Beautiful Monsters: The odds are in

Beautiful Monsters is a series by David Fore, head of Cooper's consulting practice. It is intended encourage conversation about how interaction designers can grow more sustainable practices, with the goals of improving our fortunes, our relationships, and the health of our planet. Start at the beginning, or read the latest installment below.

Critics may charge that I’m loving on WunderMap too much. But these guys have vision. They provide fantastic resources for visualizing many of the changes afoot, which is a necessary precursor to visualizing solutions. But what they haven’t done yet is provide us the coordinates of our honeybees, one in three of which have disappeared from these parts. Without honeybees we don’t have agriculture as we know it — and, ipso facto, culture.

"How would our federal government respond if 1 out of every 3 cows was dying?" a scientist recently asked a bovine Congress.

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Beautiful Monsters: Why on earth does this matter?

It used to be that everybody talked about the weather, but nobody did anything about it. Not anymore. Through the magic of technology, I am empowered to make better decisions about where not to breathe. That’s because the good people at WunderMap have devised a smoke map. For a few days there, the smoke from local wildfires were absorbed by our (formerly) infinitely capacious atmosphere. So I didn’t think I’d need the smoke map. But then temperatures hit new epochal records, humidity took a dive, and the wind began fanning the flames again.

Should our misfortunes expand to include plagues of frogs, boils, and gnats, I know WunderMap will have my back.

In other news last week, the U.S. continued to emit vivid plumes of interactive graphics displaying our industrial might, which nobody can deny … it’s just that my emissions are necessary, while yours are not. World leaders at the G8 Summit in Japan, meanwhile, decided to postpone serious action on climate change for another few decades. Tomorrow’s always the best day to begin a diet.

Why on earth should such things matter to interaction designers? Put another way, why does earth matter to interaction designers?

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Everything smart is dumb again

Once upon a time, Google made the dumb interface look like the smartest thing to ever hit the Internet. By removing the blizzard of navigation that characterized Excite and Yahoo — and by actually delivering reliable search results — Google removed huge hurdles for millions of users. Still, Google-style search is far from the end of the road; it has always had limitations and drawbacks, and it seems like these things are cropping up a lot in conversations and in the media recently.

Just yesterday, my team and I heard something interesting during some research into a really complex system for analyzing corporate finances. When we asked what had been discovered in previous user research efforts, we were told:

Whatever we build has to be stone simple. It can't be like Google, where you type in how you think about it, and I type in what I think about it, and we both get different sets of results.

Constructing good Google search strings can seem like a black art, but individual users develop personal techniques and styles that help them get more reliable results. Still, the fact that others must craft their own path toward reliability creates a lack of confidence that others will get a similar view onto any given topic.

Search results: Skimming the surface

The act of sifting through results has also created some unique behaviors. Users need to parse them in order to find what they need, and there are a variety of parsing expectations, behaviors and processes that are changing the way that people absorb information. Some see it as somewhat ... Orwellian. The current Atlantic Monthly has an interesting cover story about the effects of search on our reading behaviors and mental capacities. The author attributes the Google-enabled ease of Internet search with a shift in the way that his own brain works:

My mind isn't going — so far as I can tell — but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore.

Andrew Sullivan at The Times echoes the above author's sentiments in a blog review of the article:

The experience of reading only one good book for a while, and allowing its themes to resonate in the mind, is what we risk losing. When I was younger I would carry a single book around with me for days, letting its ideas splash around in my head, not forming an instant judgment (for or against) but allowing the book to sit for a while, as the rest of the world had its say — the countryside or pavement, the crowd or train carriage, the armchair or lunch counter. Sometimes, human beings need time to think things through, to allow themselves to entertain a thought before committing to it.

These reading-related pains remind me of writers' critiques of word processors, and the growing popularity of interface-free tools like WriteRoom. There are certain behaviors that require some radical reconsideration of current UI norms. Few would propose that we go back to a pre-search world, but the question seems to be: How to appropriately apply UI and technical smarts to retrieval technologies to foster the confidence and comfort that comes from predictability and structure?

Beautiful Monsters: With such a late start, we best get moving

From our position at the confluence of human desire, technology, and business, interaction designers can make a tremendously positive—or negative—impact on the biggest issues facing us today: the sustainability of commerce, human societies, and natural systems. Despite these opportunities, software makers are discouraged from thinking outside the aspect ratio of the computer ’s monitor.

This is the first in a series of articles intended to serve as an ongoing conversation about how interaction designers can move the industry toward an Ecosystem Centered Design to improve our fortunes, our relationships, and the health of our planet.

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