Season 1, Episode 1: Andrew Hinton
Dan Klyn: The agenda for today is very simple: For the first 40 minutes or so I'm going to interview Andrew and ask him about any number of things. And then in the second part of the session, I will do the best that I can to facilitate you-all interacting with Andrew; I'll get out of the way. And then in the last bit of the session, it'll be open to Andrew [also I'd be happy to take any or field some of the questions], but mostly we want to take advantage of having Andrew Hinton here today, author of Understanding Context from O'Reilly, and a really dear friend so welcome Andrew.
And... It looks like you're muted
Andrew Hinton: And I am yeah. Unlike Skype for business for Mac, which likes to hide the microphone from you while you're talking because you know, it's cleaner.
Dan Klyn: Yeah
Andrew Hinton: So, you never really know if you're on mute or not until you hover over the damn thing? Yeah, so, that'd be a fun thing to unpack in a workshop some time. Anyway, so hey, so what's up what you want to talk about?
Dan Klyn: I would like to talk about context.
Andrew Hinton: Oh god.
Dan Klyn: And I would like to talk about any number of things, but I think. One of the many pieces of a legacy that you left here at The Understanding Group when you worked with us for that time is the conceptual model... I have it on my whiteboard over here: situation/need /task.
Andrew Hinton: Oh, yeah
Dan Klyn: That for somebody who is trying to make a product or service have a better fit with its context, that the interplay of those ideas is important to being able to do a good job of context. So I'd love to just hear a little bit about how you came up with that approach, and how you use it [or maybe you don't use it anymore], and then the thing I want to get to through that is "jobs to be done."
Andrew Hinton: Oh, yeah.
Dan Klyn: And how do tasks and jobs-- especially in this very popular parlance of jobs to be done-- what does situation/task /need, how does it relate to [if at all] jobs to be done?
Andrew Hinton: So, I'm gonna, I'll talk a little bit about where the situation/need/task thing came from, and then I'll talk about some stuff from before that I think gives a little more background on where I'm coming from. And then we'll wander our way into the jobs to be done thing, but hopefully, it won't take too long to do that.
Okay, so situation/need /task and where that came from was... this is like 10 years ago. Like: the last year I was at Vanguard. We were having issues on the Vanguard website [Vanguard is, by the way, for those who don't know, a big mutual funds and financial services company]. We were having issues where we [of course, this was a first-generation or second-generation website] had tons of forms online, right? So, there was this whole area on the website, it was about forms. And so basically the idea was, if you need a form to fill out, you go to this whole area called forms, and you somehow manage to find the form you need. It was not friendly. It was a kind of a mess. You kind of had to know secret things about these forms in order to even search for the right one.
Dan Klyn: And so the form, just to be super clear, a form would be… ”I've got a…
Andrew Hinton: Like a PDF.
Dan Klyn: ... how do I move my 503b.”
Andrew Hinton: Yeah. "I need to get power of attorney, or give power of attorney, to an adult child." "I need to," I don't know, "roll something over," you know? Like just, anything you needed to do almost needed a form filled out. So, it's a fascinating story that will go into all of it because there's so many things to unpack with it, but what it came down to was, me pushing an agenda around "okay, look, the problem is people are finding these..." Well, I'll tell you one funny little story about it. So, we were using if you're familiar with Tea Leaf, which I think is still around right, but it's that analytics package that allows you to kind of track somebody's clicks.
Dan Klyn: OK... Session - follow a session of a real person?
Andrew Hinton: Yeah. Yeah. So, you're like, screen by screen you're watching kinda what they do click by click. The one we had wasn’t like a video in real-time, but it was sort of like you could trace the steps, you know? And it was fascinating because we saw that people were coming to the website, poking around, and then pausing for a while. And then somehow, after pausing for a while, going to the search bar and typing - I think they either went to the "forms" area and then typed, or went straight to the search bar - One way or the other, they seemed to know these arcane phrases to type into the search bar, right? To get to the right form.
And what it was that they were calling people, the people in the call center were telling them the magic words, right?
Dan Klyn: They didn't come up with that on their own. They were given the "magic key" to here's where that information is hidden on the website.
Andrew Hinton: Yeah, and I mentioned that example because I think it's a - that kind of crap is going on still probably with, just anybody who's listening, you know, to whatever they're working on right, like you see, it's a great object lesson or was for me in terms of the limitations of analytics, the limitations of using a digital-only aperture that you're looking through in terms of what you're working on, especially web-only, for goodness sakes. And you really couldn't understand all of that unless you unpacked it, and you thought about the context that these people were doing things in. The thing is, though, that what we were missing was "well, why is it that you need this form?" And what we saw was that some of these people were actually going to the search bar and like typing things like "getting a divorce" or something. Some of them were very specifically more like financial service-ey. So, they would move another dot or two closer to the language game of financial services, but some of them were just like, I'm in a life situation, and I'm just throwing something in this environment, and what is it going to give me back?
And the thing is it didn't know how to give you back what you needed. So what I came up with was this strategy around well, look: we need a content strategy, and this is before, I mean, it was kind the content strategy was definitely a thing 10 years ago, but it wasn't being talked about yet in enterprises as much. But [and I'll confess to the ignorance], I didn't actually know to call it that at the time…
Dan Klyn: That was going to be my question - did you say it that way, with those words?
Andrew Hinton: No, no because I'm actually really slow, and I catch on to things maybe five years after I should have to be perfectly honest. So, it wasn't like until two years later that it really clicked for me: “Oh, oh, this is why we need content strategy [but it was a whole other situation].
But yeah, this was you know, like okay, see, somebody's in a situation, and they have some needs that are spawning out of the situation. So, something is happening in your life, it's shifting things around you, your environment is changing. And it's making you have to figure out different needs than you're used to right? The needs that you're used to having.... You already know how to do. You had to learn those, how to deal with those too.
Dan Klyn: Yeah
Andrew Hinton: …Because you've been in situations and repeated ways in which you know, you figure those things out just like knowing how to pick up this this delightful [laughs] redneck-chic mason jar, but with a handle, to drink my water, right?
Dan Klyn: Yep
Andrew Hinton: In order to do that. I had to learn that at some point, right? I didn't come right out of the womb like "oh, yeah: handles! That's how they work!"
Dan Klyn: No: there may have been a sippy top first.
Andrew Hinton: Just grabbing whatever I can grab one of my own fingers, you know? And so that sounds like it's we're getting off track, but we're not, because that's about affordance. We'll get back to that at some point, maybe.
Dan Klyn: Yes we will.
Andrew Hinton: So, anyway, the way I look at these things now, which I didn't then, but the way I look at it now a lot of language you're hearing from me now is post-book, which rewired everything for me,
but the idea is that you've got a creature ecologically situated in an environment. And then something in the environment changed. Including something with the creature, because they're part of their own environment. And now they have new needs that they didn't have before, and they're just trying to figure out what the need is, and how to get to some resource, right? to take care of that need, and in order to get to a resource, and access it, and use it: That's a task.
So now I look at it in this sort of ecological, more evolutionary way, but at the time it was just "hey, there's people, and we are not contextualizing things for them." So what we're doing is we're using the signifier "forms" as a sort of boundary object. It's a little hinge between the company and the customer, that there's a sort of a tacit assumption that customers know: if I need to do a task for some corporation, I need a form. And so the signifier "forms" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
The thing is, if you're starting to digitize your forms, and turn them into online application fields and things that you fill out online, right? It's…We still kind of call it a form... But why would you have to go to "forms" to do that? Why wouldn't you just be able to do it within whatever article are you reading? And so I started asking? Okay. Well, where are we…and I looked at the inventories, and I was like, there is no content telling somebody going through a life situation what forms they should fill out, right? Regardless of whether they're PDFs or not.
So that's where that came from, and to be honest, I haven't used it as a method per-se. It's not like I say "let's do a Situation/Need/Task workshop."
And this is where I go to the other thing that I was going to talk about. So, I cut my teeth in this whole industry 20-some years ago on contextual design, the methodology that Holtzblatt and Beyer came up with. It is brilliant, and I always tell people, if you're not familiar with it, go read about it: contextual design. Because you'll see things there that you're like "Oh, I thought that was some radical new idea." To use ethnographic... You know, right?
Dan Klyn: Look what we invented!
Andrew Hinton: Yeah. Yeah. So the cool thing is though that it's actually very architectural, their approach, right? So they're very much about talking about an environment. They're very much talking about sort of the blueprinting and the structure of the environment. The whole environment, you know, they're all about like you want to understand the whole context with - what are they doing on their whiteboard at their desk and stuff like that, right? So these are things that I've taken for granted for so long that it's jarring when I run across the UX teams who don't have anybody that has ever done anything like this.
Dan Klyn: No, it's like a set of goggles that you need somebody to put on you, maybe, before you then: "Oh, naturally: situation/task /need." Back to your example,
Andrew Hinton: Yeah.
Dan Klyn: Is a divorce… is part of the complexity that a name change in a divorce situation is maybe a different experience that you want to give ultimately than a name change in some other situation? Is that why …
Andrew Hinton: I think so.
