Transcribed with Otter.ai
Guest Bill Buxton
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Hey. Hey everyone, welcome to unique ways with Thomas Girard in audio podcast, we have a notable guest on today. He’s had a 50 plus year romance with human aspects of technology, interaction design, telepresence, multi modal, adaptive designs, access and the nature of innovation, morphing from musician to designer slash researcher. He has practiced his craft at the University of Toronto, Xerox, PARC, alias research, SGI and Microsoft Research. His awards include four honorary doctorates, co recipient of the Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement, ACM, SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award and fellow of the ACM in december 2023 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada, writer, speaker and consultant. He is also an AJAX Professor University of Toronto and distinguished professor of industrial design. Tu einhoven. He is currently largely occupied curating his collection of over 900 artifacts documenting the history of interactive technologies. Outside his work, he has a passion for his family, books and the outdoors. Please join me in welcoming Bill Buxton, welcome.
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Thanks. Good to be here. Ready for 20 questions? Kind of we’ll see. Okay. Question one, tell me a little bit more about yourself. What do
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you do?
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Too much to summarize in a sentence. But on the other hand,
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the things that concern me
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involve many different dimensions that some of which I do myself, and some of which I do with others. So it’s some ways for any problem.
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I’m a curator, an orchestrator, as well as a designer. In terms of what’s the right process, who are the right people? What are the right skills in with the ultimate goal of sort of saying,
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how do we
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make technologies serve society in the large better and
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and to
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how to avoid having technologies, maybe even supposedly smart technologies make it make us stupid. And I think that’s a risk that we deal with.
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The problems with technology
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go way back to industrial revolution, and even before. And so it’s about how the what the impacts are in social, cultural, political, economic, and
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I think for people in our profession, given the impact technology is having
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on our society and culture worldwide,
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we need as many people advocating for the Humane use of technology
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as possible, and not just the humane use the the the abuse of the world is partially technology based, no matter how well intentioned. Much is much of the time, and that’s long answer, but, and I still didn’t answer the question, but it says, why I do what I do?
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Great. And just a quick note for the audience, if you guys are interested in a related episode, check out our recent episode with Don Norman. Question two, what’s a key piece of knowledge that makes you different.
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So I,
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I kind of
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question the premise of the question, the the there’s,
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unless you go to such a generality, a broad generality, that it’s it’s not that helpful. The thing,
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the flaw in that question
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is, is kind of like, what’s your favorite technology, or what? What’s the next big thing?
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There’s no single thing, or single point of view which is going to bring us to where we need to go. The problems are far too complex,
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I guess. If I So, that’s why I’m not sort of saying in terms of I’m trying to do this or that, or this device or that device, or this application or this service. Rather,
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this objectified notion of what we do and even what we make are making,
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obscures the fact that the next big thing isn’t a thing. It’s a change in the relationship among.
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Expressed all of the things that exist in the environment and the environment in terms of your physical, local environment, but also your social, cultural environment. And that includes people. It includes our methodologies. We have to remember that technology doesn’t mean a thing. It’s anything that’s a structured or organized and that’s technology. Encompasses political structures, how we vote. Those are all technologies and so, and they’re all integrated, and they all interact. And so
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it’s
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the challenges. How do you think about it? If you because what I just said, and it just means the problem space expands to take us a ridiculous degree
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and then so the question is, how can we, having taken the broad view, how do we reduce
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our day to day activities to addressing things that can still make progress despite the complexity and and learn
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by appropriate process
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what works, what doesn’t, and and just test our hypotheses so that we can move on and make progress, albeit slowly. The
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good news about this is that things aren’t moving quickly.
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At least no single thing is moving quickly.
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And that’s the fear that everybody says, oh, technology is moving so fast, maybe collectively. But what we forget is that
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we mistake
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a bunch of things moving slowly
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with
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some that technology is moving fast collectively, but it’s the speed is due to the volume of slow things that are changing, as opposed to any one technology moving quickly and and in making that distinction, which is sort of like the distinction between voltage and amperage,
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we realize that, oh, it’s a bunch of slow things. So whatever’s coming, the roots are already there, and they’ve been there for at least 30 or 40 years. And therefore, if you know how to be a prospector, which maybe that’s what I do, I’m a prospector, but then also a minor that I’m a refiner, but is to see what’s going and then you can actually see the rate of progress, and look at the relationships, not of just the slow moving thing, but the other slow moving things and what happens when they reach certain points where they can come together and aggregate in a way that brings some new insight and some new capability, but it’s based on things that have been evolving for quite A long time.
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And I’d say that
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if you wanted to
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see even how I think there’s a journalist I admire really a lot named Brian merchant, and he has a book
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on the short term. He wrote a really good book called The One device, where he deconstructs the iPhone and talks about every single component that made the iPhone possible, and shows how they relate, but also where they came from. And you see the long
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the long nose there, but he’s got a more recent book called Blood in the machine, which is basically comparing the impact of technology through the industrial revolution, in and not just in the local sense, but in global economics with what’s going on now.
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And if we actually understand the history as and realize we can mine that to gain insights when we do studies and we do build things, we can formulate much better hypotheses, which have some existing foundation, because it’s not all new, and then test them and therefore be far better grounded. And do get more for less work if we because
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other people’s work, and especially failures,
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are actually the greatest design tool, because it’s if we can learn from what’s happening,
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then
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that’s the cheapest, most valuable education you can get for where someone else pays a tuition,
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and I’d argue that in a lot of levels.
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But the point is that
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the
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the act of designing has to go it’s at the front end of.
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That where we make our biggest mistakes. We make assumptions too early. We don’t do the research, we can’t write, we don’t rationalize. We tend not to rationalize, or cut short the rationalization of why we chose this versus that. And we tend not to work in multiples,
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and and. And we tend, for example,
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to assume that, for example, 3d printers are a super thing to help us prototype. But we don’t realize that eBay is a much better way to get prototypes, because if everything’s already been done in one form or another, it’s there for on eBay, ready made of product quality for 100 bucks and and therefore you can get multiples that way, which echoes, by the way Duchamp and his readymades, and how you think about that from the art.
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Great, too, vague,
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great. So you kind of hinted at number three. But the question is, why this of all things? Why do you do what you do? I
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because I,
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I guess, because of, maybe the way I was brought up,
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because
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I, I my background was one of my primary backgrounds, and my basic, you know, my university degree, and I started playing music professionally when I was 14,
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and played Music at least for 20 years professionally my undergraduate degrees in music, composition and theory,
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I’d argue that
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musicians have a longer history of expressing powerful, creative ideas through a technological intermediary than any other profession in the world. Therefore, for what I do in terms of the digital world,
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that that background in performance and understanding the design and actually the esthetics of a musical instruments is one of the best training that you can do, because it’s all about performance. And how can a well designed instrument amplify the capable human capabilities. And by the way, instead of replacing them, and
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I don’t need a better record player, I want a better instrument that’s worthy of practice and where the instrument itself shows incredible respect for the multiple hours I’ve spent learning
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to play it. But they also motivate me to I’ll say the same thing about my bicycle.
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So the
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the
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taking that as the ground, you know, the reference point I see technology.
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I’ll say it this way.
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I believe the in the last 50 years, digital technologies have had more impact at every level, at the individual, at the social, cultural, political and economic levels, they’ve had more impact on our culture than music, cinema, art, dance, architecture,
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painting,
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whatever you want to do. From the fine arts, they’ve had the cultural arts. Shall we say, what we normally think of cultural arts, the technology has had more impact on our society and all of those put together.
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And
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I recognize that from having spent the time struggling as a musician
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and but also from the perspective of having a deep background in digital and I think if you take the values of what you can learn from the arts and and these instruments of technology that are directly intended to be cultural.
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We have to bring the same esthetics and the same values to to the digital technologies, and we don’t.
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And the thing that I would use as an informal proof of that concept is simply go to any newspaper of record and read the book reviews, read the theater reviews, read the film reviews,
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read the art reviews. But let’s take book reviews. So we’re both Canadian, so we have
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Margaret Atwood. And if you this is my whole example I use is that if we reviewed Margaret Atwood’s latest book, The way that we just review some new technology, some, let’s say, a new laptop or something.
