“A friend told me that there is a “Slow Media” movement brewing out there, somewhere or other. The Internet confirms. NO. I only want food to go slow! The growing advance of knowledge, the tantalizing proximity of answers to all our questions, the new ability to share and synthesize our knowledge, almost instantly—we’re so lucky to be experiencing all this. If the price is more anxiety, then let me wind up like the Tasmanian Devil, just a blur of anxiety. Of unbelieveably knowledgeable, totally undeceived anxiety. So what if the Internet has turned each day into a panic-ridden informational hot-dog-eating contest? So what if with the incomparable gift of access to limitless knowledge comes also a little melancholy, and anxiety that waxes sometimes into an Ernest-Beckerish sense of impending doom?”

In Praise of High-Speed Overload

I, Me, Mine

I remember the exact moment my perception of the world switched into “grown-up mode.”

I was a sophomore in college, sitting in class, doing the usual Monday morning catch-up with my classmates. A good friend started talking about a crazy dream she had had the previous night. No specifics were spared: how David Duchovny showed up in a semi-truck, how he was going to drive her to a dentist appointment, how he was wearing a red shirt, and how he had a French accent. It was a quagmire of a conversation. I sat there wondering when it would end, and stupefied with how I got into this spot to begin with.

But then, something scary happened. The projection of judgement hit her and came right back at me. A thought popped into my head. Judgement had been passed. “Oh god,” I thought, “No one cares when I talk about the dreams that I have either.” Value isn’t always mutual in communication.

Adulthood comes with responsibility and empathy. And I realized I had been blowing off something huge: responsibility to an audience. Suddenly, I felt very small as a person, and the parroting about the importance of audience in design school made me realize that maybe these classes might teach me something more valuable than ems and ens, colors and kerning.

I think a lot of us understand the importance of empathy to an audience. But often, we (or at least I) forget to suggest that it is natural and beneficial to impose limits on the scope of the audience. The internet allows us to share everything with everyone. While great most of the time, the ubiquity means we’ll come in contact with things more frequently that are not for us specifically. The scale of sharing on the internet makes us face two scary ideas.

The first is that to do good work, a person will exclude people from a conversation they start. The second is that you yourself will be excluded from something, and by you not being a consideration, the work will be better. Ouch. Both ideas are equally terrifying, because they make me feel small. Just like my revelation on conversations about dreams.

The thoughts are scary because the message is clear: each one of us is not the center of the universe. It’s a trite ideal repeated often by those-who-have-their-act-together to those-who-do-not, but I never really started thinking about how it applies to the idea of audience until recently.

Some people will always misunderstand what a communicator is saying or trying to do. Some people are, irreconcilably, absolutely freaking nuts and want to make everything offensive or dramatic or insulting. On the internet, these folks are called “trolls.” They live in basements, survive on Cheeto dust and are the most reviled passengers on the Good Ship Internet. They spawn and thrive in YouTube comments and show up on or call in to shouty news programs out of addiction to outrage. There’s a feeling of entitlement to suitability. Everything must be perfectly for them. The wrath grows if the troll is tantalizingly close to the intended audience, but still on the peripheral.

Maybe customization, capitalism, and self-help have helped to woo us to the idea that maybe, just maybe, each one of us could be the center of our own universe. But then, as close as we get, we’re presented with something that short-circuits that delusion, and we’re reminded that we can never be the center of it all. There are just too many people and opinions here, and we’re just not big enough to have things orbit around us.

It’s scary to not be the center. My “dream sequence” forced me to flirt with the idea that everyone around me is sometimes bored when listening. Talk about being brought down to scale. No one likes to be minimized or excluded. But, as a maker, it becomes crucial to exclude some others if you want to make good work. You can’t please everybody. And, as a consumer, you will be excluded from things you wish not to be. You can’t have everything. And you’ll have to swallow being excluded, if you believe in quality. Sometimes, removing you from the equation makes things better for everyone else.

