NYC as an interface

Photo by Delcio G.P.Filho.

The big apple.

Many say it’s the greatest city in the world. Whether or not you agree, there’s no denying it’s an incredibly dense place with an overwhelming amount of people and things to do. Not only are there over 40 million tourists annually, jostling to see the sights and get a taste of the cultural capital but there are also over 8 million people living here − struggling to manage the tasks of daily living amongst all the tourists. That’s a lot of people with very different goals. How do they all figure it out?

(For those of you not in New York, you might want to consider pressing play for some mood music.)

The usability of cities

I’ve been on the road for the past few weeks and am struck by how some cities are easier to use than others. Since I’m in the business of interfaces I’ve been thinking about it in those terms. Just like software, smaller cities with few features are generally (but not always) fairly easy to use. Once you have a large, complex city with many features − like NYC − it gets much more challenging to maintain that ease of use.

New York City is an incredibly powerful interface with multiple entry points and endless features. One might say it has feature bloat. It overloads the senses and it’s not always easy to navigate and understand, yet people learn to use it effectively and often grow to love it.

In that way it’s like Adobe Photoshop - optimized for expert users, perfect for their needs once they have taken the time to learn how it works, but very intimidating to novice users. Over 40 million of tourists enter the city each year and have to navigate the New York City ‘interface.’ How do they figure it out?

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The Drawing Board: Fill 'er up

We find that looking at the world from the perspective of users and their goals makes us notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. Being solution-minded designers, we can’t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea. We put together "The Drawing Board", a series of narrated sideshows, to showcase some of this thinking.

In this episode, we look at car information systems. Sure there’s a ton of useful data in there, but most of it is trapped behind a series of menus, idly waiting for us to enter the correct sequence of commands to unlock it. We imagine a car information system that’s more forthcoming with the data it already has, making us feel like we’ve got a great road-trip buddy in the passenger seat instead of a computer.

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Stratus Air: A Cooper concept project

When we saw the topic of this year's I.D. Magazine Annual Design Review concept category, we thought it would be fun to put together an entry. As frequent travelers, we were particularly inspired by the brief: design a graphic, object, or environment that would improve the experience of air travel.

We thought our approach was a good mix of practicality and inspiration; a premium loyalty service enabled by helpful bits of technology that would ease the pain and smooth the turbulence of business travel. Did we expect to win? Absolutely. Even though the judges didn’t share our enthusiasm, we’re happy with what we came up with, and we wanted to share it with you.

We present Stratus Air.

(To view at full screen HD, click the little icon with 4 diagonal arrows next to the Vimeo logo.)

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Travel and the experience of being a beginner

On a recent vacation to Europe I promised myself that I’d put my new camera to good use by documenting as many examples of typefaces as possible. With only a week of travel time I quickly realized that I wasn’t going to accumulate the desired collection of new and modern trends that I’d hoped for given that I was dedicating my travel to the olde parts of York, London and Paris.

I captured some old and new typefaces but came to a more profound realization that traveling is like being a beginning user. As designers, we try to put ourselves into the minds of beginners through observation in research but this can be only partly successful. Research doesn’t beat the real thing and there’s no better way to do that than throwing yourself into another country. I should disclaim that I spent 18 years of my childhood in England so it’s not a completely new experience, and I’ve been to France many times also. Being away for so long is a good way to completely forget old experiences and see new design innovations for the first time.

The photos

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Full disclosure: This information has been processed

When we create a persona or a model organization, we're deliberately creating an archetype — a person or company that does not map to any one "real" person or company out there in the world. In creating personas, we need to be up-front with ourselves and our clients about the choices and assumptions we made along the way. We also need to be clear about what questions we asked and what we didn't. When we don't have the data, we need to acknowledge this and rectify it if necessary.

This point may seem like a methodological nuance, but it relates to ethical considerations that in other realms, as I recently discovered.

My design partner Chris Noessel and I just completed three weeks of research travel around the world. Neither of us had been to many of the countries, and we both photographed our adventures obsessively. One morning, he asked me to compare a photo he took to one that I took: Why did they look so different? We were using almost identical cameras and taking photos often of the same views.

Chris's photo.

My photo.

Why does mine look different? Because I adjust the photographs post-capture, slightly adjusting the contrast, lightness, and so on. For me, the unprocessed photos rarely convey my experience of the event or location, and the post-processing is intended to re-create my memory of the experience. I take photographs to share that experience, not to share the exact pixels the camera captured.

Chris admitted that it made my photos "look better," but that I "took liberties" to adjust, and once I started, where would I stop? How much change was too much change? How different could it be from his untouched version and still be the Great Wall of China?

Of course, this is part of a much larger conversation. Photographs appear to be very faithful representations of reality, so one may argue that viewers of photography bring a different set of expectations to them than they do to other visual art. Viewers expect photos to be more "real," more true to life, and therefore post-facto monkeying could be seen as deceiving. On the other hand, who is to say what "real" is, really?

Essayist and photo critic Susan Sontag addresses this argument in the introduction to her book, On Photography.

In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.

Even before taking the shot every photographer has made choices which will affect the captured image — camera and lens, film v. digital, SLR v. point-and-point shoot — and each has an effect on the contrast, color, and depth of field, aspect ratio, and so on. We can continue to split hairs, too; for instance, we accept that the journalist which uses a telephoto lens is "telling the truth" even though it grossly manipulates scale between foreground and background. With so much noise in the system, it seems arbitrary to assign "reality" to the raw output of the camera, doesn't it?

The National Press Photographers Association defines a couple of broad categories in the altering of photographs.

There are technical changes that deal only with the aspects of photography that make the photo more readable, such as a little dodging and burning, global color correction and contrast control. These are all part of the grammar of photography, just as there is a grammar associated with words (sentence structure, capital letters, paragraphs) that make it possible to read a story, so there is a grammar of photography that allows us to read a photograph. These changes (like their darkroom counterparts) are neither ethical nor unethical — they are merely technical ... [However], once the shutter has been tripped and the moment has been captured on film, in the context of news, we no longer have the right to change the content of the photo in any way. Any change to a news photo — any violation of that moment — is a lie." [The emphasis is mine].

The NPPA distinguishes between the technical aspects of making photos "more readable" and "changing the content," and I think that this is an interesting analog to the world of creating design targets (i.e., personas, organizations, environments). In our process, you could look at the transition from research to personas is the process of making the research "readable."

Of course, creating personas from research is a lot different than manipulating contrast and lightness in a photo editing app, but the principles are the same: Altering the content is a lie; each archetype that we create should faithfully reflect the gathered information, and each should bring out the priorities, needs and experience imperatives that affect the design. You can monkey with research just like you monkey with photos. When done well, slight adjustments to the color and contrast of the research more effectively reveals the truth. When done badly, they can lie and deceive.

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Beautiful Monsters: Be the change

The Market Street grid, Courtesy: bricoleurbanism.

This week, San Francisco started choosing sides for another Market Street Mêlée, which we fight once every ten years or so. On one side of the double-yellow line are arrayed various assorted starry-eyed, bipedal dreamers who propose closing down the main artery of our fair city to most carbon-emitting traffic so as to give pedestrians and bicyclists a break, reduce pollution, and increase the beauty and overall mellow vibe of the grid. On the other side stand the self-styled hard-nosed rationalists who see in this as a pedal-powered economic and moral calamity in the making.

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