomes a thing you can sell or license. I’m thinking pretty hard about Jack and Matt J’s responses to a couple different project proposals, because they have senses of smell I don’t have, and so I’m spending time interpreting their reactions in order to come to my own opinions. A quarter hour ago, I had a browser window open to check something to do with cash-flow that won’t matter for another two months. I’m thinking about how to increase delegation more deliberately, and how to balance that with cohesion in studio output.

Look: it’s been a great week. Exciting, actually, now I think about it, but it’s late and late makes me reflective. I have no worries about the studio. But I wanted to get at how mentally occupying this kind of enterprise is. I am certain that Jack nor Matt think any less about the studio than this. (I know it; every morning they effortlessly resolve concerns I’d only just realised I had.) Nor anyone who writes weeknotes.

Meanwhile one of the old standards has come on iTunes. Andy Williams, Kisses Sweeter Than Wine. When I was a very little one, my dad used to sing this at bedtime. I wonder if my sister remembers. There’s a bird outside that thinks it’s morning and is singing.

Good night.

I’m at home with a glass of red wine at my new desk. I’m writing these notes late. It’s already week 248.

Jack and Matt J were in Berlin briefly last week, on a media design consultancy gig. I’ll quote from The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan/Quentin Fiore (1967) for a second:

The wheel is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye. Clothing, an extension of the skin. Electronic circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system. Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. … When these ratios change, men change.

Media is both our environments and that which mediates us. Our cinema and our glasses.

Cinema… books, television, radio, circus, salons, telegraph and telephone: our media used to be hard to invent. They came along once a generation. But now what we call “new media” is really ten thousand new media. The question for a newspaper moving to new media, I mean really moving to new media, is not how to build a CMS blah blah delivery platform blah blah for the whatever. It’s what you want the equaliser settings to be, for social interaction, for immersion, for gameplay, highbrow/lowbrow, predilection to truth, emotional resonance, etc. We don’t just publish, we get to invent the medium into which we publish.

Super fun.

Also this time last week I got a pretty down-to-earth reminder about product innovation. Product innovation has its own path.

We’ve been having a tough time with Ashdown. That’s not fair. It has been a perfect response to the brief (our own brief) to present and contextualise information well. But it hasn’t become a product. I felt that most keenly when I presented the current private version to a Very Important Person about three weeks ago. And in that presentation, I had to do most of the talking. If you need to narrate a thing, it’s not a product.

A product tells you what to do. It fills you with motivation — you want to use it, and you know what you’ll get. And when you don’t get exactly that, you’ll be tickled and delighted. (If it’s a good product; frustrated otherwise.) A product markets itself. It can be described so people can tell other people about it. It has a voice, and an opinion about how the world should be. You know where its value is… and what the value exchange is. Inside an organisation, teams can rally behind a product. A product has meaning, and goals. Products can succeed. Or fail. Products tell you, the designer, how they should grow.

So with Ashdown we’ve had data and an area and a design direction… but no product (we’re intending to make a suite of products). And Matt Brown, who is leading the project day to day, has now found the product. It’s taken all kinds of approaches to get there. Tom Loosemore has been part of crits. Tom A has been making experiments with generative journalism. We’ve tried big wireframes and little sketches.

But on Monday last week Matt managed to crack it. We now have a single line motto for the product. We have a tone. And we have a map of the site where we can see what the user motivation is at every page. Clicking through will feel like a good joke being told. It has rhythm. And everything unfolds from there.

If you looked at the sketches, who knows whether you’d be able to tell that something’s changed. But I can tell you now that the week before I wasn’t sure what we were making, and in week 237 – with Matt’s page of post-it notes and pen drawings – I feel totally confident that it’s cracked. It’s a product now, it’ll tell us what it wants to be.

But it’s humbling, to get there only now, and to be honest none of this “product innovation” chatter counts until we also execute and get to market. So let’s see what happens this week, and I want for us to work much better at cracking the product thing (and continuing to crack it — product focus in a project has to be maintained every week, every week) in future work.

Oh there’s a bunch more to say.

Kendrick is making its way to launch. I wrote a short teaser blog post about it a few days ago, based on one of Matt B’s icons.

El Morro is halfway through. It’s the biggest project we’ve done, and it lasts only a little under two months. I can sketch out seven distinct parts. They meet like dominos. It’s like building a bridge from the middle. Last week and this week the various components started linking up.

Most of what I do now is have 20 minute chats with people designing and building various parts of El Morro. The chats are easy because the team is incredible. People want to know how to build their particular bit, so they grab the relevant other people and make decisions. If there’s a need for clarification or knowledge of the ultimate client ambitions, that’s when I get pulled in for one of those 20 minute chats.

What else.

Kari is producing, weekly, summaries of what everyone is up to this week and next, and a per-project status, in a sentence or three. These are invaluable. Also she’s moving to two days a week, and spending the extra day project managing some new product development. We’re terrible at letting NPD slip, and my hope is that it’ll really happen with some of our established client process applied to it.

I’m learning a lot about my own process, talking Kari through what I believe is needed. Project initiation docs, briefing packs, milestones… all of this sounded like so much hot air until I saw I bumped up against what it was all helping with. I mean, when you know what you have to write down at the beginning of a project to help a team work together and keep on time and on budget and to allow room for the design to blossom and find the way, what else do you call it but a project initiation document?

I’m talking about process, which is a sure sign that I should wrap up and head to bed.

What I noted down to talk about in week 247 were a few old lessons I’d been relearning. What products are, how I use project management. I wanted also to say a few words about tuning and about documentation. I haven’t got t those.

But really when I think back over last week I think about how strange everything feels. I’m not used to the scale. I’m not used to the systems in these sketches. I mean roughly, but not fully. I’m watching a team of 8 bring a thing to life and I’ve no idea how it works, the path from individual action, I mean the tap of the finger that types the curly bracket, that somehow manifests and becomes the breathtaking beauty and correctness that I want to see, I mean how does that even occur; do you need to be dreaming of heaven while you type a subroutine because I doubt it, yet if not that, if that’s not the way beauty happens in software, then what? We plan projects we have full confidence in but there’s a moment because we’ve never done this project before at 3am where you wake up and go, Hang on, really? (And if we all didn’t do that, I’d be worried, so ok.)

So there’s an opposite of deja vu which is in action all the time, a feeling that, whatever it is, it should be familiar, but it’s not at all, and for me this strangeness creates both a risk aversion and then an overcompensating overconfidence, and I alternate between then, ultimately averaging out but only after talking and sketching a lot with Jack and Matt, and what’s left is a residual strangeness to the whole world. Gosh the walls are white. Gosh the sky is blue. Gosh it’s 2010 and here we are, this is the studio we create and this is the work we do, and aren’t we lucky, we work hard and the work is good, and maybe those adjectives are a good a way as any to sum up week 247: Strange. Lucky. Hard. Good.

I wanted to show you one of Matt Brown’s super pretty icons for the project codenamed Kendrick, which he and Nick Ludlam have been magicking up. Kendrick is for learning German.

(Or Spanish, or Italian, or French…)

It’s almost cooked!