We don't want people to remember their interactions with Facebook

Facebook is playing a different design game than the rest of Silicon Valley. Instead of obsessing about making tasks like posting a photo easier or making the interface more beautiful, Facebook is getting its product out of the way. The goal, explains Cox, is to "make the experience of using Facebook as seamless and easy as talking to people in real life." That sounds like the absence of design, but the simplicity of the look and the reach of the service has attracted top designers....
"The biggest thing that's different is that Facebook is not about human-computer interaction," says Cox. Most designers in the computer industry have focused on helping humans interact with machines. But Facebook is about human-to-human interaction. "We don't want people to remember their interactions with Facebook," says director of design Kate Aronowitz. "We want them to remember their interactions with their friends and family." Cox calls this "social design"....

E. B. Boyd, "The Design of Happiness: Why design is the secret engine of the social network," Fast Company, Mar 2012,
www.fastcompany.com/magazine/164/designing-facebook.

“Can you imagine looking at that every day? It’s not just a little thing. It’s something we have to do right.”

I’ll know it when I see it. That was Jobs’s credo, and until he saw it his perfectionism kept him on edge. He looked at the title bars—the headers that run across the top of windows and documents—that his team of software developers had designed for the original Macintosh and decided he didn’t like them. He forced the developers to do another version, and then another, about twenty iterations in all, insisting on one tiny tweak after another, and when the developers protested that they had better things to do he shouted, “Can you imagine looking at that every day? It’s not just a little thing. It’s something we have to do right.”

Malcolm Gladwell, "The Tweaker: The real genius of Steve Jobs," The New Yorker, 14 Nov 2011, www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell,
via Sam Grigg.

Jony Ive on Design at Apple

Q: What makes design different at Apple?
A: We struggle with the right words to describe the design process at Apple, but it is very much about designing and prototyping and making. When you separate those, I think the final result suffers. If something is going to be better, it is new, and if it’s new you are confronting problems and challenges you don’t have references for. To solve and address those requires a remarkable focus. There’s a sense of being inquisitive and optimistic, and you don’t see those in combination very often.

Q: How does a new product come about at Apple?
A: What I love about the creative process, and this may sound naive, but it is this idea that one day there is no idea, and no solution, but then the next day there is an idea. I find that incredibly exciting and conceptually actually remarkable.
The nature of having ideas and creativity is incredibly inspiring. There is an idea which is solitary, fragile and tentative and doesn’t have form.
What we’ve found here is that it then becomes a conversation, although remains very fragile.
When you see the most dramatic shift is when you transition from an abstract idea to a slightly more material conversation. But when you
made a 3D model, however crude, you bring form to a nebulous idea, and everything changes - the entire process shifts. It galvanises and brings focus from a broad group of people. It’s a remarkable process.

Q: What makes a great designer?
A: It is so important to be light on your feet, inquisitive and interested in being wrong. You have that wonderful fascination with the what if questions, but you also need absolute focus and a keen insight into the context and what is important - that is really terribly important. Its about contradictions you have to navigate.

Mark Prigg, "Sir Jonathan Ive: The iMan cometh," London Evening Standard, 12 Mar 2012,
www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/sir-jonathan-ive-the-iman-cometh-7562170.html via Core 77.

"Never delegate understanding."

"Never delegate understanding." - Charles Eames

14:20 into the documentary Eames: The Architect and the Painter, 2011.
The whole documentry can be viewed on Netflix and on PBS.
www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/charles-ray-eames-the-architect-and-the-painter/watch-the-full-documentary-film/1950/
An additional source for the quote is this TED talk:
www.ted.com/talks/the_design_genius_of_charles_and_ray_eames.html.

PR - Doing good and getting credit

A PR guy I know once gave me the following shorthand definition of his craft: Doing good and getting credit. Companies need to remember that. They need to be honest, make their messages clear, and tell their stories over and over. When they make mistakes, they must admit it and correct them as quickly as possible. When they do good, they should take credit. Above all, they can’t do stupid things. As the TSA has learned, that can put you back to square one.

Harold L. Sirkin, "Don't Do TSA-Style Public Relations," Businessweek, 6 Dec 2011,
www.businessweek.com/management/dont-do-tsastyle-public-relations-12062011.html.

Empathy

“If you can’t empathize with others,” John Seely Brown says, “it’s very hard to solve their problems.”

