Design and Architecture

April 8, 2009 By

This is a modern nail clipper. It was invented, it appears, by Chapel Carter in 1896. Ask yourself, which elements of this object reflect design, and which elements represent architecture. I am going to offer a fairly clean distinction for you to ponder, but I’d like you to make up your own mind first. You don’t have to be a mechanical engineer or any sort of engineer, architect, artist or designer to answer. Just go with your intuitive sense of those terms, and apply them. These ideas also apply to organizational and social design and architecture.

fingernail_clippers

This piece grew out of an interesting bit of crossfire on Twitter a few days ago. It began when I said:

“Am realizing I enjoy design, but not architecture. Design is the ‘play’ subset of ‘architecture.'”

This provoked an instant response from @jrdotcom, a  software guy I know:

@vgr In software, there is no difference between design & architecture. They are just words that non-programmers have invented.

After a bit of back and forth thesis-antithesis, another guy I know, @jbsil01, also a software guy, offered a partial synthesis:

@vgr as a programmer, design can mean the same thing as architecture. as a user, architecture should be irrelevant to design.

Reflecting on the exchange, I realized that all three positions bother me. My own remark is too flippant, clearly. But @jrdotcom’s position, that there is no substantive distinction, that this is all pointy-haired-boss-speak, at least in software (and I have heard similar views from other sorts of engineers) is too dismissive of the importance of language. And finally, @jbsil01’s reliance on subjective user experience as a fundamental filter to tease the two apart is too pragmatic and operational. So let’s dig deeper. I’ll frame my discussion in terms of engineering, but this applies, mutatis mutandis to other synthesis fields which mix utilitarian intents with aesthetic ones.

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Fools and their Money Metaphors

March 2, 2009 By

This has always puzzled me: why do people with similar backgrounds and intellects vary so widely in their effectiveness in dealing with money? One guy goes to work straight out of college, saves strategically, quits and starts his own SAP consultancy in 5 years, and is worth a few million by age 30. Another gets an MBA, gets sucked into a high-class lifestyle of expensive suits and dinners, and ends up with a BMW and barely $50,000 saved by age 30. And yet another, for reasons obscure even to himself (ahem!) goes off into a PhD program, and emerges, blinking at the harsh sunlight, at age 30, with exactly $0. Last weekend, I finally began to understand. Here is the secret: depending on your direct experience of the money you manage, you think about it with different metaphors. Your metaphors, not your financial or mathematical acumen, determine the outcome of your dealings with money.

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The Solemn Whimsies of Larry Morris

February 21, 2009 By

I haven’t done a blog post about art since I wrote about Amy Lin’s “Dot Art.” I stumbled upon Larry Morris’ metal sculptures at the same place, the Torpedo Factory in Old Town, Alexandria. Here is an example, titled “Meditation.”

lmorrismeditation

"Meditation" by Larry Morris (used with permission)

So what’s interesting about this sculpture, other than the fact that it instantly brings a smile to your face? Where Amy’s art is inspired Outsider Art, Morris’ is clearly a good deal more informed by the mainstream art world, and admits a lot more interpretation. Pondering Morris’ pieces led me to an interesting idea I call “solemn whimsy.”  The pieces may look like sculptural gags welded with a straight face, but you can definitely find more than just laughs in his pieces. Once I had the solemn whimsy concept clarified in my head, one other good example occurred to me: Demetri Martin’s new sketch comedy show, Important Things (brilliant, but uneven).

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Health and the Happy Hamster

February 10, 2009 By

Two months into my new work-from-home lifestyle, it hit me: having my elliptical machine right in my office is not making it easier to be healthy. It is just locking me more securely into an approach to health that does not work.  Like Robin Williams, I feel exactly like a caged hamster. One particularly lousy-body-day a couple of weeks ago, watching the Discovery channel for inspiration, realization dawned: we are an ape species that evolved into perfection outwitting and killing huge mammoths. And then we got too clever for our own good and turned ourselves into caged hamsters.  Thinking got us into this mess, and only thinking can get us out. Hamsters of the world, follow me to freedom. I don’t have my blockbuster fitness DVD idea yet, but I’ve got a few attitude-fixing principles that I’ve been trying out, and they seem to be working.

