Soundtrack: “Homesick” Kissy Sell Out Featuring Oh Snap!

“I was reminded over Twitter of a post I made to the Interaction Design Association list regarding the design of a UX portfolio for someone looking to move into their next great job. Here is the edited version of that post.

Question: I need to create portfolio to show my ability to design end-to-end user experiences with examples of design proposals, scenarios, use cases, interaction flows, wireframes, UX architecture, visual designs and specifications. I am looking for guidance and examples for how to create an interesting portfolio.”

You already have all the tools you need, you just don’t realize it yet.

The first step is to back away and re-imagine the problem space. For this particular one, you don’t need to necessarily go all the way back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but pretty close. Getting work to put a head over your roof and food on the table would seem to be the most basic way to set the problem and solution – needing a job. This doesn’t really require white-boarding and blue ocean strategy. The next step is always harder, and I think most of us approach it bass-ackwards, as if every UX method, process, activity and deliverable we ever did was wiped from our memory like some godforsaken episode of Lost, leaving us quivering, alone, and drooling over a half-eaten pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Instead of applying at least the semblance of UX to our own career development (and portfolio design), we jump right into the visual design and copywriting of our last 4 successful projects (leaving out our failures – just kidding – I’ll get to this), crank open Photoshop, or Omnigraffle, Visio (shudder), or InDesign and begin from the end – our portfolio. I think this sucks. It is an affront the very craft we say we love.

What is the first thing we usually do when we take on a new UX project of almost any size and scope? If you answered “Kickoff Meeting” – then you get the cookie. What I mean though is not the traditional kick-off meeting with a bunch of knuckleheads gathered around a conference table with fluorescent lights and stale baked goods from the local caterer. I mean engage in some of the following activities:

1. Project Definition, Goals and Objectives: Ultimately this should be finding and getting your next perfect (or near perfect, or at least your next least sucking job/contract/gig). You need to have a vision of who you want to be in 2 years, not just that you want to eat next week.

“Designers have a prescriptive job. We suggest how the world might be; we are futurists to some extent,” said Bridget Botja de Mozota.

Have a vision for where you want to be, and sketch out a strategic roadmap for how you think you can get there. Don’t worry — that roadmap can and may include picking up some freelance gigs just to keep the rain off your head and a scotch in your hand.

2. Competitive Analysis and Research: Identify and research the top 5 companies or agencies you would love to work for. I think most UX Designers have this list floating around in their head, even if they never admit it. It could be a top tier design agency like IDEO or frog; it could be reinventing the way social justice entrepreneurs fund their next innovation – anything – but write it out; research those opportunities; gather data about the way they phrase their job requirements.

Then identify at least 1 or two people at those companies and stalk them – virtually. Check them out on LinkedIn — try to find out what in their past: their writing, blogging, publishing, and tweeting – got them hired to this dream position. Ask yourself these questions:

• What do you need to learn, or skills you need to acquire to get where those people are now? This is often called the “Design Gap,” the difference between where you are today and where you want to be.
• What does your T shaped skill-set look like? What additional disciplines should you spend time on? Great at wireframing, but terrible at doing remote usability testing? Perhaps you should focus on that. But make sure you focus your learning on things you want to do in the future — remember, this is moving towards a future version of yourself. Align you skill enhancing activities with your goals.
• What soft skills should you focus on improving? Do you talk constantly? Too fast? Do you take forever to get to a point? Are you judgmental? If you need to become better at communication — either verbal or written, do you have a plan in place?
• What ingrained, annoying behaviors and personality defects have prevented you from succeeding in the past? Be honest about this – write it down and stick it on your monitor. One personality defect I have is that I rush to judgement to quickly, sending off scathing, sometimes biting comments without thinking, so I have been trying really hard to be more empathetic – to engage my mirror neurons and put myself in the shoes of the person I am responding to. It’s not easy, this behavior is ingrained and toxic – but I have acknowledged it, and trying to temper my communications accordingly.

3. Stakeholder Interviews: Use your network of friends, friends of friends, school connections, IxDA, IAI, SIGCHI, UPA, whatever – to engage with people that make hiring decisions at companies like the ones you want to work at. Have a simple list of 3 or 4 questions you would ask them about what they look for in a portfolio. Let them tell you what the portfolio should show, how it should be communicated, and at what level of details. While you’re at it, observe everything from their mannerisms, affect, language to how they answer the questions.

Then take this information combined with the information gleaned from activity #2 above – and craft at least 1 straw-man persona based on that information. You’re designing your portfolio (like a product or solutions) to meet a need of a target audience which means that you need a persona that identifies those decision makers (hiring managers), and their goals, needs, pain-points, desires, background, aspirations, work habits, etc. Be explicit in the detail, but remember – you will never show this persona to anyone – EVER.

4. User Scenarios: Write at least 1 if not 2 User Scenarios, or narratives, from the perspective of the hiring manager. Write into the narrative a day in the life: all the people they interact with, and their interactions with the team they manage. Make sure that if you can – identify other people on the team and bring them to life. Hiring decisions are rarely left to just one person. Write some dialog, if you feel inspired. The key is to humanize these decision makers, place yourself in their shoes, and understand that you are designing your portfolio as a means to solving a problem *they* have — ignore your problem of needing a job. That’s not their concern.

5. Narrative Writing: Find one solid story that you can tell from your previous or current position that tells a complete story of your skills, background, and thought processes. This is far better than showing wireframes across 10 different projects. Would you rather see 10 different decontextualized sex scenes or one epic movie with a love scene? Which do you think will get you the job?

Tell a story — make it compelling, and … wait for it… be honest about when you failed, how you dealt with it, and what you learned. Do not be some douchebag that frames failure as being everyone’s fault, or state something meaningless and vapid like “I was just too passionate about making sure it was the most elegant, mind blowing social buzzword, buzzword, buzzword, and the rest of the team just lacked the desire to be as focused as me.” Save it for someone stupid enough to believe that load of crap – real hiring managers are human beings that want authentic engagement – stop re-writing your past like some PR press release. In fact, move in the opposite direction and PWN that failure. Every project has some failures, and every project has to deal with the realities of resources, time, commitments, team dynamics and dickhead stakeholders, clients, or boss’ wife that wants some button green. Professionals take ownership and losers point fingers.

6. Craft a  Portfolio: From the story you have crafted as a long form narrative — which will never be shared — craft a portfolio that tells your story, in context, to your audience. Make sure it addresses their needs, goals, and desires from their perspective. The portfolio should be concise, easily understandable, and provide a richer picture of you. It should represent the value you bring to an organization — things that can’t be found on your backward looking resume.

