Meditations on Power in Design

I've recently come to the realization that the process of building stuff (interfaces, experiences, software, etc.) following the principles of design in a client-supplier relationship is most often a story about resolving the conflict between hierarchical and more egalitarian/communal work structures. Which unfortunately means that allowing the design process to flourish is primarily a question of producing an appropriate system of mitigating power - like a kind of workplace judo.

The root of the conflict, (like all power struggles) is money. The person paying for a product is trying to solve a problem. And for that they provide money to people whose business it is to figure out how to solve problems. The client therefore brings two positive things to the table: the ability for people to provide for their families and accumulate desirable possessions and experiences (represented by money), and a thorny problem that requires a number of those people to solve.

Unfortunately, they also quite often bring a third thing to the table, which is ceded to them because of what is perceived to be their "ownership" of the problem: They bring an excessive amount of power over the final solution. They have the power to pull the plug, to remove the ability for the people working on the problem to provide for themselves, their families and their loved ones.

So with the imbalance of power that comes from a typical client relationship, excessive hierarchy is often immediately brought in as a way of resolving the potential risk that money or time will be wasted. Results must be provided by a certain date, so the project now has to be managed, therefore Project Management is born. And the client now needs to be managed to provide a line of defense for the team that is building the thing, therefore Account Management is born.

And you need those lines of defense if you're trying to build something within a framework of an antagonistic client superpower. You need people to get up in the morning and get beaten up over timelines and client whims because they provide a necessary buffer between the client and the team building the project. Because the process the team needs to follow has nothing to do with hierarchy. It has to do with collaboration and communalism, with careful listening, observation and iteration. It's about involving the lots of people in the design conversation and translating what they are saying, thinking and feeling into a thing that other people will find both desirable and useful.

There are actually many paths that can get you to the answer of developing a system in which design can flourish. None of them are necessarily easy, but neither is the waste that excessive hierarchy produces.

I don't have the answer, but I think there are some different approaches to the problem - different paths which, if taken wisely, could lead to good answers.

Meditation Number One

Since money is a primary issue in the power imbalance, how could you remove money from the equation? In other words, how could you create a system in which people can spend the time required to design an answer to a problem, while still being able to provide for themselves? I'm thinking open source here, but not many people make a sustainable income from open source ventures. Without winning the lottery, are there new ways of making a living without requiring money?

Meditation Number Two

Or... what if you framed the relationship differently? How could you reframe the client relationship so that the client had an active role in the solution? Allowing them to be an equal partner rather than an antagonistic force? This is called collaboration - by involving clients in the process, you ensure they have a stake in the solution. The main challenge with this would seem to be that the nature of the problem (i.e., money=veto) doesn't really go away. Unless your client is the head honcho, you'll still run the risk of the plug being pulled by someone not involved in the process.

Meditation Number Three

Or... think how you could remove the client from the relationship, but retain a source of income Maybe this is really just called entrepreneurism, because the traditional answer is to get income by selling your services to thousands of people. (Yet technology is opening up the possibilities for new developments in this arena).

For some reason, this feels like the most harmonious and simple of all the meditations, because although the "client" doesn't go away, the success of the thing you're building is based on satisfying all of your clients, i.e., your customers. You're still subject to the whims of your clients, but in a much more distributed and possibly sane way. The problem with this is getting off the ground has traditionally been expensive and often a long-term game, which often requires you to give up part of your company in return for cash. Are the low barriers of entry that we are seeing today helping to mitigate that?

Thoughts? It seems that many smart people are trending toward trying to solve the issue of power in one of these ways rather than living in the traditional subservient client model. 

Kill the Keyboard, Save the World

For my undergrad university thesis in 1994, I wrote about 30 pages on the implications of the phenomenon of emoticons on the Usenet ;-). I concluded with the admittedly difficult-to-prove prognostication that due to the nature of electric media (McLuhan's term) within 50 years the western phonetic alphabet would become irrelevant and would be replaced by some more symbolic system.

(I got a B-minus. :=0 )

15 years on, and I pretty much stand by my assertion, B-minus aside - the only things keeping phonetic alphabets alive right now are the millions of keyboards (both physical and digital) tethered to our computing devices. This silly mechanism of 104 (or so) buttons laid out in a grid is still our most consistent and reliable way of translating our thoughts into digits. Speech recognition is interesting, but most people will be hard-pressed to get over their embarrassment of talking to a machine until there's a strong motivation to do so, or until product designers make our machines resemble cute animals so we can tap into the power of anthropomorphosis. 

Our Central Nervous System Has No Keyboard

If you understand something about McLuhan's theories in the Extensions of Man, then you understand why visual communication is becoming more pervasive in our society - because electric technologies are extensions of our central nervous system. And we experience our reality and interface with our CNS through our senses. 

Writing and other communication systems, successful though they may be, are simply low-fidelity tools that allow us to share what's in our heads with others. I say low-fidelity, because what comes out of our hands when we write is very different from what would come out of our mouths when we speak , and that itself is very different from what would come out of our heads if we were simply to "think" things to each other. In short: there's a huge gap between the thoughts I'm thinking and the words I'm writing right now. It takes a lot of effort to close that gap. And that effort takes a lot of time. And that time represents waste. 

We Waste So Much Time

The implications of this are incredibly important to the practice of collaborative work. When you're trying to build complicated things with lots of people, you spend incredible amounts of time communicating things to those people, arranging for our physical bodies to all be in the same room at the same time to talk over the same things. The communication overhead becomes increasingly high with every body that is added to the project, and especially every body that is added to the project who isn't responsible for DOing anything on it, but has to make a decision about it. 

