archive.Joe Lamantia.com

I’ve been looking at ubiquitous computing for the past few weeks, working on the first installment of what will be a recurring column in UXMatters, and it’s had me thinking a lot about Borges’ enigmatic Parable of the Palace.

I’m not exactly sure what the resonance is — it literally popped into my head a few weeks ago — but the connection has stuck with me. Maybe it’s the quantum uncertainty of the tale? Or the ambiguity of the symbols. Are designers the poet? It feels that way some days. Is the palace the world around us? Maybe we’re also the emperor…

Without further ado, I present the parable in it’s entirety.

Parable of the Palace
by Jorge Luis Borges

That day the Yellow Emperor showed his palace to the poet. Little by little, step by step, they left behind, in long procession, the first westward-facing terraces which, like the jagged hemicycles of an almost unbounded amphitheater, stepped down into a paradise, a garden whose metal mirrors and intertwined hedges of juniper were a prefiguration of the labyrinth. Cheerfully they lost themselves in it — at first as though condescending to a game, but then not without some uneasiness, because its straight allées suffered from a very gentle but continuous curvature, so the secretly the avenues were circles. Around midnight, observation of the planets and the opportune sacrifice of a tortoise allowed them to escape the bonds of that region that seemed enchanted, though not to free themselves from that sense of being lost that accompanied them to the end. They wandered next through antechambers and courtyards and libraries, and then through a hexagonal room with a water clock, and one morning, from a tower, they made out a man of stone, whom later they lost sight of forever. In canoes hewn from sandalwood, they crossed many gleaming rivers–or perhaps a single river many times. The imperial entourage would pass and people would fall to their knees and bow their heads to the ground, but one day the courtiers came to an island where one man did not do this, for he had never seen the Celestial Son before, and the executioner had to decapitate him.

The eyes of the emperor and poet looked with indifference on black tresses and black dances and golden masks; the real merged and mingled with the dreamed–or the real, rather, was one of the shapes the dream took. It seemed impossible that the earth should be anything but gardens, fountains, architectures, and forms of splendor. Every hundred steps a tower cut the air; to the eye, their color was identical, but the first of them was yellow and the last was scarlet; that was how delicate the gradations were and how long the series.

It was at the foot of the penultimate tower that the poet (who had appeared untouched by the spectacles which all the others had so greatly marveled at) recited the brief composition that we link indissolubly to his name today, the words which, as the most elegant historians never cease repeating, garnered the poet immortality and death. The text has been lost; there are those who believe that it consisted of but a single line; others, of a single word.

What we do know–however incredible it may be–is that within the poem lay the entire enormous palace, whole and to the least detail, with every venerable porcelain it contained and every scene on every porcelain, all the lights and shadows of its twilights, and every forlorn or happy moment of the glorious dynasties of mortals, gods, and dragons that had lived within it through all its endless past.

Everyone fell silent; then the emperor spoke: “You have stolen my palace!” he cried, and the executioner’s iron scythe mowed down the poet’s life.

Others tell the story differently. The world cannot contain two things that are identical; no sooner, they say, had the poet uttered his poem than the palace disappeared, as though in a puff of smoke, wiped from the face of the earth by the final syllable.
Such legends, of course, are simply literary fictions. The poet was the emperor’s slave and died a slave; his composition fell into oblivion because it merited oblivion, and his descendants still seek, though they shall never find, the word for the universe.

Trying out the Ask500People polling / survey / crowdsmarts (collective intelligence is too clean a term for this) service, I thought I’d throw out a complicated question, but ask for a simple answer.
In light of the collapse of American – and now global – financial markets [which are melting faster than the polar ice caps, if anyone’s interested in what may prove to be a telling environmental parallel with dire implications for our collective future], I’m wondering “Is American culture healthy?”
Here’s the responses so far – join in!
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Related posts:

In case you couldn’t make it to Amsterdam for EuroIA 2008, or if you were in town but preferred to stay outside in the warmth of a sunny September Saturday than venture into the marvelous Tsuchinski theater, I’ve posted the slides from my talk Frameworks are the Future of Design.
Enjoy!

Reading about the recent release of SocialText 3 I was struck by the strong parallels between the defining characteristics of enterprise environments in 2003/2004, and the emerging public Web 2.0 landscape. The essential characteristics of many enterprise environments are:

• Syndication: streams of modular content and functionality broadcast widely to subscribers within the firewall, such as enterprise data feeds, ERP, BI capabilities, CRM, custom capabilities shared via SOA
• Services (e.g. environmental, like the bees we used to have for pollination): identity, security, publication, data management, cloud storage, imap email, etc.
• Social Structures: tangible networks & communities of like-minded people, oriented around a common practice, purpose, process, or pain; think of all the matrixed, horizontal org structures and ad-hoc networks encoded via internal email lists, IM, sprawling intranets, corporate directories, etc.