7. Plan for everything: Choose the best tools to tell the story. Never count on an Internet connection when you finally do get in front of the hiring manager. Make print and web versions. Make them downloadable. Send your entire story to these people when they ask for a resume. Then the interview becomes a conversation focused on the two most important things: Are you a good fit (personality/culture/demeanor)?; and How you will make their lives easier so they can go home early, play Legos with their kids, and enjoy a quiet evening with their spouse?

Good Luck. Everything above are just my random thoughts.
@semanticwill

W Hotel, The Tuscany, NYC

“There is no longer any transcendence or depth, but only the immanent surface of operations unfolding, the smooth and functional surface of communication. In the image of television, the most beautiful prototypical object of this new era, the surrounding universe and our very bodies are becoming monitoring screens.”
~ Jean Baudrillard

Time travels in one direction, memory in another. This presents problems for @SemanticWill‘s qualia and consciousness. We are engaged in the world before we are reflective. This is what Heidegger calls being-in-the-world. It means that we are thrown into a situation where we act and cannot avoid to act. It is the primarily unreflective state of active engagement directed towards the things that we care about as the world presents itself to us. Our practical artifax are ready-to-hand for action disappearing into the background of our attention, space disappearing into the background, and becoming transparent as we focus on the activities and self-reflexivity of actuated care. This is back story to the engagement of @semanticwill on twitter.

[SemanticWill] As Interface-Signifier.

Blade Runner

“So are @SemanticWill‘s writings Neo-modernist crap? Nope! Pure Simulation!”
~ Guardian

“Are we not meeting the sarcastic, iconoclastic and irreplaceable person that has always been behind the brand: Will Evans. We didn’t cream, he was nothing like @semanticwill, but we are a bit damp.”
~ Financial Times

———————————

We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgettingness. We organize these artifacts “within” a rubric of old metaphors that now fail us. We need knew metaphors, and new interface-signifiers to mediate our experience of and interaction with our lifesteams in context of microcosm.

“Lifestreams and microcosms are the two most important cyberbody types; they relate to each other as a single musical line relates to a single chord. The stream is a “moment in space,” the microcosm a moment in time.” ~ Gelernter

Caltrans District 7 Headquarters

I think that “serious”, put next to “architecture”, is probably never a good idea (accept in infinite jest). The part of me (the electoral college of me, probably) that wallows in vernacular imprecision likes to speak of, for instance, “a serious fucking hamburger”. I meant serious in that sense. There’s a fair bit of decidedly non-serious (i.e. not Famous Name) Eighties architecture around that feels almost comically Bladerunneresque to me. Though the most extreme examples are all in Japan, which for some people probably doesn’t count. For me, living in Minato-ku, Tokyo in the 90s, it counts. Everything counts, save perhaps fleeting flashbacks  of techno-dance music & whiskey inspired evening in Gas Panic on Roppongi-Dori, saved for another article.

Wayne Lyman Morse United States Courthouse

In the other sense? Well, how about the work of the LA-based team Morphosis? I read something from those guys. I think they even gleefully declared that Bladerunner had been a big influence. I liked them. Thom Mayne, of Morphosis, a Pritzker Prize winning practice based in Los Angeles, has argued of the need for “an architecture of resistance.” His eloquent critiques of the nature of building public buildings today (see his interviews published recently in The New York Times), most poignantly aimed at the Ground Zero debacle, point to the interdependencies of architecture, politics, and urbanism.

Taipei Performing Arts Center

I sometimes think that nothing really is authentically experienced (in a hungover stupor I remarked as much to Leverenze, he shat back, and we kissed and made-up); that the first pixels were particles of ochre clay, the bison on the plains rendered in just the resolution required. The bison still function perfectly, all these millennia later, and what HiDef 1080p Sony Bravia in the world today shall we say that of in a decade? And yet the bison will be there for us, on whatever screens we have, carried out of the primal dark on some impulse we each have felt, as children, drawing. But carried nonetheless on this thing we have always been creating, this vast unlikely mechanism that carries memory in its interstices; this global, communal, prosthetic, inter-connected hallucinated dream that we have been building since before we learned to build.

We live in, have lived (experienced qualia) through, a strange time. I know this because when I was a child the flow of forgetting was relatively unimpeded. I know this because the dead were less of a constant presence, then. Because there was once no rewind button. Because the soldiers dying in the Somme were black and white, and did not run as the living run. Because the world’s attic was still untidy. Because there were old men in the Laguna Hills of my Southern California childhood who remembered a time before the VCR.

W Hotel

When I turn on the radio in mid-town Manhatten’s W Hotel and hear Kurt Cobain singing “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, I am seldom struck by the peculiarity of my situation: that a dead man sings, and is as much [r]eal as a [w]ar raging i Tripoli, or Afghanistan, or, or, or and conservatives teabagging across the country without so much as access to ‘The Google’ to see how farcical their behavior is. All three I can re-wind. Ad Infinitum. All (ex)ist, in that they are detached, unreal, tevo’d reproductions of simulacra, search Twitter and you can experience all these detached artifacts, deconstructed, outside time – remembered, but without context, or conversation.

W Hotel, Lobby

“We are segmented from all around and in every direction. The human being is a segmentary animal. Segmentarity is inherent to all the strata composing us. Dwelling, getting around, working, playing: life is spatially and socially segmented. The house is segmented according to its rooms’ assigned purposes; streets, according to the order of the city; the factory, according to the nature of the work and operations performed in it. We are segmented in a binary fashion, following the great major dualist oppositions: social classes, but also men-women, adults-children, and so on. . . .” Dellueze, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

W Hotel, Lobby Lounge

In the context of the longer life of the species, it is something that only just changed a Blink ago. It is something new, and I sometimes feel that, Yes! everything has changed. (This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my experience.)

Our “Now” has become at once more unforgivingly brief and unprecidently elastic. The half-life of media-product grows shorter still, ’til it threatens to vanish altogether, reverting into some weird quantum logic of its own, the Warholian Fifteen Minutes becoming a quark-like blink. Yet once admitted to the culture’s consensus-pantheon, certain things seem destined to be with us for a very long time indeed. This is a function, in large part, of the rewind button. And we would all of us, to some extent, wish to be in heavy rotation. If this blog had pod-casts, would you all be downloading me, listening to me? Re-Wind(ing) SemanticWill, or will these be like Tweets, ephemeral. Update, @, RT, Gone. No Re-wind. A Picosecond’s of fame.

And as this capacity for recall (and recommodification, and remix) grows more universal, history itself is seen to be even more obviously a construct, subject to revision. If it has been our business, as a species, to dam the flow of time through the creation and maintenance of mechanisms of external memory, what will we become when all these mechanisms, as they now seem intended ultimately to do, merge?

The end-point of human culture may well be a single moment of effectively endless duration, an infinite digital cybernetic Now. But then, again, perhaps there is nothing new, in the end of all our beginnings, and the bison will be there, waiting for us, as we/species merge with our machines, and accelerate again.

