Samuel Bowles gave a great talk on pair design (aka Extreme Design) at the Agile UX and Lean Startup Group meetup in London last Tuesday.

Samuel explained that pair design, like pair programming, involves two people working together on the same design goal. This pairing could consist of either a designer and developer or two designers. Samuel argued that there are significant advantages to pairing up in this way with regards to the overall quality of the resulting design. Key to the process, he said, is the constant dialogue between the pair, articulating thought and rigorously defending each design decision.

The co-authors of this post chatted after the event and found we shared both an enthusiasm for the quality of Samuel’s presentation, but also certain concerns about the implied constraints of pair design. We have had much positive experience of pair design (both designer/designer and designer/developer combinations), so our rejoinder to Samuel’s presentation is more a “yes and” than a “yes but“.

Conscious awareness and understanding of one’s own design ideation processes — one of the key benefits of pair design identified by Samuel — is clearly indispensable for good design. This is particularly the case in interaction design, where a complex web of considerations (business goals, user needs, technology constraints, etc.) must be taken into account in the design process.

Whereas some ideas form quickly as a complete image, others form slowly. Given that the mere presence of another person can be enough to influence cognition significantly it seems to us that solitude can be as important to designers as is collaboration. For example, see the literature on the “audience effect”, such as Manstead & Semin, 1980, who hypothesise that social presence enhances dominant responses, which is to say the most common response or thought is more likely to be expressed. However, in design we are sometimes looking for the uncommon thing.

Perhaps even more importantly, the quick-fire nature of pair design can lead to an idea which is still in the germinal phase being killed before it has a chance to gestate and mature. Trying to prescribe words to a half-formed idea is tricky, and we often only realise the significance of an idea once we have had a chance to let our mind wander around with it and figure out the context that yields its truest expression. For instance, a designer might have a conviction that a UI element belongs in a specific place on the page, but not be able to justify that conviction until the remaining page elements, which had been only subconsciously present in the designer’s mind, reach consciousness and thence the design sketch.

While design is (usually) a quintessentially visually-focused activity, we are nevertheless dependent on language to bring our visual creations to life as “ideas” that may be discussed and evaluated.

Stendhal wrote of “crystallisation” of thought, whereby an idea becomes fixed in the mind and is hard to change. However, some designers talk of how their creative processes, both analytic and synthetic, are more like a liquid. Forcing an idea prematurely into words constrains it within a straightjacket of semantics and letters. The danger is that the truly radical ideas get squeezed out before they have a chance to develop fully as they are put through the coarse filter of language. Remember: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (Wittgenstein).

When two people converse there is, to a greater or lesser extent, a certain amount of work that must be done in “grounding”. This is the process of finding out whether you share a vocabulary with compatible sets of meanings. This would be a central process in pair design as the pair would have to do this work in the course of “getting to know each other”. Once the grounding has been sufficiently carried out, you can then express ideas that draw upon this shared dictionary. However, if you are trying to creatively solve a problem then you are having to express something to another person that doesn’t exist yet.

Here misunderstandings may occur, as your conversant has to guess at what you mean and form their own image of the idea you are expressing. Differences in how two people envision a shared idea can lead to wonderful new ideas as the gap between the two is discovered and explored. However, under a high pressure work environment the danger is that an idea may get shot down without being given a fair trial, because it is not correctly understood.

Pair design is a great approach with many positives, but perhaps it needs to be considered in the context of a broader design process that also embraces solitude? What happens in those fragile moments very early on in ideation? And do you feel the need to articulate an embryonic idea is helpful or harmful?

Taking Randall Munroe’s excellent Radiation Dose Chart and a Japanese-language version of the same as our data sources, we have created an interactive visualisation of radiation doses as spheres, where each sphere’s volume is proportional to the radiation dose it represents(1µSv ≈ 16.14cm3). Each radiation sphere is shown next to a human figure, adding a human dimension to the comparison while also establishing the scale of each view (we have assumed a height of the adult male figure of about 175cm).