These same attributes are emerging as the hallmarks of the public Web 2.0 landscape. This is how the three S’s manifest for Web 2.0:

• Syndication: A literal and figurative torrent of content in the form of blogs, RSS, feeds, streams, APIs, for social objects of all types, as well as catalogs of rentable content
• Services: This layer is growing rapidly for the public internet, with OpenID / OAuth, mapping, visualization, backup, calendaring – the list is nearly infinite, and still expanding
• Social Structures: The Web (and soon the mobile universe) is profoundly social now, and will continue to become ever more so.

I think you can easily see the strong parallels. It’s this similarity between the older enterprise environments and the emerging Web 2.0 environment that user experience practitioners, — and especially anyone practicing information architecture — should note.
Why? As I’ve written before, modularity is everywhere in this new environment, it’s apparent at all layers of the information world, from utilities like processing power, to services, to the elements that make up the user experience. The effects of modularity in syndication, services, and social structures on developers and IT have been profound; practices, processes, organizational structures, and business models have all shifted in response.

This wave of change first affected the developers who build and work directly with code and systems. But inevitably, disciplines further up the stack are feeling the impact of this shift, though many of us (and I’m putting user experience in this class) may not know it yet.

How will we feel that impact? One obvious way is in the pressure to adopt agile and other modular product construction practices created by and for developers as the preferred way to structure user experience and design efforts. This is a mistake that confuses the different stages of software / digital product creation (as Alan Cooper explained well at Agile2008). Design is not construction, and shouldn’t be treated as if it is. And one size fits all does not work when choosing the process and toolkit used for creating complex digital products, services, or experiences.

One result of this modularity rules all approach to user experience is the erosion of bounded or well-structured design processes that balance risk effectively for the various stages of design, and were meant to ensure the quality and relevance of the resulting products and experiences. Erosion is visible the trends toward compression or elimination of recognizable design concept exploration and usability verification activities in many design methods.

More immediately – in fact staring us right in the face, though I haven’t seen mention of it yet in m/any user experience forums – is the growing number of situations wherein there’s “No designer required”.

Examples of this abound, but just consider this feature list for the Social Text 3 Dashboard:

• You decide what matters
• Create your dashboard in minutes
• Include 3rd party information and applications
• Track & attend to what’s most important to you
• Status updates flow automatically, as you work

If that’s not specific enough, here’s what comes out of the box, in the form of pre-built widgets:

• My Conversations – changes others have made to any Socialtext workspace page you authored, edited, or commented on
• My Colleagues – recent updates made by people you are subscribed to
• Workspaces – workspaces you have access to and their activity metrics
• Workspace Page – any page from any of your Socialtext workspaces
• RSS Viewer – results of an RSS feed you configure
• Workspace Tags – a tag cloud of all tags in a particular workspace
• All People Tags – a tag cloud of all tags on people in Socialtext People

No architect required for most people here… and this trend is everywhere.

And then there’s the awesome spectre ofcommoditization. Listening to a friend describe the confusing experience of trying to select a short list of design firms for inclusion in an RFP made the linkage clear to me. I’ll quote Weil’s definition of commoditization from the paper referenced above, to make the point explicit.

Please recall that commoditization denotes the development of a competitive environment where:

• Product differentiation is very difficult;
• Customer loyalty and brand values are low;
• Competition is based primarily on price; and
• Sustainable advantage comes from cost (and sometimes quality) leadership.
• Commoditization is driven by excess capacity.

Please note that I’m not implying user experience practitioners face overnight obsoletion.

But I am saying that I doubt our current disciplinary worldview and toolkit adequately prepare us for the realities of the new environment emerging so rapidly. Code, by contrast, is and always will be modular. (After all, that is the defining attribute of our alphabets.)

But user experience is holistic, and has to learn to build in its own way from these smaller pieces like a writer combining words and phrases. Eventually, you can create works of tremendous depth, richness, and sophistication; think of Ulysses by James Joyce, or the Mahabharata. These are richly nuanced experiences that are the result of working with modular elements.

My suggestion for one response to the oncoming wave of modularity and commoditization is to focus our value proposition in the creation of tools that other people use to define their individual experiences. In other words, shift our professional focus to higher layers of abstraction, and get into the business of defining and designing frameworks, networks, and systems of experience components. Practically, this will mean things like observing and defining the most valuable patterns arising in the use of systems of modular elements we design, and then advising on their use to solve problems. This is the direction common within enterprise environments, and in light of the appearance of public pattern libraries (Yahoo’s UI), I think I see it happening within parts of the user experience community. I’m not sure it’s happening fast enough, though.

I hoped to communicate some of these ideas in my talk on why frameworks are the future (at least for anyone practicing Experience Architecture) for the 2008 EuroIA Summit that just took place here in lovely Amsterdam. I’ll post the slides shortly. In the meantime, what do you think? Is user experience ready for the modularized, enterprise-like environment of Web 2.0? How are you responding to these changes? Is commoditization even on your radar?