I wonder — are we not already Cybernetic, but seem to simply need Myth to bring us to that knowledge? And is @SemanticWill simply an interface to that Myth?

Next steps, besides slowly acquiring and reviewing more books, is to begin further classification of books. Until that can happen, this is my UX library. If I don’t own it or haven’t read it, it’s definitely not on this list. At the same time, there are books that I own that aren’t included because I thought they sucked for one reason or another. The fourth option is that I have it, have read it, liked it, but simply forgot to include it. So if you ask “Why haven’t you included X, Y, or Z – it’s one of those reasons.”

The Big UX Picture

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper

Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman

Leonardo’s Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies by Ben Shneiderman

Core: Required Readings in User Experience Design

About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper , Robert Reimann, David Cronin

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville

Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge

Designing the User Interface by Ben Shneiderman

Introductions to UX

The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web by Jesse James Garrett

A Project Guide to UX: For user experience designers in the field or in the making by Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler

Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design by Bill Buxton

Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices by Dan Saffer

Thoughts on Interaction Design by Jon Kolko

Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology by Jonas Löwgren , Erik Stolterman

Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design by Robert Hoekman Jr.

Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web by Christina Wodtke

The Electronic Design Studio: Architectural Education in the Computer Era by Malcolm McCullough

Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing by Malcolm McCullough

Practice, Methods and Tactics in UX

Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning by Dan Brown

The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web by Steve Mulder , Ziv Yaar

Design Research: Methods and Perspectives by Brenda Laurel and Peter Lunenfeld

Rapid Contextual Design: A How-to Guide to Key Techniques for User-Centered Design by Karen Holtzblat, Jessamyn Burns Wendell, Shelley Wood

Contextual Design : A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs by Hugh Beyer, Karen Holtzblatt

Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research by Mike Kuniavsky

User and Task Analysis for Interface Design by JoAnn T. Hackos, Ph.D , Janice C. Redish

The Persona Lifecycle : Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design by John Pruitt , Tamara Adlin

Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction by Bonnie A. Nardi

Design Research: Methods and Perspectives by Brenda Laurel (Editor), Peter Lunenfeld

Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior by Indy Young

Card Sorting: Design Usable Categories by Donna Spencer

Prototyping: A Practitioners Guide to Prototyping by Todd Zaki Warfel

Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces by Carolyn Snyder

Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become by Peter Morville

Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design by Jenifer Tidwell

Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns and Practices for Improving the User Experience by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone

Search Patterns: Design for Discovery by Peter Morville

Modular Web Design: Creating Reusable Components for User Experience Design and Documentation by Nathan Curtis

Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski

Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook by Dan Cederholm

Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman

User-Centered Website Development: A Human-Computer Interaction Approach by Daniel D. McCracken , Rosalee J. Wolfe , Jared M. Spool

Usability

Don’t Make Me Think: A common sense approach to web usability by Steve Krug

Human Factors in Information Systems: The Relationship Between User Interface Design and Human Performance by Jane M. Carey (Editor)

Web Usability: A User-Centered Design Approach by Jonathan Lazar

Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines by Sanjay J. Koyani , Robert W. Bailey , Janice R. Nall

Usability for the Web: Designing Web Sites that Work by Tom Brinck , Darren Gergle , Scott D. Wood

Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests by Jeffrey Rubin

A Practical Guide to Usability Testing by Joseph S. Dumas , Janice C. Redish

Prioritizing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen , Hoa Loranger

Designing Web Usability : The Practice of Simplicity by Jakob Nielsen

Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability by Luke Wroblewski

Web Site Usability (Interactive Technologies) by Jared Spool , Tara Scanlon , Carolyn Snyder , Terri DeAngelo

Visual Thinking & Info Viz

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition by Edward R. Tufte

Beautiful Evidence by Edward R. Tufte

Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte

Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative by Edward R. Tufte

Information Design by Robert Jacobson (Editor)

Information Graphics: Innovative Solutions in Contemporary Design by Peter Wildbur , Michael Burke

Visual Function: An Introduction to Information Design by Paul Mijksenaar

Over the last years I have noticed that many books and articles talk about the usefulness (or not) of personas, delving a little into the actual production and design of the persona as well as defending it’s usage. Very few explicitly define some of the activities that occur within the design research phase. It was Jared Spool that mentioned the real value of personas being the actual process of engaging with users and developing empathy towards their circumstances and experience interacting with a product.1 The following article grew out of a conversation with Nathan Curtis of Eight Shapes (author of “Modular Web Design“) when I offered to contribute what I called a “Mood Map” to the Unify Documentation System. Let’s start.

You can read the entire article on Johnny Holland.

Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can’t invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.
- D.H. Lawrence

Shades of Grey: Thoughts on Sketching

In designing mostly interactive systems (spaces, processes, and artifacts for people to use), I must increasingly stretch the limits of communication tools to explore and document what it will be like to interact with the things I create. Artifacts used in communicating design create an inherent frame of experience between the subjective response of the person for whom I design, and my expectations of their response. There is a divergence of meaning in that the audience can only experience the communications artifact, not the object being communicated.

Read the entire article on UX Magazine.

Abstract

I’ll take a more conversation tone (more conversational than I am on twitter) in introducing the concept of dynamic visualization of quantitative information for a couple of reasons. First, I feel that often times the theories discussed in the ‘ivory towers’ are considered too esoteric for the lay reader (which isn’t really true); and secondly, I wanted to share some of the fruits of my overpriced MS in information design with as many people as possible. So – put simply, dynamic visualizations can be thought of as extensions of multivariate displays (or multiple-variable displays). They attempt to overcome problems of static data by allowing real-time manipulation of information objects through dynamic data queries displayed in the user interface using such technologies as AJAX or rich internet applications with front ends implemented in Adobe (Macromedia once upon a time) Flash.

The visualizations that are created must support the cognitive requirements such as pre-attentive processing, working memory, etc.. To do this, many of the same theories, strategies, and techniques are also duplicated in a dynamic visualization (Image Theory, the Gestalt Laws, verbal / visual dual-coding, etc.) Instead, I will give a brief overview of the literature, cognitive processes, and techniques that are unique to dynamic displays. This article is roughly organized into the following sections: Introduction (WTF), Dynamic Visualizations (BBQ), and Conclusion (FTW), References, and Apologia.