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At the review would read as follows,
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it’s got a cover. It really protects the pages really well, and the two covers for the front and back are connected by the spine. And it’s really neat because it joins them together and it’s hinged, but also there’s a mechanism where all the pages are fit within don’t fall out, so you can turn them. And the really neat thing is that there’s, there’s print in it, but there’s a high lunens contrast between the color of the ink and the color of the paper that makes it reading. And by the way, they’re in, let’s say, a 10 or 12 point font. But even cooler than that is there’s all the search algorithms and methods and heuristics within it, because it’s got page numbers that the sentences are broken down by punctuation. They’re into paragraphs and Oh, and there’s even chapter numbers, and there’s an index and a table of contents. And all of this works together in an integrated package. Is portable. It’s got an infinite battery life, if it was built, especially the ones before 1900 before we put acid and paper and and it’s fantastic. Oh, and by the way, there’s a story.
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Now, that’s how we review technology.
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And at no point, if you reviewed the book, you would never get into a the arts page and a culture page by reviewing a book with that type of approach, because you cannot talk about films, cinema, art, ants, or anything, any of these new creative arts without
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placing them in a social, cultural, political context, because the story is just there largely as a metaphor or as a parable, to actually make some type of statement, an ethical statement that reflects our society and helps people learn. So yes, you’re entertained, but by that entertainment, which is the draw, it’s part of the reward and the discovery, but it’s also part of what’s going on. And I would argue that’s true even at all different kinds of literature. And I’d say the same thing’s true with most music and art and architecture and so on. They’re all they’re all this way to help shape us, but they’re dwarfed
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in terms of the impact on our culture by this technology that we never so the most powerful technology influencing those things, for the most part, is not grounded in that ethic and that mindset of how we approach it and how we think about it, how we discuss it, and that’s why so many people start to back away from it, because to say, I can’t see myself or my values reflected in it. Yes, you can give turn by turn instructions, but if you have Uber drivers driving around, taking turn by turn instructions. And the AI is absolutely brilliant. The speech recognition, perhaps, is brilliant. They pretend there’s never any mistakes, and so on so forth. The fact is that you take the technology away, even though they’ve been through that city center a million times, they have no idea where they are. It makes them stupid. They park their brain. Same thing, if you’re using GPS, is on Everest and you a storm comes or your battery runs out, you’re toast. In the fall, once false, once war, a British ship was hit by an extra set missile. It took out the electrical system. Nobody knew how to navigate celestially. It had to sit there as a sitting duck to be escorted back to the UK
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and, and it’s these types of things where
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we we don’t think about these things in a larger context of usage, and what’s the longer lifespan?
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And, and I’d argue that
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that
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in some sense, that’s the transformation and the types of attitude I would encourage all of us to adopt and be able to chew on that while we can still walk and like the to walk and chew gum at the same time. It doesn’t mean you have to solve all those problems, but you at least have to be aware that those problems are there. Otherwise you get something like, oh, we’ll just fix it. We’ll keep get as many active users as we can to bump up our our share price when we go public and and by the way, what if something goes wrong? We’ll just fix it. And we’ve seen what happened there with in the past, and in terms of Cambridge Analytica and so on so forth. No, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. So maybe you better think about those things. You better take it seriously. And then if the industry can, then the rest of society can,
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and they have shown that, and it’s not the tech companies, largely, that are the final barrier, really, to do that. But I would also argue that As consumers,
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we should maybe think about these things when we make purchases as well and have that be a guardian thing, not just the price and not how many MIPS it has. Okay?
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Great, perfect, okay, um, some people struggle with number four. The question is, what does your future look like?
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I’m 75 I have 576, grandchildren. I have this huge collection that I’m trying to curate.
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My mind is still working. I’m still active, but
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I
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I’m not stepping back from our not caring is walking away from what things but
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my futures
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want you being far more
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careful with how I allocate my time, because I
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want to stay healthy. I want to participate with my grandchildren growing up in a way I probably didn’t with my own children and but I also want to, I don’t want to walk away and
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and not be available to
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consult or mentor or whatever
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design designers, or the field I’ve been working in my whole life, I’m not going to walk away from that, but I think my role in that is going to be
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far more judiciously placed
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and
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and even doing Something like
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what I’m doing right now. This helps people think about this stuff.
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Then it’s an hour well spent.
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Great. Okay, number five, we say, is unique to this show. The question is, let’s talk about location. How does the notion of place play into what you do?
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Yeah, there’s some
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there’s a
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guy who’s a colleague and just just a brilliant person in our field named Mark Weiser, with whom I worked at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. He was the director of the computer science lab.
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And what he is best known for is an essay he wrote in Scientific American called the computer for the 21st century and and in it, he defined the concepts and the principles underlying what he termed ubiquitous computing. Sorry, UbiComp.
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And the notion of ubiquitous computing was, is that technology is kind of everywhere, and yet it’s transparent. It’s integrated into the ecosystem.
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And when I say, How can I be everywhere? Transparent? Well,
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my good example would be, if you walk into somebody’s house and the dining room, tables in the dining room and the toilets in the bathroom, then you’re not going to notice either. They’ll just be there and they’ll just go about your business and conversation. You’re not going to stop and talk about it, unless it’s such a beautiful
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table, or if you happen to notice that it’s a gold gilded gold tape toilet, which purportedly is in Donald Trump’s bathroom, those would maybe cause some but that’s the point. Is, if you switch to the toilet in the living room, the table into the bathroom, you’re going to notice it because they’re out of place. And in sociology, there’s a term for this around location, and it’s called What’s the moral order. And so we have this concept of within this particular point and where you are right now, there’s a certain protocol, so I will
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we know the difference between so we’re going to McDonald’s as a salmon posh restaurant. We’re going to dress differently. We’re going to dress in a way that’s appropriate for the location of the function, for going to court, if I’m going to church, if I’m going to a baseball game, if I’m going sailing or cycling.
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So place is really important. Now here’s the deal.
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Everything that Mark wrote about, I agree with, except for one thing, he used the wrong word. Ubiquitous has this notion. Ubiquity means everything’s everywhere,
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and, and,
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and it kind of, if you went to the extreme, it’s everything everywhere, all the time for everybody, and it remains, uh, transparent. Well, I think that that’s, there’s a conflict there. He used the wrong word, and I went to the dictionary trying to talk of one of.
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Thinking about place and look to look up what in the Oxford English Dictionary is this specific meaning and definition of ubiquity. But on the way, I stumbled across by complete accident for a
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different word I never heard of. Called you biety, U, B, i, e, t, y,
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and U, by thee
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has a very different meaning. It both have to do with place where things are. But ubiquity means everywhere you buy. The means no in this specific place, and so
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you body would say the right thing in the right place, at the right time for the right person, the right task, as opposed to everything, everywhere, all the time, for everybody and everything. I’m stretching those to the extreme, which doesn’t make sense, but it has to bifurcation is simply to accentuate the contrast between the two the minute you start thinking about place as a fundamental component in design, you get something new. Now part of this is already there. The way we interact with our computer, our phone, when we’re driving our car,
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is
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if you are using eyes on and fingers on to operate your phone, you should lose your driver’s license, because otherwise you might kill somebody, some little kid on the street.
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When you’re in the car, the interaction language is mouth on and ears on, primarily,
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and there is a 100%
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change in the interaction language when we’re driving our car and operating our phone
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than there is when we’re not in the car, and we when the action is fingers on and eyes on,
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on the touchscreen device. If I was a really good example of you biety, where you the the function matches the place in context. Now,
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everything we do in life is a compound task. The nature of skill acquisition and learning is just taking a bunch of
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elemental things and putting them together and joining them, or actually moving and coupling them. A phrase, adding larger and larger to is how we build up chunks of meaning or semantics. So the point is this,
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we should all do back flips when we get out of the car in the middle of a phone conversation, pick up the handset and close the car and continue the conversation and then and maybe actually go and search to find things while we’re talking with our fingers. The reason we should do backflips is there was just 100% change in interaction language and a 90% change in the technology that was managing that call locally. Oh, and by the way, the whole way, when you’re driving down the highway
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that you’re being headed off, or cell tower to cell tower to cell tower. And therefore, if you’re not near cell tower, none of that works because, and that’s again, a function of place. If there’s no cell coverage, you’re toast, unless you’ve got a satellite phone. Now, all of this says that we have to think about things in their place, recognize that everything you do is a compound task. Each of those tasks may have a different place and or set of technologies required for them, and as we move from one phase of the task to the other, whatever that task may be, the technology has to morph in the same way that the phone does all the time, and we’re so it’s so natural that
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none of us notice it.
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We don’t. We don’t think about it.
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Now we can come back and think about this in terms of so called large language models that are sub driving AI right now,
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and this is about place as well. So look,
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the thing is that large language models can’t handle even elementary linguistic utterances
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in one context, at least which I will give, which I think is a very significant one, and it has to do with place.
