It's mid day on Ghuznee street in downtown Wellington. The no-ozone-for-you-folks sun is hitting hard on a mix of striped shirts business types and common people on their lunch break, and you have to stay in the shade to truly enjoy this cool breeze coming from the vast Pacific ocean. Cars and trucks make their way, regularly washing ears with their muffled clinky engine roars.

"It's a little cafe"

So said Mike Brown, co-organizer of the Webstock conference, who kindly accepted to meet a webby french tourist who solicited him for an interview via email a month before. It was only two weeks before the 2011 edition of this remarkable conference would start, but he and his partner in crime Natasha Lampard said "sure, let's meet", took time out of their busy schedule, and sat with me to answer a few questions I had for them.

How it started

First, I wanted to find out how they were able to attract and publicize Webstock among the great speakers available in the webdesign industry. Because here’s the thing: New Zealand is far far far away, and it’s tiny tiny tiny. Get a map of the world if you’re not familiar with its location, and ask yourself if you’d choose this country to host a webconference where you want the very best people to speak at. It would be as if the best car show you could get to was set in the middle of Newfoundland, or if the best cinema festival was in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.

Mike: originally it wasn’t Webstock, it started from a desire to share webstandards best practices with people. We started a series of meetings in Wellington, we emailed people and said "Are you interested in coming to an evening where we have some speakers about webstandards?". We ran probably five or six meetings through 2005, we’d have people talk about accessibility, content, design, all sort of topics related to the web. There seemed to be quite a following, we had 50 to a 100 people from Wellington at those meetings. That was trackting along and then Webstock itself was kind of a... we just sort of pulled up with the idea of a conference about the web just a couple of years after it started where people were going in Australia, in America and so forth...

Natasha: there was really nothing for people other than the little things we were running and a lot of mailing lists... there wasn’t really anything to bring people together, to share in the same space.

Mike: so we thought that would be cool to do that in NZ, and also we were big fans of lots of people in the web industry, people doing great stuff with html and css

Natasha: usability

Mike: so that would be fun to have them here and hang out with them for a while.

Natasha: Mike and I certainly couldn’t afford to go to these places to meet these people, so the only way to make it work was to bring them to us.

Mike: so Tash said we should have a web conference in NZ and we should invite Tim Berners Lee. So we dropped a list of all these people we’d love to come and we wrote to them and most of them said yes. So suddenly we’ve got to run a conference, all these people are coming and we have no experience and no money.

Natasha: it was quite funny our emails too, looking back on them : "Hi, we’ve never run a web conference before, you don’t know me..."

Mike: do you still got those ?

Natasha: I know that I’ve got some of them, it would be funny to step back in time. But you know, this kind of very cheeky emails, very much from a fan "I love you work, would you consider coming to NZ?". I think we were very fortunate because of the lure of NZ, it is quite strong for some people, so that certainly helped us. But also we were perhaps a little different from some other conference organizers. We were out for a good time, and we really just wanted to celebrate all this stuff. We must have been a little unusual.

Mike: thinking back it’s one of the reasons that we managed to succeed, we hadn’t really run conferences before, we weren’t in a mindset of "this is what you need to do and this is how it should be and this is how it should feel".

Natasha: but after saying that, we had been to other conferences and the memories of things we didn’t like was very strong. This is what we don’t want, and everything else should be open for debate, and let’s give it a whirl.

Mike: so we kinda did like we do websites I guess. We thought of who’s the customer, who’s the people paying money to come. How can we make their experience wonderful? So right from the emails, the website they go onto, the swag we give them, the bags and the t-shirts, the registration...

Natasha: some little things like you’re at a conference and you try to look at your program, you have to take it out of your little plastic thing, unwrap it and sometimes it can be quite huge, then you try to fold it back up... Little things like having it around your neck, but have it up the way you look at it so when you open your name badge. The program is presented to you the way you’re looking at it, rather than having you to swap it around. Trying to think about the experience we’d like people to have, and what’s the experience we ourselves would like, and then starting to design a conference that way.

Thibaut: and I guess these nice experiences made the Webstock reputation.

Mike: definitely, and we also wanted to treat people speaking here really well. They would come all the way to New Zealand to be at our conference, so we would cover all their expences, we would pay them, we would treat them really well here. And I think they responded to that. It’s also how you treat people in New Zealand already, really.

Natasha: if you treat them with respect, if you actually do respect these people, you want to give them the love that they deserve.