Introduction (WTF)

What is a dynamic visualization? Simply stated, it is an alternative way of accessing a database in which it can be queried multiple ways in order to form a changing and multi-dimensional visualization of the data. Shneiderman (1999) states that dynamic queries involve “the interactive control by a user of visual query parameters that generate a rapid (100 ms update), animated, visual display of database search results.” (pg. 236) The visual results can be displayed in many ways. Tables, node and line diagrams, tree-maps, hierarchical data, data landscapes, geographical representations, and two-dimensional diagrams are just a few of the ways that dynamic visualizations can be displayed on a computer. (Shneiderman, 1999; Ware, 2000)

As with other types of visualizations, dynamic visualizations are an extension of working memory. However, its main goal is not to enable creativity or support problem-solving (although they are involved). The main goal of a dynamic visualization is to amplify cognition often times to aid decision making. A designer of a dynamic visualization must take into consideration all previous concerns about visualizations and add an additional dimension of real-time variances. The dynamic visualization acts “as an extension of cognitive processes, augmenting working memory by providing visual markers for concepts and by revealing structural relationships between problem components.”(Ware, 2000, pg. 335) While the main goal may be to amplify cognition, the designer shouldn’t just add vast amounts of data into a display, making it dense, complex, and confusing. Instead, the designer must focus on “the principle of reducing the cost structure of information.” (Pirolli, Card, & Van Der Wege, 2001) Dynamic visualizations must support search techniques, provide an overview of the data, and a specific subset of it.

Figure 1: Gapminder.org

The process of interacting with dynamic visualizations is typically broken down into three parts. Ware describes a process that consists of three interlocking feedback loops: manipulation, exploration and navigation, and problem-solving.(2000) Manipulation occurs when objects are selected and moved. Exploration and navigation is an intermediate level in which a user explores data and build a cognitive spatial model. Hypothesis generation and refinement occur in the problem-solving stage. Dynamic visualizations support cognition in this stage because users “can quickly perceive patterns in data, ‘fly through’ data by adjusting sliders, and rapidly generate new queries based on what they discover through incidental learning.”(Shneiderman, 1999, pg. 237) They can also quickly discover which sections of a multidimensional search space are densely populated and which are sparsely populated, where there are clusters, exceptions, gaps, or outliers, and what trends ordinal data reveal. Gapminder (Figure 1 by Ola Rosling) is a fantastic example of this – perhaps one of the best in turning dynamic visualization into a cognition-amplifying and gestalt-generating machine)

“Humans can recognize the spatial configuration of elements in a picture and notice relationships among elements quickly. This highly developed visual system means people can grasp the content of a picture much faster than they can scan and understand text. Interface designers can capitalize on this by shifting some of the cognitive load of information retrieval to the perceptual system. By appropriately coding properties by size, position, shape, and color, we can greatly reduce the need for explicit selection, sorting, and scanning operations.” Shneiderman, pg. 241)

Dynamic visualizations are most valuable in environments that require monitoring or manipulation of large quantities of data, in real time, and under tight time constraints. There are several benefits for the ability to directly manipulate data and have returned visuals. Beginners are able to learn basic functionality quickly, there is little need for error messages, users can immediately see if their actions are accomplishing their goals, and users feel in control (On Kayak.com, user un-checks a particular Airline, and those automagically disappear from the display of results is an example). However, there are risks to using dynamic visualizations. Bad, missing, or erroneous source data could lead to wrong conclusions, and false relationship identification. De-skilling, coupled with a false sense of security, could have serious consequences where patterns are missed. The face-validity of any visualization must be questioned when the decisions that are based off of the displays have serious consequences.

Figure 2: Revealicious - Hyperbolic Tree

Dynamic Visualizations (BBQ)

There are many types of dynamic visualizations. Tables are perhaps the most simplistic display option for dynamic data. Other options are more visual such as hyperbolic tree browsers (See Figure 2 Revealicious), overview and detail displays, three-dimensional data landscapes, and tree maps. Inputting data into these displays are done through forms in which a user selects data to query. Radio buttons are preferred for selecting binary nominal variables whereas sliders “allow setting a single ordinal or quantitative variable value.” (Card, Mackinlay & Shneiderman, 1999, pg. 235)

Eick describes sliders as “a generic user input mechanism for specifying a numeric value from a range.” (1999, pg. 251) He goes on to explain that they have an added visual effect because the space inside the slider can serve as an interactive color scale, a bar plot for discrete data, or a density plot for continuous data. Eick states that the purpose of a slider is to control filtration and restriction of displayed information. Doing so reduces visual clutter and enables “users to see important underlying patterns. The pruning of visual clutter from data-rich displays by adjusting sliders is particularly effective in information visualization, and even more so when done dynamically.” (Eick, 1999, pg. 251) Figure 3 below is the interface for Kayak.com I designed which utilizes sliders to dynamically prune data by attributes such as price, departure time, airline – all facets attached to flight manifests.

Figure 3: Kayak.com Sliders

Bertin and Greene’s planar and retinal variables are an integral part in any visualization in which data must be pre-attentively sorted and identified with graphic variables. Briefly, the process of data extraction consists of three stages in which the viewer

• determines what components are being represented,
• determines which components are mapped to which visual graphic variables; and finally
• perceives correspondence between components.

Bertin stated that a visual variable must have as many steps equal to or greater than the number of components it represents. A user can distinguish types of data either through serial or parallel processing. In serial processing, the user goes from target to target to determine differences in data. In parallel process, targets reveal measures through pre-attentive visualization techniques.

Overview + Detail

Overview + Detail refers to a group of visualizations that allow a general overview of information with the ability for a user to search and explore data to discover details and patterns. Within the visualization there is dedicated space for each and so there are really two displays within one visualization. “It reduces search, allows the detection of overall patterns, and aids the user in choosing the next move. A general heuristic of visualization design, therefore, is to start with an overview. But it is also necessary for the user to access details rapidly. One solution is overview + detail: to provide multiple views, an overview for orientation, and a detailed view for further work.” (Card, Mackinlay & Shneiderman, 1999, pg. 285) Examples of these types of displays are dashboards with spatial zoom displays, semantic zooming, zoom-and-replace, and tree maps (see the dashboard mockup Figure 4 below, where overview data is presented, but detailed views can be seen by clicking and graphs to drill down). One drawback from this type of visualization is that loads for working memory and visual search are increased which in turn degrade performance.(Card, Mackinlay & Shneiderman, 1999) Furnas (1981) explains that in the zoom system, local and global information is not available at once and so integration of the two must occur in human memory.

Figure 4: Sample Dashboard

Focus + Context

Focus + Context is another technique that supports the ability to see an overview of information while having access to detailed data. Context refers to the necessity of a user to see the overview of the data while focus relates to detailed information. Another term for this group of techniques is distortion-oriented presentation techniques. (Leung & Apperley, 1999) Single visualizations are created with the knowledge that the information that is needed in the overview may be different from the data required for the detail. Focus + context techniques were created in the attempt to build one visualization which displays overview and detail information in a way that peripheral information is displayed in less detail while the information that is in focus is dynamic and dependent on the user’s interest.