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The first linguistic utterance a human ever makes is at about nine months of age. And what they do is they point
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and, and, and with my grandchildren, I’m honoring that, but that’s that’s been known for years.
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And that notion of place, indicating location, in order to communicate that is absolutely a linguist utterance. It is simply not a vocal or a verbal utterance. And as you go along, they become more COVID.
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Compound where you use two hands and other gestures to enhance the vocabulary, let’s say around 13 or 14 months to pick me up. I want this and so on. Dynamic gestures,
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no speech. Speech comes later, and then you start to couple these. But we notice that
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every computer out there today has
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a pointing device, it has a microphone, has a speaker, it has a display, and very few of them can let you point and say, Hey, what’s that much less? Hey, make this bigger like this, and show it while you’re speaking and move it and use manual with or some mouse, a keyboard or touch screen coupled with the voice to be able to chunk together the multi dimensional, multi modal,
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different modalities in order to perform a complex, complex, Compound task.
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Now if you go back to 1979
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and for all of your listeners, please do this, go to
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YouTube
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and look up, put that there. It says, video made by ah.
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Uh,
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Chris schmont and Eric kaltin. And work was done 71 to 779. To 81 at MIT at the media was what became the Media Lab, the architecture machine group.
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And watch what they’re doing.
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This is before the Macintosh,
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and every piece of hardware in that video was over the counter. They went out and bought it. Nick Negroponte had a very large budget from DARPA, and they set them up. But they bought it. They just put it together and demonstrated things that none of us, or very few of us can do today with our modern technologies, despite over a billion fold increase in computational power available for 1,000,000,000th of the price kind of thing
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and and say, How is it
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that with these so called large language models, which are not engineered to integrate these multi modal things at all. And therefore, it seems to me, and I might be wrong, that there’s a huge amount of refactoring that’s going to happen because they’re not taking place of this, taking account of this. Why can’t we do that today? Why is it there every day? Because the tools are there
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and and so let’s come back to place to make sure I’m not losing the thread. Pointing a deictic gesture is all about place, where we have things and how they behave when I move from here to there. Is all about place and location. And we also have to be place. Means not just any single place, but the transitions from place to place to place in every dimension of place that we can think of. And if we don’t take those things into account when we’re designing systems, they are going to be limited, and there’s going to be these speed bumps that inhibit the flow of the things that humans do. We are analog devices. Humans. We move in continuous ways and flow like music, and our technologies don’t do that because things don’t work together. They don’t work cooperatively.
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And so the AI that I’m seeing today is clever. It’s neat. I respect the people who do it. I think it’s in terms of what they do. It surprises me,
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but it is narrow, and I believe it’s going to stall like every other generation, every other time when we’ve had these great big waves of breakthroughs in AI that stall another one, big, hot one, it stalls because they’re not taking account the big picture. From my perspective and my observation of where the industry is going right now and again, I might be wrong, but if you’re not questioning this and and checking out for it,
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then you might not want to invest because you have you better just do your homework. Whether you’re jumping into that field or if you want to make a difference in that field, you might want to take a different perspective than the sort of the race of the lens all trying to do the same thing and be first and fastest, as opposed to thinking differently, which tends to be the way that most breakaways and new innovative companies get ahead, not by chasing the leader and doing the same thing trying to do it better. I.
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Great. So number six, if you had to start from the beginning, what advice would you give your former younger self?
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Well, first, don’t go to the same university from undergraduate through your PhD. Expose yourself to different teachers. So every time you change the degree, probably go to a different find a different mentor.
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I would say that
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you have to make sure that you pursue other passions that are outside of what you’re specializing in, no matter what that is, so that you have breath as well as depth, literacy and breadth, depth in your specialty.
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But I,
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and I guess the
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thing that I
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first timers asked that question, my answer was this,
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always be bad at something you love.
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The thing is, when you, when you, when you, you fall in love, whether it’s with
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a person or whether it’s with music or whether it’s with a sport or stamp collecting or literature or poetry, whatever
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you’re a beginner,
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and it’s that initial flow when you’re in that state of
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passion for something which you can do along with something else, which is your single thread, you have to always be Falling in love with something because that keeps you,
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it keeps you in a state of being a learner, of struggling with something new. For me, it’s been things like mountain biking, skiing,
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three day eventing on horses. I’d never been on a horse before in my life, till I was 40 years old, and I
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decided I wanted to go the Olympics and, and that’s, it seems like an idiotic, stupid thing to do, but I,
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I just followed that, and I worked really hard, and, and, and I actually got on a talent squad for the national team within 10 years. The point is this, that I didn’t go to the Olympics, but through that, I was learning, learning, learning and understanding what it meant because of some 16 year old or 12 year old girl is telling me how incompetent I was, and here’s how to fix it. You learn from anybody, and you realize that it’s learning about how to learn, and when you do that amongst different things as you go along and you you develop that, and then you realize, oh, this is how the people who use the things that I make and my expertise are feeling when they try to use the things that I made where I didn’t take those that learning into account. And there’s nothing I have done outside of my discipline. Let’s say the discipline is UX designer or
Unknown Speaker 38:05
human impact on technologies. There’s nothing I’ve done outside of that formal discipline
Unknown Speaker 38:13
that hasn’t informed it. I’ve been able to draw on that. My list of examples is huge. So here’s here’s the deal. Not only does it keep you learning all the time,
Unknown Speaker 38:24
I would challenge anybody who calls themself an experienced designer,
Unknown Speaker 38:29
ask yourself, what is the repertoire and the breadth of experience that you have curated throughout your life that would help inform your practice of experience design, and if you have spent your whole time in this narrow area about graphic user interfaces or things like that,
Unknown Speaker 38:50
then you are
Unknown Speaker 38:53
your answer to the question from the patron saint of experience design is going to be far too narrow to help you get where you need to go. And by the way, that patron saint is Jimi Hendrix, who asked the fundamental question, Are You Experienced? And the quality of a user experience designer is individually but also in terms of your design team and your colleagues and the other people who are upon, who are in the food chain of whatever you’re trying project you’re trying to do
Unknown Speaker 39:28
is the collective experience, the best it can possibly be to inform the decisions you’re working on. And since nobody can know everything, there’s no such thing as a renaissance man or woman. There never was otherwise. Why did the Medici what? Why did Rembrandt or Donatello need the Medici to fund them? They should have done their own banking. They’re, they’re, after all, their Renaissance men and women. No, they’re not. They were really, really good. They’re brilliant.
Unknown Speaker 39:59
You need.
Unknown Speaker 40:00
Have a renaissance team, but every one of that Renaissance team has to have this broad breath, because with that comes an overlap, which comes common ground and common understanding, but also mutual respect and you and nobody’s the smartest person in the world. Sorry, nobody’s the smartest person at the table or in the room.
Unknown Speaker 40:21
It’s a collective team sport,
Unknown Speaker 40:24
and if you are really narrow, no matter how deep you are,
Unknown Speaker 40:30
you’re not going to be very good player in that type of environment. And that you can’t sacrifice depth, because these are really hairy problems, so you have to really, really work hard on the tap,
Unknown Speaker 40:42
but that, by definition, means you have to be narrowed to leave room to have a breadth of to lay out the common ground so you can communicate respect and understand that need, who you need, why you need them, and how you communicate with them, and how you so you can actually get Do the job at hand.
Unknown Speaker 41:00
And that’s that’s just,
Unknown Speaker 41:04
I would say, from a perspective of
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anybody who’s an employer, whether you’re in HR or, I don’t care what your discipline is,
Unknown Speaker 41:14
I would say the following. I’d say the last person anybody should hire
Unknown Speaker 41:21
is the person they’re most qualified to hire. Because the person you’re most qualified to hire is the person who’s just like you were your expert. You’ve already got one. You’ve got you. So your real challenge is knowing what you can’t do and what you’re bad
Unknown Speaker 41:37
at, and and then make sure you fill those gaps. And then they sort of say, Now, your question is, in terms of hiring, is,
Unknown Speaker 41:45
Who, who do I Who do I find? To find out, who to ask to find out
Unknown Speaker 41:51
how good this person is, what to test that person’s qualifications? So you have you, if I don’t know how to,
Unknown Speaker 42:00
how to measure the competence in a field outside of my own. But I need them. I need I need partners, and I need that sort of social system around me as well. And
Unknown Speaker 42:12
I’d say that
Unknown Speaker 42:14
the
Unknown Speaker 42:17
biggest challenges, especially in large organizations, is how do you manage breaking out of this, these deep, narrow silos of expertise that
Unknown Speaker 42:30
all go the wrong way, and they get so far along the path that you when you realize, oops, we could have done this with that, because there was none of that mutual reinforcement and division of labor and cross pollination from the very beginning and and it
Unknown Speaker 42:49
has to start before you even draw one line on paper from sketching or spend $1
Unknown Speaker 42:57
Great, perfect. So number seven, what’s day in your life like?