Mike: so they would go away having had a great time and they would tell others about it, write about it, or introduce us to other people. It kinda grew that way.

Natasha: we have never been the type of people to go from mainstream PR, or any of that advertising stuff we feel quite uncomfortable about. So it has been on the down low and all the reputation about Webstock being so great is not coming from us. We’re super excited about it, but it’s other people being our advertising medium. If they liked it, they’ll talk about it. It’s the word of mouth thing which is way stronger than any advertising you can take out, which is often overpriced. Our goal is to have people like it, love it.

Thibaut: can you talk about the very good article by Bruce Sterling recently published on the Webstock blog?

Mike: he was a speaker in 2009, and when the whole Wikileaks thing blew up, I remembered some of the things that he said in his talk, that quite struck a nerve to me. He’s obviously a great writer who would have a really fascinating take on the Wikileaks thing. So we just emailed him and said "would you be interested in writing a blog post?".

Natasha: we’re so fascinated by the Wikileaks thing, about Julian Assange, he’s such an enigma. And to have someone like Bruce, who is also an amazing guy, write about it was just, even for personnal reasons, really exciting.

Mike: we didn’t know what to expect, and we received this huge amazingly written article, put it up and it just went wild.

Natasha: the site went down. At 11 o’clock at night Mike was up with the server guy working on it, and thought it was fine at 1 o’clock. I got up at 4 just to check on it, and it was down!

A lady, walking past us whispers: "Happy Webstock!"

Mike: who’s that ?

Natasha: it’s my friend :-)

Mike: oh...

There are no reasons not to.

Thibaut: the webpage for the 2011 Webstock edition featured arguments about its advantages, for people who participate, but also for these people bosses. What do you think about the state of self education in companies?

Natasha: before I got into the web, I used to work for a computer training company. And yet the crazy thing was I never got any training. I used to get very — there’s a webstock bag!

Mike: just there (pointing at a guy walking on the other side of the street).

Thibaut: it’s everywhere.

Natasha: if you’re in the medical profession, or you’re flying planes or something, no one is going to stop training you, because you need to know this stuff. So why is it that some employers will not invest in their people to get the best out of them. They want these amazing sites, they the best out of their people, yet some bosses are not prepared to pay. And I find that curious. But one of the cool thing is that people who do face that battle between Webstock and their bosses, a lot of them are actually paying for it themselves. There was one girl who couldn’t afford to come last year – she’s unemployed at the moment – and she’s saved up money over the last twelve months to be able to afford to come. By and large, bosses are really great, and Webstock is becoming more accepted by managers, saying "if you’re going to go to one event, then it’s going to be Webstock". But when people still face that battle, they’re actually investing in themselves for their personnal development.

Mike: to me there are three aspects of it. There is this thing you’re going to tell your boss "If I go to somewhere like Webstock, I will come back being able to do parts of my job better because I’ve learned new techniques, I’ve learned where things are going, what sort of things will work". And especially we run in depth workshops, full day or half day about HTML, CSS3, content strategy or web performance. So you do that and you will be better in an aspect of your job. It will be immediately efficient, when you’re back on monday. Then there’s the connection with people. You can’t qualify that in advance, because you don’t know who you’ll be meeting, or if you’ll meet anyone. But chances are you will, and you’ll have conversations when something might come up.

Natasha: and it could be that this conversation, in a way, could be more powerfull, or more thought provoking than some of the talks that you’ve heard.

Mike: you may meet someone your company can partner with on some project, and they know about them now. The third thing, and it’s more personnal, is that you’ll come back inspired. You’ll hear stuff you weren’t expecting to hear but that will trigger something and you’ll be reminescent of why you’re doing all this stuff.

Natasha: it’s very humbling when you receive emails from people saying "I went to Webstock ’08 where I met so and so and so, and we’re now in a startup". There are actually stories of people doing something cool out of the Webstock experience.

Mike: I went there, on the other side of the coin where we had to try and convince bosses of the need for training or time off or whatever. It just seems crazy that you wouldn’t do that because of the benefits you get out of that.

Learning at work.

Thibaut: managers tend to view design work as a linear process, just as an assembly line job, aren’t they? If you sit fourty hours at your desk and bring that much profit, you should bring at tenth of that amount in four hours of work. And if you don’t «work» for four hours, you’re causing a profit loss of this much.