Dan Klyn: Situation and task are separate because they…
Andrew Hinton: So, I think that that is true too. I don't know that I was thinking about it when I came up with it then exactly, but I've much more so now. So with service design on the ascendant, which I think is a brilliant thing. I do think that contextual design still has enormous value and I think if you put them together, it's like, you know, galaxy brain.
Dan Klyn: [laughs]
Andrew Hinton: You can pretty much do anything, make anything amazing for anybody, I think, if you put those two things together. But anyway, in service design that I've been employing more of the last few years, that is a thing where you start realizing that okay, and I knew this before right, but I guess the front stage/backstage structure for those not familiar...There's a key model in service design called the service blueprint. And the service blueprint has a front stage/backstage structure to it that it uses that metaphor very literally, if that makes sense. And so the idea that you've got a "touchpoint" that people hit over and over again, maybe in several different ways, and for several different purposes, but for different reasons, it's important to realize like hey, your chipper language for this person, who's “I just got married blah blah blah” and somebody else, is like “oh somebody just died blah blah blah.” So how do you do that, right? So either you need to give them different things to do with different sorts of environments that are more suited or you have to be more neutral.
Years ago I worked with breastcancer.org and one of the things that we discovered was that we needed a sort of content model that added an attribute to all of their content that made sure that people were being the writers and publishers were being thoughtful about "is this clinical?" "Is this more practical?" or "is this more emotional?"
So a clinical article on your symptoms might sound one way, and it might be expected because it's "doctor stuff," right? But they also were trying to service the emotional needs of these people, but also the practical to like you might have something where you might want to address the same topic in three different ways with three different voices or altogether, but at least you know, you're hitting all three dimensions of the topic, right? So hair loss. There's clinical things you want to be able to understand and these people, many of them, they didn't want things dumbed down. They wanted them explained clearly to them, not oversimplified. They wanted, the clinical language actually helped them feel grounded in like, “okay, these are facts, this is real.” But we also wanted to be able to provide them a way to “okay, now, what does that mean to you and your family life, and how you're feeling right now? And what do you do about that?” And practical like, okay so, stuff that goes beyond what you do in the clinical setting is things like, “What do I do for a cosmetically…” or whatever right? “If I'm losing hair.”
But the thing is is that having that model, calling out those dimensions of the contextual needs people might have I think was really important because otherwise, you're just sort of – and that’s the architecture right? Otherwise, you're just sort of doing it ad hoc. You don't have a shared language for it. It's not built into the bones of what you're doing, and the only way to build it into the bones of what you're doing is to name things, define what they are, and what their relationships are with each other. Which is information architecture.
Dan Klyn: Well, it strikes me that those three kinds of classifications, although they're not really that it doesn't sound like, that if you weren't working in terms of information architecture or content strategy, with that realization, you might then think "well, then, the way that I address that is there will be a tab that says clinical information, and then a tab that says.."
Andrew Hinton: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Dan Klyn: You've talked about that really interesting and important seam: what is information architecture what is content strategy? That's the Mobius strip version of…
Andrew Hinton: That's the nature of our media that we work in is that, all the membranes are very porous where there even any, right? It's all continuums. I mean... content strategy. I think there's big overlap in terms of, I think content strategy employs an information architecture for the structural engineering and definitional, framework-ey side of what content strategy does. Because content strategy also has a lot of operational aspects to it. And it's got a lot of editorial aspects to it, that are not IA-ish, especially, right?
Dan Klyn: Ooh
Andrew Hinton: At the same time... We're talking centered sets, right?
Dan Klyn: Yes
Andrew Hinton: As opposed to tight boundaries, you know, and mutually exclusive definitions we're talking about things, "where's the bullseye in this?" And everything gets fuzzy as you get out from the center, right? So to my mind, at least, content strategy employs information architecture's practices. And of course, information architecture has similar overlaps with library science and other things, right? So it's not like anything I'm saying is like “no, no, this is territory.” That's always a bad way to look at it, I think. It's really more of a matter of when we say something. What is it we're really talking about. And in practice, because this is where I go when I'm getting into like, okay, what is this word? Well, what it is is the way people use it, because, what else is it? Right? We made it up and it's however people are using it and if more people are using it this way than this other way than that's mostly what the word is. So so anyway, so yeah to me those two pieces have a lot to do with each other. But ultimately what you're talking about is. Lots of dimensions of a system or systems interconnected and they often make sense together, so you have to pay attention to…
But yeah, the thing you mentioned - that idea of literalism or, “Well, if there's something important structurally then it has to be a tab” or it has to be explicit on the screen. You know, that's an immature way of thinking about it. Right? I mean really need to think about what's the underlying model and then but what parts of it are going to service front stage or the perceived environment I should say, right, because it could be for somebody who's backstage too. What gonna service that perceived environment and make it clear and useful, but then what other structural things need to be happening behind the scenes where an end-user isn’t necessarily seeing them but it's informing and clarifying what they're doing. Right?
And what was weird is I was working with a home improvement company for a couple years. You know, it was fascinating that they’d gotten feedback from like ForSee or something saying their search needs to be better designed and it was something about auto... you know autosuggest and all that, was in the recommendations and what the leadership of, with the people managing the web team at this company decided was, okay, well, we gotta go hire an agency to come in and design us a really beautiful like, you know automatic drop-down autosuggest-y thing.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Andrew Hinton: And I kept asking where's that information going to come from and nobody can seem to answer the question because the - it was like they were just thinking about the physicality of it. Right, and it's like yeah, but in order for that to be good. You need to do a lot of stuff with language underneath the hood that you're not doing yet, that you need to do for all of your search and all of your browsing. Right? So there was a core problem with search not being modernized enough, but the fixation was on this, you know, the things on the screen.
Dan Klyn: Well, it strikes me that that's maybe one of the better questions in a search for better questions about information architecture. The less helpful question is what's in the navbar? What's in the autocomplete to make it push the conversion metrics that are being watched? The thing you said about the breast cancer org that you worked with, that there's a structure that is important that helps people understand, that isn't "the navigation". Is that the navigation? The dialing-in of that content to be clinical, or friendly, or whatever those other designations were: is that navigation?
Andrew Hinton: I'm on this kick lately talking about how navigation is what people do --it's what creatures do-- it is not “things on screens.” Right, so, things on screens are parts of someone's environment and people use their environment to figure out where they're going and what they need to be doing and there's a perception-action loop that's happening where you really can't separate perception and action, you can't perceive without acting, you can’t act without perceiving. And this is all goes back to this ecological psychology stuff that I said earlier, rewired my brain a few years ago. So if I'm thinking of a creature in an environment and that creature is trying to find its way through that environment to whatever resources it needs because there's some situation, whether it's just I'm bored and I want to go find a game to play, it doesn’t really matter, but there's some situation that’s giving me some sort of need to take some kind of action and I'm trying to find resources to take care of this need, which by the way, something I emphasize all the time is, that need is not necessarily clear to that person; that need is not necessarily an articulated goal, right? So this idea that everyone thinks they have a goal, I think can give us the wrong idea. Because the goal isn't always articulated or clear. In fact, the goal is often forming as they go, right. They're feeling their way across the stream by the stones, or whatever, right?
Dan Klyn: Yeah, and this is where I can bring in…
Andrew Hinton: So that’s what navigation is, is you're finding your way through an environment for some purpose and sometimes that purpose becomes more clear because you're heuristically figuring things out as you’re navigating, right? And so that's why I think of like a website or any other information environment, it's a learning environment first because you're trying to learn as you go.
And if you aim that way, and I don’t mean learning like, okay, I'm going to sit in a classroom what I mean is you're learning in terms of, you're an infant trying to figure out what your hands can do, you know or what that cabinet door, how that works, you know if you're crawling on the floor. So yeah, so if you think of it that way then it takes, it re-centers us on the navigator, and it makes us have to think of the whole environment as material for them figuring things out, not just whatever we've stuck on a screen or within a screen of a screen, you know, and it also then gets us away from this idea that like, okay nobody can like, you know… Two things, they are intension: one, nobody can do anything unless we cram it all in the home page, which isn't, you know?
Dan Klyn: Yup
Andrew Hinton: But too, the idea that oh, well people navigate using only these slender bits of a screen and so we can, marketing or merchandising can put giant banner ads for, or heroes or whatever for whatever it is they want to push at people. When in fact if you walk into, like so if you know, let's say, like, you know Office Depot or somebody's doing on their website you walk into Office Depot, that's like somebody putting a giant, you know, poster in front of your face as soon as you walk in the door, like “Hey buy, you know, printers are on sale! printers are on sale!” and I'm trying to look around the edges to figure out where the hell to go.
So yeah, so it's an environment when you think of it that way.
And just more and more I've just thought of everything we're doing is environmental design and it's complex and there's lots of different facets to it. And that's really what all of our different disciplines and practice community of practice are about.
Dan Klyn: Well, I want to maybe attach that to the thing about my question about jobs to be done and the task part of situation/need /task. It seems like and I'm just playing, you know playing dumb here, which I'm really good at by the way, but that navigating wouldn't be a task or a job for that matter.
