Steve Barth | Reflexions

Whatever Happened to the Page?

My article on Adobe Creative Suite 3, “Whatever happened to the page?” is up on KMWorld as part of its June issue.

The digital age has deeply undercut appreciation for how graphic design not only makes information more appealing, but more learnable. When documents are digital and/or disposable, we tend to forget that they have tangible power in their form as well as their function. Meanwhile, design is a field in which much of the skill is tacit—both the art and the technique. Crafts like art direction, graphic arts, photography and page layout blend training, experience, invention and automation to create new value on demand and on deadline, inevitably under constraints of inadequate time or money.

See also: “Maintaining the integrity of design in a virtual world”

Adobe,InDesign,graphic design

Stories of Old, Stories of New

A great quote from Euan Semple: “Science and religion are both collections of stories that work to varying degrees at any particular time.”

Some people seem to want to force you to choose sides. I remain militantly agnostic about both, so reading the exchange that promped Euan’s post, I was thinking in more anthropological terms about the stories we use to simplify the present by making sense of the past and predicting the future.

Whether your faith is based on evidence or its absence, I think it’s important to remember (especially in knowledge management) that people act on what they “believe” rather than on what they “know.” The narrative dynamics of science and religion are with us in our daily lives even if we are not aware of our devotion to their stories.

“Claiming either of them is ultimate and unchanging truth seems naive and dangerous. They ought to change over time in order to stay relevant,” Euan rightly says. But I have to disagree with his critique of religion when he adds, “The fact that science works hard at changing its stories and religion has failed to come up with any new ones for nearly 2000 years give science the edge in my book!”

The first climate refugees in the US

In the town of Newtok, Alaska, descendents of the earliest Americans are about to become homeless. They were previously convinced by the government of the folly of their formerly nomadic ways. Thanks to global warming, the permafrost is melting and their town is sinking into fetid mud. This New York Times article discusses the plight of “the first climate refugees in the United States.”

Studies say Newtok could be washed away within a decade. Along with the villages of Shishmaref and Kivalina farther to the north, it has been the hardest hit of about 180 Alaska villages that suffer some degree of erosion.

Some villages plan to hunker down behind sea walls built or planned by the Army Corps of Engineers, at least for now. Others, like Newtok, have no choice but to abandon their patch of tundra. The corps has estimated that to move Newtok could cost $130 million because of its remoteness, climate and topography. That comes to almost $413,000 for each of the 315 residents.

Not that anyone is offering to pay.

Global warming

Knowledge wants to be very, very expensive

There’s a paradox at the heart of knowledge management, isn’t there? On one hand, it’s the old dictum that “information wants to be free” and the new ditty that “knowledge shared is knowledge doubles.” But on the other, the whole premise of KM and the whole knowledge economy thingy is that organizational learning and knowledge are the most valuable resources that any company (or nation or individual) can posses for a competitive edge.

Which brings me to my extremely mixed feelings about the release of Ark Group’s Next Generation Knowledge Management, Volume 2. It’s an amazing collection of collective and collaborative wisdom, based on the Association of Knowledge Work’s Star Series online roundtables featuring Bob Buckman, David Gurteen, Patti Anklam, Carl Frappaolo, Megan Santosus, Verna Allee, Nancy Dixon, Rob Lebow, Nick Milton and others.

Dave Snowden and I anchored the first confab-turned-chapter. The June 2004 online event, “Comparing and Contrasting Corporate and Personal KM” was ostensibly a “debate” between the individual perspective of bottom-up personal knowledge management and the complex socially-oriented collectivist approach. There was little debate really, but a wonderful symphony on the symbiotic relationship between the organism and the organization. (You can get a flavor of the discussion from my closing remarks.)

Profitable or Predatory?

While there are many successful examples of inclusive finance in America, there is a growing buzz about "predatory" practices that take advantage of the poor. It's quite possible that a backlash—including regulation by Congress and prosecution by state attorneys general—could affect the legitimate efforts as well as the worst practices. I notice that there is a lot of debate, for example, about whether payday lending is predatory or legitimate microcredit.

BusinessWeek has a compelling cover story for the May 21 issue: "The Poverty Business Inside U.S. companies' audacious drive to extract more profits from the nation's working poor."

In recent years, a range of businesses have made financing more readily available to even the riskiest of borrowers. Greater access to credit has put cars, computers, credit cards, and even homes within reach for many more of the working poor. But this remaking of the marketplace for low-income consumers has a dark side: Innovative and zealous firms have lured unsophisticated shoppers by the hundreds of thousands into a thicket of debt from which many never emerge.

Meditation Increases Attention

In our sense-making work, we have been looking at the relationship between different approaches in eastern meditation practices that result in or involve tranquility, insight and mindfulness.

Now a scientific study recently published points to increased attention to fast-changing stimuli when subjects practice meditation.