The essence of these [focus + context] techniques is the concurrent presentation of local detail together with global context at reduced magnification, in a format which allows dynamic interactive positioning of the local detail without severely compromising spatial relationships.(Leung & Apperlay, 1999, pg. 352)

Focus + context displays are also referred to as attention-warped displays in that they distort the display in order to provide the maximum space for a use’s attention. This can be accomplished by filtering, selective aggregation, micro-macro readings, highlighting, and distortion. (Card, Mackinlay, Shneiderman, 1999)

Figure 5: Focus + Detail: Election Dashboard in Flex

There are many types of visualizations that use the focus + context technique. This technique “supports visualizing an entire information structure at once as well as zooming in on specific items.” (Rao & Card, 1999, pg. 343) The detailed view is blended with a view of the overall structure in a way that manipulation operations can navigate through the data. (Lamping & Rao, 1995) The context + focus techniques support different types of data and different user goals. Some of these are cone trees, fisheye view, bifocal lens, table lens, magic lens, hyperbolic browsers, perspective wall, polyfocal display, map displays, and bar charts such (see Figure 5 above – a dashboard example for the 2008 election).

Furnas (1981) proposed the fish-eye view as an alternative way to display a large structure. He uses detailed algorithms called the degree of interest metric to determine an appropriate balance between “the need for local detail against the need for global context: by showing full detail in the immediate neighborhood some place of current focus, but requiring increasing a priori importance as the distance from the focus increases.” (pg. 312) The variable zoom algorithm that creates the fisheye lens has been proven to support a user’s ability to maintain a global context within hierarchical clusters.(Schaffer et. al, 1996) Spence and Apperley’s (1999) bifocal lens is based on an overview + detail display. They inserted the detailed view into the overview in a way that resembled a bifocal lens. They used a point of interest where data that surrounds it is mapped and compressed based on their positioning within and from the focal area. A variation of this technique was extended into two dimensional form by Leung and by Mackinlay’s Perspective Wall. (Leung & Apperley, 1999) Rao and Card’s (1999) table lens is based on a focus + context fisheye technique to display tabular information using label information and multiple distal focal areas. Their hyperbolic browser is an additional focus + context technique that was “based on hyperbolic geometry for visualizing and manipulating large hierarchies. [It] assigns more display space to a portion of the hierarchy while still embedding it in the context of the entire hierarchy.” (Lamping & Rao, 1995, Pg. 382)

Conclusion (FTW)

Dynamic visualizations can be considered one of the most difficult displays to create. Systems can be extremely large, data could be constantly entering the system, and users can change queries instantly. Communicating the information in a meaningful way must be seriously considered. There are several techniques a designer can utilize to help reduce the cognitive load of a user and to support his/her cognition. Image Theory, the Gestalt Laws, working memory, learning theories, and biological processing all come into play in these visualizations. In this article, overview + detail and focus + context techniques were discussed. These techniques were created in the attempt to solve the problems “associated with the presentation of data in a confined space: a spatial problem and an information density problem.”(Leung & Apperlay, 1999, pg. 362)

The distortion techniques such as the hyperbolic browser and fisheye view largely address these issues, however there are always risks involved in using such techniques. Users can miss patterns and connections as well as make incorrect assumptions. Designers must understand how different displays support different types of data and different tasks in order to support user cognition. One of the places significant improvements can be made is that, given the increasing ubiquity of dynamic data visualization applications on e-commence websites and common applications like hotel and travel booking, the more important it is for designer’s to take these theories into account and try them in the real world.

Apologia (#formarketingreasons)

I realize there are a number of important concepts which I only briefly introduced here, as well as some more technical terms that I take for granted that the reader knows. These assumptions are problematic, and for that reason, on the next iteration of this article – I will need to include a glossary of terms and overview of some the basic concepts of information theory. Any further recommendations are always appreciated.

References : Everything you wanted to know about information visualization but were too darn cheap to buy the books. Note: I am exhausted, but need to include the appropriate links to the following resources for further information.

Card, S.K., Mackinlay, J.D. & Shneiderman, B. (1999) Readings in information visualization: Using vision to think. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman.

Eick, S.G. (1999). Data Visualization Sliders. In S.K. Card, J.D. Mackinlay, & B. Shneiderman (Eds.), Readings in information visualization: Using vision to think (pp. 251-252). San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman.

Eick, S.G., Steffen, J.L., & Sumner, E.E. (1999). Seesoft – a tool for visualizing line oriented software statistics. In S.K. Card, J.D. Mackinlay, & B. Shneiderman (Eds.), Readings in information visualization: Using vision to think (pp. 419-430). San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman.

Furnas, G.W. (1981). The FISHEYE View: A New Look at Structured Files. In S.K. Card, J.D. Mackinlay, & B. Shneiderman (Eds.), Readings in information visualization: Using vision to think (pp. 312-320). San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman.

Greene, M. (1998). Toward a Perceptual Science of Multidimensional Data Visualization: Bertin and Beyond. ERGO/GERO Human Factors Science.

Lamping, J. & Rao, R. (1995). The hyperbolic browser: a focus + context technique for  visualizing large hierarchies. In S.K. Card, J.D. Mackinlay, & B. Shneiderman (Eds.), Readings in information visualization: Using vision to think. (pp. 382-408). San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman.

Leung, Y.K. Apperley, M.D. (1999). A Review and Taxonomy of Distortion-Oriented Presentation Techniques. In S.K. Card, J.D. Mackinlay, & B. Shneiderman (Eds.), Readings in information visualization: Using vision to think. (pp. 350-367). San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman.

Lin, X. (1999). Visualization for the Document Space. In S.K. Card, J.D. Mackinlay, & B. Shneiderman (Eds.), Readings in information visualization: Using vision to think. (pp. 432-439). San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman.

Pirolli, P., Card, S., & Van Der Wege, M. Visual Information Foraging in a Focus + Context  Visualization. CHI 2001, 3(1) 506-513.

Preece, J., Rogers, Y., & Sharp, H. (2002). Interaction Design: beyond human-computer interaction. John Wiley & Sons.

Rao, R. and Card, S.K. (1999). The table lens: Merging graphical and symbolic representations in an interactive focus + context visualization for tabular information. In S.K. Card, J.D. Mackinlay, & B. Shneiderman (Eds.), Readings in information visualization: Using vision to think. (pp. 343-349). San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman.

Schaffer, D., Zuo, Z., Greenberg, S., Bartram, L., Dill, J., Dubs, S., & Roseman, M. (1996). Navigating hierarchically clustered networks through fisheye and full-zoom methods. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 3(2) 162-188.

Shneiderman, B. (1999). Dynamic Queries for Visual Information Seeking. In S.K. Card, J.D. Mackinlay, & B. Shneiderman (Eds.), Readings in information visualization: Using vision to think. (pp. 236-243). San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman.

Ware, C. (2000). Information Visualization: Perception for Design. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.

