Studio Non Troppo

Recently, there was a big scuffle at the university where I work: should the mountain in the logo be blue (as it is currently) or yellow? All sorts of complaints and tomfoolery, made unintentionally comic by several individuals’ use of the “reply all” button to emails that had been sent out to the campus-wide mailing list.

But with all the discussion and gratuitous character assassination, one point was ignored: if a brand is supposed to represent an entity, there has to be an entity to represent. A brand can’t do all the work of standardizing and unifying on its own.

There are many different ideas of what this particular university is, what “its” goals are (which begs the question of what is “it”), and what “its” goals should be, and these different ideas are protean, in flux, none definitively unifying the constituents.

If the brand had been designed to correspond closely to one of those identities, some people would be supportive, and others would dissent, but there would at least be an active correspondence, one that the supportive folks could leverage in their work and that the dissenting folks could rally around and against. But the brand is sufficiently vague so as to avoid choosing sides.

So it doesn’t brand.

To the outside observer, the university’s brand either fails to indicate and represent an identity, or it indicates and represents a failure to create identity.

Having something work out the right way is not a matter of the thing.

As Malcolm Gladwell would put it in Outliers, it’s not just a lot of hard work that made Bill Gates more wealthy than 99.9999999% of the other people in the world. Nor was it his smarts. No, those things were necessary for his off-the-charts success, but they were not sufficient. It also took a constellation of opportunities, huge and irreplicable opportunities (though not necessarily evident as such at the time) for his hard work and smarts to pay off in such an over-the-top way.

When developing a product, say, for example, a bar of soap, it is absolutely critical to recognize that the nature of the new soap is not the key to its success in the marketplace.

The bar of soap simply does not exist on its own. It is tied, inextricably, to the particular marketing plan you attach to it. And to the time (the specific time, not just the time of day or time of year) in which it is released. And to the words you use when you describe your pet project to your friends. And to the global contingencies of soap manufacturing processes today, the day you email companies for production bids. Think the butterfly effect, smushed down to a world of implications in an instant.

There is no such thing as a bar of soap, separate from the myriad details necessary to imagine, design, create, sell, and use that bar of soap.

It’s so complicated, really, that it’s almost miraculous that any particular bar-of-soap idea succeeds. Richard Feynman talked once about how miraculous it seemed that of all the possible license plate numbers in the world, he just happened to see ARW 357 one morning. (Think about that, and feel the delightful discomfort in your mind. He was talking about how some things we consider miracles are examples of an outside-in way of looking at things that are equivalently, but differently and beautifully weird when we look at them from the inside out.)

Catching a wave is absurdly unlikely, and it’s easy to credit wave-catching surfers with superhuman skills. But it’s not that. It’s time on task, luck, sequences of opportunities, a willingness to keep playing with configurations. Aside from mental spin and Taoism, success is neither within our power nor outside of our power.

Everything, logic included, is necessary but not sufficient.

Isn’t that grand?

Here, in no particular order, are three technologies I really appreciate. I admit I use the word “technology” broadly.

1. The candle

It has no moving parts (not counting the flame), and it contains its own fuel. It’s not a case of overkill. Dropping a candle might dent or break it, but the candle will still work. The light it produces is soothing.

2. The sidewalk

Again, no moving parts. It generally adds to the safety of being a pedestrian. Crack a sidewalk and it’s still a sidewalk.

3. Life

Plenty of moving parts. Quite a talent (though not unlimited) for self-healing. Predictable enough to reward those who observe and think; unpredictable enough to humble, thrill, and amuse those who observe and think.

OK, now how do most technologies stack up to these? They are frequently complicated in such a way as to make them extremely sensitive to jostling and bad inputs. Drop an iPod, and it won’t be an iPod. Leave out a tiny semicolon from that line of code, and watch the program crash.

Very few technologies are transcendent. Most are fussy.

Photo: Redvers

Several years ago, and shortly before reading a Douglas Adams essay in which he mentioned the very same oddity, I saw for the first time the highway sign outside of Albuquerque that warned (or was it philosophizing?), “Gusty Winds May Exist.”

It’s an accidentally beautiful sign that can be found in at least three places in New Mexico. Despite its poetry, I do feel warned to put down my cellphone, soy extra vanilla latte, and electric shaver and put both hands on the wheel.

Recently, I’ve started seeing highway signs that purport to be warning signs but which actually have the effect of sending my mind off in confusing loops and starting my head shaking side to side in an unconscious statement of “no!”

Here’s the text of the diamond-shaped, orange sign:

Guardrail Damage Ahead

OK, so what am I supposed to be warned to do? Not crash into the area where the guardrail is broken? Or “yes, driver, if you’re about to crash, please pick this already damaged spot so we don’t have to make two separate repairs?”

Some things, like road signs and test results and department meetings, should be actionable. If there’s nothing I can really do in response to them, please take them away!

As members of a CSA (community supported agriculture) program in Albuquerque called Los Poblanos, each week (or two, depending on what we want) we pick up a box of organic fruits and vegetables from them. Occasionally, due to travel or a full crisper drawer, we need to change our box pickup schedule.

The Los Poblanos website had a form-based way to change the pickup schedule. Or that’s what I think it was. It was a typical implementation of a typical technology to make a typical task possible.

Went I went to the site recently, though, their web designer had decided to put some more time into the interface, and this was the result:

With this version, I saw a representation of when my boxes were scheduled, and I could make the change I wanted easily. I hadn’t felt that the old way had been a problem, but when I experienced the new way, I realized why I liked it so much better.

The old interface was designed according to what a computer finds easy to do.

The new interface was designed according to what I find easy to do.

Spend a few minutes today looking at the implementations of technology around you. I guarantee you’ll find examples of person-ignorant design. What should the design have looked like instead?