Meditation teachers such as Gil Fronsdal would point out that there are differences between attention, awareness and mindfulness. (See Fronsdal’s talk on mindfulness here.)

These three concepts are often used interchangeably, but the differnces need to be better explored. For example, attention--as concentration--can cause tunnel vision that misses threats coming from unexpected angles. Whereas awareness can be seen as an improvement in peripheral vision.

Dharma for Dummies

A few months ago I discovered Gil Fronsdal, a Buddhist scholar and teacher whose explorations of Vipassana and Zen led him to study in monasteries throughout Asia and also to Stanford University. Gil’s dharma talks are posted on the Web and are amazingly digestible and thought-provoking for a novice Westerner.

There are almost 500 of his talks posted for free download. His own selection of best 32 talks--in order--are at www.audiodharma.org/talks-rec.html. I'm about half way through; I took him backpacking with me a few months ago. There's also a site called Zencast that mixes talks by Gil and others with some music and also classic talks by people like Shunryu Suzuki.

Emergence in Times of Emergency

US disaster response planning seems to assume that victims are helpless, hapless and hostile obstacles to the imposition of order on chaos. But should governments instead design for emergence in times of emergency?

Dave Pollard has a sobering post at “How to Save the World” about the inevitable incompetence of disaster response planning. Like a catastrophic earthquake in San Francisco, a devastating hurricane in New Orleans was not even a statistically improbable event—in fact, officials and citizens alike knew it was literally a disaster waiting to happen. Nevertheless, as real-time news coverage illustrated and post-mortem analysis confirmed, the most powerful nation on earth couldn’t handle the most predictable possible natural disaster, “despite” having recently reorganized the entire federal government to create a massive bureaucracy dedicated to the single promise of securing the homeland.

It’s interesting to contrast the failure of institutional planning in emergencies to the success of bystander reactions in terms of self-organized teamwork.

The Cognitive Design of Airport Terminals

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”

Saint-Exupéry was not a designer, but an aviator and author (The Little Prince). Too bad he wasn’t an airport designer (although he did once manage a desert airfield). Because late last night, I rode out to Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport to pick up my wife.

Thailand’s brand-new international airport is an award-winning architectural masterpiece. The AIA raved, “Leafy roof forms protect you from the sun and it provides a beautiful way to get from one end of the space to the other.” It is has been a godsend for contractors, vendors, and VIPs. But no one seems to have ever considered how the facility might actually serve the average passenger, especially after a 25-hour flight.

Can a magazine guru redesign the Web?

Those who design for the Internet need to embrace a more timeless visual language than is common today. Don’t just take my word for it. Roger Black has been a magazine design legend since long before I wrote my first articles (ie., Rolling Stone, Newsweek, The New Republic, Fast Company, Foreign Affairs, National Enquirer). In a new essay in MIT’s Technology Review, Black argues…

Like singing a song or writing a story, designing a printed page is a craft that is fundamentally uni­directional, or one-to-many. The flexibility of Web structures confounded and then humbled many traditional designers as they started trying to make Web pages. The whole thing had been developed to let the readers—the users, software developers confusingly called them, as if they were addicts—have control. How could that be good?

Orders of Social Magnitude

To work effectively in today’s collaborative knowledge environments, we need to have communication, presentation, persuasion, listening and learning skills for different levels of social interaction. I think that, a lot of times, the skills are completely different from one level to the next: 1-1, 1-many, many-many, many-1, and then just 1.

I started to write this list with the infinity symbol, which made me realise that there are degrees of many—orders of magnitude, really. Those range from a few people that you know well (say, a team) to lots (community) to most (culture) to everybody (Web).

You Are Not in Control

Dave Snowden is all freaked out about how parasites can influence the behavior of their infected hosts—even humans and human cultures. According to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (nicely summarized by LiveScience on MSNBC) a unicellular organism “precisely alters fear.” Toxoplasma gondii causes rats to be attracted to—rather than fear—the smell of cats because T. gondii’s life cycle requires both animals. The rats get it by eating cat feces and the cats get it back by eating the rats. Changing the behavior of the rats presumably facilitates both transfers. It does not otherwise endanger their survival because it leaves their other instinctual fears alone.

Here’s the thing: up to 80% of humans are also infected by T. gondii at one point or other in their lives. There can be serious physiological consequences, but apparently psychological ones, too.

Complexity and Evolution

By the way, one of the parasitologists Carl Zimmer interviewed for Parasite Rex was Dr. Daniel R. Brooks a very cool biologist I met at Pedro Sotolongo’s complexity conference in Havana a few years ago. Dan is brilliant on ways in which evolutionary theory intersects with concepts in complexity, self-organization and information theories.

Sue the Suits?

I'm a little worried that last month's Toxic Workplace post is the most googled article on my blog. But take heart. New state laws may give you a better recourse than just blogging about it, according to an article in the current issue of Business Week.