A/

Presenters
Russ Unger, Will Evans, Fred Beecher, Todd Zaki Warfel

REGISTER NOW!

Background
Increasingly, as designers of interactive systems (spaces, processes and products for people), we find ourselves stretching the limits of communication tools to explore and document what it will be like to interact with the things we design.

We describe “wireframing” as a form of design communication that enables stakeholders, team members, users and clients to gain first-hand appreciation of existing or future problem spaces and solutions.

We create wireframes to inform both design process and design decisions. Wireframes range from sketches and different kind of models at various levels of fidelity – “looks like,” “behaves like,” “works like” – to explore and communicate propositions about the design and its context.

We think that the wireframing strategies user experience designers use are often constrained by the tools they feel most comfortable with: problem space, domain, expertise, theme, context of problem, bias towards types of design tools and documents, timeliness of artifacts created. For this reason, a session that attacks one business problem from the perspective of four different designers will provide attendees with a unique understanding and set of strategies and tactics to improve their own practice.

Description
This workshop will be presented in two parts and will revolve around a single design problem. Before the workshop, a third party (TBD) will provide clear business requirements to the four user experience designers leading it. They will each choose their own tool and method for exploring the requirements via wireframes and specifications. They will each work with their own graphic designer to develop and apply a visual design.

When the workshop begins, the workshop leaders will present the design problem/requirements to the participants. Participants will be separated into four different groups based on their preferred wireframing tool: paper, Visio, OmniGraffle, or Axure. Each group will be coached by one of the workshop leaders. In these groups, attendees will tackle the design problem through sketching and review sessions. At the end of the sketching activity, the teams will each choose their best sketch and will turn their sketches into wireframes using the tool of their choice.  Each team will then present their final solution to the workshop, taking questions and critiques from the attendees and session leaders.

After the presentations have been completed, each of the workshop leaders will show their own solutions. They will each provide a detailed account of how they arrived at their solutions and how the tools they used influenced them. Participants will be provided ample time to critique these solutions and ask questions of the workshop leaders.

Session Takeaway
Gain a better understanding of three different kinds of activities within the design and development process where wireframing is valuable:

• Understanding existing user experiences and context.
• Exploring and evaluating design ideas
• Communicating ideas to and audience of decision makers and team members.
• Provides user experience designers with a variety of approaches to creating wireframes.
• Details four different approaches to business requirements synthesis and wireframe exploration.
• Shows the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches within a specific context
• Refutes the argument that wireframing is dead by showing that it has just multiplied its forms
• The realization that the tools we use to design, such as wireframes, prototypes, etc. influence the way we think. Solutions, and probably even imagination, are inspired and often time limited by the tools we have at our disposal – which is perhaps the greatest takeaway from this session.

The Interaction Design Association (IxDA) and the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) are proud to announce Interaction 10 in Savannah, GA, February 4-7, 2010. Mark your calendar so you don’t miss this incredible opportunity to gather with several hundred other design professionals from around the world.

We want you to participate in Interaction 10! This is your conference and we want to hear what you have to say. We offer three ways for you to get involved:

Be a Session Speaker
Lead a 40-minute session by hosting a discussion, leading an activity, demonstrating something fascinating, or presenting a topic.

Contribute a Video to the Community Documentary
We are creating and debuting two 30-minute documentary videos about the state of interaction design today, assembled from individuals, agencies, and schools from around the world. This means you!

Display Work in our Art Exhibition
We’re curating an interactive exhibition of your work. What does interaction mean to you? Show us in this IxD-inspired show exploring concepts related to interaction design.

About

Interaction 10 is the third annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other.

Our Host
Interaction 10 is hosted this year by the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), the University for Creative Careers, located in Savannah, Georgia

Some of the rocking speakers will include:

Todd Zaki Warfel: Sketching & Prototyping: Rapid Design Techniques

Twitter: @zakiwarfel

Bio: Todd Zaki Warfel, founder and principal design researcher at Messagefirst, has been designing interactive products and services for over 15 years. Todd’s clients have included fortune 500 companies like AT&T Wireless, Bankrate, Citibank, and Comcast, as well as smaller companies like Numara and rPath. An internationally recognized thought leader on research and design, and member of the Web Standards Project Education Task Force, he has spoken at conferences and taught workshops around the globe.

His upcoming book, Practical Prototyping (Rosenfeld Media) will discuss how prototypes are more than just a design tool and show you how to use prototyping to create a common language, market a product, gain internal buy-in, and test feasibility with your development team. Anticipated publication is in 2009.

Jared Spool: Revealing Design Secrets from the Amazon

Twitter:@jmspool

On its surface, Amazon.com just seems like a large e-commerce site, albeit a successful one. Its design isn’t flashy, nor is it much to write home about. But deep within its pages are hidden secrets — secrets that every designer should know about.

If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he’s probably the most effective, knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. What you probably don’t know is that he has guided the research agenda and built User Interface Engineering into the largest research organization of its kind in the world. He’s been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term “usability” was ever associated with computers.

Bio: Jared spends his time working with the research teams at the company, helps clients understand how to solve their design problems, explains to reporters and industry analysts what the current state of design is all about, and is a top-rated speaker at more than 20 conferences every year. He is also the conference chair and keynote speaker at the annual User Interface Conference, is on the faculty of the Tufts University Gordon Institute, and manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time.

Olga Howard: Making the Case for Social Networks in Organizational Settings

Twitter: @olgahow

Why should your company/organization use social networking tools within the organizaiton? I’ll answer this and other tricky questions.

Bio: Olga Howard is an independent user experience architect. She has helped large and small companies including, MTV, PBS, Martha Stewart Online, and more. As a community strategist, Olga helps clients create organic, healthy, and successful environments. As an information architect and usability consultant, Olga has been developing processes and tools that allow for faster and less expensive information architecture with high quality results.

URL: Social Networks in Organizational Settings

Whitney Hess: Evangelizing Yourself: You Can’t Change the World If No One Knows Your Name

Twitter: @whitneyhess

Bio: Whitney Hess is an independent user experience designer based in New York City. She helps make stuff easy and pleasurable to use. She is a strategic partner with Happy Cog and UX consultant for boxee, among other startups, agencies and major corporations. Whitney writes about improving the human experience on her blog, Pleasure and Pain and can pretty much always be reached on Twitter @whitneyhess.

Livia Labate: The User Experience Health Check: A Measure a Day Keeps The Redesign Away

Twitter: @livlab

The UX Health Check allows UX professionals and their collaborators to introduce metrics of success and benchmarks to their product and service design decision-making, from the most strategic to the most tactical aspects. Measures of success that qualify and quantify user experience efforts are scarce and not widely adopted. The UX Health Check approach introduces a common language for UX professionals to measure how direct investments in improving the user experience result in concrete outcomes. The session will provide a summary of the approach with the goal of getting the audience interested in giving it a try. Once you go Health Check you never go back.

