Design as Storytelling
Design as Storytelling by Thomas Erickson
In this excellent essay from the mid-90s, Erickson, describes an architect’s design process, “play[ing] around” with sketches on tracing paper over a site plan. In contrast, we have the software designer:
Pity the poor interaction designer whose terrain is less tangible. Rather than an easily mapped site, our terrain is a situation, a set of tasks embedded in an environment that is as much cultural and social as it is physical.
As Alexander says in Notes on the Synthesis of Form:
[E]very design problem begins with an effort to achieve fitness between two entities: the form in question and its context. The form is the solution to the problem; the context defines the problem….the real object of [design] discussion is not the form alone, but the ensemble comprising the form and its context. [Aka, g]ood fit.
How can developers navigate the myriad options of development tools and plat(form)s within the tricky context of nebulous business needs and (mis)behaving people? Back to Erickson:
Because interaction design has strong roots in the social sciences with their positivist approaches to studying and analyzing behavior, little has been written about non-formal methods, approaches which might serve as an analog to the architect’s playful, exploratory sketching…
The subject of Erickson’s essay is one of those non-formal methods. “[W]hat to do before you know what to do.” Simple and timeless (going way back to the 1990s). The answer is storytelling.
We are compelled to communicate complicated problems and complicated solutions to a disparate group of individuals: end-users, developers, project managers, networking, database administrators, users support, trainers, and upper management. Erickson’s solution is a clever understanding of a common language:
[S]tories have particularly strong powers as communications catalysts…Storytelling can break the ice, and make more formal processes like structured interviews a bit less threatening….Stories are a sort of equalizer. It doesn’t require much expertise or training to listen to and tell stories. Team members from any background can be made part of the process of telling and collecting stories. And once stories have been gathered, team members can discuss the stories, argue about their interpretation, and generate hypotheses about users’ problems, needs, and practices.
And, there’s more:
What all these people need is to quickly understand the gist of the design, why it makes sense…Stories excel at capturing and communicating this kind of information. First, stories are memorable. People will remember — and re-tell — the…story long after they have forgotten the more formal principles…Second, stories have an informality that is well-suited to the lack of certainty that characterizes much design-related knowledge.
Erickson goes on to argue that it’s the process of collecting stories that is more important than the actual content. I’m not so sure about this. It’s the 90s, after all. This seems a little bit like post-modern hedging. The content of a story says a lot. But, the content may live in the subtext of the story. Here’s a gem. Erickson worked at Apple, where there was an R&D building using an intelligent energy management system:
The system conserved energy by automatically turning off lights during hours when employees were not expected to be present. One weekend, an employee, accompanied by his six year old daughter, stopped by to finish up some work. Suddenly, the lights go out.
Daughter: Who turned off the lights?
Father: (matter-of-factly) The computer turned off the lights.
Daughter: (pause) Did you turn off the lights?
Father: No, I told you, the computer turned off the lights.
(Someone manually turns the lights back on)
Daughter: Make the computer turn off the lights again.
Father: (with irony) It will in a few minutes.
Erickson says it’s not the conclusion that is drawn from this story that is important but the fact that people are engaged in the discussion about these ideas. True, engaging people with this story is important. But, how timelessly ironic is the computer that knows better than us? Whether they turn off our lights without asking us, try to march Captain Kirk into a disintegration booth as a phony war casualty, or enslave Neo as an organic power source for their tyrannical rule on Earth, damn, those machines are pushy. Hey, the next time you design one of those really smart computer systems, make sure it doesn’t enslave the entire human population. And, don’t make me look stupid in front of my kid.
What values do stories have for development? They can be anecdotal, exaggerated, apocryphal.
Virtually any kind of information has uncertainty associated with it: it is likely that it will only be true of certain individuals, in certain situations, under certain circumstances. Presentation of such information as “design principles,” or “findings,” will often elicit arguments about validity and generality from the skeptical. In contrast, stories seem to sidetrack the debates about methodology. People understand that stories are not accurate, that they are likely to bend the truth for rhetorical ends, and so the discussion tends to be of the issues raised by the stories, rather than their obvious shortcomings.
People are saying something important to us when they tell us their stories. You may just need to read between the lines.
Android phones aren’t as simple to use as the iPhone, but they’re not that much more complicated, and “if you’re willing to do the work to understand it a little bit, well I hate to say it, but there’s more available in some ways.
Woz often diverged from Jobs. He wanted Macs to be easily upgradable, Jobs didn’t. Same reason he likes Android.
One of the things that drove Jobs nuts was how he thought Google stabbed him in the back with Android, he felt they stole a lot of the iPhone technology from him and would not get into the smartphone business, even at just the OS level. This comment from Woz would have likely set him off if he were still around today because of the anger he carried around with him about Google.