Andrew Hinton: Yeah jobs to be done, okay, so so navigating… and this is also by the way where words start to fail us, right? Because they, I mean not fail us—they were very well—but they fail us in the sense of the simplified clarifications we want sometimes. So of course, I'm not going around slapping people's wrists when they say, “Oh, I'm going to do something to the navigation on the website,” right? It's not like I’ve become that person especially...
Dan Klyn: ..hands on hips: "Oh, no your not. You so aren’t doing that, actually Karen what you're really doing is..."
Andrew Hinton: [laughs] Oh God. No, so what but, what I'm just trying to say: "hey, let's look at it from this other angle," right? So whether you use the word navigation or not, so much of the deal is "well, maybe you need to stop using it a certain way in order to make yourself remember the other thing."
But anyway, to your question, so what a task is and what the situation is and what a need is ..that's very fuzzy stuff, and that's one reason why I've never turned it into some kind of a reusable method is because, depending on your layers or your level of zoom, depending on what you're focused on that can get very slippery.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Andrew Hinton: So it's really to me, it's like a lot, honestly like a lot of the best methods in design work, it's really a... to me, it's a way to make me wrestle with the layers of what's happening. Not necessarily codify them into something that’s logically pure and true. So it gives me clarity, it gives me understanding, but not necessarily some kind of architectural order where I've got, now, a reference model.
So we have to kind of come back and go what kind of things can we create in the environment that are stable and consistent enough to where people have reference points, where they're still oriented, and they still know where they're going and they can learn the environment,
because when they learned something they can reuse what they've learned, you know, and that's really at the heart of tons of like usability and information architecture and interaction design practice.
So the jobs to be done thing. I'll just I'll dispatch this pretty quickly. I'm not an expert on that because, once I found out about it and dug into it some, I realized I'm already basically doing that, and have been doing it, just under different means. And that doesn't mean that that is bad. I think whatever way you can get to it is great.
But whatever way you can get to the idea that, "okay, well, it's not necessarily about this thing. It's about maybe one or two or three layers of the world around that thing. And I need to understand those other layers of context in order to really know what this thing should be.”
Dan Klyn: Yeah
Andrew Hinton: That's the core thing right? That's the core idea, and that really should be at the core idea of any human-centered or enlightened design practice. Jobs to be done I think is a way to… It's weird. It's almost like it's doing something similar like what design thinking is doing, and some, there's some other things out there that are taking ideas that really I think arose in…
Dan Klyn: Yeah
Andrew Hinton: Like in design practice, or in various threads of design background and turning them into things that engineers or business people or whoever can rock. And yeah, so it's fine.
Dan Klyn: [laughs]
Andrew Hinton: I mean where I've got, where there have been issues is when somebody who does jobs to be done was like, “oh, well UX doesn't know any of this stuff blah blah blah.” Because of two problems. One: [well one problem really] that they're not familiar with the background of human-centered design, and when they see UX they assume it's UI because yeah. I still think that the people who think that far outnumber the people who don't. In our various businesses...
Dan Klyn: Well, there's that, for sure, but the other one that you intuited, and then you thought well, maybe there's just one. I think there's another group, which is the group who are "orthodox" in how they practice JTBD as a trademarked way of doing.
Andrew Hinton: Yeah.
Dan Klyn: And I've we've struggled a bit with how much or little to call it that [JTBD], or map it in, it has this helpful thing of it helps people move up the abstraction ladder. Just how you say it: saying "task" is like: click button.
Andrew Hinton: Right.
Dan Klyn: I feel like it [the label JTBD] gets people into a different headspace about what we're talking about. It makes it a little bit more abstract.
In our practice at TUG "job to be done" sometimes serves the purpose of "handle for someone to understand." It's almost like a cognitive affordance and I'm curious about what your sense is about how we overuse, perhaps, the word affordance.
Andrew Hinton: So in my last job actually, everybody's transforming, and design thinking is having this second wave, I feel like. I felt like there was a wave 10 or 15 years ago when Bruce Nussbaum and those folks were talking about it a lot. But then some of them ended up kind of dis-owning it [laughs] and but then like in the last five years [and this is just my perspective --maybe it's always been a big deal and I didn't know] but anyway, like all the consultancies, all the agencies, they've all got design thinking on their sheet of things they do, they all have their own flavor of it. So, inside the company, in my last job, you know, one of the things we're doing was figuring "okay, what is this to us?" --I don't think I'm giving you a secret here. I mean, everybody's doing this-- You've got 14 - 15 different flavors [of design thinking] depending on how many agencies are talking to about what their design thinking program is and different parts of the company hiring different ones. And so, we're like, "well look, we feel like there's power in this and their usefulness in this we should have our, but we need to have kind of one way that sort of our official way of talking about it. Right? Like: at least just get the language the same, you know? What are the steps, and what are the things you do, the principles underlying all of it are always kind of the same depending on how well people are doing it.
So long story shorter: we're putting together materials for all this, and trying to explain it. And I realize that the Wikipedia article on design thinking is actually excellent and I ended up recommending using that as, when somebody's like "well, what is design thinking?" I think this is a very useful thing, this Wikipedia entry, because instead of jumping right into "oh, it's these steps or principles" or whatever, it's like "no, here's the history of how design thinking as an idea came about." Basically it talks about how the sort of the academic background some of the business-ey background, that it was it came out of ideas… Some of it was coming out of research about what is it that's different about what the way traditionally designers solve problems versus the way other people do it, right, and then, and there's a whole tradition of thinking about this for a long time before even design thinking was coined. I thought that was useful because what it did was it gave a better origin story and then it said now then it got sort of taken up by D school programs, agencies and whatnot, and turned [design thinking] into this thing that they sell and teach and do. And I can be really skeptical and cynical about these things, but you know a lot of the outfits we talked to I thought had a very that they had a very responsible way of talking about it and doing it.
So I kind of feel like jobs to be done as a similar thing, right? It's got its own background. I don't know what the origin story of it is. I've heard some people say, it's been around for you know decades or whatever and okay cool. I guess to my mind, it’s, again, it's whatever, like so what you were saying, these are hard, complex abstract-y things to deal with and so we keep trying to -- you figure out the right language and shapes to put on a whiteboard or whatever the hell -- to try to try to get the get the point of view, the paradigm, clicked over into a different slot with people, so they go, “Oh, oh now I see there's this whole world of stuff underneath all this and we just need the right words for it.” And in the company I was working in there was a huge enterprise architecture outfit, you know, they really bought into that for a long time. And that's a lot of what in enterprise architecture is about, it's like let's just come-- we got a name what all the things are and define what they are, so we have handles that we can use to move. And that's really what language does for us in general.
Now, that is not affordance. Affordance, technically, is what physical bodies of creatures can-- it's--- I'm not going to go into the whole official thing, but basically it has to do with the physical bodies and physical parts in the environment, how they fit together. There's a system. Okay, so, you know, again, I have a hand, I can pick up this thing, well this was clearly it was made for a human hand to pick it up. We made it.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, that’s a good fit.
Andrew Hinton: Yeah, it's a good fit. So, the idea is that that fits for me. For another human who maybe can't use hands in the same way I can, right, rheumatoid arthritis or something else, like, well, it's affording-- it has affording characteristics for the species human, homo sapiens. But not necessarily for every instance of homo sapiens.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Andrew Hinton: So affordance is really about, it's about that, right? And even Donald Norman ends up straightening this out some in his newer edition of Design of Everyday Things, which, if you haven't read it, I recommend the newer edition because he ends up clarifying this better and then he talks more about signifiers and linguistic types of meaning is mostly what we're dealing with in design that, especially if we're doing digital design… if you're like a potter, you know, or you’re designing furniture, then, of course, you're thinking about actual affordance, but what we're having to do digitally is to tap in to learned things about affordances in our world, in our physical ecology, as a way to bridge people into this world of abstract stuff that can do anything, you know, so you click on… If I pick up this class right now and I pick it up again tomorrow, it's gonna do the same thing always. If I click on a button in an app or if I
Dan Klyn: [laughs] Good luck
Andrew Hinton: if I tell, you know, Alexa a command, tomorrow it might do something really different than it does today.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Andrew Hinton: You know, even though nothing physically changed. Yeah. So there's that.
Dan Klyn: Would it be? I've observed people struggling with affordance as a concept and it seems, based on how you just described it, would it be correct to say that in how you've described it affordance isn't something that you make or don't make it's more of, you… something you would turn up or turn down a number of factors relative to some actor in the environment?
Andrew Hinton: I mean. Here's the thing is that I don't talk about affordance much in digital work because now I've, you know, again, gotten rewired around it, so I don't think of it that way. So when I'm if I'm doing something and I'm in a digital information space. I'm not thinking about affordance: I'm thinking about information.
