Monthly Archives: December 2013

look what i got fer Christmas!

theTV_app

hey y’All — guess what?

yep, that’s right! i GOT it! i fuckin’ got it! its finally outta Beta and totally ready for Prime Time

Prime Time TV that is

i’ve been waiting for this one for like a decade now — like, ever since the advent of the first frikkin’ smartphone

now millions upon millions of smartphone users need never suffer through the slings and arrows of outrages television torture no more, thanks entirely to the Television App

that’s right all y’Allz, ‘ats what i said — the Television App!

tired of all of those stupid sitcoms? are like a gazillion shows about hard-boiled cops on the forensic investigative beat wearin’ you down? need a break from all the reality out there?

then you’re probably down with the A-P-P for your T-V

yeeeeeeah, you know me ;]

just download the TV App from The App Store or Google Play today — available as a native mobile app for your iPhone or Android device — and let your smartphone do the watching

just turn on your TV, set up your smartphone and tap that app to get that TV App fired up an’ watching hours and hours of completely incoherent and untalented shit for you — there’s even an M2M audio connection to hook your widescreen up to your second screen and completely remove that annoying audio noise TV show accompaniment from the room for you and anyone else hangin’ at yer place for the evening

and then, know what chew kin do?

put on some frikkin’ music again or something — or talk to each other — maybe even draw or write down your unfettered and newly re-focused thoughts down in a notebook with an actual pencil or pen

i’m tellin’ ya — its like that y’All!

now that your 2 most brain-defyin’ devicez are busy in that infinite loopin’ circuit a cybernetic fun, you got some life ta do again, an’ now you can get that shit DONE!

there’s like SO much more quality shizZzat done fo realz y’alL — shits not been that good fo like yeeeeazZz, ya know?

hell, you might even be able to get back to focusin’ on yer inner self, all y’All, ya know?

the Television App — new, from the Bureau of cyberSurreal investigation — we’re turnin’ this shit around now, fo’ sho’

Nam-June-Paik

why do we need to ask appropriate questions?

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as professional experience designers its of the utmost importance to me that we drive every decision we make in an informed and somewhat sensical manner as a means to create and optimize what we design for real people

i don’t call people users or participants or customers — i try to avoid terms like personas or user types as much as possible, although words like these help us all understand that leveraging the powerful tool of a properly developed or estimated persona can help us generalize the psychographic and demographic populations of people that make up our target audiences for businesses

i prefer to refer to people as people

to call people people just simplifies some of the interesting dynamics that might get in the way as part of the process and helps to build a better empathic relationship with the people we’re designing for at the end of the day

calling people people turns what can be a very uppity and exclusionary sense of them vs us into the more elegant and gracious one-word phrase us

the process becomes more inclusive and friendly when we realize our users are people, too — just like us — so let’s not refer to the people we design for as them because its simply not a nice thing to do and it creates a competitive dynamic that oftentimes misses the goal to meet the real needs of real people and to hopefully create an authentic experience for people that is helpful, humble, beautiful and meaningful

walking along with the people we’re designing something for is probably the best way to understand and design for those particular real people — its as close as we’re going to get to actually being them — or being with them — and truly understanding what they need — and its how we can get to understand what’s working or not working for the real people we’re designing for with our design work from the most appropriate perspective to properly guide the design process

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also, i don’t consider the way i do what i do as an experience designer to be user-centered

i prefer people-centered

or better yet, human-centered

previous versions of Design with a Big D didn’t always successfully meet the needs of people due to the fact that the focus was somewhere else entirely

when we lose sight of who we’re designing for and drive our processes and decisions by something other than servicing the needs of real people, we’re unfortunately positioned to miss the mark and create an experience that just doesn’t feel right

for example

another way we can focus the design work we do might unintentionally focus on a more systems-centered methodology — and much of the time, since the material elements { or immaterial elements to be more precise, maybe even representative or mapped elements could better define what we’re talking about here } we’re given to design something with is deeply based in data and information, if we don’t properly focus on consciously guiding toward a human-centered experience we will almost definitely end up with a more systems- or information-centered set of processes and experiential outcomes that improperly focuses on what we’re designing for { a dataset, or one particular interpretation of a dataset } instead of who we’re designing for { once again, the actual people }

if we’re hoping the results of our design processes bring people into our world to engage with our company’s business offerings we need to focus in the appropriate direction and we need to invite and guide the people we would like to collaborate with in an evolving business relationship in a way that’s really actually about the people, not the systems or the information that make up the pieces of the experience

if, at a certain point, the working results our design processes aren’t quite working as anticipated, we need to be very critical about the integrity of processes we’re involved in and we need to ask some big questions to hopefully help better guide the design work moving forward — and what a lot of people sometimes lose clear sight of when looking at the metrics and when listening to the qualitative feedback and suggestions is very definition of the word feedback and what it ultimately implies