Unknown Speaker 43:08
I
Unknown Speaker 43:11
It’s not random, but
Unknown Speaker 43:18
there’s very few patterns. I guess the best I could say is I tend to work quietly on my own, without interruption in the mornings, and I tend to prefer to go, whether that’s in a recordings to your composing music back in the old days, or writing. And I tend to work better
Unknown Speaker 43:39
in groups, having refreshed and come up that way in the afternoons, but
Unknown Speaker 43:46
these days, since I’ve rewired,
Unknown Speaker 43:49
i My days are far more flexible. So
Unknown Speaker 43:55
I tend to try and be disciplined about exercise, getting outside, sleeping, eating, well, and stuff like that. But
Unknown Speaker 44:03
I
Unknown Speaker 44:04
guess maybe the other job description that I didn’t mention was I’m a juggler, and I try to keep
Unknown Speaker 44:13
a number of balls in the air at once, and sometimes I drop them often I do and too often, and I’m still practicing and to get better and
Unknown Speaker 44:27
and
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then often I take on too much which is
Unknown Speaker 44:32
and therefore
Unknown Speaker 44:35
I still pull all nighters, I guess, as a consequence, As a penalty for that which isn’t healthy but necessary, but
Unknown Speaker 44:45
it’s something that if you’re not willing to do that, even in your 60s or 70s,
Unknown Speaker 44:52
from time to time,
Unknown Speaker 44:56
I guess if you’re, if it’s your own choice and speak.
Unknown Speaker 45:00
You’re so enthusiastic about it, that’s kind of neat that you’ve still got that enthusiasm. If it’s because of poor management,
Unknown Speaker 45:09
it’s probably a character flaw.
Unknown Speaker 45:13
And maybe the way to tell the difference is that if you do that, do you also have in your schedule,
Unknown Speaker 45:21
plans for recovery time so that you do still have balance and you don’t get just manic.
Unknown Speaker 45:30
That’s
Unknown Speaker 45:33
something they
Unknown Speaker 45:35
would like to have the skills to
Unknown Speaker 45:38
have taught myself probably 50 years ago.
Unknown Speaker 45:43
I’m learning that part better in my at this age, which is later than it would have been used more. It would have been more useful to know that earlier. I knew it. I just intellectually, just didn’t know it viscerally.
Unknown Speaker 45:59
And by the way, having said that, I just want to say that when I talk about experience, it’s really important.
Unknown Speaker 46:09
We need to experience things this way, actually hold and move them with stuff,
Unknown Speaker 46:16
design and what guessing and sort of reading about experience just doesn’t cut it.
Unknown Speaker 46:25
And and that’s why we need artifacts and so on around us. That’s why I have such a large collection of devices, so that I can actually, because some anything I’m thinking about, I can find an example somewhere that where somebody’s built something, that they can inform that.
Unknown Speaker 46:39
And therefore you need to be a collector,
Unknown Speaker 46:43
not a hoarder. A collector.
Unknown Speaker 46:47
Great, okay, number eight is around lifelong learning. It’s a popular topic. How do you stay up to date?
Unknown Speaker 47:01
But choosing your topics well, choosing your questions, well,
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the
Unknown Speaker 47:09
and by
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if it’s obvious what you need to learn, it’s probably not the thing you should be looking at, because that means there’s somebody else who already is really good at that.
Unknown Speaker 47:29
I tend to
Unknown Speaker 47:32
rather look at the stay up to date
Unknown Speaker 47:38
by improving my understanding of, let’s say, some of the core principles that I can reduce in terms of what
Unknown Speaker 47:46
and where I think I can bring value, and how I can bring insights and creativity
Unknown Speaker 47:52
and compelling arguments for and against
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things that I’m encountering, and how to behave. So
Unknown Speaker 48:06
I think
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I read far less stuff about current trends and technology
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than many people might
Unknown Speaker 48:22
and yet,
Unknown Speaker 48:24
and that’s largely because I believe things move slowly, and that the latest new thing is is not a fad, but it’s, it’s not long standing
Unknown Speaker 48:37
and and so I’m going to look at other places where other people have had The same class of problems, so I read a lot of history. I haven’t read fiction for
Unknown Speaker 48:47
I used to devour fiction as an undergraduate in early graduate school, but I know I have a huge library, and I read a lot. And everything I read, I’m always thinking, oh, what does that mean to I recognize that. How’s that? How’s that parallel? And it brings me insights. And I learn more about computer science by or my field that I from
Unknown Speaker 49:12
reading about navigation, for example, in, you know, in the days of sale and leading up to Hamilton’s clock and going forward, so on, so forth, and exploration. And how do people map make and how do they make sense? How do they communicate and and by going to other cultures and not just reading a book about, you know, what’s the different gestures you use in this place? No, go, go, spending time in different countries, and learning different languages. Those are all things if you’re trying to think in a global sense about how to design learning figma. It’s a great program, so it’s really neat, but, but my time is not well spent becoming an expert in figma. It’s far better spent than.
Unknown Speaker 50:00
Saying, what, what would I use figma for, and what, and what doesn’t it do well? And where are the gaps? And how do we know those things? Rather than getting good at that tool, I can just hire somebody to do
Unknown Speaker 50:14
that. And there’s lots of people there as part of their career path.
Unknown Speaker 50:18
And I think that
Unknown Speaker 50:21
anything that when you’re writing code for tools and and even these AI systems, because they’re pattern recognition systems, they’re going to do the best jobs at make it easier to do the way things have always been done,
Unknown Speaker 50:41
the same way that GUI builders meant that everybody thought the interaction design was how to make better graphical user interfaces, and never thought that maybe there’s another ways to do do things, or another better way to do different types of tasks than than
Unknown Speaker 50:58
that, gradually getting none of that. But,
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and, and by the way, in saying that, I
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I could be accused of contradicting myself, because earlier, I said,
Unknown Speaker 51:14
you know, just base yourself on history and stand on the shoulders of giants and merge from that and so that you can make people move forward
Unknown Speaker 51:24
more easily based on building on previous knowledge, both from the design perspective and manufacturing, but also the user’s perspective.
Unknown Speaker 51:33
And then I just said, Well, no, we want to find out very different paradigms, but those aren’t contradictory,
Unknown Speaker 51:41
because
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the
Unknown Speaker 51:46
often you will find the roots of of of new ways of thinking and innovation buried within things are already there. I’ll give you one simple example that I think will illustrate this.
Unknown Speaker 52:04
This guy, Don Hopkins, who wrote a paper on pie menus. He’s a really bright guy.
Unknown Speaker 52:12
One of my students, Gord hertenbach,
Unknown Speaker 52:16
did a thesis around the marking menus, these radio menus. And the principal thing about these things are is there
Unknown Speaker 52:25
they are just a pop up menu, like any pop up menu that was on a Mac or the Xerox star. And the only difference,
Unknown Speaker 52:36
besides the graphical picture, is that instead of making a selection by how far you go in linear distance, up and down, say, in a pop up menu or across the menu bar, left and right. Instead of doing making your choice by where you travel to and release the mouse button, you simply do it by the direction you go.
Unknown Speaker 52:59
You sort of say, Okay, it’s just direction versus distance. Well, hang on
Unknown Speaker 53:04
without using your eyes, you cannot make a selection.
Unknown Speaker 53:10
We have no fine motor control to
Unknown Speaker 53:14
be able to judgments. You can’t control where you’re going to land. You can’t hit a target in linearly by distance without looking at least not ballistically. You can ballistically go in the eight points of the compass. And therefore you can have pop up menus that are have eight selections, which can be hierarchical, by the way, that that are are just pop up menus
Unknown Speaker 53:40
and they illustrate what they the answer, just like a regular pop up menu, they cue you the direction, but every time you make a selection, you’re training yourself to actually do the gesture. And you delay the pop up by about a third of a second, so that you’ll get to the point where I did the gesture before the thing even popped up and all of a sudden you made a transition smoothly using existing skills, existing metaphors, to a gestural interface that’s 10 times faster than selections that you can do eyes free in many cases, depending and that can be localized then, but it’s just a pop up menu, but it looks nothing like a graphic user interface. Oh, by the way, you can integrate them into a graphic laser interface at the same time to make the transition.
