Journal

Subscribe!
Sign up to get our featured articles delivered straight to your inbox every month or two.

RSS feed of all articles

Recent Entries

Alternate dimensions
by Daniel Kuo
If you’re a typical designer working in the software world, the majority of products you’ll create will have strictly two dimensional interfaces — length & width only, pixels on the screen. As interfaces have evolved over the years many have gained a very simple kind of "depth": lighting effects, drop... (Continue)
An Insurgency of Quality
by Alan Cooper
Dave Hussman, one of the leaders of the post-agile movement, recently hosted a one-day conference on the topic of “Redesigning Agility”, and invited me to give a plenary talk. The focus of the conference and my talk were how to integrate agile development with interaction design. I was very... (Continue)
Making pagination meaningful
by Chris Noessel
Working with long lists of information over a network, like web email, can be problematic. Very long lists can have a huge performance hit on your servers, leaving the user tapping her fingers waiting on slow page loads, especially on “very thin” clients like mobile devices. To limit the server... (Continue)

Digregiousness

by Chris Noessel on August 22, 2008

One of the nice things about working with smart people is the conversation. It soars to heights, teleports across topics serendipitously, and can suddenly dive back towards its original target like a bird of prey. As an illustration, one day I slyly documented these topic shifts over a long lunch between myself and two other designers at the company. The results of this exercise are below.

To protect the innocent, let’s just call my cohorts Designer A and Designer B.

—Here the lunch began—
  • The mighty power of A’s coffee
  • Giant squid, existence of
  • Digital plague in World of Warcraft
  • Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, to Hell
  • Assistant Stage Managing
  • The casting couch
  • A’s Mac’s inability to run World of Warcraft
  • Half-Life, Destroy All Humans!
  • Movies made from games, quality thereof
  • Resident Evil
  • Clue
  • Mrs. Peacock’s dinner quote, a recital
  • B’s game idea: Home of Terror
  • The need for more talking dinosaurs in interfaces, generally
  • 10-word Firefly summaries
  • Zombies as a philosophical construct (P-Zombies)
  • Why zombies are scary
  • The constituent parts of fear
  • Vampires compared to zombies

—Here the food arrived—

  • Consciousness & souls
  • Daniel Dennett
  • The souls of rocks
  • Buddhist animism
  • Everything2.com
  • SOY!
  • Huppets
  • Digressions
  • Burning Man
  • Wrestling for Dummies
  • Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the movie
  • Socks
  • Sockscriptions
  • Losing socks
  • Travel
  • Rio Bravo
  • Zombies again, consciousness as an Invisible Pink Unicorn
  • White board marker technology
  • Pirates
  • The need to play Pirates of the Caribbean
  • The meaning of “Dead Man’s Chest” in general vs. George MacDonald Fraser’s interpretation
  • Fight choreography
  • Transporter 2, a mini review
  • Dinosaur Comics, the brilliance of
  • Does Cthulu’s head qualify him as a cephalopod? Discuss.
  • Greco Roman & Turkish wrestling
  • Hating the Sound of Music
  • B’s plan for his 3 wishes
  • Choosing invisibility vs. flight vs. telepathy

—Here the lunch ended—

Though this capacity for digression significantly enhances any given lunch, during pressured design meetings, it needs to pointed out and reined in when it’s not contributing to productivity. But you can’t just note that you’re “digressing.” After all, digression is part of the free-wheeling free-association that helps designers discover useful connections and patterns. No, you need another word, a new one that points out that you’ve begun to go down more rat holes than gold mines.

A New Term is Needed
For this reason I coined the term “digregious” as a portmanteau of “egregious” and “digression,” and have been trying to popularize it amongst the teams here. Please feel free to use it in your own design meetings.

Some references, for those wondering: plague in World of Warcraft, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, Destroy All Humans!, Firefly, philosophical Zombies, Buddhist animism, Everything2.com, SOY!, Digressions, Burning Man, Sockscriptions, Invisible Pink Unicorn, George MacDonald Fraser, Dinosaur Comics, Cthulu, cephalopod

Filed under: Cooper

Chris Noessel

Chris Noessel is a senior consultant at Cooper. His industry experience ranges from owning a small, museum-focused company in Houston to working with Microsoft's futures prototyping group in Seattle. For marchFIRST he was Director of Information Architecture, conducting research and design for notable web sites such as Apple, SEGA, and Harmon Kardon. He was one of the founding graduates of the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. He teaches interaction design at the California College of the Arts.


More entries by Chris

Comments

On Sep 26, 2008, Nancy said:

Okay, this? Is cute. :-)

On Nov 26, 2009, Walter Aprile said:

Well, you know me and you know how much I love digressions. I notice that your post outlines the dramatic dependence of digression activities on pop culture. If I had been present at that lunch, about 50% of the references would have flied (screaming) above my head...

I am also very touched that you can still discuss Everything2.com

 

Post a comment

Name

Email Address

Comments (Feel free to use basic HTML tags for style)

We're trying to advance the conversation, and we trust that you will, too. We'd rather not moderate, but we will remove any comments that are blatantly inflammatory or inappropriate. Let it fly, but keep it clean. Thanks.

To help filter spam, please enter the letter o here