So the important thing about affordances, or one important thing about affordances, is that the affordance exists regardless of, so like,
Dan Klyn: Yeah
Andrew Hinton: You know, the like, our dogs, we have two Boston Terriers and they’re amazing, but like we could put a treat in a box, right? And that treat is made it's a size for their little mouths, right it affords picking up with a dog mouth and eating and swallowing. Right the object is such that, its characteristics are such that, it affords that …
Dan Klyn: Yep
Andrew Hinton: … by an animal. Put that in a box with a lid. It... Okay, so. The affordance didn't go away. That object still can afford that, it's just that there's another affordance in the way and that affordance—which by the way affordances are neutral; they are neither good nor bad. Well, it depends if you're the spider of the fly, right?
Dan Klyn: [laughs]
Andrew Hinton: But like, but the affordance is, affordances can afford, like, stopping you from doing something that you want to do. It’s still an affordance. So kind of goes against the grain of how we might want to think about it.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Andrew Hinton: So there’s no such thing as bad affordance. You know what I mean. Anyway, okay, so but the thing is, right. What's the information? So can the dog pick up on information about that object? Is there a scent that can pick up on because that's another informa… kind of information in the environment. If they if they can smell that and they've worked with something boxy before they might, and they're smart, they might know to nose the lid off of that thing and kind of get at that treat, right? And now they've changed their environment such a way where that affordance is no longer gone and now there’s a new affordance of “open box” that they can stick their heads in. So I say that because what matters is how is the creature interacting with the information in the environment? Right? Because sometimes the information about the affordances is clear and sometimes it isn’t.
In a mobile app, for example, there are no affordances other than here's my phone right? I can, I mean, you know, that's it. That's the affordance. Like, I can tap on the screen. It reflects some light, you know, but that's this thing affords. It’s a brick.
Dan Klyn: Some phones you can push harder or softer and it
Andrew Hinton: Oh yeah, mine does that fancy stuff too. So but the affordance is only the sensation I have of it, right? moving or whatever. But what's happening is all simulated. So it's simulating that objects are going to do things in response to my physical interactive interaction. And so that that's why we have to really think about what are the rules and structures of that environment we're creating, and how are we making it clear that -- so back at you know, remember you were really into Windows Phone Metro. Right?
Dan Klyn: Yeah
Andrew Hinton: But one of the learning curves I felt like about that OS, and there's a lot of brilliant things about it, but one of the learning curves is going from a world where all the objects you interact with at least in the OS are these little objects sitting on a desk which we don't call the iOS a desktop, but that's it's still borrowing, right? We go from that to something that's less object-y, and it's more like they're just these panels of color and whatnot. Right? And so now it's more abstract. So what is that? What is that simulating? This is where skeuomorphism becomes a thing where… What is it simulating that is reminding me of something in an environment that I've been in before, that gives me some idea that I can do something with it, and sometimes you don't know unless you're…You just start tapping stuff, right? And this is why I think people say “oh, my toddlers are brilliant with stuff. They're just they're just natural. It's like no, they're not natural. They just don't care so much. Like they have time to sit and poke at things. This is what toddlers are good at. Like we said earlier, toddlers are learning how to use their whole environment and they're very good at that, that's just a new part of their environment. So they're going to make mistakes. They're going to figure stuff out. It takes us longer, I think because, one, we've learned more stuff that gets in our way to a new interaction paradigm. And two, we want to get something done, and so we're very frustrated with like, “okay, this is doesn’t make sense to me.” Because I'm trying to do a thing, right? Whereas if I'm a toddler, I'm like, the thing I'm trying to do is to see what happens when I poke this, right? And this is why I can't ever learn Siri well. Like on my watch and stuff is because I never sit down to just play with it, to figure out how to use it best. I'm always like in a car or something trying to “okay, maybe I can make it work this time,” and text my wife, and it's like, no it messes up, and I just get frustrated because I'm not sitting and just poking at it as a part of my environment to learn how it works.
I don't know how I get on to the various tributaries here. So I'm relying you to [laughs] remind me where we are.
Dan Klyn: No, it's good. I’m wondering about the example of your Apple watch there, and you saying that you don't personally use the conceptualization of affordance or the concept of affordance so much when thinking about digital. Is it a different case when you're talking about your watch because it's on you? Is it more thing…
Andrew Hinton: No. No, I think. So here's the thing is, I think it's important. The reason why I do-- I don't go around like, again, like slapping people’s wrists obviously… a lot. [laughs] I do it gently.
Dan Klyn: [Laughs]
Andrew Hinton: But the only reason I do is because I do think it's actually, once this became more clear to me, I was like, oh my God to the problem is we… a lot of the stuff we make, we forget... It's kind of like when you take an art class or early on and they say okay try to draw this picture upside down.
Dan Klyn: Hmm,
Andrew Hinton: You know, it's like you have to break your... Your reifying way you're used to thinking about what you're perceiving in order to really unpack it and see it for what it actually is.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Andrew Hinton: I feel like as designers and architects we have to do we have to be really good at that. We have to get ourselves out of everyday user head, every day just person-environment head and break down, like, what is the grammar of what's going on? You know somebody can read an article and not have to think about the grammatical structure. But that means they're having, that it's well written, but the person writing it really had to think about it a lot.
So in the same way, I think that, so something like my Apple watch, right, there's a grammar. There's points of joinery between what is physical and what isn’t? And understanding those things is sort of a key to unlocking a lot of things that we worry about as designers, which is “Is this understandable? is it usable? And so I think it's useful for that right? It's useful for breaking down, “what's the distinction between the kinds of information that are in play here?” Because they need to be used differently and thought about differently. But then you still have them all converging as a system. The other thing, though, about affordances and this is more been a more recent sort of thing that I've become, I say more clearly I think that I did in the book, which is: humans --all creatures-- right? We're affordance hungry, right? So we [I do say this but] you know,
Dan Klyn: [laughs]
Andrew Hinton: Every creature wants everything in the world --their world-- to be as straightforward as this, you know, they want everything to be as straight… I usually talk about hammers, right? That our bodies and brains, because they're not separate, it's all - the brain is part of the body. Newsflash. So when I say bodies, I mean the brain too. Our bodies want the world to be as straightforward as picking up a hammer and bashing something with it.
Dan Klyn: Yeah
Andrew Hinton: Hopefully for constructive purposes. So the thing is most of the stuff we make is much further down the continuum, away from that straightforwardness, right there's much more ambiguity. And the reason why is because we deal with things that are even more complex in terms of the connection between action and reaction or cause an effect, right? Pick up the hammer. ‘Cause-effect is: Hammer is now in my hand. if I go to another example I use a lot is: a crosswalk right? So if I'm going to push that big silver button or whatever button it is and a crosswalk on a street in an urban street to get the walk sign to come up right? Well, the truth is sometimes it affects that, sometimes it doesn't. It just depends on how it's been wired. There's a there's sort of an urban myth about it. But it's…
Dan Klyn: That they're all fake?
Andrew Hinton: Yeah, but they're not, like, but some of them have been manipulated to a point where you can't really even tell if that affected anything because they've just made it so that it comes on automatically anyway, right? Sometimes it doesn't. The reason I point that out is well now there's a hidden mechanism between cause and effect.
Dan Klyn: Right
Andrew Hinton: Now there is some hidden mechanism that is not mechanical even right? It's not even something where like, you know, if I'm on a mechanical contraption, there's only so much you can scale that. So if I hit this thing this other thing happens if I pull this lever the drawbridge goes up. But if I what if I pull the lever and the drawbridge changes into a yacht, I don't know, you know, we can do that with digital, right?
Dan Klyn: Yeah
Andrew Hinton: So affordance is important to understand partly because we need to understand that the closer we get to something having that affordance-body relationship of “It just fits,” the better off we are.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Andrew Hinton: Most of what we make can never be that clear, but if we can make it aspire to that clarity, you know what I mean? Well, the thing is, it kind of can be but then you're severely limiting the power of your medium, right? So if only have one button and it only ever does one thing.
Dan Klyn: Right. So we're not saying the ultimate in simplistic-ness here, we're saying…Well one of the ways that Resmini and I said it, that some people think we should not say, is that
architecture is good when it makes sure that there's more of the worldness of the world in the thingness of our things.
And I want to connect that to what you were saying about that continuum of affordance and the more into virtual affordance land we get, the further away from something that we could use our embodied cognition to understand viscerally.
Andrew Hinton: Yeah
Dan Klyn: The more potential for trouble we are teeing ourselves up for.
Andrew Hinton: So let me make sure I'm following you. So you're saying, are you talking about the double-edged sword of like the more straightforward something is the more the more clear it can be, but also the more thought-less-ly it might be done?
Dan Klyn: Sure. Yeah. I’m not sure what I'm saying, but that sounds good.
Andrew Hinton: Okay. Well, two things so the thingness of things … I mean that… my understanding of that sort of phenomenological framing [I think that’s where it's coming from?]
Dan Klyn: Yes, it is.