"Try This Suit On For Size, Boss"
Bullied at work? Depending on where you live, you may soon be able to file a harassment claim. A half-dozen states from New Jersey to Oregon are considering laws that would make workplace bullying an "unlawful employment practice" and give victims the right to sue an employer that fails to prevent it.
The draft Oregon statute defines bullying as "derogatory remarks, insults or epithets, physical conduct that a reasonable person would find threatening, intimidating or humiliating, or the gratuitous sabotage or undermining of an employee's work performance." The preamble to the bill cites surveys and studies that found 16% to 21% of employees "experience health-endangering workplace bullying, abuse, or harassment."

Toxic workplace,organizational culture,harassment,incivility

Remembering James Abegglen

Jim Abegglen, one of the original post-war Japan hands, passed away last week at the age of 81. I got to know Jim in the early 90s when I was covering US-Japan relations. We spent time together several times when he came to the West Coast to speak at events I helped organize. We once did a long interview that I published in several places, which I’ll post.

Download chaos5-Abegglen.pdf

The thing about Jim was an incredible graciousness not only toward people but also toward ideas and trends. At a time when it was fashionable to bash Japan—the way we bash China now—he was attacked for this (and I was attacked for even interviewing him). But I think it was exactly his determination to treat ideas respectfully, rather than critically, that gave him his deep insights into Japanese economic and industrial culture.

Dave Snowden's "Complexity 101"

Dave pointed me to some new slides after teasing him about the old IBM template. The format is much better (esp. for a Victoria’s Secret sales report), but I’m done with bashing PowerPoint for now.

The point is: the content of the slides was fantastic! “Complexity 101” is an eight-slide introduction to the implications and applications of complexity science, prepared for a half-day seminar Dave led for IBM in April. It covers a lot of history and does a great job of quickly connecting the early complexity work from math and physics to the human complexity underlying the Cynefin/Cognitive Edge work done by Dave, Cynthia Kurtz and others.

Dave Snowden,complexity,Cynthia Kurtz,Cognitive Edge

Typography boosts comprehension 500%

"Good typography can improve comprehension by up to 500 per cent. Bad typography can kill a reader's interest almost immediately. In our word-and-advertising-heavy culture, we are bombarded with thousands of printed messages on a daily basis. Written language is presented to the viewer using typography, and, unfortunately, much of what currently surrounds us is compromised and amateurish due to the designer's lack of knowledge surrounding the old, established discipline of the manipulation of type and typographic elements. The results are serious; bad typography can render even the most beautifully written message incomprehensible. "

Source: Course description from Humber College Institute of Technology & Advanced Learning. CABA 131 - TYPOGRAPHY 1 (Humber Full-Time Calendar 2007.2008)

Typography

Jakuchu and the Age of Imagination

The Price Collection, Jakuchu and the Age of Imagination is turning out to be the astonishingly popular traveling exhibition from the Shin’enKan Foundation. It’s a real triumph for Joe and Etsuko Price, who single-handedly curated world attention for Edo-period painters such as Itoh Jakuchu (1716-1800) long dismissed even by Japanese art historians. Joe was first attracted to Japanese art while apprenticed to Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed the Price Tower for Joe’s father in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

I’ve been a huge fan of the Prices ever since first getting to know them at the Japan America Society of Southern California in the 90s. JAS Director Doug Erber reports that Joe has become a sidewalk celebrity in Japan, mobbed by teenagers wherever he goes.

Typography, Perception and Cognition

Think fonts don't matter? BBC: An air traffic controller sent a Glasgow plane to Cardiff after misreading small computer text at the new control centre… “Screens blamed for air blunders.” May 23, 2002

How do the fonts chosen for documents and information affect sense-making? At Wichita State University, the Software Usability Research Laboratory (SURL) team specializes in user interface design research for software and websites. They have done some interesting studies about the effect on reader perceptions and cognition of different fonts, line lengths, multiple columns, etc.

For example, they studied how the chosen fonts change reader perceptions of the author and/or of the material, finding: "Typefaces can influence the mood of a document in three possible ways: the typeface may reinforce the text and mood; the typefaces may conflict with the message/mood; or there may be no influence resulting in a neutral effect." They used Calibri, Comic Sans and Gigi and found—not surprisingly that people got low scores for knowledge, believability, maturity, professionalism, and trustworthiness when they used Gigi in their emails.

PowerPoint when Thinking is Critical

The year I worked for Dave Snowden’s IBM Cynefin Centre, I was required to use the official Big Blue PowerPoint template. Based on 12pt Arial, the template was impossible to read, even close to the screen. The year after, when Cynefin went independent (eventually as Cognitive Edge Pte.), Dave used my presentation font, Marker Felt Wide, at a minimum of 18pt (but usually 28-36pt). You decide:

Dave has since moved on, but Marker remains my signature font for presentations.