Mike: oh, yes. The thing in the web, or design, is that with insights you have, you can save hours or days or weeks of work. Because it’s not a thing that takes that long to do, you get those insights outside of work, you get them when you’re talking to people, at a conference, or reading.

Thibaut: should there be a more structured way to get training, like once a week, or one hour a day? We have time for lunch, we could have time for training.

Natasha: a lot of the people I know of who are in-house designers, they do actually seize every moment it seems, any down time, to continue their training. It might just be reading A List Apart or following someone on Twitter. A lot of people do take time at night, it’s part of their relaxation time. They are hooked, this is not a job, it’s a way of life. Everything is about their online existence, and aiming to the Web which is so mighty and powerful.

Mike: yeah, it’s a good point. For a lot of the people who seem to be doing good stuff on the web, it’s not a job. Well it is a job, but it’s not a 9 to 5 job.

Natasha: it’s incidental, their work would get to the web anyway because they love it, they love the possibilities of it, that we’re only just so young and we’ve got so far to go. When you think of people like Matthew Buchanan, they want to soak it up. So, structured training would almost be not appropriate for them, because they are at a level that maybe someone would find it hard to come up to where they are.

Thibaut: but how can a manager can take this into account when he’s trying to organize his team’s efforts?

Mike: this is probably why we don’t manage people, but if we were managing people, it would be more like...

Natasha: a trust thing.

Mike: ...we actually don’t care when you work and what you do. We care about getting something finished.

Natasha: like output oriented rather than clock watching.

Mike: there’s a whole movement, ROWE - results only work environments. The idea is that the employer just cares about the results, and the employee, if he wants to take a day off because his kid is sick, or he needs to chill out, he does that, as long as he’s committed to getting work done. It’s that, rather than you have to sit at your desk for eight hours because you charge on billable time.

Natasha: the requirement of that is a level of passion or interest in what you’re doing. If it’s oh-um, then you’re probably happy to just do the eight hours and then «see you later, it’s my time now». But the people we have the privilege of hanging out with in the web community are people who don’t stop.

Code like it’s 1999.

Thibaut: how can you make sure you’re up to date with the constantly evolving knowledge in this field?

Natasha: it’s hard. For usability, which was my line of work for many years, it’s quite dificult, because there’s not one standard, you’re dealing with human beings. The only thing that you can do is have relationships with other people who are in the same industry, and who are as interested, excited and passionate about it as you are. Swapping notes and sharing information with them, you have this feedback loop.

Thibaut: until the end of WWII, NZ was a very isolated country, forcing people to deal with all sorts of constraints while building. Is this Kiwi inginuity still around today and does it have an impact on the creation of kiwi digital products ?

Natasha: I think it does exist and there are groups of people who love that and really promote this reputation, and then there is another school of thought where people ask why should we have these constraints. It’s great that we have this ingenuity, but we don’t necesseraly need to be facing this battle, we can have more investment to allow people to work. There are lots of talented people, there is money... We could have more creativity if we had better broadband for example, it would allow people to do more, to connect more freely with other people.

A line is drawn.

Between an amateur and a pro: my sound recorder battery died at this point, my sincere apologies to you for this lack of preparation.
An extra fifteen minutes of conversation are consequently lost, where we talked about the good quality of kiwi web design and graphic design, and about how we (try to) cope with the amount of information we are fed with nowadays. I see this as a sign that I need to fly back to New Zealand, sit at Superfino and chat a little more with them with a recharged battery.
In the meantime, you really should have a look at the Onyas site and the featured sites to get an idea of what good kiwi web design is today. Also, don’t forget to set some time to watch the 2011 or past conferences that are available online for free. You’d be missing out a lot.

My sincere thanks to Mike and Natasha for their time and their contagious passion for the web.

Here is the translation of an article published by Andy Rutledge on his Design View blog. Although I don't view creativity and pragmatism that exclusive to each others in the practice of design, it is important to recall as often as possible that design is a process you call for when you have a problem to solve, and that solutions are not coming out of nowhere. The way you look at things has to be educated for you to be able to identify the true nature of the problem, question it, and evaluate the viability of the solutions you propose. Creativity comes in, fortunately, in the production and shaping of possible solutions, but without the knowledge anchoring them in a practical reality, they haven't got any value. In a field where graphic design, typography, ergonomics, kinematics, techniques and industrialization find themselves involved, the amount of theoretical knowledge to acquire is substantial. And I don't think this is pointed out enough. This article reveals the existing gap between creativity and this knowledge.
A big thank you to Andy Rutledge for this article, and for allowing me to publish its translation here. You can either read it in its original state, or practice your french a little.

