Hippo Dignity

I’m at Interactions08, the first annual conference of the Interaction Design Association, and it’s being held at the Savannah College of Art and Design. It’s a beautiful day in Savannah, and I’m looking forward to the conference — and, uh, to finishing the slides for my talk, which I’m giving on Sunday. Come on down, if you’re here!

I got bad advice on the geography of the South, or I would have scheduled my trip differently to see John, who is fighting the good fight with the Conservation Voters of South Carolina. As happy as I’d be to see him, it’s probably just as well it won’t work out this time, since my schedule is insane — on Wednesday morning, I’m flying to Cape Town as the frog representative on a research trip for Project Masiluleke. I’m not sure how much Internet access I’ll have, but I’m hoping to blog the hell out of the trip.

My New Year’s resolution to post to my blog more often was quickly challenged by my ongoing battle royale with the office cold, which has been epic. Thus I didn’t have a chance to post a timely link to Clive Thompson’s terrific piece on the problems with computerized voting machines - luckily, now the NYT archive is free, and Clive handily posted the piece to his blog.

It was a typically Clivean excellent piece - full of great details, good explanations, and terrific quotes. No one who works with computers could have failed to have a chill run up their spine reading this:

When a county buys touch-screen voting machines, its elections director becomes, as Warren Parish, a voting activist in Florida, told me, “the head of the largest I.T. department in their entire government, in charge of hundreds or thousands of new computer systems, without any training at all.”

My one disappointment with the piece is that he didn’t mention the other way people are working to ensure that votes are counted correctly — through design. The Design for Democracy project of AIGA, which featured among other contributors the work of my friend and neighbor Mary Quandt, has created best practices for polling place and ballot design, from a visual and information design standpoint. Their work has been accepted as official guidelines by the federal Elections Assistance Committee, and AIGA continues to work with individual states (including, yes, Florida), to make their ballots and polling place instructions easier to read and understand. Reliable voting machines are important, but a butterfly ballot could still screw up even the most technologically perfect election.

For myself, I’ll be continuing to read The Arsonists’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, which is, fear not, a novel. But if you’re looking for some Awesome Design reading, you could do worse than Five Reasons Why The iPhone Is Older Than You Think, which was written by my boss and makes reference to some findings from a research project I led. I also recently had my mind blown by The Sound of Interaction Design, which manages to combine principles for good design for interactive products with The Sound of Music. Goddamn clever British people.

For those of you observing Yom Kippur, an easy fast, and a happy and a healthy New Year. Everyone else, have a great weekend, and eat something really fattening and greasy for me!

Recently, I had to write a bio for a not-work project I’m doing. I’m doing interaction design for the project, but I’m doing it for free in my (hah!) spare time, and I don’t want it to seem like my employers are involved or endorsing it. So I left out their name and what I’ve done for them, and I sent the draft to Shana, my PR go-to person. She made a couple of minor edits, and then said, “OK, you don’t want to mention your job, but don’t you want to talk about what you do?”

I said, “I did! It’s right there in the first sentence! ‘Michele Tepper is a digital interaction designer and usability expert.’”

She said, “Yeah. I don’t really know what that means, and I’ve been listening to you talk about it for years.”

This is an interesting problem — sure, good design is (usually) invisible, but if you don’t know what sort of design it is that you need, how can know how to ask for it? No one but my sister goes to the legal site she told me about, where she consistently chooses the wrong button because of where it’s placed, and thinks, “what this site needs is an interaction designer.” Also, I think “interaction design” sounds too much like “dancing about architecture,” to be honest. But what are the better options? My current job title, “design analyst,” sounds like I have coffee makers in once a week to obsess about why they aren’t better liked. “Information architecture” is a little ponderous and not, in this age of rich internet applications, fully descriptive of what I do anymore — sorry, Lou. “User experience designer” sounds like marketing. My mom once bragged that I was her “interface guru,” but as much as I loved that, I don’t think it’ll catch on.*

So I was intrigued by Alex Ross (the critic, not the artist, you nerds) and his attempt last year to rebrand classical music as awesome music. How excellent is that? It’s even finally gotten some traction, with this weekend’s Awesome Music Live concert. Don’t worry, newcomers! It’s not boring, it’s not incomprehensible: it’s awesome! I think when talking to non-technical audiences, I’m going to try referring to what I do as “awesome design” — it won’t be any more misunderstood than anything else, and it might lead to some good and fruitful conversations.

*And yes, I am aware of the irony of the group of people charged with making things easier to use and understand being unable to decide what to call themselves as a group, but I think that’s actually a condition of having a large group of people who care deeply about the nuances of labeling: something like Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, except without all that math.

1.  The strip is designed to keep you inside casinos.  Inside my hotel (the Flamingo, because we information architects like to kick it old-school), every path you can take is designed to take you through or into a casino.  The rooms don’t even have those terrible hotel-room coffee makers, which I presume is to get you downstairs, near where you could spend money, without caffeine.   It’s bizarrely fascinating.

2.  The keynote speaker at the conference has an office literally down the block from where I work.  I walk past his building at least a couple of times a week.  And yet I don’t think I would ever have just walked in to say hello.  Now we’ve exchanged cards, and I’m hoping he or someone from his firm will come address our brown-bag series in the works.
3. Steven, in comments to my last post, directed me to the geeky story behind the Bellagio water display, which has made me unreasonably happy.  Thank you, Steven!

4. I’ve seen the room where I’m presenting.  I’m definitely going to need to run for a presentation-clicker.  (I bought one in New York, which is… um, I think still on my bed at home.)

If I had to choose, I don’t think my first viewing of the Las Vegas strip would have been jet-lagged and stomach-achey from a turbulent flight.  Still, I can’t imagine it wouldn’t have been overwhelming anyway.  And this from a woman who functions at her best in New York.

The Bellagio water spectacle, so beautifully captured at the end of Ocean’s 11, is even more impressive visually in person, but it’s spoiled by being choreographed to “I’m Proud to Be An American.”  I have been reminded more than once on this trip so far how different New York is from most of the rest of the country, but I’m in the sort of mood where that seems pretty all right.

I may end up posting some notes from the conference here: apologies in advance if your geekiness doesn’t intersect with mine.

My flashback to the old Lingua Franca site on first laying eyes on the new New Yorker site now makes even more sense — I discovered, via Emdashes, that both were designed by the same people.

Though it’s amazing how much more design you can get out of a 1024 screen and a Condé Nast budget…

I am one of maybe five people in the entire world, if that, who looked at the new New Yorker site  and had a flashback to the navigational structure of this site.  But that’s only to be expected.

(Thesis: there are interface design paradigms that speak deeply to lit geeks.  Discuss.)

Now that it’s safely over, and Jason can’t drive out here to cause trouble, I can report that my talk to the Usability Professionals Association, “Information Architecture Meets Industrial Design: Working Collaboratively Across Disciplines” was very well-received, and more fun to write than I’d expected.  I talked about my experience working on the IQ/MAX turret, a specialized phone for financial traders.

It was a presentation.  It was written in Keynote.  And yet I keep calling it a “paper.”  Old habits are very strong indeed.

I’ll be giving a revised version of the same paper talk at the IA Summit next month, so, should you be really interested in information design, come on down — I’m speaking on Monday morning, late enough that I’ll be fully caffienated, but not so late (I hope) that people will be ready to leave.

Me, today in a meeting: “Il n’ya pas de hors-interface.”