Sort of like the paparazzi, but for smart people.

Kind of fun. I grabbed a text file of “A Tale of Two Cities” and put it into Wordle to generate a Word Usage Cloud of the top 75 words.

WARNING: Not for the faint of heart.

If you want to understand what waterboarding is and how mentally excruciating it is, watch Christopher Hitchens go through the experience for a recent Vanity Fair article. I was watching the video and I thought they were just warming him up. I had no idea that what they were doing was the actual torture until Hitchens caved. Yikes.

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered.

The lunchtime presenter at Seed 3 was Edward Lifson who dropped in to tell us a bit about the building we were in. I’ll admit, I loved the Seed Conference, but Crown Hall was easily one of the largest stars of the day for me. I became an enthusiastic Mies van der Rohe fan while listening to Lifson in this most exquisite setting.

Lifson is most well known for his work on NPR and has reported extensively on architecture, city planning, public art and the like. He also happens to be a huge fan of Mies van der Rohe and lives in van der Rohe’s Lakeshore Drive apartments in Chicago.

Lakeshore Dr. Apartments, Chicago, IL

Crown Hall

Crown Hall is considered one of Mies van der Rohe’s masterworks and he himself was quite pleased with it. When asked about his architecture, the understated Mies stated:

“Many of them turned out as expected but perhaps the best example of what we’re trying to do is Crown Hall.” - Mies van der Rohe

Crown Hall exudes a sense of calm and zen-like tranquility. As light changes outside it can be felt instantaneously throughout the interior. Indeed, as Lifson stood on stage and spoke, he would occasionally stop and marvel at the remarkable setting he was in. He took great care to point out that even his slightly elevated perspective from the podium was causing him to see the building in a new way, and that we were all lucky to be able to see the building so soon after its recent renovation.

Upon the approach to the building there is a sense of ascension into an elevated profession (architecture). The building, thanks to its signature entrance stairs, use of glass, and its hanging ceiling appears to float, a Mies trademark.

The frosted glass around the lower interior windows contributes to this sense of floating as only vague shadows and light from the exterior penetrate inside. When you want to look through clear glass, you’re looking up into the treetops, as if for enlightenment. I can only assume that working inside the building feels quite special. One of the anecdotes Lifson brought up was that our conference was seated right in the same spot that Mies’s architecture students would sit. It was apparently said that students would get up to walk across the hall to ask Mies a question and often figure out the answer for themselves on the way over to his desk.

Crown Hall is about being in space.

“Architecture starts when you put two bricks together.” - Mies van der Rohe

Oddly, I have less notes about Lifson’s presentation than any of the other speakers at the conference. I will say, however, that his enthusiasm and awe left a real indelible impression on me. It made me want to understand more about Mies van der Rohe and spurred me to explore his other buildings during my trip.

330 North Wabash (formerly the IBM Building)

Links:

• Who is Edward Lifson
• “The New Modernist,” Edward Lifson’s Blog

[Disclaimer: What you have read in this post is my recollection and my notes from the event. I make no claims to 100% transcription accuracy and if I botched something, I'm happy to fix it - just drop me a comment.]

It’s amazing how much marvelousness we humans miss while focused on our daily routines. This is why it’s always so heartening when somebody does pay attention and discovers something noteworthy like how you can study sunspots from inside New York’s Grand Central terminal.

The southern wall of the Grand Concourse, facing 42nd Street, has semicircular grills high up, with small curlicued spaces like those in a leafy tree. Many of those spaces act like the aperture of a pinhole camera, reflecting an image of the sun that, when it reaches the floor, will be 8 to 12 inches wide. The smaller grill spaces will produce dimmer but sharper solar images on your paper.

It’s a huge shock, I know, but Cheney’s Chief of Staff is a royal d%@&!

Addington went on to explain how the enemy’s actions — “smoke was still rising. . . . 3,000 Americans were just killed” — justified his legal reasoning. And he showed abundant disdain for dissenters, such as Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.), who asked whether Addington consulted lawmakers about anti-torture statutes. “There is no reason their opinion on that would be relevant,” he answered.

[via The Morning News]

Jason Fried decided to part with the “Getting Real” presentations he’s been giving for a while and focused on why the details matter and how 37signals thinks about the details of their products. His talk was sprinkled with tons of application demonstrations and interface development experience.

Fried started with a high level discussion on the building Seed 3 was being held in, S. R. Crown Hall, by Mies van der Rohe. This building is a great example of how paying attention to details yields a product beyond the base components. You can feel the details before you even see them. For instance, one of the things that Crown Hall is most well known for is its floating ceiling, something you don’t necessarily catch when you walk through the door - it’s too subtle for that. It’s only upon deeper reflection and analysis that you see the thought behind the design; you notice the gap between the edges of the ceiling and the windows running the entire perimeter of the building. Van der Rohe really wanted a feeling of floating to permeate the space and it does. Light changes moment to moment, altering the entire mood of the interior. The roof is suspended from the building frame above. None of the interior walls or posts are structural.

