The video series is almost at an end, and it’s approrpriate that we’ve finally gotten to Stowe. The seed of these interviews was a post I wrote a while back, which came from hearing Stowe and Leisa Reichelt both talk about designing sites. Neither of them are designers in the traditional “graphic design” sense, so there was a bit of a definition question there for me.
Stowe’s pretty well known online, but if you haven’t read his blog or seen him speak yet: he’s a consultant, blogger and thinker, so far over “the edge” of social tools that he often sounds a little crazy (and I mean that in the most admiring way). He writes about social tool developments on /message, and earns his money by helping companies think through (or design) their tools.
Funnily enough, a number of people at Reboot asked me, “what exactly does Stowe do?” Admittedly, I didn’t really know exactly either. He explains it pretty good in the interview.
And what’s Stowe’s take on design?
It’s the laying out of processes or models that represent some thing that’s going to be built or manufactured.
Unfortunately we got cut short by the rain. I’ll see if I can’t squeeze some more out of him next time we see each other.
I interviewed eleven smart people at Reboot10 in Copenhagen, Denmark, asking the same question: what’s design mean to you? This is the ninth video in the series. The last two, Kars Alfrink and Thomas Vander Wal, should be up tomorrow.
From now on I’ll be focussing more on design here, and shifting the whole social/web 2.0 stuff over to /message.
I must admit, the invite took me by surprise (floored me actually) and I’ve been very plesantly surprised by the response to my first post both on FriendFeed and in the comments. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Stowe for giving a relative stranger and unknown blogger a chance.
Stowe Boyd responded to a typical re-hash of the “connectedness = overload = falling productivity” argument against social media, but to be honest, the argument (yawn) wasn’t nearly as interesting as Stowe’s response. It’s a lovely visionary rant about a future most people can’t even imagine, from a guy who sounds like he’s been there. This is what he calls Boyd’s Law:
Connected people will naturally gravitate toward an ethic where they will trade personal productivity for connectedness: they will interrupt their own work to help a contact make progress. Ultimately, in a bottom-up fashion, this leads to the network as a whole making more progress than if each individual tries to optimize personal productivity.
At the the risk of sounding like some sort of Boyd fanboi, this is the stuff that flashed my ass off last year at Reboot.
The willingness to swap personal productivity for connection is just that: it is an ethical choice that asserts that the bonds of connection, today and over time, are more important — not just abstractly, but in the most concrete way — than making headway on this piece of work, right now.
As someone who’s got more friends who’ve never heard of Twitter than have, it all sounds pretty damned far out to part of me. But there’s also a part that has begun feeling incomplete without an hourly dip into the stream of contact that today’s net makes possible, and that part can see Stowe’s future from here, and is eager for everyone else to get on with it and get connected.
I have said for years that the centroids — media, religion, government, and corporations — would war against connectedness and the flow consciousness that is needed to operate in the new social Web. It is inherently subversive, because at its core flow is about remaining connected to those that matter to you over the more formal and official relationships that individuals are supposed to have with organizations.
I’d agree, but so far in my experience the biggest hindrance to a more connected world are the people themselves, and not the media, church or whatever. For example, I’ve been evangelising Twitter quite a bit lately, and the first reaction of most people is a pitying look—“Matt, my soft-brained friend… I hope he’s not dangerous…” Of the very few who actually give it a try (possibly only to pacify me), almost all come back to me after a day and say, “I don’t get it. What’s the big deal?” When I try and show them, and see that they’re only following one person—me—I try and explain it’s about connectedness or as Leisa Reichelt calls it ambient intimacy, and that you can’t be very connected with only one contact, and, and… and then I often run out of steam and mumble something like, “you’ll get it if you do it long enough…”
The reason I know Stowe’s onto something, no matter how far-fetched and techno-hippie it sounds, is I’ve seen this kind of transformation happen. Firstly to myself (I didn’t get it to begin with either), and occasionally to someone I’ve browbeaten into trying Twitter for more than a day. The transformative power of social media is made clear by the aversion most feel to it at first—it’s foreign, unimaginable, and therefore threatening—and the “I get it!” moment most experience at some point after giving it a try. If it was just another fad, just something to play with and forget, everybody would try it without resistance and nobody would care longer than a couple of weeks. But for most, it’s becoming an essential part of everyday communication, and it’s changed who they are. And who we’re becoming is more connected, more aware and faster thinking people, through the influence and support of our networks. And that’s such an optimistic vision—such a rare optimistic vision of the future—that I can’t help but grin to be a part of it, and can’t help but thank Stowe for pointing it out to me.
I don’t mean to suggest for even a second that Leisa, Stowe, Ryan and Jeffrey aren’t designers. They’re just four people who, although they all work in the indernetz, do wildly different things. Talking and listening to them, and my discussion with Mathew Patterson the other day, got me thinking about how the folks who call themselves “designer” define what they do.
The web has exploded the concept of design. Once was the day that a designer was someone who made aesthetically pleasing things (that’s right, objects you could hold in your very own hands) which solved a problem. Sometimes the problem was a selling a new car, sometimes it was selling concert tickets, sometimes it was earning points for taste with your neighbours, and the list goes on and on. Although these are very different endeavours, all are called design, and there are also fancy, well-designed drawers for all of them: industrial design, graphic design, furniture design, and so on.
Now we’ve got “web design”, a drawer that’s full of folks who do funky stuff in photoshop, some who think and scribble, others who write HTML and CSS and quite a few mash-ups of the above.
Do you call yourself a designer? Think about design for a minute, and write a comment below and let me know:
What do you do every day?
How do you define “design”?
What parts of what you do are essential to your definition of design?
The more answers, the more interesting the comparisons, so even you lurkers and off-chance one-time-only visitors are encouraged to chime in.