Brad Stone, "It's Always Sunny in Silicon Valley," Businessweek, 22 Dec 2011,
www.businessweek.com/magazine/its-always-sunny-in-silicon-valley-12222011.html.

frivolous, even self-indulgent

One of the great but often unmentioned causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment: The kinds of walls, chairs, buildings and streets that surround us.
And yet a concern for architecture and design is too often described as frivolous, even self-indulgent. ...

Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness, Pantheon Books, New York, 2006, inside front cover,
www.alaindebotton.com/architecture.asp.

Design is a culmination

When you sit down to design something, it can be anything, it can be a car, a toaster, a house, a tall building or a shoe, what you draw or what you design is really a culmination of everything that you’ve seen and done in your life previous to that point.

Tinker Hatfield, Nike Designer in Birth of the Nike Air Max 1, Devour.com, via Tadd Giles and Rich Goade.

maybe stories are just data with a soul

A few gems from an insightful talk:

...I collect stories; that's what I do. And maybe stories are just data with a soul.

... one of the big sayings in social work is lean into the discomfort of the work. And I'm like, knock discomfort upside the head and move it over and get all A's.

....

So where I started was with connection. Because, by the time you're a social worker for 10 years, what you realize is that connection is why we're here. It's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. This is what it's all about. It doesn't matter whether you talk to people who work in social justice and mental health and abuse and neglect, what we know is that connection, the ability to feel connected, is --neurobiologically that's how we're wired -- it's why we're here. So I thought, you know what, I'm going to start with connection. Well you know that situation where you get an evaluation from your boss, and she tells you 37 things you do really awesome, and one thing -- an opportunity for growth? (Laughter) And all you can think about is that opportunity for growth, right. Well apparently this is the way my work went as well, because, when you ask people about love, they tell you about heartbreak. When you ask people about belonging, they'll tell you their most excruciating experiences of being excluded. And when you ask people about connection, the stories they told me were about disconnection.

So very quickly -- really about six weeks into this research -- I ran into this unnamed thing that absolutely unraveled connection in a way that I didn't understand or had never seen. And so I pulled back out of the research and thought, I need to figure out what this is. And it turned out to be shame. And shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection. Is there something about me that, if other people know it or see it, that I won't be worthy of connection. The things I can tell you about it: it's universal; we all have it. The only people who don't experience shame have no capacity for human empathy or connection. No one wants to talk about it, and the less you talk about it the more you have it. What underpinned this shame, this "I'm not good enough," -- which we all know that feeling: "I'm not blank enough. I'm not thin enough, rich enough, beautiful enough, smart enough, promoted enough." The thing that underpinned this was excruciating vulnerability,this idea of, in order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen.

....

What do these people have in common? I have a slight office supply addiction, but that's another talk. So I had a manila folder, and I had a Sharpie, and I was like, what am I going to call this research? And the first words that came to my mind were whole-hearted. These are whole-hearted people, living from this deep sense of worthiness. So I wrote at the top of the manila folder, and I started looking at the data. In fact, I did it first in a four-day very intensive data analysis, where I went back, pulled these interviews, pulled the stories, pulled the incidents. What's the theme? What's the pattern? My husband left town with the kids because I always go into this Jackson Pollock crazy thing, where I'm just like writing and in my researcher mode. And so here's what I found. What they had in common was a sense of courage. And I want to separate courage and bravery for you for a minute. Courage, the original definition of courage when it first came into the English language -- it's from the Latin word cor, meaning heart -- and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. And so these folks had, very simply, the courage to be imperfect. They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because, as it turns out, we can't practice compassion with other people if we can't treat ourselves kindly. And the last was they had connection, and -- this was the hard part -- as a result of authenticity, they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were, which you have to absolutely do that for connection.

The other thing that they had in common was this. They fully embraced vulnerability. They believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful. They didn't talk about vulnerability being comfortable, nor did they talk about it being excruciating -- as I had heard it earlier in the shame interviewing. They just talked about it being necessary. They talked about the willingness to say "I love you" first, the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees, the willingness to breathe through waiting for the doctor to call after your mammogram. They're willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out. They thought this was fundamental.

Brene Brown, "The power of vulnerability,"TEDxHouston, Jun 2010, www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html via Sarah.

creative tension

During Jobs' last absence, this person says, the creative tension disappeared, replaced by a play-it-safe ethos. The unavoidable fact is that lots of people can manage the company. Only Steve Jobs could have had the visionary spirit—and risk tolerance—to turn Apple into a mobile phone company.

Brad Stone and Peter Burrow, "Apple, With or Without Steve Jobs," BusinessWeek, 19 Jan 2011, www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_05/b4213006664366.htm.