archive.Joe Lamantia.com

JoeLamantia.com complemented my formal professional work in technology, design, product, and strategy, beginning with the early(ish) Web moment of the middle 90s.

For approximately 15 years, beginning about 2000, the site shared practice-related tools, methods, frameworks, industry and academic publications, professional presentations, and evolving perspectives (after 2006, genuinely raw thinking out loud mostly happened via Twitter).

The final postings publish industry analysis on the then-emerging field of data science, with a broader frame of the expansionary category of analytically-driven business products and services.  My roles at the time emphasized product strategy for B2B software applications and B2C platforms powered by predictive models built from collections of business, consumer, and research data – composite assets newly recognized as Big Data.  I described this as  the machine intelligence space, to clarify the focus on new technology and product development outcomes, and distinguish the broader category of AI.

From 2016 onwards, with ‘software eating the world‘, my professional roles shifted to leading scaled / scaling product development groups, with charters emphasizing innovation powered by the expanding stable of human-centered technology disciplines: information architecture, interaction design, user experience, content strategy, design research, product strategy (still not well-articulated…).  With broad success and growth within the business context (read, steady buyers), the questions shifted from foundational — e.g. codifying ‘What is User Experience?’, and shaping ‘How does it even happen?’ — to operational  — ‘How is this done better at scale?  In new channels?  For the entire business? With customers around the world?’

To answer these basic ‘get it done’ questions on crafting human-informed products daily within large business contexts, the cross-border communities for product development, technology, and media spun up a healthy circuit of professional gatherings,  and a layer of complimentary social forums.  Conversations that originally took place via small group gatherings and niche news groups or listservs, shifted to Big Conferences, and Big Social Platforms.

In that landscape, there was less to share directly in the blog format.  Also, there was the rest of life: family, home, community.

Then in 2018, after a series of minor maintenance and administration incidents, that show how the social Web and the entire Internet environment was changing to a regime of financialized surveillance capitalism, and algorithmically amplified predation, there was no ‘there’, there.  JoeLamantia.com went dark, as far as sharing my work was concerned.  The domain was doing a different job, for different audiences. and stayed that way.

Before I decided to focus fully on looking ahead and making new things for the new spaces of the early Web, I’d planned to study history, media, and technology – essentially looking in the other direction, as a scholar.  I *almost* did a PhD at U. Chicago or Pitt (thanks to both programs for seeing potential and offering opportunity).  This path not taken taught me the deep value of a historical perspective, especially when you’re considering where to go next, and how to get there.

Now, almost exactly ten years since the last original post in June of 2014, following a modest technical reanimation effort, I’m happy to offer a restored archive version of JoeLamantia.com.  It’s not *everything* that was written, said, or shared — but it’s most of what mattered.  We’re back.

To move forward, we’ll be reflecting on some of the “practice-related tools, methods, frameworks, industry and academic publications, professional presentations, and evolving perspectives” shared, to assess and learn from them by looking in both directions.

Thanks for your consideration: then, and now.

Designers interested in the new challenges of ubiquitous computing / ubicomp, ethics, and the future of integrated experiences will enjoy Improving Our Ethical Choices: Managing the Imp of the Perverse, published in UXMatters on September 8th.

Ranging from Baudelaire to the Big Chill, with Edgar Allen Poe as guiding spirit, this fourth and final installment of the Designing Ethical Experiences series written for UXMatters provides practical suggestions – drawn mostly from business, psychology, and ethics researchers – on how to balance the tensions of difficult design choices. We’re not all philosophers, so as always the focus is on insights into how we make all types of decisions, not simply ethical dilemmas.

Aligning The Decision Cycle

Here’s an excerpt:

Ethical fading, the tension between our Want and Should Selves, and our natural tendency to create juicy rationalizations are powerful obstacles to the making of ethical design choices. As UX professionals, how can we better align our Want and Should Selves, ensuring that we create ethical experiences?

I learned a great deal about myself and my outlook while researching and writing this series of articles. I hope readers find the insights and tools valuable; either directly as a resource for dealing with ethical challenges of the new integrated experiences, or more generally during the day to day ebb and flow of design work.

At least accord­ing to the Boston Globe arti­cle titled Don’t under­es­ti­mate the value of social skills, in which Pene­lope Trunk quotes an HBS fac­ulty mem­ber as fol­lows:
’In fact, across the board, in a wide vari­ety of busi­nesses, peo­ple would rather work with some­one who is lik­able and incom­pe­tent than with some­one who is skilled and obnox­ious, said Tiziana Cas­ciaro, a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Busi­ness School. “How we value com­pe­tence changes depend­ing on whether we like some­one or not,” she says.‘
I guess this explains how we ended up with George W. Bush as President…

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Some star­tling num­bers about call cen­ter employ­ment, from the newslet­ter Knowledge@Wharton:
“an esti­mated 3% of the U.S. work­force [is] employed in call cen­ters“
That’s a greater share of the total than for all farm pay­rolls and agri­cul­tural pro­duc­tion across the U.S.
“Call cen­ters… typ­i­cally expe­ri­ence a 30% annual turnover in employ­ees.“
Not as high as some meat pro­cess­ing facil­i­ties, but get­ting there…
“In some cases the mean dura­tion of employ­ment is 17 days.“
Which I believe at one point was the expected life­time of a freshly deployed infantry­man for the Soviet Army on the East­ern Front dur­ing WWII…

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