Voici la traduction d'un article publié par Andy Rutledge sur son blog Design View. Bien que je ne partage pas complètement la dichotomie qui est décrite ici entre créativité et pragmatisme, il me semble important de rappeler dès que c'est possible que le design est un processus auquel on fait appel pour résoudre un problème, et que les solutions ne sortent pas de nulle part. On doit dans un premier temps former son regard pour bien identifier le problème, le remettre en question, et surtout pour évaluer la pertinence des réponses apportées. La créativité intervient – heureusement – dans la production et la mise en forme des solutions possibles, mais sans de solides bases qui les ancrent dans une réalité pratique, elles n'ont pas beaucoup de valeur. Dans un domaine où se mêlent graphisme, typographie, ergonomie, cinématique, technique et industrialisation, le savoir théorique à acquérir est conséquent, et je doute que ce soit assez mis en avant. L'article ci-dessous est un brillant révélateur de la différence qu'il existe entre la créativité et ce savoir. Je remercie Andy Rutlegde d'avoir eu l'idée de cet article, et de m'avoir autoriser à en publier la traduction ici.

❦

Il y a quelques années, j'ai publié un petit test pour à la fois engager une discussion dans notre profession, et pour que les lecteurs puissent auto-évaluer leur compréhension des fondamentaux du design. Il a été – et reste – très populaire auprès de mes lecteurs. Voici un autre questionnaire autour du design, avec cette fois une audience plus ciblée et un but plus spécifique.

Les notions de créativité et de design sont trop souvent confondues chez les designers, comme chez les non-designers. Cela me dérange, car c'est l'une des idées reçues qui permettent à des prétendants créatifs mais sans savoir-faire de se considérer comme des professionnels du design alors qu'ils ne sont rien de la sorte.

La créativité, ce n'est pas du design. La créativité n'a rien à voir avec le design. La créativité n'est contrainte par aucune loi, règle ou restriction ... ce qui est sans doutes pourquoi c'est aussi enivrant (parfois jusqu'à s'y méprendre). Le design, d'un autre côté, est entièrement basé sur les mathématiques, la psychologie, la perception humaine, et toute une série de règles strictes et de lois qui peuvent être contournées par une poignée de personnes très compétentes seulement. Ceux qui ne seraient pas en territoire connu avec ces règles, ces lois et ces sciences associées ne sont en aucun cas des designers.

Pour aider à illustrer les différences entre la créativité et le design, j'ai mis au point ce petit questionnaire qui abordent certains fondamentaux du design – et non de la créativité. Ceux qui baignent dans la créativité, et non le design, seront perdus. Ceux qui ont acquis les bases du design ne rencontreront que des notions élémentaires.

En observant le log de mes referrers au long des années, j'ai pu constater que mes articles sont régulièrement inclus dans les cours de design dans les lycées, universités et centres d'apprentissage de part le monde. Pour continuer dans ce sens, j'espère que ce test pourra être utilisé par les professeurs afin qu'ils aident leurs étudiants à comprendre et identifier la différence entre la créativité et le design. Trop d'entre eux passent leurs diplômes en ayant une idée vague de cette distinction, dans le cas où ils en aient une.

Le test

1. Dans l’exemple ci-dessous, quelle disposition apparait comme étant créée par l’homme, et laquelle apparait comme étant organique ? Pourquoi ?

2. L’orientation de cette composition est-elle horizontale ou verticale ? Pourquoi ?

3. Laquelle de ces deux compositions évoque l’inconfort visuel ? Pourquoi ?

4. Suite à votre dernière réponse, par quel autre moyen pourriez-vous évoquer l’inconfort dans une composition ou une mise en page ?

5. Compte tenu de ces deux dernières réponses, quels sont les éléments que vous prendriez en compte pour mettre en place une expérience visuelle confortable ? Pourquoi ?

6. Pourquoi l’asymétrie est-elle généralement plus conseillée que la symétrie dans une mise en page ?

7. Quels mécanismes pourraient vous aider à compenser les effets de la symétrie dans une mise en page informationnelle ?

8. Décrivez les raisons spécifiques de communication pour lesquelles vous utiliseriez des coins arrondis plutôt que des coins droits dans une mise en forme.

