The common theme for my weekend seems to have been phase transitions.
Firstly I got hooked on this dynamic traffic simulation. I wasted an inordinate amount of time trying to discover tipping points for traffic jams.
I blame Mat Webb’s Interconnected, which also led me here. And in particular here. The theme was set.
Next up, I spent the afternoon in East London watching West Ham take on Manchester City in the FA Cup. It ended up being a pretty drab affair, largely because it lacked any creative players (or at least creative play). With no player willing or able to inject anything extraordinary, the match became disappointingly stale and predictable. What I and thirty three thousand other spectators really needed was something to subvert the unimaginative patterns the game had fallen in to. Someone or something that could move it towards a critical point. This proved to be wishful thinking on my part and the game ended as it began: nil nil.
To give all this pretentious nonsense some context, I should probably mention that I’m currently reading Philip Ball’s Critical Mass. I’ve just got to the part in which Ball explains that phase transitions can be considered generic phenomena:
“It is surprising enough that two different fluids, such as carbon dioxide or methane, which have quite different critical temperatures, should approach their critical points at the same relative (that is, percentage) terms. It is baffling that two wholly different kinds of system – a fluid and a magnet – also display this universality. What this suggests is that phase transitions are generic phenomena: they happen in the same way for a wide range of apparently different systems.
So why not traffic and football? In fact, Ball ends up drawing one such parallel:
“Every traffic jam involves a different set of vehicles and circumstances, but there are features that are common to them all.”
I read this on Sunday night and so brought an end to my weekend of (seeing) phase transitions (where there were none).
Really enjoyed Kevin Mitchell’s article on Ricky Hatton in this month’s Sport Monthly. Fantastic sports journalism.
“To watch Hatton hone his skills is to understand not just the unglamorous agony of boxing but the finely tuned mechanics of the art. For minutes on end, he will stay transfixed on the target, lungs sucking at the stale air as he props forward at 80 degrees or so to the horizontal. He is prevented from toppling over not just by his proximity to the bag, which weighs about 100lb, but by an invisible force: his own certainty of where his feet and body should be. His footwork is neat, nimble. His shoulders roll and ripple. He never strays out of position, shifting to the rhythm of the smoothly swaying weight, right to left then back again, over and over, his wicked punches carving craters in the worn leather. Above the revved-up music that bounces off the grimy walls, you can hear the spare air hissing out through gaps in the stitching. You would not want to be a big brown bag in Manchester.”
Kevin Mitchell, Local Hero
“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”
Jamie Zawinski
There’s a fascinating conversation over on the Adaptive Path website between Henning Fischer and Chris Conley from Gravity Tank. The dialogue focuses on the challenges around fostering creative culture within an organisation.
In the same way that Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk highlights prevailing attitudes to creativity in education, Fisher and Conely seem uniquely placed to reveal similar patterns within ‘design’.
I particularly like Henning Fischer’s reference to ‘creative stagnation’ at Motorola:
“Does survivorship bias contribute to creative stagnation? To me there seems to be an almost reactionary thing going on. Organizations will break new ground, and then do almost everything they can to stop and consolidate that position and maximize returns. Motorola did that with the Razr and look where it got them. Before long, the organization realizes that it needs to recapture its creative voice and so begins the endless back and forth between breaking into new territory and holding your hard earned ground.”
“Every time I sit down with a finely crafted title such as Tetris or Super Mario Brothers, I catch hints of a concise and clearly defined structure behind the gameplay. It is my belief that a highly mechanical and predictable heart, built on the foundation of basic human psychology, beats at the core of every single successful game.”
Daniel Cook, The Chemistry Of Game Design
P.S. this is a highly recommended article for anyone interested in the science of play.
“Players seeking to advance in a game will always try to optimize what they are doing.
If they are clever and see an optimal path—an Alexandrine solution to a Gordian problem—they’ll do that instead of the ‘intended gameplay.’
They will try to make the gameplay as as predictable as possible.
Which then means it becomes boring, and not fun.
In the real world, we call this ‘security’ and ‘steady jobs’ and ‘sensible shoes’ and ‘routine.’
Call it a treadmill, if you want.”
Raph Koster (via Kars)
When asked what personal qualities make a good interaction designer, Larry Tesler highlighted humility:
“Enough confidence to believe you can solve any design problem and enough humility to understand that most of your ideas are probably bad. Enough humility to listen to ideas from other people that may be better than your own and enough confidence to understand that going with other people’s ideas does not diminish your value as a designer.”
Larry Tesler, Vice President of the User Experience and Design group, Yahoo in Dan Saffer’s Designing for Interaction.
“Starbucks is selling a public gathering place. Coffee is the enabling mechanism.”
Jim Kunstler
“…watching a tool in use is the same as observing a conversation. everything, in a sense, has its inputs and outputs. From that point of view, the boundary between “interactive” and “noninteractive” tools start to dissolve.
Interaction design is largely about the meaning that people assign to things and events, and how people try to express meanings. So to learn from any tool, interactive or not, go watch people using it. You’ll hear them talk to the tool. You’ll see them assign all sorts of surprising interpretations to shapes, colors, positions, dings, dents and behaviors. You’ll see them fall in love with a thing as it becomes elegantly worn. You’ll see them come to hate a thing and choose to ignore it, sell it, or even smash it. And I guarantee you won’t have to do much of this before you encounter someone who makes a mental mapping you would never dream possible. And you’ll learn from that.
I’ve been using tea kettles as an example in some of my teaching, because on the one hand kettles are so familiar to us, and they’re only interactive in a borderline, predictable, mechanical sort of a way. But once you start to examine the meanings involved with kettles in use, you realize they have things to say that people would love to know, but most designs allow them to be said. “I’m getting hot, but I have no water in me.” “My water is a good temperature for a child’s cocoa.” “I’m too hot to touch.” “I need to be cleaned.” And so on.
Marc Rettig, Founding Principal, Fit Associates in Dan Saffer’s Designing for Interaction
Paul drew my attention to the terms of use on Facebook:
“When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.”
Facebook
A little excessive perhaps?