Unknown Speaker 54:25
And so the the these are, this is what I would call this is radical evolution. The way to design is design things in a way where the thing feels familiar. You can build on familiar metaphors, at least you can make best Evers. This isn’t going to do for everything all the time for everybody, but it’s a really robust way that you should be searching for. We should all should be searching for. This is how I approach it. Do that, but it’s and say it’s just like this thing you already know how to do, and there’s just this one little difference. But when you actually cross the threshold of using that little difference, all of a sudden it takes you.
Unknown Speaker 55:00
To a complete new world. This is what I call as radical evolution. It’s a small, incremental evolutionary step, but it’s at a tipping point, if it’s well designed, that takes you into a whole new mindset that is immediately understandable and unusable, and integrates into a conceptual model, but then gives rise to a whole other set of hopes and expectations, which then you can start to move to fulfill. And one of the things about making change and managing change as a designer is, how do you bring people by to make them as comfortable as possible, to just cross the threshold and find this new place where the threshold is just like going to any other door, except it just
Unknown Speaker 55:47
where you land. This is this whole new magical place and
Unknown Speaker 55:53
and then all of these techniques on, the gestures and so on. If we want to talk about current day, they can move with touch. They can move in VR they can move in AR. You can work in 2d and 3d there’s there’s different. And I’m not just talking about radio menus, but there’s techniques all around us for which metaphors can work. That where we can bring people along by emphasizing skill transfer, as opposed to skill acquisition from new that’s learning. Learns a power function.
Unknown Speaker 56:29
Skill transfer is just recognition. Oh, I recognize that. Okay, bang, I can do it. And understanding the basic psychology. Now, where do you draw these things from? Well, these single stroke shorthand like graffiti and so on so forth, which made the Palm Pilot really happy, and which actually led, in my case, towards where we were working on these gestural
Unknown Speaker 56:52
things, actually was discovered and first used by a slave of Cicero in 63 ad and was used to record the minutes of the Roman Senate. That’s where graffiti came from.
Unknown Speaker 57:05
Jeff Hawkins doesn’t, or certainly didn’t understand that. He just reinvented the wheel. But anybody, if he hadn’t gone to look at a book and writing systems, he would have found it. There was no research to be done other than go to a book on a topic, as opposed to spend your time inventing something that you think is brand new, and trying to and, you know, so this, these are the things you do, reading, going breadth of things which are formed and trusting your curiosity, if it seems unrelated to what you’re doing, what you’re supposed to be doing, do it anyhow, because there’s a connection there you just may not recognize. And for me, that’s always been the case, maybe a couple exceptions, but not many.
Unknown Speaker 57:45
Great, okay, nine is around tools. Can you talk about digital versus analog tools you use? I
Unknown Speaker 58:03
Yeah, well,
Unknown Speaker 58:05
I could answer that with a bad pun, but I’d say snapping my fingers. That’s a digital tool. Those are my digits.
Unknown Speaker 58:13
I don’t make a distinction.
Unknown Speaker 58:16
I think that.
Unknown Speaker 58:19
Okay, I’ll ask you a question,
Unknown Speaker 58:23
what made the iPhone special,
Unknown Speaker 58:29
right? What was this distinguishing feature that made it cause basically Microsoft’s and everybody else’s mobile phone business is basically creator.
Unknown Speaker 58:40
What? What?
Unknown Speaker 58:42
What was it?
Unknown Speaker 58:44
So, implementation of a vision
Unknown Speaker 58:48
I don’t understand. Can you be more I want that in the interaction, because you did what you said
Unknown Speaker 58:55
was ocular only. I want it has to be bi directional in terms of conversation, on how you interact with it, because that’s what we’re doing.
Unknown Speaker 59:03
You ask the question again,
Unknown Speaker 59:05
what was the thing that made the iPhone so special? What was the attribute? What? What? What was,
Unknown Speaker 59:17
what was the thing? By the way, anybody listen to this, start thinking about your own answer,
Unknown Speaker 59:24
and write it down so that you can’t lie to yourself afterwards that, oh, yeah, I was going to say
Unknown Speaker 59:29
that.
Unknown Speaker 59:31
Well, how about ubiquity?
Unknown Speaker 59:34
No, but what made it ubiquitous, it was because it got such a rapid adoption because of the what I’m talking about that actually, is why it becoming ubiquitous and growing so fast, is why it got the market share. What drove that? That’s unknowable.
Unknown Speaker 59:51
Oh, I think it’s very normal for them. Okay, yeah. Because if you look at, if let’s, let’s, let’s take a look here, if you look at an iPhone, um.
Unknown Speaker 1:00:01
It. It had icons. Microsoft smartphones had icons. Had a touchscreen, microphone. Microsoft did. It was smoother, and things like that. It was, it’s like it was prettier, and so on, so forth, and apps, they do, and so on, so forth, the So, first of all, it was there was in one way, you could say there’s no one thing.
Unknown Speaker 1:00:23
And for anyone who wants to deconstruct this, I mentioned Brian merchant before. I highly encourage anyone who wants to understand the full thing about there’s no single feature of
Unknown Speaker 1:00:36
at the detail level that makes anything work. It’s a perfect storm. And Brian merchants book, the one device deconstructs the iPhone into every single new component, not everyone, but the full body, from the glass to the touchscreens and the lithium batteries and the processor and so on so forth to to say all these things contributed, but, but I’ll tell you what my answer is.
Unknown Speaker 1:01:03
And the reason I’m asking this is you could sort of say, Why am I talking about this? Because you asked me a question, digital, analog. Here’s because this is germane to precisely that question.
Unknown Speaker 1:01:15
To me, my answer would be the iPhone was the first digital appliance broadly available
Unknown Speaker 1:01:28
that had an analog interface.
Unknown Speaker 1:01:31
Everything else was poke switch, bang, bang. The iPhone you you stroked it, you squeezed it, you caressed it, it. Things moved. If you move things, they squished. If you threw them, they bounced. They had all these analog features,
Unknown Speaker 1:01:48
as opposed to screen pop. The worst thinking do is to have one screen disappear and another one come in, as opposed to float them in and out, so you can actually see the transition, so you can acquire that it takes longer, but it’s faster to perceive. It was brilliantly designed in terms of the transitions and the animations and the fact that had it, and they got the sense right for the touch. So it was, it was using the testing of what pressure it took and the fingers. They did their ergonomics really well, but they actually tailor it to be, in a way, the difference between, you know, an amateur violin and a beautiful violin, it was finally killed. But the main characteristic was it flowed. It had this animation,
Unknown Speaker 1:02:38
and
Unknown Speaker 1:02:40
the others who can
Unknown Speaker 1:02:43
disagree with me or that have different opinions, and I’d suspect that none of us are right.
Unknown Speaker 1:02:49
And therefore, when we have these sets of questions, we want to enumerate them collectively, give their opinions, and then look at them, because if you ask that kind of question, before you start trying to build an iPhone competitor, the depth of variations you get from asking those questions, because I think most people wouldn’t give the answer I gave,
Unknown Speaker 1:03:10
but,
Unknown Speaker 1:03:12
but again, doesn’t mean I’m right, but those are the times and things that we got we go
Unknown Speaker 1:03:20
go up against. But I would argue that the reason you don’t see and jump up and down when you walk out of your car and the whole UI and your phone is because each thing what you’re coming from, whether you’re coming from walking around and getting into the car, or vice versa in the middle of a call, that it’s it’s certainly got to do. What? What can? Can the interface in one context at one place morph to and smoothly morph and with a smooth transition, seamless analog, in an analog way, to the other context and vice versa? So you got to take both contexts into account to make sure you can make that flow. You design the technologies to accomplish, to accomplish that flow, which still is pretty in rudimentary we’re going to look back in 20 years, and even in, even in five years, and say, how do we manage for these crude things we have today, but, but let’s just think back and think we’re doing, we’re making progress, but this the world is analog, and there’s very few things we need to be digital. From the user’s perspective, it doesn’t matter. And as we know from electronic musical instruments and sampling theory, that you just that that there’s a blur where if one be one morphs into the other in terms of action and how things flow. But if we talk about behavior, we talk about flow.
Unknown Speaker 1:04:50
Um, the tools should flow, and the technology behind them shouldn’t matter.
Unknown Speaker 1:04:57
I mean, the only reason you should know.
Unknown Speaker 1:05:00
How the plumbing is in your house, is, is, is when it doesn’t work and you got a flooded floor, or something like that.