We've all been there.  You sit in a meeting room and brainstorm a bunch of amazing ideas with some great people - you've got it all on the board, with sketchy scribbles, boxes and arrows flying. You've developed a conceptual model, written in erasable marker ink, that all the participants understand and agree on. You've created a symbology, a visual vocabulary that maps to a problem you're all sharing in your heads. Then you all look at each other and say, "Okay, so who's going to put this into a powerpoint so we can communicate it to XYZ?" 

Then some poor sucker then has to read all of the scribbles and transcribe it into a digital format like a Powerpoint deck. He laboriously draws boxes where a scribbled line was drawn in less than a second. He retypes all of the text, written on the board in less than a minute. The work of honing and crafting and making a PowerPoint or Keynote deck starts. In the end the team spends two weeks creating a 28 page powerpoint deck that represents what a few individuals came up with in less than an hour, but means nothing to the people who were not at the meeting. So things need to be explained, rationalized, defended. Along the way, ideas become stillborn and don't develop. Important ideas get forgotten. People spend enormous amounts of time justifying the time they spent on things. And then they're sent home with Carpal Tunnel syndrome because of all the keystrokes they've performed trying to communicate and justify ideas that they came up with in less than an hour.

Our Problems Can't Afford This Amount of Waste

When you realize that this scenario is one that is repeating itself millions of times over across the planet, you start to get a picture of how much we are wasting. 

Given the promise of the future - of pervasive computing, virtual reality, emergent reality, nanotechnology, all that - when you sit down and look at what we're doing, it seems that we're mostly just wasting time. It's incredible that we get as much done as we do. But think how much more we could get done if we had better interfaces with our global CNS.

If we had a smooth interface with our global CNS (okay, ultimately I'm talking about plugging our heads in, Matrix-style, though it does make me cringe a little :-P ), not only would technology not limit us, but we would be free to develop digital human languages that would mirror thought more closely, and free us from the shackles of linguistic determinism (the idea that the language you speak moulds the way you think).  We could be able to start tapping into the universal grammar dictated by how our brains have developed, to communicate with all humans, and even our machines in a way that minimizes the physical labour of communication and REALLY start to be able to build amazing things. 

And then we'd really be getting somewhere. Until then, I'll do my very best to type as fast as I can, and design projects that emphasize doing over talking about what we're doing.

Lego and Star Wars: Intersecting Design Universes

As my friends and coworkers will attest, I'm a big Lego fan. I love the flexibility that such a simple system enables. I love playing with it. But I also appreciate it as a metaphor.

Another thing I've loved for a long time is the Star Wars universe. Over the years, I've probably bought and played more Star Wars games than any other license.

And you might expect - and you'd be right - that I also love the Lego Star Wars games, which combine my two loves (along with a bunch of hilarious cut scenes).

Aside from the gameplay, what I really really admire, however, is how both Lego and LucasArts have created consistent and complete, fully realized design universes. What's most fascinating about Lego Star Wars (to me) is that it exists at the intersection of those two universes. Looking at that intersection reveals some interesting lessons about the power of pattern languages.

Star Wars

Every Star Wars game i have ever bought fits into the Star Wars universe. The sound of the lasers, the floorplans of the ships, Hoth, etc.. they're all consistently rendered. When I explored Kashyyk in Knights of the Old Republic, it mapped pretty well to my understanding in Lego Star Wars. Snow walkers are pretty much always vulnerable to being tied up by harpoons, no matter what game you play. Star Wars has become so much more than a bunch of movies and merchandise. It has a system. It has rules that you can understand almost innately, and the more you engage with that universe, the better you understand it.

Lego Games

Lego video games are also fully realized universes. For one thing, everything in a Lego game is made of rendered Lego bits, which is itself probably one of the most perfect modular systems ever invented (ok, i'm gushing here, I admit). But pretty much all of the vehicles in Lego video games are also available for purchase in stores. So after playing through the game, I can actually go out and buy, then build, modify and experience an actual model that I first experienced in the virtual world. In Lego Batman, you find yourself in streetscapes populated with Lego models straight out of the Lego City series of models. There are police cars, helicopters, fire trucks, dump trucks, etc. You could actually recreate the entire scenes you just played (although it would be damned expensive).

It's actually quite a bizarre experience when you go into a toy store and you see the exact same police truck model that you have intimate knowledge of from a video game sitting on the shelf. You realize you thought you knew that police truck, but you didn't really know it - because you didn't experience how to build it. I have a feeling that as 3D printers become possible, this bizarre feeling may become more common and real.

The Intersection

Lego and Star Wars are compatible design universes because they are systems designed for complementary things. Lego, essentially, is a system for modeling. Whether it's modeling reality or some science fiction universe, it really doesn't matter. When you think about it, Lego pieces are really just metaphors for matter. All that really matters with Lego, is that the pieces fit and follow the logic of the system.

Star Wars is a universe that is designed to provide a stageset, backdrop and actors for telling stories. Whether those stories are told in Lego, TV, movies, plastic toys or life-size costumes, it doesn't really matter. All that matters is staying true to the story.

The Point

When you're looking at creating something, you can do a lot worse than looking at to Lego and Star Wars for inspiration for developing a consistent design system. As you're creating the system, ask yourself "Is this system logical? Does it make sense? Can it be extended? Could it be combined with other systems?" Although the Lego and Star Wars universes were created to serve different ultimate purposes, they're both compatible, and, indeed, by combining the two systems, each one extends its reach and power - Lego extending into a fantastic universe and multibillion dollar franchise, Star Wars extending into the hands of children and grown lego afficionados like myself.