You can play with the infographic here.

放射能というものは、人間の五感では探知できません。そのため、放射線被ばく量とそれが人体と健康に与える影響を比較して把握することが困難になっています。
我々は、ランドル・マンローの放射線被ばくチャートと、その日本語のバージョンを使って、放射線量を立体の円の大きさで表し、図式化してみました（1µSv ≈ 16.14cm3）。それぞれの立体の円を人体（課程高さ≈１７５cm）の横におき、その人体の大きさと立体の円の大きさを見た目で比較することによって、より放射線の量を掴みやすいようにしてみました。

インフォグラフィックはこちらです。

System Concepts’ impressive user research capabilities dovetail nicely with Weaver’s strategic and design expertise to enable us to deliver compelling end-to-end solutions to the most ambitious challenges.

Read our full press release here.

Introspecting, I realise that to answer my question well, Google would need to know my political views, those of my neighbours (civic pressure), my council’s facilities and policies around recycling, the contemporary environmental cost/benefit balance of recycling particular types of materials (we have massive global surpluses of some recycled materials), my friends’ opinions on the matter, the extent to which they would know what and if I was recycling, and how much I care that they know… and so on. Google would also need to know which of the gazillions of pages and data in its index were relevant to such sub-questions.

Of course, Google knows nothing of most of the above (which I am quite glad about, particularly in the light of certain recent subpoenas), and very likely wouldn’t be able to string the data together effectively to come up with a good answer to my question even if it did. This is one of the big challenges for computer-mediated search.

An elusive promise

When Google burst onto the web in the 1998 and we were suddenly able to find a plethora of useful information with natural language queries, it seemed to many that it was surely only a matter of time before we could find pretty much any information we wanted by asking a computer.

The web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, certainly did nothing to dispell that idea with his much vaunted Semantic Web project.

Fast-forward 12 years, though, and the naked computer seems, if anything, less able than ever to provide satifactory results for many of our informational searches. Specifically, it is often difficult to find information of sufficient quality (a subjective attribute), and even more so, of personal relevance (still more subjective a matter) — as is certainly the case with my recycling example above.

My computer doesn’t understand me

Why do machines struggle to understand what kind of information we want? Google, Bing and the like certainly have no shortage of raw information to serve up to us, given their massively wide-ranging spidering of the web and other data sources. So, by inference, the problem must be in how search engines make sense of our search queries on one hand, and/or of the data they index on the other.

At the heart of the problem with search is the massive gap that remains between the representation of reality by computers and humans.

Humans experience their world in the context of highly-complex, mutually-interacting social and semantic constructs; which is as much to say that we are extremely good at creating coherent (albeit often flawed) mental models of our world from the complex and often messy tangle of experiences and beliefs we carry around in our heads. We communicate accordingly, encoding into the natural language we exchange with one another a great deal of the rich complexity of our world views (consider the effortless way in which you would naturally, perhaps sub-consciously even, factor in most or all of the various considerations I listed above in answering my recycling question).

And at the heart of our cognitive and communicative sophistication is self-awareness and free will (or at least the illusion of the same), which two attributes allow us to proactively evolve and adapt our mental model(s) of the world in an incredibly dynamic and complex manner. We continuously build our model of the world from the point of view of being an autonomous and self-reflective agent within that world, slicing through outworn conceptual structures with the chainsaw of our insight in order to make room for new and potentially more useful ideas about reality.

Computers, on the other hand, follow rules in logically-linear processes. Sure, they can be used to model semantic and social contexts and linguistic fuzziness in an attempt to emulate the workings of our human brains. But those models remain very far indeed from the actual workings of the human mind (and I’d certainly include the Semantic Web here, though a discussion of this topic is beyond the scope of this post), and/or the search engines lack sufficient and appropriate data to feed into those models — otherwise they would be able to answer our personal search queries well, after all.

