Everything Bad is Good for Design

Want to be an interaction designer? Spend some quality time playing video games and watching TV.

I just finished reading Steven Johnson's latest book, Everything Bad is Good for You. It's a great, provocative read and makes me feel much better about the hours I've wasted spent productively on Lost, Survivor and Medal of Honor. The book posits a number of concepts that are interesting to think about as a designer.

Johnson's basic premise is that over the last twenty years, popular culture has gotten more complex and is making people smarter. He calls this the Sleeper Curve, after the Woody Allen "sci-fi" movie Sleeper where scientists from 2029 are astounded that people in the 1970s didn't know the nutritional merits of cream pies and hot fudge. The type of intelligence that pop culture is training us in is the same sort of intelligence I use every day as a designer: pattern recognition, decision-making, and the ability to assess and respond appropriately to emotional signals. Television, video games, and the internet have all conspired to make us smarter in specific ways.

Johnson gives names to two types of activities that interaction designers not only engage in, but also observe all the time with users: probing and telescoping. Probing involves the discovery of the rules of the system through exploration, through playing with it. You discover not just rules, but the physics of the system: the patterns and tendencies. Probing can take the form of testing the limits of a system, pushing it until its artificiality (the seams) show. Telescoping is about the nesting of objectives inside each other like a collapsed telescope. It's about focusing on immediate tasks while keeping in mind the ultimate goals, something both designers and users often need to do.

"Telescoping is about order, not chaos; it's about constructing the proper hierarchy of tasks and moving through the tasks in the correct sequence. It's about perceiving relationships and determining priorities."

Johnson argues that the heightened probing and telescoping that we're seeing is a result of complex forms (e.g. video games, the internet, etc.) that "encourage participatory thinking and analysis" and that "challenge the mind to make sense of the environment." Johnson has a lot of interesting things to say about form, and about learning new digital forms. "Learning the intricacies of a new interface can be a genuine pleasure," he writes. "I've often found certain applications more fun to explore the first time than to use."

It's an interesting, quick read, right up there with his other books, Interface Culture (a must for interaction designers), Emergence, and Mind Wide Open. I recommend it.

Originally posted at Thursday, June 2, 2005 | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)