Andrew Hinton: And by the way, so I was a phenomenology fan as a philosophy major, but James J. Gibson and ecological psychology and embodied cognition stuff like that end up replacing it for me in a lot of ways, that you heard me say this before, just because it pragmatically it's like, “oh now we're talking about like actual stuff in a way where I'm not having to make up 40 syllable German words for it.” You know what I mean? Like, it's just it is more straightforward to me. I think both are awesome, but the kind of ecological psyche or the embodied way of thinking of that is something that, oddly enough Donald Norman who was not an embodied cognition person, but what's funny is that his, when he rewrote Design of Everyday Things, he says in the beginning “I don't really agree with Gibson's you know ecological psychology thing” Norman still thinks of himself as a cognitive traditional cognitive scientist that thinks of the brain as sort of a processor, and the body is sort of the medium it uses. That's an oversimplification but the thing is, is that in his book he ends up basically, all the advice he gives, ends up being very Gibsonian. And one of the things that I love is his idea of: knowledge in the world versus knowledge in the head.
So the idea that my environment should already have the information in it that I need to figure out what I'm doing…
Dan Klyn: Yeah
Andrew Hinton: without me having to have a lot of things I'm memorizing and remembering and trying to track and, right? Like don't make my brain do things that the world can help me do.
Dan Klyn: Yeah!
Andrew Hinton: and right? And so that's what we're trying to do, right? The thing is though that we live in this linguistic sort of little loop, where we forget again what it's like to look at a chair and not think of it … again I'm thinking of like the drawing thing again, right like you look at a chair and you think “Oh, that's a chair. So I'm going to draw a thing that conceptually is chair, but actually doesn't end up looking like the chair, because the chair is actually in a weird sort of angle that isn't the way I think or conceptualize of chair. But if I flip a picture of a chair upside down and just try to draw the shapes now, right? I can I can unpack that. I think again, we have to unpack that grammar of our environment in a way where we can really see more clearly. What information is in the environment that is giving you the knowledge already, so you're not having to hold it in your head. You're not having to remember a bunch of stuff. You're not having to you know, and that's a complicated thing to do.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. Yeah, when you were talking earlier about the need for I think maybe you were talking about creative people, but I might broaden it for us to break out of typical conceptualizations of sort of workaday life in order to see something maybe that we've always seen but that we've never really seen. I'm curious about you as a, as an “old”, and do you feel like -- I have some questions on my whiteboard here-- Are you getting better at information architecture? And I'm thinking about that in the… being able to break out of how everything seems to want to be understood in order to understand better.
Andrew Hinton: Yeah
Dan Klyn: And something that Cennydd Bowles observed on Twitter this week that Tim Kanes answered as an old, like “no”, like, I think Cennydd said something about “Are there any practitioners who are you know sharp who are older than 45?” It's just like [gasp]. Oh God, I hope so. But I can also see the point of why the ageism in tech is a thing. Is there something about a more pliant younger person's ability to think different, conceptualize more novelty? So I tie that question to the question of are you getting better as an information architect over time?
Andrew Hinton: I don't know. I… ‘cause better as a complicated word. I'm not gonna come to age thing yet. That's all… God. But I do think… There's a lot of different dimensions involved here in terms of like what is it… in terms of what I'm doing, right? So getting better as an information architect? Okay, well information architect meaning what in terms of what I do every day. So in my job I've had for last few years, I think I did a lot of information architecture even though I did nothing in terms of a other than whining and hollering about it a lot. I didn't do much in terms of the website, right or any particular application. I was in a practice lead or principal style role, where a lot of what I was doing was figuring out, how are we going to be doing what we do as a company or as a department next year? You know, how are we moving our practices forward? How, what Frameworks do we need to scale all of the stuff, to make sense of all of it? And so a lot of what I was doing was just trying to make sense of all that, and in doing that I inevitably did what I think of as information architecture part of what information architecture is where you just explaining complex things as clearly as possible without oversimplifying. But another…and I think I did a pretty good job, but, and I think I do a pretty good job, but then other days I think oh man I suck at this, right? Because I'll think it was understandable and then people walk away and seeming to understand it, then I have to take another run at it. The other… I did do some like you know, “okay, let's structure a site this way” information architecture. But it was sort of more of a quick one-off, like, “here's some scribbles on a whiteboard y'all go work with that and come back to me kind of stuff. But, the other thing I was trying to do in my job, the last job I just finished, was create durable, resilient frameworks that worked as underlying models that can keep being built on and worked. Think of it as design system, but for IA, right? So, which I think every design system should have anyway. And in a my new job I'm going to make sure of that. But basically like not just well, what is the interface look like, and what does it do when you click on it, and what codes snippets are you using and that kind of stuff which is already complicated. But like the example I used a lot in the insurance company I was working in was, “what is a claim to the people who work with claim as a thing,” right? What is it? Does it have the rental car that you got your while your car is being repaired. Is that part of your claim? Now, behind the scenes, right, backstage, well, not even backstage but like, you know in the bowels of the enterprise architecture, it might not be right? It might literally be the car rental is not even in the same domain structure of application or technology or data model, right? It's a whole separate thing and there's like APIs or something. Maybe there's a third-party service, right? So you talked to like the architects the iron and the business processes and stuff like that. And you're like, “is it a part of the claim?” They're like, “well, no, it isn't part of the claimants in this other part of the model.” Okay, that's fine. That's necessarily bad. That's what you have to do under the hood to make things work just like in a car. I can just use a gas pedal and you know, and I don’t have to think, I don't have to know shit about carburetors or whatever.
Dan Klyn: They don’t have those anymore, but keep going.
Andrew Hinton: Yeah. Yeah. It's just a fun word to say. So anyway, so making that make sense, I mean across all these different businesses, business lines and things from banking services all the way to life insurance, is like, well, we need a model that says this is what a claim is. And it's a nested model of here's claim the concept of claim and it's like mental model work, right and what do people expect there to be there? So if they come in and they log in or if they're talking to an agent on the phone and they're looking at their claim, like, we're all in the same landscape. Regardless of whether the pixels are the same color or the layout is exactly the same. That's not the thing. It's more how is stuff structured and what does it mean to each other? Right and then we're in the same dimension we're talking about the same things together. And, so that kind of information [architecture]… so I think I was getting good at that. But the problem is you reach a point where you can't just sit by yourself and come up with these things.
Dan Klyn: Right.
Andrew Hinton: You hit a certain scale where you're like, I actually need more people to get it and to be marshaled toward working on, in order for it to be a thing. And that was where I was having trouble in that role, because the organization wasn't really there yet, you know.
Dan Klyn: Well, you said, one little thing that you said when you're explaining that for me Andrew was “you need a model dot dot dot,” but before you came they did stuff.
And there wasn't a model and for us at the understanding group we get to work with lots of amazing organizations of every type including some really sophisticated, you know, household name kinds of places and from those down to the most modest, nobody has these models.
Andrew Hinton: No, they don't. Well some do.
Dan Klyn: What the…how come they don't, and why do we say, “you need this”?
Andrew Hinton: So here's the thing is..
Dan Klyn: But where is it?
Andrew Hinton: Yeah. So here's the thing right, is that they actually do have them, they just don't know it, and that means they're doing it badly. So they end up with lots of things that are fragmented. So they actually do have a model. What their model.. one out of… I mean, I'd say 8 out of every 10 examples you could grab out of the ether.
Dan Klyn: Yeah
Andrew Hinton: Their model is their UI.
Dan Klyn: [laughs]
Andrew Hinton: Or, maybe a workflow diagram.
Dan Klyn: Yeah
Andrew Hinton: And the workflow diagram though is almost literally a mirror image of a business process model. Right?
Dan Klyn: Right
Andrew Hinton: If they bother to draw one of those, which a lot of them haven’t. A quick side trip here fascinating in service design, I think, is that you see a lot of service blueprinting examples that you're like, that looks more that looks like a hybrid process model plus some experience-y things in it. And the reason why I think a lot of those have been very successful is because a lot of these service design things happen in companies where they haven't bothered modeling their processes yet or they haven't kept up a model. So this is the first time somebody's modeled the way things actually work, right? Especially modeling them in terms of how people are interacting with them, as well as how the operations work and all that. Anyway, so that was a side comment. But not all companies have much like disciplined architecture going on to begin with. So at my previous employer, they have lots of models. They got models up to here. Like they've model kinds of stuff. The thing is it's all modeled for the enterprise’s use, right? So it's more arcane. It's more fragmented. It's not converged in a way that people are expected to understand it. And so it…
Dan Klyn: Well, in my, in my asshole…
Andrew Hinton: At a certain scale, it starts to break down. Right? So the, sorry this last point, to answer your question, is that, so what you end up with is, “oh, well, there's so many things going on. We got to keep it all consistent guys. Let's Okay every week we're going to take all the interfaces, and everyone is going to stick-em on a big wall and we're all going to look at them together, and somehow going to use our pattern recognition,” you know, knowledge in the world on your head, right? “Let’s put all that knowledge in the world in front of us and we're going to pick up all the patterns and the inconsistency”
Dan Klyn: Good luck.
Andrew Hinton: It kinda of works, but even at brute force, with just a little bit of stuff, it starts to break down. You just can't keep up with it all, right? So, but within each project, it's fine, right? You don't need a model just to make this one thing.