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Enculturation Recapitulates Civilization

January 23, 2009 By

When I was a kid, we lived in a big, drafty bungalow-style house, verandas, mango trees and all. The dining room floor was some sort of dull red matte-like surface. It worked perfectly as a chalkboard. I would frequently cover the entire floor with chalk drawings. It strikes me that the way I drew back then was rather caveman-like. Atavistic mixes of symbols, metaphors and icons. Here’s a scene I drew frequently. Not quite a buffalo hunt.

scene

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How to Make New Year’s Calibrations

December 15, 2008 By

You read that right. Calibrations, not resolutions. Until you know a) exactly where you are, b) where you are already going, b) with how much momentum, c) and how much discretionary steering authority, resolutions are just rituals. For New Year’s party drunkards. You, of course, are a paragon of follow-through, but forward this to all those friends of yours who clearly need help. It’s an illustrated five-step program. If you start right now, you might actually be ready to make real resolutions by first-drink-time on December 31st.

Step 1: Calibrate PERSPECTIVE

Resolutions are supposed to be significant, even lofty, life-course-changing intentions. The only way you’ll know what counts as significant for you is to look back as far as you can, until your memories vanish into the foggy cloud of babyhood. For me, that means late 1974 foggily, late 1975 practically.

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Brain Rules by John Medina

December 3, 2008 By

If you read only two books about the brain, Medina’s Brain Rules should probably be your second one (thanks Kapsio, for the recommendation), after Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. If you’ve been reading this blog for more than a few months, you might remember a post I did nearly a year ago called The Broken Brain Books. Let me repeat the quote from Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open that I used to start that post:

…while it is interesting to find out [the] exact addresses [of brain functions], that information is ultimately unsatisfying. Call it the “neuromap fallacy.” If neuroscience turns out to be mostly good at telling us the location of the “food craving center” or the “jealousy” center,” then it will be of limited relevance to ordinary people seeking a new kind of self-awareness — because learning where jealousy lives in your head doesn’t make you understand the emotion any more clearly. Those neuromaps will be of great interest to scientists of course, and doctors. But to the layperson, they will be little more than trivia.

By this critique (which I wholeheartedly agree with), most ‘brain’ books are a big waste of trees. Medina, thankfully, avoids this trap, and doesn’t even mention fMRIs till fairly late into the book, and when he does, he steps away lightly from pointless fMRI-pornography. That leaves us with 12 brain rules, each of which gets a chapter. The chapter on short-term memory for instance, is titled “repeat to remember.” Well Duh! you might say. Fortunately, there are deeper insights buried within. Despite appearances, the book isn’t an exercise in providing unnecessary proofs for folk-tautologies.

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The Headcount Myth and the Value of Overbooking

October 7, 2008 By

Fourth quarter, when a young information worker’s thoughts turn lightly to thoughts of headcount. I’ve argued before that the idea that headcount (a.k.a HC in managerese) measures information worker bandwidth is a myth. The interplay of strengths and the ambiguity of definition of information work conspire to make it so. Headcount persists as a fixture in resourcing discussions because it signals relative priorities (and because we haven’t found anything better). So far. Here I’ll argue for a far better way to optimally use human bandwidth: true overbooking via continuous planning, coupled with strategic quitting. First, let’s understand why headcount is a dumb measure of resource capacity and bandwidth, using one of my famous drawings. This one shows how 3 different workers (assume they are equally valuable) might react to 3 different loading conditions, and how much they can drive themselves before it becomes too much and their capacity “overflows.” Think of capacity overflow as “brain muscle failure.”

The Headcount Myth

The Headcount Myth

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Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

September 18, 2008 By

[This detailed, chapter-by-chapter précis of Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions is a guest post by George Gibson, a colleague of mine at Xerox. George originally posted it on our internal blogs as a series, and I found it so much fun to read, I asked if I could repost it on ribbonfarm. So here you go.]

Chapter 1: The Truth About Relativity

This was clearly the most interesting of the books from my summer reading list. Let me be clear that though I don’t buy all of the points Dan tries to make, I find them all interesting and worthy of thought. With any luck we can begin a real discussion of his ideas and observations in the commentary. That means I’ll attempt (not always successfully) to keep my opinion out of the body of this piece, and reserve that for any commentary that might develop. The real point here is to get you interested enough to read the book yourself.

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How to Measure Information Work

September 11, 2008 By

Continuing my exploration of information overload, in this piece, I’ll further develop the argument that it is not the real problem, but a mis-framing of a different problem (call it X) that has nothing to do with “overload” of any sort. Most people who start their thinking with the “information overload” frame look outward at the information coming at them. One aspect of the real problem is terrible feedback control systems for looking inward at your work. On the feedback side of things, we measure capacity for work with the wrong metric (headcount, or in shorthand managerese, “HC”). I’ll explain why HC is terrible at the end of this piece (and I’ve also written a separate article on HC).

So, can you measure information work? Yes. Here is a graph, based on real data, showing the real cumulative quantity of information work in my life during two years and some months of my life, between January 2004 and about March 2006.

Quantity of work over one year

Figure 1: Quantity of work over one year

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