All eyes are not created equal. As a person who makes things, it takes courage to say that the thing you are making is not for this group of eyes. And, as a consumer, it takes an adult to say that sometimes you’re just not who something was made for.

dbreunig asked: A question/thought inspired by your iPad piece:

When designing for malleable devices like the iPad and iPhone (or piece of software really) we tend to use metaphors from the physical world to suggest function and usage. In Apple's design guidelines for the iPad, they heavily suggest designers continue this habit. Certainly, context has been chiseled away from the iPad and more than most software, it needs a wink and a nod from the outside world to clue its users into it's function.

Do you think that in a few generations that kinetic, physical interfaces with moving parts will live on only as metaphors? In some ways they already have: for instance, on smartphones you click names, not numbers, to dial.

Further, what 'clues' do you think designers will use to hint at function when these metaphors are forgotten? (a generation or so down the line)

I’m no UI expert. I just have a set of inferences that feel correct to me with no statistical or professional data to back it up.

As a user of technology, I think it makes sense to continue the analogy of referencing physical objects. I think a malleable interface allows us to do this easier, but even more so the multi-touch technology. Now, when you see a button, you can actually push it with your finger, just like a real button.

I don’t think clicking on a name to call a person on a smart phone is even more of a metaphor. To me, a phone number is a greater abstraction. I think having a name to push to talk to that person is more parallel with intent than dialing a series of digits.

danielwilber asked: Given your background as a student and now as an instructor, how important do you feel is the role of formal design education is in the development of a young designer?

Do you feel like a comparable set of skills can be acquired through self-education?

How do you feel about the relationship between getting a design education and dealing with the debt incurred by high tuition?

Do attending a 'prestigious' art school (RISD, SVA, Art Center etc.) for the instructors/facilities is worth the tuition premium as opposed to 'smaller' or public schools?

Thanks for your time, and keep up your work (and writing), it's definitely appreciated.

Let’s number your questions.

1) I don’t think formal education is the be-all, end-all. I have several friends that are incredibly talented and very successful, and they are self-educated. Formal education offers a curriculum and a structure and pace to the learning. It also offers an outside pressure to commit to learning. If that’s something you feel like you need, there it is.

Regardless of how you receive your education, self-education is a necessity. If you go to a school, after you finish you’ll need to continue to learn and teach yourself new skills. I wish some schools would emphasize the cruciality of self-education more frequently. The design industry you work in when you graduate may be completely different than the design industry of when you started school.

2) Yes. But, I feel even with a self-educated designer, having some sort of mentor is necessary for success.

3) That’s a hard question with no tidy solution. Every student is different, every school is different. Some schools offer more value, others less. The debt from education should be considered an investment. But, I’m glad I finished school with as little debt as I did. Having less debt opened up my options and allowed me to take more risks.

4) I can’t comment on this. I’ve never been a student at a prestigious art school. All I know is my experience at my dirt-poor state school. I will say this though: a program is only as good as its instructors, regardless of what school.

samwieck asked: Hi Frank,

Recently I've been revisiting a project I did in school where I wrote and designed a manifesto. I was reminded of your Ethos section while doing so, and in a way, I read it like it was your manifesto.

Was their a conscious 'declaration of values' behind it? Do you think all designers should spend some time exploring their own manifesto?

I have mixed feelings about manifestos. One one hand, I think the word gets lobbed around too much and many of them seem insincere. It’s very purposeful that Ethos is called Ethos. Manifestos, in my mind, seem more of a platform, a set of objectives. Ethos seems to be more about capturing qualities of the process of doing the work. If a manifesto is a platform, my blog Ethos is maybe more about the disposition you bring to the work.

I think a manifesto has a finished state, and I wasn’t interested in making a list that had to be “done.” If circumstances change or I get new information or new experiences, I want to be able to change my mind. I’m not interested in publishing a little red book, because I can’t change it after the pages get glued together. It’s a thin line between ethos and manifesto, and maybe it’s a line that only I can see. It may not even exist, but it feels important to me.

While, I may get itchy when someone says they’re writing a manifesto, I think it is incredibly valuable to know what you believe. I think there is a benefit to broadcasting beliefs to clients so that you can attract clients that share similar values. You get along better with people who value the same things. You work better with folks that have the same definition of success.