NYC is walk walk walk honk honk siren walk people people people walk honk.

It would drive me crazy to live here.

On the other hand, I saw the Buckminster Fuller exhibit and some pervy Maplethorpe Polaroids (really, kind of tame), ate some pretty sweet food, absorbed the sweet-o fashion of the day (which is some strange cross between 80s European style and washed out colors, with the American Apparel layered hair thing thrown in for good measure), saw some friends, and got to think about design.

honk honk honk honk honk

I spent the weekend fixing my irrigation system, digging up valves and repositioning them. It felt good to do something real, something that involved moving dirt and getting sweaty and feeling productive. No air conditioning or fancy chairs, just sweat and sprinklers.

Writing up the synthesis materials from usability testing led me back to the ol' "how many users to test with" article. There's something weird that happens when you start to view the world through an abductive lens; everything could make sense, because that's the point of abductive thinking. So Jakob's 5 users, which makes sense scientifically, if you buy into his studies, makes sense subjectively as well - the output of the study stops being about proving anything to anyone and starts being about positing what could be, or considering things in a new light. It's been an awful long time since I cared about anything quantitative, and this was no exception, yet I couldn't help remembering Bonnie John pushing for a separation of motivated design changes and unmotivated design changes; the separation is an old one, of inductive/deductive, but all changes are both, and all are neither: they posit a world of potential, if the evaluator is able (both from a skills perspective as well as a company culture perspective) to "let go" and imagine.

The quant methods of marketing don't allow the letting go; they demand an impartiality that is counterproductive to insight development, as insights are embedded in the nuance of the findings but aren't allowed to be culled in a more scientific method.

I spent the day user testing paper prototypes. It's been a long time since I did any user testing, and a particularly long time since I tested paper (I think the last time I worked with such low-fi stuff was in grad school). It was fun, and I learned a lot. nothing revolutionary about our concept, but it felt good to be away from the computer and (literally, and figuratively) in front of actual ideas.

It struck me today, and it's something that I've been aware of for some time now, that I've achieved competence with the medium - there's no challenge in the actual production anymore, because the production is autotelic. Instead, the challenge can be in the ideas, but I'm not really interested in the ideas [that's both a specific subject matter problem and also a general problem with all things design for me right now]; so what's left is a challenge in the theory, which is interesting - but not really billable. It's something left for coffee shops and under-the-breath muttering.

That's too bad, because probably it's about as intellectual as the process gets, and if a client is looking for IP, these types of discussions are the things that *should* be producing actionable, and patentable, material. They aren't, because the conversations aren't happening or because they are happening void of context. This is what a client is really paying for, but because of the emphasis towards agile, speed, and production, they end up with a bunch of artifacts and not a lot of mindshare.

I suppose it's a flavor of the age-old problem of clients, but I'm finding my way back to Roark's "I don't intend to build in order to have clients; I intend to have clients in order to build".

I hope that kind of thinking keeps me sane, and doesn't get me fired :P

It's that sort of morning, good for laying around and soaking up the 104 degree sun. I should have been born a cat.

In an effort to slow down my life, I'm going to try to start writing in here again, or at the very least, post photographs. The entire month of July - and the summer, basically - seems to have gone by much too quickly, and I'm searching for ways to make life slower. Kind of strange, considering that I hate boredom and the sense of slowness that comes from inactivity, but I just don't like the idea that the world is passing by on some ridiculous schedule.

This weekend was spent working - with the small interlude of our sprinkling system going haywire and flooding the porch - primarily on wires for the side project, and wrapping up loose ends on Issue 6 of the magazine. Hard to believe that Richard and I have spent a year working on this - again, time flying too quickly to reflect on it. All work and no play...?

Jess is cooking and it smells nice in here.