Unknown Speaker 1:05:09
It doesn’t toilet flush, you get hot water. Those are the things that from the end users perspective, that you expect,
Unknown Speaker 1:05:18
and it’s rare that knowing the technology for the end user
Unknown Speaker 1:05:23
is important,
Unknown Speaker 1:05:26
because then you’re this thing. This is the cool thing, because it’s a cool technology, as opposed to, wow, look what it just enabled me to do.
Unknown Speaker 1:05:34
Nobody does. Nobody asks. By the way, that when you’re going down the freeway with your cell phone, and you’re being handed off for cell tower to cell tour. How’s that happen? It’s unbelievable. You got separate computers, separate antennas, and there’s just a seamless handoff all the way down the highway, 100 kilometers an hour.
Unknown Speaker 1:05:56
But you can’t walk down the hallway with your phone with a Bluetooth this you know where your phone where it’s driving a Bluetooth speaker in one room and have it follow you into the next room. There’s no handoff.
Unknown Speaker 1:06:12
The model for for how to manage networks, to get continuity of moving from place to place in a building without disruption, of having to repair and all that sort of stuff doesn’t exist in our homes in any any scalable sense,
Unknown Speaker 1:06:28
but it doesn’t our cars going down the highway. How’s that? Because one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing, because the people who do cell phones don’t do this. And how do you know when to transfer completely over the next hour and leave the ones from 100 miles
Unknown Speaker 1:06:41
behind? If they’re no longer in the game.
Unknown Speaker 1:06:46
This is and this again, comes back to place. It has flow from place to place. Then think of what are the dimensions of place and location that are important for the tasks we’re doing? And it might be from doing line art and then coloring and that, that transition. How do you do that? How do you back up?
Unknown Speaker 1:07:07
These are, these are not common things that we talk about in interaction design. We spend all our time saying, how do we make this icon better? Or, how do we move these things around? It’s basically putting nude lipstick on the pig, the fundamental operations and how we do and the and the speed bumps canned that they’ve got makeup on them smoother, but they’re there. There’s there’s not that much change, I used to say, and it’s still almost true,
Unknown Speaker 1:07:36
if we’re playing Winkle
Unknown Speaker 1:07:41
went to sleep having used a Macintosh in 1984
Unknown Speaker 1:07:47
and woke up today, he’d still recognize and kind of be able to work today’s computers. Now, in some ways, that’s a good thing,
Unknown Speaker 1:07:57
but I would
Unknown Speaker 1:08:01
say that that’s at least
Unknown Speaker 1:08:05
at one level of abstraction, a conversation that maybe design teams should have with each amongst themselves or with or with themselves. What what might have been different? What were other paths? What have we left behind because we were so all of our tools, graphics, interface builders, Gui builders, and if you’re using writing Python programs, using tactic here already the new AI stuff,
Unknown Speaker 1:08:33
the
Unknown Speaker 1:08:35
you’re going to get
Unknown Speaker 1:08:37
variations on what already exists, because you’re copying patterns, and
Unknown Speaker 1:08:42
that’s questionable. What new things will be invented. New patterns are invented without human intervention or different training models and rethinking
Unknown Speaker 1:08:54
that
Unknown Speaker 1:08:56
we need to step out of our comfort zone to find examples which are hidden in plain view,
Unknown Speaker 1:09:05
to inform
Unknown Speaker 1:09:07
where we go and how we get there. And I think the status quo of how we teach design and how we tend to practice and how it’s integrated into corporations large or small
Unknown Speaker 1:09:20
needs.
Unknown Speaker 1:09:24
A lot of work.
Unknown Speaker 1:09:26
See present,
Unknown Speaker 1:09:29
great, okay, halfway, number 10, life work balance. Work life balance. How do you deal with it?
Unknown Speaker 1:09:39
I think we already talked about that, but it’s
Unknown Speaker 1:09:48
difficult for me to answer that question,
Unknown Speaker 1:09:53
because in one sense, I never worked a day in my life.
Unknown Speaker 1:09:58
I what I do.
Unknown Speaker 1:10:00
Uh,
Unknown Speaker 1:10:03
in terms of what I have been compensated for, for whatever reason
Unknown Speaker 1:10:10
is something which
Unknown Speaker 1:10:14
I care about, I think is important and that I love, and it’s worth my time, and where i
Unknown Speaker 1:10:21
i I find growth,
Unknown Speaker 1:10:25
but I,
Unknown Speaker 1:10:31
but in a way, you know, I sort of sit there and say, Wow, I get paid for doing what I love and and I, I and therefore I can, I can afford to do it, and the and it allows me to do other things with my family and so on, so forth. But the,
Unknown Speaker 1:10:58
yes, there’s times when no matter what I’m doing, whether it’s in play or other sports or other things and families, there’s stuff that’s just hard, miserable and so on so forth, in the same way there is in work. But the I don’t know how people get good at something they don’t really love,
Unknown Speaker 1:11:16
and reading a bunch of books is I’m going to help you.
Unknown Speaker 1:11:20
It has it in a way,
Unknown Speaker 1:11:24
it takes effort, it takes determination. It takes
Unknown Speaker 1:11:29
it takes time. For sure, we know that about skill acquisition, but
Unknown Speaker 1:11:37
work, I don’t know it’s
Unknown Speaker 1:11:42
if I’m working for a company, I
Unknown Speaker 1:11:46
choose the company
Unknown Speaker 1:11:50
because the work I which my life’s work, can be grow there, and I can mutual exploitation by consenting adults. I’ll exploit the company because they provide me the means to pursue the things I care about, and and they hire me because they want to exploit my ability to contribute to things that they care about, that I happen to have. And that’s, that’s the mutual exploitation by consenting adults, kind of model we both benefit.
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But financial composition compensation has never entered the equation. It’s there, it’s expected, but because nobody’s going to want to be taken advantage of on either side of the equation. But
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that’s not
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that’s not why
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we go. So the question is, is that,
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what do you care about enough to spend your life doing, or this next section of your life?
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And I guess the I’ll go back to another answer to a previous to a different answer to a previous question is, what’s my advice to the to the young designer or profession in any profession, whether it’s a sports or anything or the arts, my pattern is this, when I
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find something that I care about
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and I’m really interested in
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I do some homework, and one pieces prime piece of homework is who is the best person in the world in that field,
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and how am I going to bug them so much that they’ll take me on as An apprentice or a student by making such a nuisance, it’s easier to take me on than tell me to keep keep telling me to go away.
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And that’s a slight exaggeration, but the point is this
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life is too short. These things are too important
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to deal with crummy tools or or or crummy instruction, you have to go and find out who’s the right person. I don’t mean the smartest, the richest, the most famous, the person
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who
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you can learn the most from. And how can you do that? And for me, early on, before you know where to play saxophone, I’d listen to Paul Desmond and Stan cats, and then Wayne Shorter on saxophone. I’m listening to them. I’m studying with them. They don’t know me. I don’t never met either any of them, but, but even there, I’m looking for things where I can actually see because I respect so much what they’re doing, but if, but in terms of
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my Introduction to Computing and interaction that all came in intimate design. All of that came because I found people who were in equestrian stuff. I took found,
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here’s this thing, when I wanted to learn how to write, I had writing lesson.
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This for a few months. I saw the event, and I want to do that.
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I looked up the woman who was a top Canadian in the Los Angeles Olympics in Kelly plitz, and I just called her up and said, my name is Bill Bucha. You don’t know me. I want to go to the Olympics. I want you to coach me. She said, Do you have a horse? No. What can you do? Almost nothing. She said, You’re crazy. Why it makes you think that? Because I really am determined. It says, You know what, you have to be crazy to do three year venting. You sound like a crazy person. Come on out, and I’ll see if I think there’s any hope with your hopeless case. And that led to a 10 year relationship. Now this is the kind of thing, the same thing to come to University of Toronto, I saw a piece of computer graphics art in
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a catalog of the first show of computer art that cybernetic serendipity, a woman named Yasha Reichard curated it was at the
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Center for Contemporary Art In London, but somebody was trying to do something graphically, a guy named Leslie Messi, that I was trying to do musically. This is in 7475
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I started corresponding him by snail mail. There was no email. And finally he said, I can’t help you anymore. Just come to Toronto. We’ll make you an artist in residence. By the way, we don’t have an artist in residence program, but we’ll give you a key to the last give you a key to the lab. It’s a computer graphics lab, and so on so forth, and we’ll just figure it out.