Also noteworthy, in Crown Hall, is the alignment of all the building materials - the roof tiles line up with the floor tiles, which line up with the building frame and windows. Everything is perfect. Even smaller things, like the sprinkler system, are made to fit within the overall design concept, they’re not afterthoughts.

These observations are what led Fried into discussing the development of software. One of the nice benefits to working in software, rather than building masterworks of architecture, is that you can build and tweak iteratively and quickly at very low cost. For Fried’s software, “building IS designing.”

37signals tends to use pretty low resolution designs. In fact, if it can’t be drawn with a sharpie, they feel there is too much detail. It’s only by building in this way that you end up focusing on actual user experiences with your applications rather than thinking in terms of artsy screens. The products 37signals builds try to think through people actually using them for repetitive workflows. For instance, task entry using Ta-Da Lists is as simple as title -> return -> task -> return -> task …

Writing copy

At 37signals, they consider copy to be part of the design and not just a means of explaining their product. When you write copy, “it has to make sense to read out loud,” says Fried. Explain your features in ways that your audience will understand, not in techno-babble.

“If you wouldn’t say something in conversation, don’t say it in your app.” - Jason Fried, 37signals

Make your app have “photographic memory”

One of the other UI concepts expressed in Fried’s talk was about remembering what your users are doing so that you can make it easier for them to repeat it. User preferences are a horrible way of doing this. It’s much better to look at what your users are doing and have the application be smart enough to guess it the next time.

An example of this in action would be adding tasks to a to-do list. If you have multiple to-do lists, it’s not a good idea to have a default list and then require customers to always move items from that list to other lists. Instead, have the application be mart enough to know which list a task was added to and remember that to suggest the next time the user adds a task. Chances are good that your users are repeating tasks if they’re using your application - they’re in a particular mode and it’s best not to break their concentration.

Time is the new vector of interface design

How you time activities that occur on your site and in your application has an enormous impact on how responsive and intuitive your application feels to users. If a user deletes an item from a list and the object just disappears or the page refreshes the page, this time without the item, it might be difficult for the user to figure out what happened. If you instead, show the deleted item fading out over the course of a quarter second and then the items below it sliding up the list to replace it, you’ve done something more visually intuitive and noteworthy while making the user more comfortable the action they just completed.

Other Jason Fried:

• BusinessPOV Video from June 2008: Jason Fried explaining how his work is like that of a museum curator or a chef with a request to add bananas to his lasagna.
• BusinessPOV Video from April 2007: Jason explains how 37signals builds software with tiny decisions.

[Disclaimer: What you have read in this post is my recollection and my notes from the event. I make no claims to 100% transcription accuracy and if I botched something, I'm happy to fix it - just drop me a comment.]

Japan has a new health-care initiative that involves measuring the waistlines of all company and government employees. Men with waistlines over 33.5 inches and women with waistlines over 35.5 inches are considered overweight and subject their employers to penalties and fines.

These new guidelines affect 44% of the Japanese population. The goal of this initiative is to reduce the overweight population of Japan by 10% over the next 4 years and 25% over the next 7 years.

I can see how reaction to these measures is split amongst people who feel that this is trampling their personal freedoms and those who applaud a course correction that will force employers to think about the physical activity and diets of their employees - a decision which impacts usage of the medical system, insurance, etc. From a pure economics standpoint, I’d prefer a system which rewards employers for advocating healthy-minded decisions as opposed to penalizing them for poor ones. For instance, offering well-balanced meals in the cafeteria should be applauded and promoted rather than penalizing the offering of burgers and fries, etc. Perhaps I’m too optimistic about behavior though. My concern with the Japan approach is that it could keep overweight people from getting jobs in the first place as employers may not want to hire somebody that they’ll be fined for.

[via Money Morning]

I’ve always loved this poem and now I’ll have a beat to drop to it.

[via The Elegant Variation]

[click to continue...]

The skinnyCorp Guide to Doing What You Love for a Living
(and whatever else we end up talking about)

The business

The second presentation of the day at Seed was from Jake Nickell and Jeffrey Kalmikoff, who discussed the “perfect storm of awesomeness” known as Threadless. Threadless is basically an online call for t-shirt design submissions where the winning shirts get printed and sold for 1-week on the site. Designers are paid for their winning designs and gain reputation points within the community for influence over future design choices. Actually, the kind of cool thing is that anybody in the community who votes, comments, and purchases from the site, gains influence via reputation scores which feedback into a more loyal customer-base and better product selection. This sort of radically open feedback loop is known as “crowdsourcing.”