The social network — Search saviour?

Step forward socially-enabled technology (you know, Facebook, Twitter etc). Nowadays, we spend a lot of time talking to each other in little online messages. And many of us are finding that it’s not only more enjoyable to spend time in the virtual company of people than in the mere company of our computer (still better to get face-to-face time, but 3D reality is limiting in that regard), but also that we are stumbling across more useful information in this way than we tend to when searching the web in a more traditional manner. (I am, of course, glossing over somewhat-social bookmarking services — Delicious, Stumbleupon etc — and news aggregators or RSS readers, which I would suggest could be considered as transitional technologies between traditional search and services like Facebook and Twitter where the user’s social network is their primary information filter.)

A tweet unfurled

It’s amazing how much sematic depth can be unfurled from a very little message. Take this one, for example, from Stephen Fry:

“Possibly the funniest morning of my life: talking with Brian Blessed about swearing. Here is the face of God http://frypi.cc/gDpyQX”

Let’s unpack the (culturally-dependent) meanings of this tweet:

• If Stephen Fry says something is funny, it’s probably going to be very funny. He is a connoisseur of funniness. And this was “[p]ossibly the funniest morning” of his life.
• All Brits know that Brian Blessed is a booming, uncontrollably enthusiastic Luvvy. So if he is talking about swearing, you can just imagine…
• “Here is the face of God”. Brian Blessed has a massively bushy beard. He is the face of God (move over, Morgan).
• In short — most of Stephen’s UK audience would surely be sorely tempted to click the link in the message. Fry packs in at least three good reasons to in two short sentences.

When you stop to think about it, what we humans can do with language is mind-boggling. We bring to bear our life history, culture (national and regional), personality, opinions, and our knowledge (such as it may be) of the same attributes of our respondent, in both creating and decoding the stuff (language, that is). All of which allows us to exchange the most intoxicatingly rich muddle (the possibility of getting mutually-muddled about what is communicated always remains, and seems to be the price of our communicative flexibility and fuzziness) of meanings in a few choice words.

Trouble in social search paradise

Of course, social curation of information remains far from a panacea when it comes to information discovery: you often have to wade through yards of ‘feed to find an information nugget, and if you’re in the market for a more directed, less serendipitous approach to finding the information you desire, your social/fan network often proves a somewhat clogged-up filter. I tried asking the same recycling question I asked Google to my 1200+ online “friends” via my social network presences (including Q&A service and techcrowd-sensation-du-jour, Quora), and received just two answers so far (one day after posting the question, both on Quora, one helpful within a limited scope — about scrap steel recycling — and the other self-promotional spam)… Which probably goes to show that, just because you have a question you really want answered, that doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone will be interested in answering it.

So should we just accept defeat on the whole “asking our computer for personally useful information” thing? Is its realisation going to remain just out of reach for the forseeable future, as we learn more and more about just how complex and hard to model our human consciousnesses are? Well no, I can’t accept that argument, as a science and techno-enthusiast — breakthroughs in scientific understanding of our minds may be imminent for all I know, and relevant technological solutions would likely follow smartly behind.

And in the meantime, perhaps, just perhaps, could technology’s continuing failure (and I include social networks here) to furnish us with deeply and consistently effective means of findng personally useful information have a tangential but rather profound upside?

A conversational silver lining

The gap between human and computer “cognition” (quotes apply to the computers amongst us) is forcing us to talk to each other, or at least to listen to each other, in an attempt to furnish and, more commonly, find information that is useful to us as unique, human individuals. The ongoing wars and inter-faith/race/region/etc wrangles around the world make it all too clear that we are continuing to do a pretty poor job, on aggregate, of achieving a deep understanding of and compassion for one another. Talking and listening, at least if done in the right spirit, can hopefully only help to increase our ability and interest in understanding one another, and thereby foster mutual respect and care between individuals, groups, societies.