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So I just went. I moved back to Canada. I had no intentions of doing that,
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and and if you because I found somebody who resonated I could learn from. And I went there
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and and reached out and and you, I think, for anyone in the formative ages but stages, but even once you’re better known, if you’ve got a reputation, but in a different field, other people, it’s easier, but, but that’s what you have to do. Don’t just sit there and wait for it to come, go where the traffic is, and the
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chances of getting hit by cars far higher. It’ll be random, but you’re going to get you’ll
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find go to the places where the people congregate, or whatever read, go to the library. But that’s
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choosing your mentor. Sort of RE is one of the most fundamental thing. And by the way, when you get older and you are one of those people, should you get to that point, it’s payback time. By receiving that in your early stage of your career, you take on an implicit responsibility to mentor and help other people down the road. And that’s kind of why I’m doing this today,
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because it’s payback.
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Great. I love it. Number 11, if you weren’t doing what you do now, what might you be doing? You kind of answered
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them. Get your pick.
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Yeah, the i There’s
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another rule I have,
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and this is terms in terms of projects,
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I always have at least five things that I want to do more than anything else. I know that sounds like a contradiction terms, so it’s five things. I don’t care which one, because I care about them all equally. And I don’t I know I can’t do them all at once. So if I’m what I’m going to do is I’m going to pick the one which is the easiest to do, the one I’m going to be able to get through and work with the least amount of friction, not because I’m lazy, because I’ve already said they’re equally important to me as well as to the results. So if I can get knock one off, then I can get the other sooner. So I want to get as many things done as I can, and by the way, along the process, I might change what are my five favorite things to do, and that that’s within my working, professional life and within my personal life as well. So when I moved away from the ocean, my passion for marine zoology, it didn’t disappear, but it I just it was, I didn’t have the resources to do it, so I switched to something different,
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distance running. And so it just you have to again, that’s right back to place, to ubiquity, biology, as opposed to ubiquity, and
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and so I, I don’t know, because the answer will be different, because I might discover something different. And it doesn’t mean you’re just a gap fly. It means that you’re curious,
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and that’s not a bad thing. Never gonna apologize for being curious.
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Are there things you wouldn’t want to do with your career? I.
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I never thought of having a career. I just thought about having a life.
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And
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if I’m lucky, I maybe got 2025, more years. So yeah, time’s shorter, and
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as I said,
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my algorithms were heuristics for deciding what I do next are going to become sharper more
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as I go forward,
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because I recognize
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I can’t postpone some things,
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so I have to priorities change. How
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about a favorite word, quote or sentence
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say that again, a favorite word, quote or sentence,
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I’m still I’m still sorry
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you’re choosing a favorite word or a favorite quote or a favorite sentence.
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Ah,
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I can give you a couple. First one is from a historian of technology named
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Kranzberg. Wrote, not drawn
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Melvin Kranzberg, who was a historian of technology,
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and he wrote in his seven laws that
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the first law is that technology is not good, it is not bad, but nor is it neutral. It will be some combination of the two. And
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if you use the words good and bad, that means you have some kind of moral compass. And with technology, there’s probably multiple dimensions of that compass, so it’s a bit trickier,
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but it does say every technological decision is an ethical decision.
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And the second thing is second law, and I’ll give you the two
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is that invention is a mother of necessity, as opposed to the other way around, how we usually say it.
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And that means, and that’s sort of like a corollary from the first law, given
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it’s not good bad, nor is it neutral. There will be some it will be a combination of the two,
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having put something out there
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you own, cleaning up your mess,
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in terms of
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fixing what you got wrong,
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and also
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enhancing what you got right, but more people are going to enhance it if you’re showing leadership. And so you want to give priority to getting fixing what you got wrong and figure out. And so to minimize the problem, you got to take a look at that.
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There’s a consequence from this, even that quote, because it says that
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if
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how I try to manage things myself and with the teams I work with,
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we and this is the classical process, or practice of critique as practiced in architecture and good design studios,
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is
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you enumerate possibilities to get a number of possible alternatives meaningfully distinct means to address the problem you’re trying to solve, and you enumerate them, but when you add them to the list of things that you are considering,
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you must give a design rationale. Why that? And why is it meaning the distinct from the other things, or is it just the same thing? And, you know, all fun sheep’s clothing, but that’s just and,
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and then you
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and so the first part is just the enumeration, and
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that helps you explore the problem space, the design space. This is the one real part of design where the rolls, Royce tree, you can do anything. There’s tons of different ways to do things, and it’s just as creative of bringing things out,
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but then design becomes a really negative thing because of all of those things,
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only one’s going to emerge, everything
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else is thrown away. So it’s a it’s a really negative process, actually,
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but you can’t eliminate things without giving a reason why.
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But you, first of all, but all of those things you have that you’ve enumerated, you have to say, What’s the good, the bad, the ugly and what’s neutral, and then compare them. And that helps you. So two places for creativity in design,
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the things you enumerate.
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It to consider.
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And then the closing part is the heuristics, the creativity you bring to the heuristics that you apply in making choice amongst them, and which includes maybe taking pieces of each other, making something new that comes out differently those that’s a process that is not it’s well quoted, it’s well discussed, it’s well covered in the literature, but it’s not well present in practice, because people appear not to have the time. I think they don’t have the time
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but,
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but that’s how you tried to
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minimize the needs for
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Kranzberg second law to be put into play, and try and stack things on the positive side of good versus of a combination which percentage are good and bad in your final decisions.
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But the final thing I would say is, is one of
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two of my own, if it’s not too egocentric, but one is everything’s best for something and worst for something else, and it’s the and if
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a responsible design would imply that you need to know the who, what, where, when, why, how, of the dimensions of that good and bad for any particular technology you’re
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using feeds back into cransberry’s laws. But
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the other one is this advancement that
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do not be deluded, that the things that we design be the applications, devices or services.
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Do not delude ourselves that those things that we create are the outcome or the product of our design efforts.
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Rather they’re not. Rather, what the output is is the experiences that they engender and encourage, the biases that they apply to behaviors in the world when they’re in practice.
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Thurlow, the economic economist, actually speaks about this in a funny term, in terms of behavioral economics, is he calls this becoming a bias architect. In some sense, that’s what we are. The bias of the path of least resistance is the best way to direct people’s behavior by making it simpler and easier cheaper to be able to achieve a certain end. So you have to design those biases too.
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So if you don’t take into account the experience, and you just look at the device and stuff like that and how it’s applied, then you have no idea what biases you’re doing, or you just leave it for random. And I don’t think that’s a good way to leave things, but those are three,
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three lines, one liners with a bunch of fat probably over really verbose commentary that I hold fairly close to my heart.
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Great. And the flip side a least favorite word, least favorite quote, least favorite sentence. Oh, that one’s easy
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fail or early fail often.
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That’s
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that makes my blood boil. It’s the biggest, simple and the most
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cop out kind of excuse for bad process, bad thinking, so on so forth. It’s absolute nonsense. It’s it’s a terrible negative expression.
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And this is why words are so important. Just flip it around and say, learn early, learn often,
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and the reason they’re set. And so what you can say, well, it’s just the same thing the other way around. No. First one’s a positive perspective and the other’s negative. No, but it’s even more than that, because failure is just failure. What’s learning mean? So when I do an experiment, let’s say you’re doing an experiment on, you know, let’s take a classic example about pointing devices, comparing them in terms of fit slots, stuff like that, whatever it is.
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The first thing about experimental design is you must have before you do the study, but you design the study accordingly. To test a hypothesis.
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Here is what I think will happen.
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Now, how do I test if that’s what’s actually going to happen?
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Now, if my hypothesis is proven wrong
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and it doesn’t happen,
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that is not failure. So when people say science is full of failures, no science has a hypothesis, and a negative hypothesis would not achieving the hypothesis not being proved.
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And true. Basically says, oh, okay, I can just eliminate this part from a search space. Now I’ll go to the next one. I’ve learned something.
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It’s not a failure,
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it’s it didn’t meet it. It means I asked a good question. I found a, you know, a knife in which to carve up this problem space, to narrow it down, and I can make progress,
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and and, and, and, the earlier you can do for the fundamental questions, you can actually find a way where you make a hypothesis
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that
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the more effective your design is going to be,
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because you’ve got more time on the on the final level things, because you’re not going to make the biggest mistakes, the most expensive ones to correct are the ones that are made earliest in the process. So get that stuff right when you’ve got a small team, and you can do it quickly if you’ve got good process. But the point is, you have to learn. The other place to learn is by going to literature, because there’s a lot of stuff out there. And have people who are good at that,
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Tom Moran and Stu card, who are two founders of HCI, and are just friends and just huge mentors that that I learned a huge amount from, said to me when I was about to do the first experiment, they said, why on God’s earth do you want to do an experiment?