9. Décrivez les différences de messages portés par ces deux structures :

10. Suivant la logique de la question précédente, pourquoi utiliseriez-vous un dégradé comme texture visuelle ou une gradation dans la mise en page ?

11. Quel est le but dans l’utilisation d’une grille dans une mise en page ?

12. Puisque les relations entre les objets des deux groupes ci-dessous sont les mêmes, qu’est ce qui a changé dans la figure B ?

13. Décrivez la ou les différences de message visuel primaire porté par les figures A et B.

14. Décrivez au moins trois différentes façons de guider le regard de l’observateur dans et au travers d’une composition, en empruntant un chemin particulier. Quels mécanismes peuvent être utilisés à cette fin ?

15. Dans l’image ci-dessous, quel objet influence l’autre ?

16. Est ce que l’influence que vous percevez implique le mouvement ou est-elle de nature statique ?

17. Compte tenu de votre dernière réponse, pour quel(s) effet(s) utiliseriez-vous l’influence d’un objet graphique ou structurelle sur un autre dans une composition ?

18. Laquelle de ces deux lignes communique la vitesse ?

19. Dessinez une forme géométrique masculine, et une féminine. Qu’est ce qui distingue le genre entre ces deux formes ?

20. Comparez la figure A et la figure B. Quelles fonctions sont assurées par les éléments structuraux de la figure A ? Sont-ils nécessaires ? Pourquoi et pourquoi pas ? Existent-ils d’autres moyens d’obtenir le même effet ? Si oui, quels sont-ils ?

21. Comparez les deux mises en page ci-dessous. Laquelle possède une hierarchie de l’information claire ? Comment cela est-il accompli ? Par quels autres moyens pourrait-on obtenir le même résultat ?

22. Dans laquelle de ces compositions le logo est-il le plus grand ?

Explications

Voilà. Ce sont les bases, le plus simple. Quand bien même, il est important de noter que même la plus fructueuse des créativités ne vous sera d'aucune aide pour ce test. Vous noterez que plusieurs de ces questions ont plusieurs réponses possibles, et pourraient souvent s'articuler sous forme de dissertation. Ce format est important, car c'est la meilleure façon pour les étudiants de démontrer leur assimilation, et pour une classe d'ouvrir un dialogue vers des problématiques similaires.

Vous noterez aussi que les réponses ne sont pas fournies ici, et ce pour deux raisons spécifiques. La première est que les enseignants en design les connaissent déjà et n'en ont donc pas besoin (et cela compromettrait l'usage de cette page dans leurs cours). La deuxième est que je tiens à ce que les personnes qui se croiraient designer et pour qui ces questions restent sans réponses comprennent le manque de compétences dont ils font preuve. Dans ce cas, si les réponses étaient disponibles ici, cela atténuerait certainement le sentiment d'urgence à finir leur éducation qu'ils doivent ressentir. Mon souhait le plus sincère est qu'après avoir fait le constat de leur incompétence, ces personnes cessent de tromper leurs clients sur la qualité de service qu'ils leurs proposent et s'engagent dans une formation en design digne de ce nom pour acquérir le niveau de compréhension nécessaire à la pratique du métier qu'ils prétendent aujourd'hui avoir.

J'ai pu constater au travers des discussions que j'ai eu avec des designers que les lycées, universités et centres d'apprentissage proposent souvent des formations incomplètes, et forment donc des designers incomplets et mal préparés. Je n'ai donc aucun doute que beaucoup de designers "très éduqués" échoueront à ce test. Et si les formations sont directement responsables par cet état de fait, les étudiants en design ne le sont pas moins. La responsabilité de votre éducation n'incombe pas à votre professeur, elle vous incombe à vous uniquement.

Enfin, si vous êtes de ceux qui êtes d'accord avec le fait que le design est une profession "de créatif", vous devriez sans doutes réévaluer le rôle que vous attribuez à la créativité dans le design, ainsi que la pertinence d'associer cette étiquette à votre profession.

Si vous avez trouvé le test facile, félicitations. Dans le cas contraire, et si vous souhaitez être un designer, je vous suggère de recommencer à plancher avant de prendre en charge un projet de design.