Dan Klyn: Hmmmm
Andrew Hinton: I mean, you need it to make it better. You always need it to make it better, I think. But you can do a pretty successful checkout process or something like that without having a… defining the reusable model for what the cart is, but if you really want to make the shopping cart make sense and all the other instances of where you encounter a shopping cart functionality.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Andrew Hinton: You do need that model because people are expecting things to behave in a certain way, you know, and so to get that coherence you need to define what that is. So you're right, almost nobody is doing it. So, but what they do then is, it's sort of like a broken clock is right twice a day and intermittently broken clock is right, you know, eight or ten times a day, you know. [laughs]
Dan Klyn: [laughs]
Andrew Hinton: But there's this invisible problem that's being missed. You know, it's like, it could be a hell of a lot better, and this all can make a lot more sense. But what do we do? Well, we create Design Systems and the Design Systems the most of them that I see are mainly style guides, that are like, “if you're going to do a drop down it has to be like this.” But there’s no definition of okay, but what's the underlying definition of this environment that I'm interacting with and how is that make this drop-down different from this other instance of a drop-down? And that's the context of how you're using it, right, which you’re just not accounting for.
Dan Klyn: Well in my asshole parsimony about maps and models, my observation is that lots of people have a map that describes the details of an implementation, but nobody's got a model, and one of my pet theories about that is-- it's based on Dave Grey's definition of the difference between maps and models. A model is for playing with, and at enterprise scale, making room for people to play doesn't feel like it is directly connected to your holder value.
Andrew Hinton: Yeah
Dan Klyn: And that's… that's underneath the missing models. I mean we do better if we had maps. I mean, I would love everybody to have a really good map. That's not just a diagram of an implementation, but a map like, like I think you were describing of, these this is what things mean and this is how things relate, as a snapshot. I want one of those. But I want even more. I want something to play with that you generate that map off of, so that, at intervals have something you think you can work with.
Andrew Hinton: Yeah, so. I haven’t really thought of it exactly that way before but absolutely, I think that gets into a distinction that I'm I feel like I'm constantly bringing up which is the difference between artifacts that were using to figure shit out versus artifacts we are using to communicate the shit that we figured out, or to remind us of what we figured out. Right?
Dan Klyn: Yeah
Andrew Hinton: And the thing is is that our world, it… the pressures over-index us toward the artifacts or things that are now a part of the world that are definitional and, you know, some sort of deliverable or whatever. But the thing is that then we end up trying to eat the picture of the pizza, you know, it's like “it's not the pizza.” So I think, so this gets also to a thing that's a more recent thought of mine that I'm bringing with me into this new role. [Inaudible 1:04:55] I think everything we're doing, I think of it as learning. And I'm borrowing this from other smarter people. I don't know if you saw that, (pnts.us) Andrea Mignolo that wonderful medium article that she wrote, recently, you should check it out. I've been pinging or back-channeling her like…
Dan Klyn: Yeah, I'm not sure that I have.
Andrew Hinton: Do a proposal about this. Yeah, well, look it up.
Dan Klyn: I do like the conversation about pants, if we're talking about women's clothing and the…
Andrew Hinton: No, it's a pnts, you know her, her Twitter handle.
Dan Klyn: Okay. Different thing.
Andrew Hinton: Yeah. Yeah. But anyway also Jeff Sussna has this wonderful book on DevOps, but it is really bringing in cybernetics. It's such a crazy.
Dan Klyn: He's amazing
Andrew Hinton: Mad, mad scientist book and I still haven't finished it because I keep like thinking of things and reading other things and need to come back to it. But like this, there's some emerging thinking and around this, so I'm not making all this up the whole cloth, but the angle I'm bringing to it, again, comes from being re… remixed in terms of the way I think of the world from the work I did in the book where JJ Gibson talks about dynamical systems and the idea that like, so, for example, so people think of vision and they tend to think of the eyeball. Okay. Well, that's your vision system. Well, it isn’t really. There's more things. There's other muscles and there's nerves and there's the part of your brain -- parts of your brain -- that deal with vision, which we keep you know, thinking we figure that out and it turns out it's all spread around. Anyway.
Dan Klyn: [laughs]
Andrew Hinton: But then it turns out well no, but vision also is affected by all these other things in your body, right and even just the way your body's movement is -- your vision depends on your body being able to move a certain amount in order to really see the difference between things. That's why the dress, the black and gold blue and whatever dress, the photo of it was tricking some of our, but if we had seen that person in person.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, if we could do that…
Andrew Hinton: and moved in the light a little bit we were, right, it wouldn't have been so much an issue. So he talks about this a lot. He talks about how in Psychology like bringing people into a lab to look at pictures of fruit. It's just… all your learning is what people in labs do when you show them pictures of fruit.
Dan Klyn: [laughs]
Andrew Hinton: Similarly, when we bring somebody into a usability lab and we give them a task to do on a website, all we're learning is what they do when you bring them into your lab together with you, right?
Dan Klyn: Yes.
Andrew Hinton: So now that doesn't mean that’s useless. But it isn't the same as the environment that they're actually doing things in. And so you have to do interpretation around that. Anyway, so this dynamical system. Here's the thing. It doesn't stop at the skin. So. I don't have Vision unless I have things to look at, unless the world is structured and has certain qualities to it that afford the ability for light to interact with it in such a way that my Corpus can have this feedback loop with my environment. Vision doesn't exist without that environment.
So the vision system is creature and environment together, right? You really can't have a vision system without thinking about all it. This doesn't mean you can't zero in on parts and think about the roles they play, but you have to-- you can't understand any one part without understanding the whole system. This is a Copernican revolution in the way that you think about stuff.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Andrew Hinton: You go to the doctor today and you find out all of them were trained in the opposite right? They don't think of it. They're like, no no focus on the one little group of molecules that I have my specialty in and nothing else is a part of this.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, and the gallbladder guy, it’s all gallbladder as far as I’m concerned.
Andrew Hinton: Yeah, and but it turns out --there's enough people in my life, a lot of us do-- who have things like autoimmune diseases and stuff where it's like, well you can't really treat it unless you think about the whole person and the environment they're living in, all the lifestyle stuff. Right? It's a part of an environment. It's just like you can't have aquarium fish healthy unless you've created this whole microbiome in their tank and the point is well then where does the fish end and the biome begin? Because there's no fish without it and vice versa. Right? So this all sounds very philosophical and whoo! you know, so cool, but it's actually very practical thing to understand. Because, now let’s bring this back to –and I’ve already lost track of this-- the specific example were talking about—but, we’re talking about a company, or a product, or one screen of a website, right? That thing only.. is it only.. you don't really understand it unless you're thinking about all the things that it's there for, that it’s a playing a part in. And that's the thing you need to understand in order to make that be good. Right? Otherwise.. so it fits. It’s a good fit right? It's about, how does this thing fit into an environment?
So one thing I like about some of the strains of service design is they talk about things like design interventions. This idea that we're intervening --that came from elsewhere to I know-- but this idea that any service , we're intervening with some sort of design, that is changing something in the environment, and we’re going to see, does that work or not? So coming back to this learning idea. Well, what you're really doing in that instance is that you're constantly changing and calibrating and watching what's happening. Just like a creature trying to make breakfast, you know, or you’re a person trying to make breakfast, right? I'm constantly like, without even thinking about it, adjusting and calibrating my actions to the environment around me and learning and figuring out and, “oh, the heat’s too high for the eggs. I'm going to turn that down.” You know what I mean, like you're always adjusting. No one thing I do --in that entire thing that I need to do to feed myself-- is permanent. Right. It isn't. Why is it that all this stuff that we make, we think, “well the more permanent we can make it, the more we win.”
Dan Klyn: [sound of recognition/agreement]
Andrew Hinton: So this one component in my design system, if we can design it so we never have to touch it again for at least six months, we won, right?
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Andrew Hinton: What that does is it..it enforces this idea of, like, “okay the more permanent and more carved in stone things are the better. If we flip the script on that and we said, “no, wait a minute. Let's just let go of permanence. Let's just say all of this is ‘making breakfast.’ All of this is ‘wandering in the woods.’ All of this is ‘let's make it so it's easy as hell to change it.’ Right? So that we can learn something else from it and they keep making it better.
Well, that's what all the lean and agile people that seem to be bought in on that wanna tell us, but there's something about, I think in our DNA of Western something or other, that's in tension with it. But if you think of everything we create something that we're putting in the environment and then going, “okay, was that good? Okay. Well, how about the oh, I'm gonna adjust this. I'm going to add this other thing.” Then that if you think of it as learning, and if you think of all design as essentially learning to make the environment work better, that's a really powerful frame for me. And that's kind of my new thing. Like I'm wanting to look at everything that way and see. Okay. Where does it break if I think of it this way? How is it bad ever? Because then you're starting with a sense of: “I take nothing for granted as being permanent.” And then you start to build a little bit of permanence in as you go only when you have to.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Andrew Hinton: But that means you're going to arrange your whole design operation differently. Your metrics are going to be different. You know what I mean? Like it that changes everything.
Dan Klyn: Well it gets back to my question about are you getting better at being an information architect? And my sense is that I'm learning more about how to support emergence in an environment. And that as I focus more on that that I'm getting less skilled at.. less like.. I used to be able to just shake interface fix for something out of my sleeve.
Andrew Hinton: Hmmhmm.
Dan Klyn: A piece of invariance in the face of a problem. I feel like I was really good at that. And my interests --it's sounds like as with yours-- are more ecological now, and I want to enable things that emerge more than fix something in place and have it be invariant. And so when I think about how good am I at some --at this-- whatever this field is,
Andrew Hinton: yeah.
Dan Klyn: There's a big fat, “It depends” of “Well I used to be really badass at shaking an interface thing out of my sleeve at a problem and now, uh shit uh, I’m like “Where is it?” Like I don't even use interfaces enough now to even know.
Andrew Hinton: Yeah. Yeah yeah, so so that's, and that's part of the wicked problem of all this though, too, right? Is that we still need --and you mentioned that word invariant but that comes from the Gibson...
Dan Klyn: Yep
Andrew Hinton: That stuff right? But it's this idea that, some things, from the point of view of a particular creature, over its lifetime, or enough lifetimes of that particular kind of creature, there are certain core things about their environment that don't change.. that are unchanging enough that they are invariant to them. Right? So this isn't.. This doesn't mean.. this isn't about, like, permanence in a scientific sense of like, you know physics would look at it. It's.. it's more like how it's perceived, Right? So..
Dan Klyn: Well, I'm thinking of Heidegger and to be on earth means to be under sky that that
Andrew Hinton: Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So that could go away right? The whole planet could blow up, but at least for the way we evolved, right, there are certain core --there are certain primitives-- about our environment that we, that we take for granted. Any environment we make, whether it's a, you know, digital or service environment with conversations with, you know, service personnel or whatever, their need to be invariant qualities to it or else it can't be learned. It can't be trusted. It can't be, you know.. It's like a metaphor I've used before, of [simile, I guess technically] if you're walking on sidewalk in the winter and all of a sudden like you slip on some invisible, or like what they call black ice. Well, that's an affordance problem. Right? The problem was the sidewalk affords walking with friction. Up until the point where, I don't necessarily see that the affordance changed on me, but it did.
Dan Klyn: Yeah
Andrew Hinton: So again, the information didn't change enough for me to register the clue that “oh, this is slippery” or maybe I just wasn't paying attention which in my case is more often the case. And I slid...
Dan Klyn: You’re not supposed to have snow there anyway,
Andrew Hinton: Well here's the thing is, now I don't trust any step I take. Right? Now I slow down and it changes the way I interact with my environment. So thinking about that is important in terms of, “okay, well, you know, on this part of this bank's website if I do this it does X, but if I do the same thing over here, it does something different. And that kind of stuff, we need invariance, right? We need.. we need things that are consistent and coherent enough to where people can learn them and they've got some kind of like sense to them. But there's ways to do that in a resilient way where --and that's why the architectural idea of shearing layers that Stewart Brand borrowed from his pace layers, I think is so powerful, is this idea that? “Okay, well, let's go down the levels of this and figure out what are the things that are sort of principle level things that shouldn't change and how do we… how do we bake them into this, whatever framework or system were making. But then if you can ground things, again, grounding, right? Gound / Sky. If you can ground things that way it gives you more flexibility. Right? Rather than relying on surface consistency to give you that coherence. And a lot of that happens with the way you use language. A lot of it though was about the way you create interfaces and things to be.. to be.. where they lend themselves to: “if I've learned how to do something once I should be able to do it that way again.”
Dan Klyn: Yep. Well, why don't we.. I don't know if you need to let the dogs out or take a break.
Andrew Hinton: I'm all right, actually, yeah.
Dan Klyn: Well, I've just invited we've still got about 18. We had 25 people on here earlier. We're down to 18…I chased ‘em off.
I think some of them, no, I think I've been asking-- I've been hogging you --and so now I would love to open it up to anyone. I don't yet see any questions on the hashtag on Twitter, which is #TugSunday. And there's a little chat thing here that you could ask questions through also. So any anything you would like to ask Andrew Hinton, this is a golden opportunity, 18 humans. Actually one of my computer's…another part of the office is on too, so 17 people.
Andrew Hinton: [laughs]
Dan Klyn: Oh and then Andrew you’re one and then I'm one.
Andrew Hinton: I’m one, Yeah, context, yeah, it gets crazy.
Dan Klyn: 15 people. Yeah.
Andrew Hinton: Yeah. So what's up? Anybody? Anybody has any questions, I'm all ears, or eyes
Dan Klyn: Yep, and I can turn on microphones if people don't just want to type. If somebody wants to use their mouths words here that is… you're open to that and. So we'll just let there be some silence and see, see.. well, here we go! From Sean to everyone: “How do you get people in orgs to start thinking in larger systems and away from just ‘IA is the nav?’” and Sean says “that they are fighting that in a new org themselves.”
Andrew Hinton: Yeah, I mean… The gut reaction answer from, you, was basically, “yeah, you tell me when you figure it out.” But I know that's not helpful. But I don't know that I've nailed that right. It depends on the organization. Depends on the people. I mean, in a really huge company, what I found over the last few years was, I found I was able to find people who got it right off the bat. Other people got it after hearing it a few times. But these were all people who are sort of, you know, just situated in their own little cul-de-sacs in this organization, finding a way to marshal that into some kind of like momentum or consensus to drive decision-making and prioritization, for a department or for an organization, that was a whole other shebang. And that's one reason why.. I learned a lot right, but then I realized okay, I need a role where I actually can make some stuff happen sometimes right? Not just try to influence stuff happening all the time alone, even though that's still plenty of what I'll be doing. So, I don't know that I've got a great answer. I do think there's some things that can work, like --the thing is though it's no joke to do-- is avoid calling it information architecture, if you're working with people who already have deep-seated assumptions about what that is. Just like with UX or anything else. Like people might assume things about these words. So, I think it can be really useful to talk about it like… take it out of the context. So, one is use language that might frame it better for them. The last job I had, one thing I talked about a lot: trying to get people to bought into content strategy and started calling it “content modernization” because that's actually more accurate, to what we're doing with it…
Dan Klyn: Oooooooo
Andrew Hinton: and the word modernization in that organization meant things about, “Oh, that's a big Enterprise-wide thing we're doing and we're changing everything so it can be even more centralized, but more resilient” …
Dan Klyn: Wow.
Andrew Hinton: Like that's what “modernization” was for. For their databases. For their CRM for everything. Okay. Well if we modernize content, what does that mean? Right? And that helped, right? As opposed to “content strategy” which sounded, you know, like, “let's come up with a tone and voice strategy,” you know?
Dan Klyn: Yeah, it doesn't feel like you're making any forward progress or at least comparatively the sense of forward progress, my God.
Andrew Hinton: So the terminology can help. Figure out like what's their mental model and try to ease into it that way. The other thing though, too, is sometimes talk about things, examples that have nothing to do with your work. So something I kept looking for – I wanted to find the time to do but I never really did and may still – is, you know, walk through a popular video game, a well-designed video game, with some people and talk about, like, “okay what sort of experiences are you having here? And how does that work?” And then start breaking it down and like basically doing an x-ray to say. “Okay. So here's what was necessary, was you had to define what this non-player character is and then you've got a class of that non-player character and non-player characters only do certain things and then you've got these other things - this question mark that’s floating. It has rules attached to it and somebody decides, this is what it does and it doesn't do anything else, you know, like There's this whole x-ray this MRI you could do of Red Dead Redemption 2, you know or World of Warcraft, where you could see, right? There's a model under there, right, that somebody had to decide on all these things and what they mean to one another and if they don't do it well, people get confused, and there's 400 new games that came out this week that I can play instead, right? So but we don't think about those things, then so much of what we make. So I think that, or some other example, of some way of getting people into the headspace of thinking about what's underneath all of this.
Dan Klyn: Yeah
Andrew Hinton: I think is.. it can be really helpful.
Dan Klyn: Awesome! Next question from Christopher: “Curious about Andrew’s thoughts on what might be called ‘temporal context,’ especially regarding machine learning and increasing number of digital experiences being shaped/personalized.” That's a tasty one.
Andrew Hinton: Temporal. Um… I'm not sure what… if we mean is time. The time dimension of experience. I'm not sure what… how I'm not totally grocking how that relates to the rest.
Dan Klyn: Christopher, would like to, shall I unmute the uh, I’m just gonna do it.
Andrew Hinton: Yeah
Dan Klyn: he doesn’t need to say anything here, but uh. Christopher, if you like, ask away.
Christopher: Yeah, I appreciate it. I appreciate all this conversation. So, my thinking is, or my question is, that an increasing number of these experiences are being shaped by machine learning, and it could be as simple as, kind of, the recommendation algorithm improving over time and being more directed to me. How do we think through experiences that are different in week seven than they were in week one…
Andrew Hinton: Oh oh oh.
Christopher: when we think about context?