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I said, Well, you guys do experiments. Said, no, no, no, we hate doing experiments. There’s like, sticking hot needles in your eyes. It’s like, it’s time consuming. It’s not and there’s only one reason to do a formal experiment,
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and that is
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if the results you’re going to get from it
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will let you learn something which will improve the quality of your ability to model the behavior so that you can predict behaviors and and get to the next level of understanding of what’s going on from the from the human perspective,
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I’m happy, if people want to argue with that, but that lesson that
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from that conversation, which took place in the parking lot when I was walking into Xerox Park when bumped into the two of them, I remember that day where we were standing, And that’s never left me, and I think that
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the
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notion of what an experiment is and what a hypothesis is does not mean a Latin squared type experiment. There’s many quick ways to do quick and dirty things, because you don’t always have time, but you have to do your best efforts to learn the most you can with the within the context of your budget, team sizes and other pressures and and, but you have to understand that that’s that’s where to spend time, and that’s why I think eBay is so neat.
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I can go on about examples, but I think we probably get our time on
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it. Great. Okay, 15, you’re choosing one word to describe yourself. What word do you choose?
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Prospector,
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what keeps you up in prospect for opportunities, prospect for insights, prospect for solutions. And
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therefore I try to
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improve my technique of how to find things
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great so again, 16, what keeps you up at night?
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Very little.
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Unless keeping me up at night is
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when I start something that I’m so engrossed in that
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noon hour and
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I realize I haven’t eaten or left
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working
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till noon the next day.
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It doesn’t happen that often, but
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that’s just, I forget. I lose sense of time. I’m just so engrossed in reading or writing or whatever I’m doing,
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I sleep. I sleep well
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when I sleep,
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despite
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some sleep apnea,
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great, okay, 17, what’s the dream you’re chasing? I.
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Ski deep powder in the back country with my now
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four year old granddaughter
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in a way where she could do that safely, and I can share that with her and her father and me and any other of my grandchildren who care to join us.
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I want to live that long and be strong enough to be able to do that, and be strong enough to climb up whatever slope we’re going to be on,
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and
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that, and that
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would feed my soul sufficient to fuel any other ambitions I have in my life,
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and still have my wife beside Me,
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great and last few here, what inspires you.
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I am absolutely inspired by excellence
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in humans. What people? When people, I see people, achieve excellence in what they do.
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I don’t care whether it’s playing darts. I thought I hated golf, until my wife, who was really interested in golf, I went to a PGA tournament, gave it that to her for Christmas or a birthday present. And then I realized
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I
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my concept of what the human is capable of doing, in terms of
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putting together all of these different motor, sensory, cognitive,
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experiential things, to be able to do these feats of putting a little ball in a hole that they can’t even see when they’re heading out of sand bunkers, just just blows my mind. That’s the same thing in music when I hear
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a concert pianist, or when I see people who are have dedicated and committed and and can do things, because it’s really easy to look around the world and see things which just make you depressed, and the way to keep faith in the human potential is to make sure you expose yourself to the other side and have that be enough to help driving forward. Well, if they can do it, you know,
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maybe so Can I at least
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try and and
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when you get knocked down, which we all do, and you want to quit,
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have people around you, your family and other friends and that
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that’ll support you, but also the same time, other people who have been through the Same thing, which will
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help inspire you to keep going, and that you’re on the right path and maybe you’re not, so you can find that out as well,
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but that’s okay too. That’s just learning. And learn early the more things you try
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when
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I there was a time in SIGCHI where, which is the main academic conference in our field, on the 20th anniversary, they had a
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trivia contest, and one of the questions in the trivia contest was who had written The most papers
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in SIGCHI in first 20 years. And if I memory serves me correctly, one of my students came up and said, Hey, did you know that that was you?
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And I said, No, but
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what’s hidden in that
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is the fact I probably have had the most papers rejected as well,
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so my percentage is probably the same as everybody else’s.
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The question was,
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how
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it’s, it’s, it’s, how hard really going to work. And by the way, almost none of those papers are written by me alone. So it’s, I’m a co author, not just the sole author, and sometimes the last offer out there, but the but that’s the point. Is that you,
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yeah, there’s opportunities for select that the it’s choice of partners
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and and who you work with and and how you work. And sometimes it’s better to go figure out
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new ways to approach something than to just start, start off doing the project.
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Kind of have the stuff up front.
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Great and 19, any advice you’d like to share?
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Well, I’ll give you another quote in a way that I think that I’m extremely concerned about where the world is today, and largely because of the tools and technologies that
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we, and certainly I’ve been involved with, and it’s really easy to get discouraged
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and
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and I guess I have to revert to Margaret Mead, who said, Never doubt that a small group of determined individuals can change the world. In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has.
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And I say that in light of and in full recognition
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of what has become. And through that TV series,
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Silicon Valley has one of the largest cliches in in in digital tech and Silicon Valley, and that is, you know, we’re going to make the best compression algorithm in the world, best compression that’s ever been, and change the world and make the world a better place. Everybody gives lip service to we’re going to make the world a better place. We’re going to help humanity. We’re going to help them prove things.
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It’s a cliche, it’s BS, it’s marketing, it’s publicity, unless it’s backed up with solid proof in terms of your process, your values and execution, and what you’re working on, and being able to articulate how and what you’re not doing,
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and that’s a really hard thing to do under the pressures of meeting this supposed reality of
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you don’t work For the product, the customer, you work for the shareholders and the shareholders,
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if they don’t share your values.
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So in that regard,
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a book that I would highly recommend, this is another example of one of my passions, about mountaineering having a huge influence on how I approach my work is
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this guy who founded Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, who wrote a book,
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Let my people go surfing the diary, Diary of a reluctant businessman.
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Take a look at just even the first edition of that book. And I think that’s one of the best design textbooks I’ve ever seen, because it speaks about design. They all the different levels,
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and in particular, the ethics and, and why he keeps the company public and, and, and how he
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started the 1% for the earth type of mechanism. The point is, he’s a businessman. He’s got a very successful business, and, and, and it’s founded on a very different model than most businesses. And I think that
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there are examples out there that show that there’s other ways to do things. I think that Yvonne, somebody I respect hugely. Oh, by the way, my initial respect was as a mountaineer, because he was just hardcore in Yosemite. So like that, he, and he, his, his innovations and designs transformed ice climbing. So which I appreciate, because I make use of his tools. But the
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but the main thing is
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search for other ways of doing things and
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and by being different, you’ll stand out, which, if you’re right, you’ll gain attention. And if you’ve got attention, you can gain momentum, and then you can be a leader
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and
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and. But don’t just be different for differences sake. You have to be able to rationalize it meaningfully, why this is the right way, and what’s different about it and what’s significant about it before you make launch that, before you start back on
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you or similar kind of company.
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Great. And finally, number 20, how can our listeners keep tabs on you and what’s our call to action today?
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Well, I probably have the worst
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web page, so I’ll lose all credibility, but there’s just Bill bucha.com I
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my
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the best thing to say is that almost everything I’ve ever published is there, freely available online on that site,
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and so are our annotated bibliographies of my library on history of North America, the history of Central Asia, the.
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Mountaineering, the history, and also my design library
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and
Unknown Speaker 1:45:06
and basically all the essays and so on. So
Unknown Speaker 1:45:13
it’s I just it’s there. It’s no paywall, just it’s there.
Unknown Speaker 1:45:21
Awesome. That’s how and I
Unknown Speaker 1:45:26
and social media, I,
Unknown Speaker 1:45:30
I have largely withdrawn from Twitter or x because
Unknown Speaker 1:45:38
I’m guard my time, and
Unknown Speaker 1:45:43
the return on time invested has diminished greatly, and you have to want to get way through so much stuff that I tend not to, and The same reason I’m on LinkedIn, but again,
Unknown Speaker 1:46:00
the I guess maybe I would just show my age. Email is my favorite means of communicating with people. They interact with,
Unknown Speaker 1:46:13
and I don’t jump around. I don’t care how many followers I have, I’m happy to have followers, but don’t put stuff out. I’m not
Unknown Speaker 1:46:23
no longer in the PR game to try and promote myself.
Unknown Speaker 1:46:27
I’m easy to find. If you want to find me, I’m kind of
Unknown Speaker 1:46:33
awesome. Well, thanks so much for this gem, beautiful episode. Very, very excited to put it out there. Yeah, thanks for your time. My pleasure. Thanks and good luck. Bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai