My whole "business model is the grid" writing project is suffering because recent events show that designers are lucky if they are working in support of anything like a coherent business model.

Unhinged financialization means the investor story is everything. As @edzitron put it in his recent newsletter:

"Salesforce’s leaders…don’t even need to run their company well - they just need to both keep revenue numbers on an upward trajectory and keep the stock market believing that they’re continually entering new markets".

How to reframe "ROI of design" really needs a whole post, but I have a half pot of coffee left so I'll take a crack at it here.

Design is applied intention, so this phrase posits the ability to calculate the marginal value of intention, which is impossible…

https://twitter.com/jasonober/status/1591874591550738432

In a business context, "design" is often the name for an approach to a set of choices that it hasn't occurred to anyone to make intentionally because "that's just the way things are done", or that haven't been possible to make intentionally prior to this moment.

If you wake up every morning thinking “why are humans like that?” Like I do.

Enjoy this history of anti-vax movements from 2018:

historyofvaccines.org/index.php/cont… "Many people objected to [smallpox] vaccination because they believed it violated their personal liberty, a tension that worsened as the government developed mandatory vaccine policies."

None of this is new, which is why it's so irritating that the communication is such a mess.

As a member of that tragic class of people with Feelings about changes to Disneyland, I am bummed they're ditching the Fast Passes, a well-designed system.

Collecting passes was a fun game, and giving or receiving extras from other guests a really neat spontaneous interaction. The surcharge is shitty and I am getting resentful that everything in life requires my iPhone.

On the other hand, hooray for (finally) ditching (some of) the racist stories and characters on the rides.

Today's lesson in "asking questions is great":

Where did that 80s geometric design trend start, anyway?

Inspired by:

creepycompany.com/collections/bu… Turns out there is an answer.

The Memphis Group, also known as Memphis Milano, was an Italian design and architecture group founded by Ettore Sottsass.

This is the Carlton room divider from 1981

So I would never ever put it on a resume, but googling is a skill. A lot of people are bad at it, and I am the best at it.

https://twitter.com/CatMcGeeCode/status/1418592423865950212

I am trying to think how I would characterize the skill. I think it's connected to being a lazy, confident, generalist.

Good collaboration and information exchange don't just happen. Internal communication is interaction design. Someone needs to be responsible for it. Goals and standards need to be explicit.

Especially now that work crosses time zones in a choice of 10,000 potential channels. This is a known thing. Conway's Law dates to 1967. Organizations and their output succeed or struggle based on the quality of their internal communication.

And yet, it usually falls on particularly attentive and empowered individual managers to deal with this.

In honor of 45 getting the boot, we’re watching Escape From New York. “in the name of the workers and all the oppressed of this imperialist country, we have struck a fatal blow to the racist police state!”

Huh.

If you have people in your lives—close friends and family—who have been influenced by disinformation, do not argue with them. It will not work.

If you do want to make that person a deprogramming project, step 1 is to establish rapport and trust. Step 0, of course is to accept that it's a long game to try to counter months or years of messages and social reinforcement that have a lot of money and power behind them.

Everyone hyped on surveys or polling should actually read Rensis Likert's PhD dissertation in which he describes the method we've reduced to "the Likert scale".

Here, I googled it for you:
legacy.voteview.com/pdf/Likert_193… Oh, I should add content warning: racism.

Not his so much as the attitudes he is studying—although he does use the 1932 vernacular.

Fun anecdote.

One time I was running a remote presentation of discovery findings to a client.

Without warning the CEO had added two colleagues (buddies) to the call at the last minute. They didn't hang out and listen.

Oh no. They were just complete jerks, challenging everything from out of left field.

I googled them afterwards. Turns out they were GOP pollsters. I think one of them had been indicted for something.

If I could change ONE thing about how everyone doing "creative problem solving" worked, it would be to stop brainstorming ideas and start brainstorming questions.

Brainstorming and ranking ideas is the worst and it puts team members in competition with each other to look smart. But if you get everyone in a room (virtual or otherwise) and say "OK, what are all the things we're assuming or simply lack information about?" and then "Which of these areas of ignorance are highest priority?" that is both immensely useful and enhances collaboration.

Marine biology fun fact of the day:

Moray eels have pharyngeal jaws, much like the Alien xenomorph.

"Moray eels are the only known animals that use pharyngeal jaws to actively capture and restrain prey in this way" Additional moray eel fun facts:

Groupers swim up to moray eels and shake their heads to say "Hey pal, let's go hunting!"

nationalgeographic.com/science/phenom…

The missing role at most organizations is a communication/collaboration facilitator—a person to help create intentionally humane and effective communication protocols.

So much of work is communication in many modes and channels. And it's really really hard to get right. IT picks software tools. Facilities runs meeting rooms (in the before).

No one thinks about how to orchestrate the most functional communication among various roles/tasks/etc. People just treat it like something that everyone knows how to do well.

I ended up with my subspeciality in design research because the most critical problem in the design of any policy, product, or complex system is that humans have a tough time with critical thinking and evidence-based decision-making. IMO you can't claim to be doing human-centered design or care about human-computer interaction if you don't take as table stakes that humans are shitty decision-makers who will ignore evidence in the face of hierarchy and in-group/out-group status concerns.

Let's talk about being metrics-driven. If you are focused on metrics rather than learning or outcomes, you risk extreme tunnel vision. I mean for any of us who grew up in the US and went to college, our education and capacity to learn was reduced to GPAs and board scores that determined our fates at a tender age, so it isn't surprising this mindset is appealing to any manager who did well by those numbers.

Welcome to Sunday morning coffee thoughts.

Today: what if uncritical infatuation with the Bauhaus is contributing to the inability of some designers to engage with the underlying social and economic implications of their work? "The Bauhaus is an answer to the question: How can the artist be trained to take his place in the machine age."
—1938 MOMA retrospective catalog

Substitute internet age for machine age and that's an appealing framing for anyone looking to reconcile style, craft, and scale.

If the facts are on your side, you often have to work many times as hard to be understood and believed by the people you most need to convince.

This is a truth that people with facts on their side tend to resist. If you're a designer, you're a researcher. Asking and answering questions, gathering and critically evaluating evidence, are all part of the job.

If you're in research, you are also in sales.

OK, I was serious asking about Design Thinking.

If you could get your leadership to understand one thing about what it takes to do good design, what would it be?

You can DM me something to tweet, if you'd like to remain anonymous. From the DMs:

"You have to fundamentally change the way you build products to incorporate design. You can't tack design on to business as usual and expect it to be successful."

Hey, let's talk about conversational design.

I was so excited to find Hugh Dubberly and Paul Pangaro's article on cybernetics and design earlier this week because it so cogently connects so many of the things I've been thinking about.

dubberly.com/articles/cyber… On the one hand I wish I'd rediscovered cybernetics while I was working on my book Conversational Design, and on the other—well, these are meant to be very short, practical books and my editors already had their work trimming my tangents cut out for them.

The modern field of design doesn't exist yet.

In most cases design is taught like a trade without the standards or labor protections of a trade.

The job carries the ethical responsibilities of a profession, but is practiced without qualifications. Theory is largely absent and where it does exist, it's tied to a past practice.

Design might be taught in any of the following departments: Art, Engineering, Business, Graphic Design, New Media, and more!