Bio: Livia Labate is a use experience designer, currently Principal of Information Architecture and User Experience Design for Comcast Interactive Media in Philadelphia. She volunteers on the board of the Information Architecture Institute and can be found wondering about where the UX practice is headed at I Think Therefore IA.

URL: UXHealthCheck

Dave Malouf: Foundations of IxD

Twitter: @daveixd

This is a REALLY short version of a complex topic that aims to discuss the nature of interaction design as a material of form similar to visual design and industrial design and explains how foundational education and practice leads to better communication & critique (wish me luck!)

Bio: Dave is current the Professor of Interaction Design in the Industrial Design Department at the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD). He is one of the core founders of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) and its first VP. Before coming to SCAD he had a rich design career in industry most recently in the Innovation & Design Department of Motorola Enterprise Mobility as a Senior Interaction Designer.

Dan Brown: Designing Rules: The Engine of User Experience

Twitter: @brownarama

With static pages long behind us, the job of the information architect has evolved from thinking about the inherent structures of content to thinking about the frameworks that govern the management and display of content. As rules become increasingly relevant to the user experience (describing what to display when and to whom) information architecture will need language and conventions for describing those rules. Designing navigation these days, for example, means describing rules that drive categorizing content and displaying those categories. A navigation system now must explain how to accommodate unforeseen changes to content, how to deal with content that can live in more than one place, and how to offer flexibility in how content is found.

Bio: Dan is the co-founder of EightShapes, a user experience firm in the Washington, DC area.

Joe Sokohl: A Real Nowhere Man: Managing Remote Teams Remotely

Twitter: @mojoguzzi

TBD

Cindy Chastain: Experience Themes: An Element of Story Applied to Design

Twitter: @cchastain

As designers we too often neglect to define a common vision, or coordinating force, behind the scope of what we’re designing, making or building. Without some means of unifying our efforts we can easily end up with a product or service that falls short of its potential for delivering an optimal user experience. One path to holistic coordination is to employ the concept of themes as used by fiction writers and filmmakers. In experience design, themes can be used to pattern and unify product solutions as well as a  means of unifying teams, assisting in the work of defining strategy and helping to design for the intangible pleasure, emotion and meaning in experience. By aiming to capture the value and focus of the experience we intend to deliver to users, themes guide us in the design process and, by extension, strengthen the impact and meaning of that experience.

Cindy Chastain, user experience designer and screenwriter, has been exploring ways to engage an audience through storytelling, teaching, writing and design for over twelve years. She is currently the Director of User Experience for Interactive Partners, a New York-based agency specializing in entertainment and media websites.

Dan Willis

TBD

Dave Cooksey: Taxonomy Validation

Twitter: @saturdave

The goal of taxonomy testing is to confirm that a taxonomy’s structure enables users to find and use content. For many practitioners, this means simple card sorting. But there are other means of validating a taxonomy. This presentation describes taxonomy validation methods that go beyond typical card sorting: Delphi card sorting, remote card sorting, usability testing, and search analysis. We’ll also discuss optimal ways of using mulitple validation methods togehter and review why taxonomy testing is needed in the first place.

Dave is Founder & Principal at saturdave, a user experience consultancy based in the City of Brotherly Love. Dave specializes in strategically informing design through user research and testing, crafting user-centric taxonomies, and providing solid design documentation.

Dave is actively involved in the user experience community in Philadelphia and serves as Chair of PhillyCHI, an academic and professional group for those interested in Human-Computer Interaction, User Experience, Usability and other related disciplines. PhillyCHI hosts monthly meetings and socials for students, academics, and practitioners who share a common interest in user experience.

Dante Murphy: State Mapping

Twitter: @dantemurphy

As websites have transitioned from a series of hyperlinked static pages to rich, interactive applications, the traditional means of documenting their structure and behavior has struggled to keep pace.  Site maps fail to capture the detailed interactions on and across pages, use cases fail to show the relationship between activities, and data flow diagrams ignore the nuances of presentation and user choice.

Enter the state map.  Evolved from scenarios and storyboards, the state map demonstrates the flow of information and interaction across all of an applications possible activities for all user types.  The state map is a foundational design element, able to inform detailed technical, behavioral, and aesthetic design.

This session will demonstrate the creation and use of state maps in three key situations; defining and pitching a concept, designing an application, and reverse-engineering existing applications to facilitate comparison and gap analysis.

Dante is the Vice President of User Experience for Digitas Health, the health agency of Digitas and a global leader in digital and healthcare communications. His responsibilities include ideation, design, testing, methodologies, and building a world-class multi-disciplinary design practice.

Dante’s career in application and experience design began in 1996; previous to joining Digitas Health in 2006, Dante was a Principal Information Architect at GSI Commerce.  Assignments and clients include Toys R Us, Siemens, Radio Shack, Sony, Burberry, NFL Football, Vanguard, adidas, Merck, Astra Zeneca, Palm, and numerous others.

Chris FaheyThe Courage to Quit: Starting, Growing and Maintaining Your Own UX Business

Twitter: @chrisfahey

TBD

Donna Spencer: Design games for information architecture

Would you like your design team to collaborate better? Are you looking to gather more valuable insights from your focus groups and interviews?

Design games are a fun, technology-neutral way of gathering design insights for your projects. In this presentation, I will show you how to take advantage of design games in many situations, with all types of people, including:

• Freelisting, modified card sorting and scavenger hunts: To learn about
  your users language and categories
• Design the Home page and Divide-the-Dollar: To identify and prioritise functions and features
• Reverse-it and Idea cards: To break a creative block and generate ideas

I have played all these games and more with users, stakeholders and design teams, so this presentation will be based on my experience organizing games and making sure they provide useful inputs to the design process.
In this presentation I will focus on games and tips most applicable to IA projects.

Twitter: @maadonna

Bio: She’s been doing this professionally since 2002, and she’s a regular speaker at Australian and international eventst. Donna’s a freelance information architect, interaction designer and writer. That’s a fancy way of saying she plans how to present the things you see on your computer screen, so that they’re easy to understand, engaging and compelling. Things like the navigation, forms, categories and words on intranets, websites, web applications and business systems.

Nasir Barday: Start your own local organization chapter

The UX community continues to grow by leaps and bounds. A large part of this is thanks to leaders at the local level organizing events like this one. Ever thought you’d like to start a local chapter “one day”? It’s easier than you think! I’ll go over the basics of organizing a local event, getting the word out, and growing with other local chapters, if they’re in your area.

Bio: Nasir first got involved organizing local events with the NYC IxDA in 2005, thus beginning his love affair with the Interaction Design Association, which has recently culminated in his service as a Director on the organization’s board. In addition to being an Interaction Design nut and making things pleasing enough to come back to regularly, he’s a recording engineer and musician, with his latest album due Fall ‘09.

