Is this a model of creation? If we make music—primarily the form, at least—to fit these contexts; and if we make art to fit gallery walls; and if we make software to fit existing operating systems: is that how it works? Yeah. I think it’s evolutionary; it’s adaptive. But the pleasure and the passion and the joy is still there.
This is a reverse view of things from the traditional Romantic view. The Romantic view is that first comes the passion, and then they outpouring of emotion, and then somehow it gets shaped into something. And I’m saying well, the passion is still there, but the vessel that it’s going to be injected into and poured into: that is instinctively and intuitively created first. We already know where that passion is going.
When David Byrne started performing music from his CBGB days in Carnegie Hall and Disney Hall, he realized that it didn’t sound as good in these grander venues. He began wondering about how venues shape the music that is performed in them. This utterly fascinating talk on how architecture helped music evolve was the result.
The Open Web Education Alliance (OWEA) is applying for a Shuttleworth Foundation grant. I’m supporting them, and I’d like to encourage you to do the same.
This is about providing a solid, standards-based curriculum that educational institutions can use to prepare students studying web design and development for the realities of the job market. I could go on, but I think Henny Swan does a much better job than I could do in this video:
The first two panelists, Sir Martin Sorrell and Dr Andy Wood, decided to address Corporate Social Responsibility at WPP and Adnams respectively. While interesting and impressive, neither panelist directly addressed the questions of whether or not customers should be nudged.
Fortunately, Dr Sally Uren of Forum for the Future decided to address the question directly. She began by saying that a value-action gap existed. In other words, most consumers care about sustainability, but don’t act on that concern.
She then suggested five steps could be taken to try to close that gap.
Sustainability has to be integrated into the brand. Most consumers take only 45 seconds to decide what they want to buy. They don’t read labels.
The message must be simple. She gave the Ariel Turn to 30 campaign as an example.
People need to feel good about their decisions.
People need to feel that their actions matter. She brought up the recent huge increase in recycling as an example of a lot of small actions affecting a much larger change.
Give feedback.
She concluded that consumers should be nudged, but that behavior change alone wouldn’t be enough. Technological innovation also has a role to play, but is useless unless people start using improved technologies.
While I still have my doubts about nudging, both ethically and in terms of overall effectiveness, I thought her five steps felt somewhat familiar. Much of what she proposed sounds like basic advice for improving the user experience of a website.
The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely…more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian.
…This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It indicates a kind of maturity, an understanding that every future is someone else’s past, every present someone else’s future. Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now.
I find the notion that we slip so easily into the future somehow comforting. It’s less passive than the notion of a disruptive future. The future isn’t something that we sit around and wait for, it’s something we’re responsible for creating and actively choosing on a daily basis. You can complain about not having that jetpack you were promised, but chances are it’s already here.
Look, behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity. So if you see people behaving in new ways, like with Wikipedia and whatnot, it’s very unlikely that their motivations have changed, because human nature doesn’t change that quickly. It’s quite likely that the opportunities have changed.
This was an eye-opener for me. If we really are entering an era in which the role of UX design is to encourage behavior change, then Shirky’s view of behavior is important. The idea that we’re providing opportunities—rather than trying to persuade or seduce—makes a lot of sense to me. It’s a step in the direction of treating people like people rather than users.