(via soupsoup)
Source: soupsoup
The Laptop Is Dead, Long Live The Laptop
Asking Is the Laptop Dead? is like asking if the hammer is dead. Yes, but what do you want me to use to hammer nails, an iPad?
Just because a design has reached its natural end and “there’s nowhere to go from here” doesn’t mean it has lost its utility. You can name a thousand useful tools that no longer need any improvement but are very useful in day to day life.
When was the last time the whisk needed to be re-designed?
Quality Coding Takes A Break For The Holidays. But Why?
Great example of ”designers with a synthetic grasp of the organization of the physical world” as mentioned in this previous post excerpted the first chapter of Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Apple spends a lot of time on the details of sound design to give us a products with harmonious UI flow. Beautiful form and function. Problems solved.
Episode 15- The Sound of the Artificial World
Without all the beeps and chimes, without sonic feedback, all of your modern conveniences would be very hard to use. If a device and its sounds are designed correctly, it creates a special “theater of the mind” that users completely buy into. Electronic things are made to feel mechanical. It’s the feeling of movement, texture and articulation where none exists. We talk with Sound Designer Jim McKee of Earwax Productions about the art of designing organic sounds for inorganic things.
In addition to product (and film) sound design, public radioheads may know Jim McKee from his work with the Kitchen Sisters. They are both based in the Sentinel Building in San Francisco, which makes them extra fun to visit.
Protools photo by The Cowshed.
Source: 99percentinvisible
![Excerpted from Notes On The Synthesis Of Form by Christopher Alexander:
This is a typical design problem; it has requirements which have to be met; and there are interactions between the requirements, which makes the requirements hard to meet….This problem is simple to solve. It falls easily within the compass of a single man’s intuition. But, what about a more complicated problem?
…[A]lthough ideally a form should reflect all the known facts relevant to its design, in fact the average designer scans whatever information he happens on, consults a consultant now-and-then when faced by extra-special difficulties, and introduces this randomly selected information into forms otherwise dreamt up in the artist’s studio of his mind.
There is a good deal of superstition among designers as to the deathly effect of analysis on their intuitions – with the unfortunate result that very few designers have tried to understand the process of design analytically….Enormous resistance to the idea of systematic processes of design is coming from people who recognize correctly the importance of intuition, but then make a fetish of it which excludes the possibility of asking reasonable questions.
Rather than face the responsibility of these difficult questions, designers turned instead to the authority of resurrected ‘styles.’…The modern designer relies more and more on his position as an ‘artist,’ on catchwords, personal idiom, and intuition…unable to cope with the complicated information he is supposed to organize, he hides his incompetence in a frenzy of artistic individuality….[I]n an era that badly needs designers with a synthetic grasp of the organization of the physical world, the real work has to be done by less gifted engineers, because the designers hide their gift in irresponsible pretension to genius.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lw7rcnk3LT1r8r6w3o1_1280.jpg)
Excerpted from Notes On The Synthesis Of Form by Christopher Alexander:
This is a typical design problem; it has requirements which have to be met; and there are interactions between the requirements, which makes the requirements hard to meet….This problem is simple to solve. It falls easily within the compass of a single man’s intuition. But, what about a more complicated problem?
…[A]lthough ideally a form should reflect all the known facts relevant to its design, in fact the average designer scans whatever information he happens on, consults a consultant now-and-then when faced by extra-special difficulties, and introduces this randomly selected information into forms otherwise dreamt up in the artist’s studio of his mind.
There is a good deal of superstition among designers as to the deathly effect of analysis on their intuitions – with the unfortunate result that very few designers have tried to understand the process of design analytically….Enormous resistance to the idea of systematic processes of design is coming from people who recognize correctly the importance of intuition, but then make a fetish of it which excludes the possibility of asking reasonable questions.
Rather than face the responsibility of these difficult questions, designers turned instead to the authority of resurrected ‘styles.’…The modern designer relies more and more on his position as an ‘artist,’ on catchwords, personal idiom, and intuition…unable to cope with the complicated information he is supposed to organize, he hides his incompetence in a frenzy of artistic individuality….[I]n an era that badly needs designers with a synthetic grasp of the organization of the physical world, the real work has to be done by less gifted engineers, because the designers hide their gift in irresponsible pretension to genius.
UI Design Tip: Provide appropriate mapping of controls to functions. As it turns out, it works for stoves and web sites.
Note the difference between a vague mapping of controls to functions (Fig 11-8) and a clear mapping (Fig 11-9).
From Aboutface 2.0 The Essentials of Interaction Design, Alan Cooper & Robert Reimann.