Admission Price: $5.00
Refreshments and snacks will be served.

RSVP Here.

This will be held at Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University campus in Georgetown.
Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University
Foundry Building
1055 Thomas Jefferson Street NW
Washington, DC 20007

Gospel of @SemanticWill | Part 2

A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.
~ Walter Pater

Soundtrack: Laurie Anderson, “Oh Superman!” [thanks 2 Rabbi Zilberberg]

2. The Passion
Any Pre-Sim should die
together with his own epoch
like as any Simulation should

From the beginning of the internet revolution (Age of Spiritual Machines) I decided that I was to be re-instantiated as a PreSim. Why not? The new image was better than the old labels “Generation X,Y,M”. We need to create a new earth world like as earth gods, but our worldwide recreation has failed. Everybody agrees with me, that if I should die (because consumerism is destroyed) I’ll better die as PreSim. This “PreSim” sounds more solemnly. Or maybe you think I should to tear up or hide my Digerati-card and become a good liberal Jew and rush into temple? Don’t trouble, I wasn’t really a member of the digerati, but I dreamed to create a new earth world. I lied about that. I was free PreSim like many others.

As a rule, there must be the great grief and, as a good American rule, there must be the repentance. It is repentance that serves us as the door to the new world. It is the grief that must follow us when we say “good buy” of American consumerism. An American Consumerism that is just as [F]alse, as the seeking of some semblance of ‘Truth,’ in my Gospel and Manifesto – because it is not G-d’s word, but Mine, made manifest, but it is still a lie, as Levenenze has argued in his article “Introduction to the K-Cycle,”

For the first time I wanted to die when I was offered to make a suicide, or, in other words, to repent for my lies. New American “consumerists” (former digerati) cried: “Repent! Repent!”

I couldn’t repent – that wasn’t the matter whether you were a member of the digerati or not – all Americans were consumerists or, as Leverenze said “PreSims”. We get accustomed to on the one hand that history must die especially when we tire to watch how our epoch conquers peaks; on the second hand, sometimes, regretfully, every person dies. We like to watch when history dies; we always hope for something, and we are always sure that the death of history is the death of the old generation, government or party structures. But what should we do when a whole epoch must die, when all our life becomes our whole word’s dying? Certainly, I can cry out: “I shall not dream to rebuild world as Generation M; I shall not fight against enemies of our people,” but all the same, we want to build a New World in some or other way, and in spite of our social revolution, we all remain “re-instantiated” people, digerati or “Pre-Simulationist”. We always need to recreate something as many people need to. It is not the matter what we need to create – new internet epoch, new metaphysics or new ethics. All of us always want to ruin old values, history, theories and to create something new. Maybe I should die somewhere and never begin to cry out: “The PreSim is dead, listen to me attentively -the PreSim is dead, dead, un-dead!” – I remember in the nineteenth century somebody cried: “God is dead,” and greet the modern era, then modernism died, and greet post-modernism, but whom I should greet now, when I am dead as PreSim? I must greet the human being, mankind and so on. I gladly agree. But sometimes it seems to me that we hurry to die as PreSims, Liberal Democrats, Consumerists, Jews; precisely speaking, we hurry to cry that we are dead (everybody agrees that such repenting allows us to live eternally)….and are in a rush to sit shivah for our digital selves.

[W]e will sing of the nightly fervour of
arsenals and shipyards blazing with
violent electric moons; greedy railway
stations that devour smoke-plumed
serpents; factories hung on clouds by the
crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that
stride the rivers like giant gymnasts.
~ Leverenze quoting [Marinetti, 1909]

When I decided to die I didn’t know how I could die and for what. I soon tired from such decisions. But it seemed to me that there was more sense in my decision than I thought at first glance. Maybe as a mortal being I could find a solution for myself first of all. It was all the same for me: what else could I find in human culture (after having read Leverenze’ scathing de-contruction of my consumerist soul), because each person has only one life, and it is impossible to ask for another order of my earth being. Daily problems are greater for me than all cultural values like they are greater for any common person. When god dies then PreSim enters the new world. When PreSim dies, the man, the common earth human being, enters its own world (And when justice is gone, there’s always Mom – Hi Mom). And if I wouldn’t like to rebirth as the new PreSim in the realm of repentance I must understand that all in the earth world come to an end and nobody can exist without such ability. It is easy to become a cadaver and leave the earth world and [every]body else. But it is more difficult to leave earth history when you still remain in that history, when you continue to act, to deed, to do something. Truly speaking, this is a misunderstanding because your “leave of the world” as the image of human death belongs to the death that is an instant Jewish event for daily god’s usage.

You may find this quote funny. Maybe this is a joke. My need of death has its own history, which began with the internet. When we start to play the fool we forget the starting point of our game. I started from eager intention to remain true, to save myself. I used to be the PreSim and I needn’t any rebirth as a new conciousness – I always thought that I always invented my thought of ‘self’ as an act of creation with my own brain and hands only, and if the world refuses to accept my vision of world happiness, so I must needs naturally come to an end. And let’s come to an end together. And as a pre-eminent PreSim I wouldn’t allow somebody else to live eternally. Let all worlds come to an end if the world can’t understand where the world happiness is. This is the common step – you may find this in each great masterpiece of human culture. Each “PreSim” starts with such intention. Each presim avoids the present and seeks for new gospel in the past or in the future, and futurism was only a lame precursor. The present commonly remains for common people and only a presim can know how silly, how weak they are. Let’s greet the past as simulation of our fear of a future, or you are still caught in the previous gestalt: who is the person who possesses the potentiality to kill any person for any divine purpose? Resurrection and martyrdom as recursive acts of creations.

The bioelectrical frontier’ is an
appropriate metaphor for what is
happening in cyberspace, calling to mind
as it does the spirit of invention and
discovery that led ancient mariners to
explore the world, generations of pioneers
to tame the American continent and, more
recently, to man’s first exploration of outer
space. [Dyson et al, 1994]

||————END—————||

pre-Simulationism:

A vanguard group of prescient artists, poets, and writers who are finding new ways to surpass the exhausted postmodern epoch and its constructions of language and thought.

pre-Simulationists  look to the future and the sim worlds that will soon immerse humankind, examining what sort of consciousness might emerge when full simulation takes place. We do not reject science nor scoff at the usefulness or importance of its knowledge because of nihilistic arguments derived from Goedel’s Theorem.

In this age of neural and genetic discovery we explore new subjective approaches to creativity and the place of art in the world, searching beyond language for the workings of our feelings and experience of sentience.

pre-Sims draw inspiration for our creative works and other artists’  creations not only in the semiotics of cultural simulations, but also charting maps of awareness of the inner mind, awake or dreaming.