From the archives: Originator’s Manifesto.
I wrote this and comped it up for a presentation. It was lost and forgotten shortly thereafter.
Ugliness [is] more interesting than beauty… that stuff which is human, interesting, f*#%ed up, passionate rather than logical, reasonable, and, of course, beautiful.
—
Tibor Kalman (via a new favorite blog, How To Work).
There is so much value in our imperfect, inefficient, unreliable, messy, awkward weirdness that is overlooked in the clean, reliable efficient software/experiences we design and build. By the Machine’s standard, we are broken. But we spend our lives craving and chasing brokenness. We want to care and be cared for. We pick out the inconstancy so we can collect it, fix it, or just laugh at it. We spent time not as a fuel for a process that is relentlessly driving at an end goal — we spend time for the sake of time-spending. We take circuitous routes even when we know where we need to be. And worse yet, we often start out with no idea of where we are going. There is beauty in the Machine, but I wish we would make messier, uglier machines — chubby, huggable, unreliable, relatable machines.
Feelin’ the holidays already — Christmas card design.
From the archives: Mail Icon
From the archives: Wander Air
Case Study: What I Want Out of Facebook
Note: This experiment is in no way affiliated with Facebook, Apple, Wes Anderson, or the Tenenbaum Family.
Another Note: This experiment is not about user interface, or touch gestures, or mobile apps. It’s about an experience and a product. It’s about relationships to people. The interactions that I’ve visualized below are far from final. I was mostly playing with how an interface could make me feel about the people it represented.
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I’m a failure when it comes to Facebook. My friend count is below average. No one ‘likes’ my stuff. And I never quite finished filling out that section of my bio where I list all the bands I like and movies I’ve seen.
Or maybe Facebook has failed me. It’s not because the ads the serve up are irrelevant — sometimes they get close. They’ve done a great job reminding me of birthdays. And I’ve never questioned where to put squishy pictures of my cute baby. I know how to use Facebook, but I don’t. And when nearly everyone in my home country under 50 is on this thing, I have to ask what I am missing.
But there is a fundamental promise that has gone unfulfilled. It’s the promise that playing around with this awkwardly named website will make your relationships with the people you care about better (yes, I know the history of the name, but just think about it — Face? Book?).
I know Facebook has grander ambitions. It wants to be the clearing house of the internet, the home page, the portal, the town square, the identity infrastructure for the planet, all Facebook all the time. But something about the content and interactions on Facebook screams at this fundamental core: connect with the people you care about. And yet there is so much that pulls me away from and prevents me doing just that.
I guess what I want out of Facebook is clarity. I want that promise of better relationships front and center, and I want the activity that they are putting in front of me to clearly reflect that goal.
And I know this sounds like a humble vision for the Facebook empire. But as a product, Facebook as a tool for better relationships is probably one of the most desired and universal value propositions out there, next to Foodbook, Shelterbook, and PhysicalSafetyBook.
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Introducing Knitt
So I started playing around with something I am calling Knitt. Knitt is not a reduction of the entire Facebook platform. It is one simple tool that could live alongside many others. Knitt works like a to do list of kindness, a reminder to be mindful. It’s job is to learn who you are closest to and help you stay close or get closer.
Knitt could even be super smart. Imagine you have been out of touch with a friend for a long time. One day, that friend comes to town and calls you up. You hang out, and suddenly, you’re good friends again. Knitt picks up on the increase in interactions, and instead of a bi-annual reminder to send a shout-out to that friend, Knitt increases the frequency of interactions for that rekindled relationship.
Knitt would work both ways, helping you forgo frequent interaction with more distant acquaintances without forgetting them, and also helping you interact more often with the people that matter most. Knitt wants you to spend less time with Knitt and more time communicating and being with your own kind and kin.
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What excites me about Facebook, and about ideas like Knitt that could build on top of it, is that the connections are there, the relationships largely defined. There is a ton of potential to make peoples’ lives better, and when Facebook can deliver on that promise, I’ll be glad I signed up.
Most of the people worth being friends with are weird.
—The Fact of the Matter, Radiolab (thanks Tida for the source!)
Yes, even YOU can make are. Six simple steps. First in a series of simple tutorials.
The postcards from the Postcard Project Blog are available for the next three days on Fab❤! See them here →
Designed this set of three pocket-sized notebooks. We’re working on making them available individually and as a set of three (one each of lined, unlined, and gridded interior pages). Help us gauge interest so we can print enough but not overshoot it. Would you buy these as a set or even individually? Like this post, leave a comment, or reblog it to let us know if you want to see these printed.
Original Archiving Company is the inspiration curating / cataloguing arm of Koseli’s new brand. She’s a jack-of-all-trades copywriter, reader, editor, explorer, finder, discoverer, sharer. We wanted to build a brand that could start small and grow with her.
The Original Arhiving Co. blog will be the start of this new brand, with a portfolio of her writing work and a store to come later.
- Naming -
Koseli is the core of the brand. From there, we’ve used a consistent naming convention (Original _______ Co.) to label her portfolio of writing work, her blog, and a soon-to-come store.
Designed this postcard for people to share when they launch their own Wanderlog. Check out one of my Wanderlogs, Architexture →
Wander Airlines. Getting to send out some more of these tickets soon.
The Internet’s Mind-Shrinking Powers
I recently listened to this debate from the NPR Intelligence Squared (US Edition) Podcast. They put forth the question “Does the internet close our minds politically?”
I repond with an emphatic “no”. But aside from all the good vibes I get from the future potential of the internet, it comes down to some simple (albeit difficult to measure) science.
Humans have this wonderful and beautiful tendency to form lil’ clubs and cliques — what Seth Godin refers to as tribes. That tendancy yields some cosmic radness: the Beautiful Losers, lunatic Football fandom, Buddhist monk ninjas, and yes, even graphic designers.
Because of this, we self select. We pick and chose people and media that tend to reinforce our views of the world. The best measure of the internet’s mind-closing (or expanding), world-view-narrowing (or widening) powers is not in the search algorithms and social networks that promise content that is topically and socially relevant. Those interactions just mirror our real-life natural tendancies. The important measure is whether we have a greater or lesser chance of encountering differing world views online than we do in real life. That difference is what defines the internet as either a view-expanding or view-narrowing medium.
Someone smarter than I might be able to work this into an equation of sorts. My guess is that by sheer chance and convenience, we have more opportunity online to encounter unfamiliar views than we do in real life. I have little interest in death meta,l and the cost in energy, time, and awkwardness of attending a session of the Denver Heavy Metal Society Meetup is too great a risk. However, I have stumbled across chiptune death metal on youtube, and browsed a page of hand drawn death metal band logos (and pop band logos in death metal style). By degrees I am exposed to something new. And by degrees, my view is broadened.
Sure, we self select. And why would we build an internet that doesn’t behave as we do ourselves? But overall the internet has a tendency to randomly throw us into a room with a bunch of people we don’t know and even though we might often chose to run back to our comfortable corner, we are the better for the experience.
For the record, I code. I could not make the things I wanted to make, at the level I wanted to make them, so I learned.
— Last week I argued against designer’s learning code in this debate. It was all for the sport of the thing. I actually am pro learning to code and believe there a huge career and creative advantage to web designers that do. The first site I coded from start to finish was for my dad. I’m still very new to it but learning.