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i’m sure the tendency to externalize a perceived set of negative results from any collection of usability might tightly tether to genuine internal psychological insecurities regarding the feeling of failure — especially for deeply passionate and empathic creatives that constantly need to balance an oftentimes conflicting capability to emotionally tune into the needs of people with the exact opposite simultaneous ability to then emotionally pull away from the iterative design work we’re engaged with on a daily basis

suddenly — when faced with suggestions that the design just isn’t optimally working — the illogical but somewhat understandable reaction might cause the wrong kind of emotional distance from a design team

an emotional, dynamic shift might actually increase the distance we feel with our users — with the very people we’re ultimately designing for

we might be too emotionally involved with the design work to even understand the more competitive attitude we’re suddenly feeling in relation to our users

the team might start refer to our people as them

and now the design process goes from collaborative to competitive — and those competitive feelings, as subtle as they may seem, can really start building to the wrong kind of energy for a truly collaborative and effective set of design processes

amidst our frustrations with qualitatively negative reactions to the work, we might ask ourselves questions like

why aren’t they getting it?

how come they’re not seeing the link?

oh jeez, why did they do that?

i’d like to suggest that whenever we start to use terminology that implies any sense of an exclusionary attitude toward our collaborations with our users, that we need to stop and think a little deeper about the wrongful inversion of what’s psychologically going on with the team

instead of asking about them in reference to a set of people that are suddenly emotionally put on the outside of our competitive process dynamics — we need to start asking about we again — we need to pull them into the better-feeling, inclusive we feeling of the project work

does that even make any sense?

i don’t know — its been a long blogPost, i know, right?

but i’m trying to tie all of this back into the stupid title i came up with for this post

instead of asking the they questions — start asking the we questions again, aight?
if you’re tending toward exclusionary, competitive processes — reach out to set up more appropriate inclusive, collaborative team dynamics with the people you’re designing for

if you can feel that things are starting to feel off with your process
— and even with the results of your design work

turn that shit inside out, ya know?

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you might feel a little more humble all of a sudden — it might not feel all that fantastic even, but its a far braver and far more appropriate way to turn it all around

when we bring ourselves as designers to this inside out place and ask more questions about what we did or didn’t do, then we’ve rediscovered the proper attitude to get back to our work following a far better inclusive, collaborative mentality to guide the design work we need to do

designEmpower

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i made a decision this morning — and you can tell i’ve been moving in this direction now for quite some time if you’ve been following this blog in any way, right?

its no longer a big mystery

i want to change the world

and i’m a designer by profession — its what i’ve been doing now for over 20 years and i’ve made a nice and bumpy but decent career out of it — its what i do to make money and help my family survive in this complicated and quite chaotic, modernday world

many people — everyday people — pretty much scrounge and scrap their lives together on a week-by-week, paycheck to paycheck basis, which is distracting to those of us that really want to thrive and live up to our full potentials to make a more meaningful contribution to the world that truly creates impact, innovation and change

i’d like to leave the world in a far better place than it feels it is today

we’ve made a lot of amazing progress as a civilizations — but as we all know, thanks pretty much to H2’s amazing educational television programming, Ancient Astronaut Theory suggests that: civilizations come and go; empires rise and fall; nations and peoples grow and thrive and create new and interesting developments for our humanity and then, as the pattern would have it, they just disappear

as individuals, we really have very little control over many aspects of our lives — and it can be a little overwhelming and frustrating to think of how much of our lives, as individuals, is governed and regulated by our currently-established systems

these systems, for the most part, from an individual’s perspective { at least from my perspective }, are typically dysfunctional, to put it politely { wink, wink }

in fact, these systems are now simply broken

brokenGlass

you don’t need to think too hard about it, right? at least if you’re truly coming at it from your average citizen’s perspective

if our government supposedly represents an active and functional Democratic System that’s created and guided ‘By The People, For The People’ — then either the system itself is a vast illusion and we’ve all been constantly lied to by The Powers that Be or its completely failing us

Consumerism and Capitalism aside — the guiding principles and philosophical concepts behind our Democracy as its practiced today is a total failure for the majority of The People living under its governance

please, someboady … correct me if i’m wrong

show me the data

i am not personally an expert in Big Data analysis or statistics, but i understand our current culture of Science and Information Worship seems to trust and drive a lot of very key decisions by the metrics that are so conveniently 2 or 3 levels removed from any sense of responsibility to The People that these oftentimes quantifiable data derive from

anyhow — i want to actually use my expertise to do more than simply make a living

and i don’t have a lot of free time on hand — most people don’t

but, with the free time that comes up in my life, i am now planning on devoting some positive design energies and activities to making effective change in the dynamics at play between The Systems and The People of this nation { and then eventually, The World }