During my 2009 & 2010 holidays, I took the challenge to avoid any LCD screen wherever I went: no cellphone, no email, no IMG35002.jpg snapshots, no TV and no Web. This was such a refreshing experience that back in January, when the french labor laws made a lucky bastard out of me and let me enjoy a continuous four weeks leave from work, I decided to enforce this zero pixel policy again*.
Here are a few remarks about how it felt to be back in front of a glass panel emitting light in an organized fashion after about a month.

Eye strain

This was something I knew but didn’t really want to admit: in the evening, when I’m reading on my laptop or iPad, my eyes are hurting a little. After 8-9 hours spent in front of a 24” screen blasting light in my face at work, my eyes feel a bit like two sun dried tomatoes. They are tired. As I’m writing this, after work, I can feel it. They beg me to close this down and read some comics or something. But there is so much to discover, enjoy and tinker on these screens that I blind myself to this physiological Fact. And hope that we won’t discover in fifteen years that this habit was actually very very bad, making your sight half of what it should be when you’re seventy. Nothing to do about it though, really, but I sure wish brilliant engineers are making progress on 60fps color eink display technology so that we’ll be able to code CSS4 in plain sunlight. I’m this >< close to get a Kindle so I can read my Instapaper on it.

The info hose

On a typical day, not checking what the people I follow on Twitter have to say feels like I’m going to miss a good insight or a nice thought provoking / game changing read. With this feeling in mind, I was curious to find out how much I really had missed after four weeks off, and how far behind the flock I would be. As it turned out: not so much.
You don’t need every drop spitting out the info hose. Any relevant information will find its way into some relevant container there to stay and to be reachable later. Big news tend to ripple and leave more noticeable traces than a tweet.
This article from Robin Sloan came back knocking when thinking of this.

The desktop metaphor

That was the weirdest of all: for a good fifteen minutes I had a very awkward feeling about the computer interface itself. Almost like when I first used a pc. Everything felt very binary and jerky, on or off, opened or closed, white or black, visible or not. It missed a sense of continuity and suppleness analog things have (cars on roads, film cameras, watercolor on paper, hand writing, clouds in the sky). It was like walking in ski boots after a month of walking in sneakers. And yes, it was macOSX 10.6.
Then this feeling vanished, I was back to keyboard shortcuts and contextual menus. But this was very much worth to feel something like this, it had a strong impact on how I look at what I do all day.

Still loving it

I was a little reluctant about this experiment; not because it would impair my options during these holidays (asking people for directions is a very nice alternative to Google Maps, and quite "social" too), but because going back to my daily concerns about line height and fadeOut timings after so long could, afterwards, seem futile.
But when your efforts are geared towards making complexity more discernible, decision making quicker and learning easier, your role in today’s world has not to be perceived as futile. It doesn't matter if you're not actively working towards solving the world's mess we're in, if your work can make common problematics more soundable, it will have some impact in the end.

Recommended

Spending a month offline is becoming a luxury for most of us, but I would recommend to any person involved in building screen based products to plan and devise in advance an extended period of time where no pixels cross their sight no matter what.
For what happens during this period of time, and for what happens when you’re back.

* it was made easier because She had a smartphone we could rely on for phone calls, and quick web accesses on wifi.

The Microsoft campaign for their new phone OS is centered on the fact that our attention is sucked in by our phones, preventing us from a compeling and respectful social life. The Windows phone, because it offers you a quick glance at your digital life, will allow you to be more efficient with your digital life and get back to your "real" life much faster.

While this observation is very accurate and in the mood these days, I'm pretty sure the solution offered here is not going to be efficient at all. It will most certainly have the opposite effect.

As others have noticed, the problem with our behavior when we interact with phones doesn't come from the interaction models, but from the content itself. You read articles from the web, exchange text messages, check Twitter or Facebook. The time you spend accessing this content is a small percentage of the time you spend consuming it.

If I understood the product description well, the home screen of the Windows phone is going to be the dashboard of your digital life. Each part of it will reflect on the activity of your friends and other content your care most about. Wishfull thinking, but each part of it will be a reminder that you are missing something in your connected life. Each part of it will be an invitation to get sucked in. All the time.

It's a big push notifications agregrator right in your face as soon as you get your phone out of your pocket. Not really what's advertised.

When I discovered it yesterday, the comments via twitter on a webpage experiment at Cognition seemed to make a lot of sense.