How it works

“Crowdsourcing is not a business plug-in, IT IS THE BUSINESS. Crowdsourcing means the CEO no longer has control.” - paraphrased from Nickell and Kalmikoff

The 4 laws of crowdsourcing, as proposed by Nickell and Kalmikoff are as follows:

1. Allow your content to be created by its community
2. Put your project in the hands of its community
3. Let your community grow itself (but nurture the growth)
4. Reward the community that makes your project possible

Picking your passion and what I’ll take away from this presentation

“Find your own perfect storm. Ride the excitening” - Nickell and Kalmikoff

Veering into a a hilarious vignette, Nickel and Kalmikoff spent a little time talking about tote bags. Many people have suggested that Threadless is the perfect solution for the custom-printing of tote. Why not just reproduce the community tools, fire up the crowdsourcing, and start making money hand over fist on tote bags? Because Nickell and Kalmikoff can’t get excited about tote bags. Please don’t suggest that they make tote bags. There’s obviously a huge opportunity in tote bags. You should go make tote bags.

Here is why they say you should pick something where you have passion, and not just where you see a business opportunity:

1. Passion inspires trust
2. Work harder (in a good way)
3. Be more inspired
4. Failure is less sucky

After talking about crowdsourcing and following your passions, the guys switched over into question and answer mode. What I found particularly interesting was where crowdsourcing didn’t tend to work and how there was still some amount of moderation and control that was required on behalf of the head guys at Threadless. Basically, the voters don’t determine 100% of the designs that get chosen. This is because the when voters determine the entire content, it tends to echo. The head guys are always using the crowd as their first filter but they ultimately select t-shirts that they’d buy and they weigh the votes of other members who have also bought more heavily.

Something else I thought was really cool was how reactive Threadless is in their business. They don’t do practically anything - in fact, they’re inherantly lazy - unless the demand for it is fairly obvious, where the method of doing things is just causing too much pain. For example, Threadless was getting to a point where they were buying out a color t-shirt from Fruit of the Loom for the year, for the entire world. Rather than be beholden to a single supplier, they decided to get into the t-shirt production business on their own.

“You’ll know that you’re at a growing point when shit just goes crazy.”

The last thing that they went over was the need to be patient. In the beginning, Threadless was really just a hobby. Success did not come over night but through a long series of tweaks with a product that they loved.

[Disclaimer: What you have read in this post is my recollection and my notes from the event. I make no claims to 100% transcription accuracy and if I botched something, I'm happy to fix it - just drop me a comment.]

I went to the Seed 3 Conference in Chicago. This is the first in a series of posts about the presentations I saw there.

Carlos Segura is the founder of Chicago-based Segura Inc and runs a whole host of websites and commercial interests centering around his design expertise and passions. At Seed 3, Carlos took the crowd through a history of his businesses and explained the importance of respecting your audience, picking your clients, and doing work you can be proud of.

On seeing things differently

Carlos started out his talk by showing off some pictures of sewer covers. In New York City, he pointed out that the manhole covers are made in China and India. In Los Angeles, he noticed that they also came from India. In Chicago, they were produced in Mexico. These are the sorts of things he believes are important to notice, the details that slip past casual view.

“Communication that doesn’t take a chance, doesn’t stand a chance.” - Carlos Segura

The Segura Inc. businesses

Carlos is involved in a lot of sites/businesses:

• t26 - a type foundry. On t26, font designers showcase and sell their wares. The site was designed to market the type as well as the designer and early on in its history, they used to create music videos to go along with each font, a nifty idea that helped people understand the attitude and feeling that the write fonts could convey.
• 5inch.com - a site dedicated to CD packaging and printing.
  

  “Delivers the delivery vehicle for CDs.” - Carlos Segura

• CarType - a site for collecting design details (logos, emblems, typography, industrial art) of cars
• Segura Inc. - This is the overarching company and contract design firm. Carlos walked the crowd through various design projects such as working with fashion retailers on tags that live beyond purchase, comic book covers that didn’t look like comics, creating topographical pamphlets and brand identity for Rockshox, and working with Corbis to use their photos to tell stories through imaginative croppings and side by side presentation.

Words to work by: What I took away from this presenter

• “Respect for the audience is what will get you work from clients.” Nobody wants to work with a firm that’s “too cool” for their customers. Treat the customers as special and with respect.
• Similarly, “talk to the audience, not the client.” If the client has an issue, tell them “I’m not designing for you.”
• “Build relationships with clients that choose to listen to you.” Life is far too short to work with people that waste your time or make work feel unrewarding.
• “Be unique with what you’re asked to do.” When clients request your work, give them something more than what they were expecting.
• Only produce things that you can be proud of.
• “We create what we think the client needs (not just what they’re asking for).”
• “Cause and effect. The one choice we have the power to make - what we do with our time - is the choice we fail at most frequently. You have to be willing to accept the byproduct of being fired.”

Additional Stuff:

• BusinessPOV video interview of Carlos Segura out in front of the conference

[Disclaimer: What you have read in this post is my recollection and my notes from the event. I make no claims to 100% transcription accuracy and if I botched something, I'm happy to fix it - just drop me a comment.]