these are big, bold aspirations, i know

but i believe in pursuing The Impossible

if you don’t aim toward The Big Blue Sky or The MoonShot { as GoogleX refers to that extraStratospheric thinking that might lead to bigger and better Design Thinking } you’ll probably never take the proper risks and efforts involved in real innovation

one system i haven’t yet mentioned in this blogPost is a rather interesting one that’s based totally outside the realms of physical reality and any sense of real accountability to The Government, The People, The World and Our Overall Humanity

and this is our Corporate Systems

as far as i can tell, at least from my more qualitative assessment of our current situation of dysfunctional energies in the world, international corporatization — or what some might refer to as our movement toward Globalism — behaves at the devolved, reptilian level of The Animal Kingdom

and in many ways, our corporations currently run the entire world

our government takes second seat at The Economic Theatre — and unfortunately, The People of The World typically sit in the nosebleeds

the financial dynamics of a predominantly Capitalistic Consumerism merely disguised as a supposed Democracy allows for this sort of Lord of The Flies society completely run wild

its an entirely new case of The Lunatics running The Asylum

so, how can we change this? what real power do we have as average taxpaying citizens in the world we live in today? do we write our Senator? does voting actually help the real cause of leading the world to a safer and more responsible, reasonable place for at least 80% of The People?

i don’t think so

not anymore

and i believe we can no longer afford to simply sit at home as armchair citizens that simply watch The Show and complain from the sidelines about all the wrong moves we’re currently making as a world organism — unless we roll up our sleeves and start really getting our hands dirty through real, active participation, none of this will every change for the better

and because i am a designer, i am going to participate through my Designwork

i want to empower The People again — and i want the dynamics to switch, flip and change to something that makes a lot better sense as a process to leadership

human-centered design processes based in both quantitative and qualitative research, iterative design work, and innovation through collaboration are the only way we can start pushing toward a better tomorrow that actually speaks to the promise of what our technohumanic progress was supposed to be to begin with

we had big dreams — a vision for the future and what technological advancement would mean to the future of our social humanity — but somewhere along the way we forgot to actually Design that vision to function for the benefit of real people

our economics work to financially and functionally benefit Big Government and Big Corporations

the bigger the better, right?

but what about The People

don’t we deserve better than this? well, i hate to break it to you, but

we only deserve better if we work for it

and what better way to work for a better tomorrow than by contributing your individual expertise to the cause?

i am going to Design for a Better Tomorrow

it might not be the way i’ll make my bi-weekly paycheck { although i also aim for my day designwork to benefit the majority of the people my designs aim to serve }, but it will be the way my Bigger Design Thinking will be leveraged to help with The Big Picture to hopefully get it closer and closer to Bluer Skies for The People of The World

sleeping like a baby

gorgeous newborn baby sleeping

the Sleep App just works

awwwww, look at that, eh? he’s sleepin’ like a babythanks to the Sleep App

another satisfied user, ain’t that so sweet? so peaceful, dreaming of binkies and baw baws, with such a cute little blue-striped sleeping cap on — that’s what i’m talkin’ about

download the Sleep App t’day

the Sleep App

are you still having trouble with terrible bouts of insomnia?

its totally exhausting, right? and it can totally make life difficult — slowing your ability to be happy and productive at the office — without adequate sleep, its just difficult to be your best and just get through your typical, super-important workday

boy oh boy, you sleepless fiends of The Information Age, we have just the cure specially designed and developed just in time to meet your nighttime resting needs

now, thanks to the miracles of modern technology

there’s an app for that

introducing the Sleep App

sheep_jump

that’s right — there’s no need to waste your time at the end of a long, long day manually counting sheep in your head — there’s no need to even bother with biopharmaceutically-proven but pesky and potentially addictive medications to getchya sleep on any longer

the Sleep App does all of the painful,
human-numeric brainGame counting and calculations for you

leveraging advanced neuroscience brainwave stimulation and modern differential equation 4D projections of sheep — little baby sheep jumping over a little hill in the natural, grassy knolls of your mind — you and your brain almost immediately lose consciousness and delve deeply into luxurious REM-state, restful, dreamy sleep

available for native app downloads for iOS and Android smartphone and tablet devices, the Sleep App is the gift that keeps on giving you just what you’ve needed for the last 2 decades — that’s right, the gift of fucking sleep

download the Sleep App today from The App Store or GooglePlay — its supposedly free, but its really a freemium product with extra premium features you’ll need to pay to upgrade to for features like: advanced sleep analytics; special wet dream simulator add-ons, complete with unconscious happy endings without the real mess of just spankin’ it; and brand new, bleeding-edge, dream-data and sleep virus protection, just in case you still believe in any sense of privacy

the Sleep App

we’ll put you to sleep and make your dreams come true

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