Coming back to it this morning, I had a bad feeling about it though. It's only 15 hours old, and the comment thread is looking more like a noisy crowd than like a round table discussion where people exchange point of views, debate and learn. The number of RTs showing up are possibly responsible of this overwhelming feeling, but it may also come from the Twitter format itself.

As it eases the input from readers willing to react, it's putting us in front of the old quantity vs. quality problem. My personal experience on blog comments is that the longer a comment thread is, the less likely I will take time to read each one of them. I'll admit right here I didn't all the tweet-comments. Have you ?

The experiment should go on though to see if we can get accustomed to this new thing. I'll suggest two ideas : filtering out the RTs, and highlighting in some way the comments on blogs such as this one (it may already be in place but it seems nobody posted one...). People looking for more articulate reading material would be able to spot them while scrolling down.

Design wise, it was a big WHOAH yesterday, and it still solidly is. It successfully achieves to be contemporary where lots of its features would – easily – direct it towards Retro Americana land. Thanks again for the inspiration Happy Cog !

– The future of the book could involve lots of cool interactions you know ?
– How's that ?
– Well, look.
– And what do you do for a living ?
– I'm an interaction designer.
– Ah, I see. Hmmm.

IDEO just released a video illustrating the results so far of their research about the future of the book. If you haven't seen it, please take a few moments to watch and listen.

To sum things up, these results are disappointing. The three possible "visions" displayed have nothing to do with an immersive and satisfying reading experience, and are nothing new or forward thinking. At best, it's a nicely packaged video with analog references to appease the fears of the book industry executives it seems to be aimed at.

First, Nelson: "giving readers what they need to form their own opinions on important topics of our times".
Read this sentence again and instead of Nelson, and picture "online press". Yes, good match.

Second, Coupland (I feel bad for Douglas C. on this one): "keeping you up to date with what's going on in your field".
T. W. I. T. T. E. R.

Third, Alice: "an interactive and playful reading experience that invites exploration well beyond just turning the page".
Multi-media game !

This is what I think reading a book is, and I hope you'll share this with me: you sit somewhere you see fit, you get to a page, start reading, and a few seconds later you're not here anymore, you get places, you're time traveling. You're somewhere in a misty cloud that just formed around your head, immersed in a story, in a debate or in an explanation of some facts you're discovering. This immersion is a requisite for you to get value out of your reading, wether it's emotions or knowledge. If you're disturbed and taken out of this cloud, you loose the thread, you can't connect the dots and walk the shoes of the author anymore.

Laying out text is all about this: making the text legible and understandable with as few graphic hints as can be, so the reader doesn't get distracted or constrained, and stays with the ideas. Writing is all about this too: choosing the right words and arranging them in a manner making the sentences flow and the reader captured by the story. I got caught in the service tunnel at the end of the subway line once because of Jim Harrison, and I'm sure I stayed there a good minute, silence and all, not noticing a thing. Because I was in a book.

Every event that gets you out of this state of mind ruins the efforts of the writer and diminishes the benefit you'll get from the time you spend reading. Even a cup of tea can achieve that if it's too hot. So what the fax, IDEO ? You want books to send me text messages !?
"Quizz: how long do you think you can stay in that room ? Your pal, Blaise Pascal".

Nelson, you're right, we need to get "a grasp at the complexity of the world". But don't propose us links to other content that will link to other contents and call it book innovation, because that's what the web is and has always been.
Douglas, as mentioned by others, you should visit this online bookstore, Amazon, it's fantastic.
Alice, you're nice but you're too distracted, you need to focus. Go see Bilbo, he'll tell you.

Information delivery needs innovation, learning needs innovation, playing needs innovation. But books... The IDEO trio is a bad answer to a wrong question. Book reading is a good experience, it's been optimized for centuries now by quite a few very smart people. The humongous amount of written data we have access to and what we do with it, that's what is problematic today. Information overload, choice, priority or relevance are problems today. How we access to which books, and how we set the exclusive time to read them are the issues, not the book itself.
Very surprising coming from IDEO guys, who are usually inspiring in their insights.

And: enough with the xylo. I'm not thanking Apple for this trend of cheesy soundtracks, it's coming to a point where it's at elevator music level.

Links:
http://magazine.designersinteractifs.org/actualite/ideo-recycle-le-web-et-le-jeu-video-dans-son-livre-du-futur (in french)
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662356/ideo-reimagines-books-for-the-the-digital-age
http://beta.wnyc.org/shows/bl/2010/sep/21/future-books/