That’s something worth continuing to search for.

Weaver’s core focus has always been User Experience. Our research, analysis, testing, design and development activities all constellate around the primary concern of helping our clients to give their customers an amazing experience that also delivers on the client’s business goals.

But two key sub-themes emerged in our introspection: sociability and depth.

We are passionate about good communication and the socialisation of information here at Weaver, and those concerns run through not only how we work together as a team and how we collaborate with clients, but also the nature of our solutions themselves. Many of those solutions encompass both the integration of existing social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc) and bespoke social interaction design for the client’s own digital presences (websites, apps etc).

We also relish coming up with elegant and efficient solutions to complex and messy problems. Not for us the snake oil (arguably) of “social media consultancy”, getting paid to tell clients what common sense and a little experimentation would have told them; Weaver allies our understanding and experience of the social aspects of digital with a sophisticated understanding of business strategy and branding in order to deliver compelling solutions to our client’s business challenges.

The phrase “Deep Social” seems to encapsulate our twin passions of sociability and depth rather nicely, so that’s what we’ve gone with for our new strapline:

“Weaver Digital: Deep Social User Experience”

It’s a bit of a buzz phrase we know, but it does capture the key points of who we are and what we care about.

Weaver moved into the TalkTalk Startup Hub on Broadwick Street in Soho at the beginning of May, and it has been a fantastic experience so far. The location is ideal for coffee addicts like me and @kpopper with great cafes like Flat White and Fernandez & Wells merely yards away.

On the project front, our work is as varied and interesting as ever, including ongoing work with Vodafone on various web and marketing projects, a major site redesign and build for leading VC firm DFJ Esprit and web site and app design work for Elastik Mobile.

We have great meeting rooms here (and fantastic coffee on hand, as per the above) — so if you have a project idea, why not come and talk to us? Oh and we have the World Cup showing on the plasma screen most of the time.

Our largest client, Vodafone, must be happy with something we’re doing, as they have asked us to help them with an ever-wider range of projects — Betavine.net, JIL.org, a number of marketing campaigns, mobile widget prototypes, UX strategy planning for a major new project, a print campaign for the AppStar mobile widget competition… They have been keeping us pretty busy!

And then, as the year wore on, Weaver ramped up our activity into entirely new areas:

• We designed a “Flickr browser with a difference” iPhone app called Artful Photography, for Elastik Mobile, which launched on New Year’s Eve 2009, and which the BBC’s Bill Thompson has called “a lovely way to pass the time”. 20 out of our 28 ratings so far are five star;
• Weaver is currently designing a sister application for Artful Photography for the museums space, called (strangely enough) Artful Museums. We are partnering with leading online cultural merchandisers CultureLabel and The Museum of London on this project, and plan to launch the first version of the app in late spring 2010;
• We have also started working with TED Global Fellow Rachel Armstrong and Professor of Architecture and Digital Theory at UCL, Neil Spiller, on a project we’re calling Future Venice, which aims to stop Venice sinking by using “protocell” technology. v1 of the futurevenice.org site is on its way.

As 2009 drew to a close, it felt like a great time to take stock of Weaver’s achievements to date, so we set to work on putting together a portfolio of key projects. We made sure to keep it punchy and include lots of pictures, so we hope you enjoy it.

And now we’re here in 2010, which sounds very much like the future to me… May it be an amazing year of challenges, discovery and fulfilment for you and those you care about.

Weave well and weave skilfully!

However, things have changed a great deal in the intervening 15 months: the company has grown from a one-man User Experience consultancy to a full-service digital solutions agency contracting a sizable team of associates.

The company is no longer mainly about my work as an individual: it’s about a philosophy and approach to making amazing interactive experiences, and to fostering great working relationships within our team and with our clients.

The time had come to rebrand, and “Weaver” was the only choice! That one word captures what we’re about: pulling together the diverse threads of clients’ business requirements into simple and compelling User Experiences.