Andrew Hinton: So, yeah, I mean… It still comes down to regardless of whether it's machine learning or if it's Mechanical Turk type stuff, right, you know, it could just be that the script got rewritten for the chatbot, you know, but it still comes down to, “how is my environment behaving around me when I try to do things in it? And is there enough coherence that, as I learn how to interact with it, that I can keep building on that and get… where I'm not having to be explicitly aware of what I'm doing and I can move more toward the tacit end of that spectrum?” Like riding a bicycle, right? Or picking up a hammer. So the thing is, that just because it is machine learning, it doesn't mean it's really any different in the sense of the way the [barking in background]… oh, speak of the dogs… the… in other words, regardless of whether it's some machine learning thing that's driving it or not the human creature that's trying to understand that touchpoint or that moment or whatever it is, they still need the environment to make sense to them. Right? So what are the principles that need to be followed to make that environment make sense? And then that tells you what you need to do to your machine learning because the machine learning – just because it's fancy new AI shit doesn't mean that it suddenly gets to check out of the expectation. Right? The same expectation is on, is on, you know Alexa, as on, you know, if I, if I call and talk to a human being and they tell me to X, and then an hour later another human being tells me to do Y or Z. That's frustrating too, you know?
So a lot of this is, is like, one, come back to: It’s a person interacting with an environment and then, and then you got to figure out where the inflection points - where you're changing something enough to where it's not just a nuance but it's different somehow, right? So an example of this - and I've no idea where machine learning fits into this or not - it's in there somewhere. But like, for example, I used to be able to tell our Amazon Echo, “Play the whatever podcast,” right? And it would just play the latest episode. Now what it does is it starts playing whatever episode I was listening to last, and it says “I'm resuming that but if you want to hear the latest, just tell me to play the latest” so I've been trying to say things like, “Can you play the latest episode of podcast X?” But it doesn't understand that. I have to literally say “Can you play podcast X,” listen to it explained to me that it's resuming something and then I can play the latest if I want to and then say “please play the latest episode” and then it knows. There's no other grammar that seems to work for it right now. Maybe it's going to learn and get tweaked to where it's more literate, with that right, but it isn't yet. But what happened was, in an effort to make something work better, for me at least, it made it worse to some degree, right? Because it's like, okay, it's a nice option that it's resuming the last podcast I was listening to, that cool. And that doesn't bother me as long as I could just ask for it not to.
Dan Klyn: yeah,
Andrew Hinton: In the way that I want to, right?. So sometimes machine learning would be driving a decision like that. Sometimes not. Sometimes the decisions made by human, but then they're like, let's point the machine learning at this new interaction mode. And I guess I'm just saying, well you have to think about real use and is it going to make sense to people. So you have to contextualize it and explain it better. So people know “what are the handles I grab to now, that weren't there before?” right? And in a voice context it’s really hard to, because you can't give somebody something on a screen that's like “call messaging up here that says hey, there's a new way to interact with us. Click this and we'll explain it to you.” Right? All you have is that voice out of that little disembodied speaker trying to - in time - tell you things enough to know that you need to adjust what you're doing, it's gonna be different now. So it makes it harder, but when it comes down to humans interacting with stuff, I think the important thing is, forget about the magic technology and just think about humans and environment. And then that gives you a sense of “okay, how do we manipulate the magic technology so that it's still making sense to people?”
Dan Klyn: [makes to speak]
Andrew Hinton: And then one thing and one thing quickly as I'll mention too, that I talked about in some talks over the last few years is, you know, be putting this smartness this learning… machine learning intelligence, whatever, into our environment. It also means that like, we really don't have very much to go on in terms of what these objects that we’re interacting with, how one is different from another, you know, so I might treat my Siri home pod the same way I'm treating my Alexa my on Amazon Echo, but they're different but then they're both changing and learning over time, and sometimes they overlap sometimes they don't.
Dan Klyn: [laughs]
Andrew Hinton: There's nothing physically about them changing that tells me that any of this is going on, you know? And, so, you know, do we need some kind of, like, labeling or some kind of signifiers that people can learn so that they're at least getting started with some idea of what is this thing doing or not doing? Does it have a live microphone, or does not have a live microphone? Is it connected to it to a centralized thing or not? And so all of it, really, I think the machine learning stuff comes back down to. Again, what are we changing? And how are we signifying that these are changes in an environment that maybe should need different behaviors or different expectations?
We're not figuring that part out very well, right, we're changing lots of stuff under the hood and making all these incredible things happen, but we're really.. it's all happening so fast, nobody I can catch up and kind of figure out some kind of semaphores for like what kind of creature am I interacting with right now?
Dan Klyn: [laughs]
Andrew Hinton: And is it is a different from what it was yesterday?
Dan Klyn: Yeah. Christopher. Does that help?
Christopher: Yeah, no, that was fantastic. I'm specifically focused actually on UX research for voice interfaces, so that was extremely helpful. Didn't want to get too lost on the ML piece of it because I think there's a lot from service design that applies here as well situations always [inaudible 1:30:37]
Andrew Hinton: Yeah,
Christopher: But I think that was really helpful.
Andrew Hinton: So.. oh good. And then one last thing I’ll mention, in terms of research when it comes to these smart things, I think I've been saying for a while is, we need to do ethnography for those. But not anthropomorphize them. So, meaning, look at them as what they really are, right? Because it's a thing where, I think, because it has a nice voice and it sounds very personable, we think of it as a person-ish thing. But it's actually not good for us, or them, to think of it that way. Which is one reason why I have trouble with these very polished natural sounding conversational voices in these devices because it gives people the wrong idea of what the thing is actually capable of.
And so I think it's interesting to go, like okay, what is the life of a sensor in a factory? What is it proceeding, and has it know if it is done a good job or not? The problem is the language we have to use is very anthropomorphic, because language is at anthropomorphic, but how do we stretch that the way a behaviorist… I remember years and years ago [and we'll get to this next question, I'm sorry.] Years ago a friend of mine, who was at MIT, this is when I was in college, and he was in a different college, you know, he's there studying science, and I won't go into the whole conversation, but he said, “yeah, one thing that our professor keeps harping on is for example, the turtles don't come onto the beach to lay eggs. They come onto the beach and then they lay eggs. Right? And it's an important idea because they don't have an intention of necessarily doing that. They just, they're, biologically that's what they do, because they wouldn't exist if they hadn't. And most of what we do is similar. We do stuff, right, but we do tend to have more intention. We can kind of.. because of this prefrontal cortex and all the stuff, we can kind of ascribe all this intention to it. But the same way that a biologist needs to understand that a turtle is not a human and that to really do - understand the turtle - we got to get out of anthropomorphizing it. We have to do that with all these little smart things too. So we have to understand what kind of creature is it -so to speak- and how does it perceive the world and what happens in the world that it perceives and then acts on. And then you start to realize, like, “oh it's perceiving the world in a way that is really alien to us.”
Dan Klyn: Yeah
Andrew Hinton: And that's okay, but how are we translating? How are we making that clear? Right? So that I understand why the Nest thermostat is now on a whole different pattern every day of how it runs my HVAC, because there's somebody staying in our house right? Like where do I see that? Other than - hidden mechanism that's totally invisible to me - and all we're doing is just acting like humans in our environment. But this device sees that as a language it's using it as information that it is perceiving and it’s taking action, right? Well what kind of clarity is that for that? And I think we're shoving all these things into our world, but we haven't thought about how are we communicating and making it clear what the cause and effects are, between us and these new things in our environment.
So anyway, go ahead. James has a question and I keep talking.
Dan Klyn: Yes, and thank you Christopher. And on the way, on the way out here from your question Christopher. I would say look, for there's some work that will be coming out from Marcia Haverty pretty soon here.
Andrew Hinton: Oh good
Dan Klyn: About something she calls “good continuation.” To your question about temporal context. I can't, I don't want to put any pressure on her by talking about it with you here, but. I think what you're asking about she's dealing with directly and there's a germ of it in her closing plenary from the IA summit in Chicago which the video for that should be online. So I would say check that out, too. Let's, James is in the, James's in the queue here, but let's toggle over to Twitter before we get to James. Christie via Twitter asks: “Can you speak to how you've seen success in building models live, with the democratization of modeling tools like Google draw, real-time board, that sort of thing.”
Andrew Hinton: Yeah.
Dan Klyn: Have you seen that?
Andrew Hinton: I have actually and I actually wrote about it and I did it when I was working with TUG. I haven’t had as many chances to do it where I am now, because I'm not in the same - or at least in the job been in for the last few years - because it wasn't exactly the same kind of like, I won’t go there,
Dan Klyn: [laughs]
Andrew Hinton: but like, you know, there's actually a project I did with TUG that I ended up using, but I changed it from “university department website” into an “art supply store” or something, where basically described this functional modeling thing that I've done before. There's a lot of ways to do this, right? But the idea is that you just get people generating - - this was just a way of, for stakeholders to just be able to define at least, what their intent was, of what functions needed to exist in a website in order for it to do the jobs they needed to do, right? And so it was just like getting them to generate all the things that, the outcomes or functions or...We did it partly by doing like an empathy map exercise and we did some other stuff. And basically, we're generating all these little bits and pieces. Right? And I'm sticking them on a whiteboard. And as we're talking I'm starting to kind of like have this back and forth where I'm sort of nudging an affinization of all these things that we're putting up there. So, I'm thinking out loud I'm going, “so this kind of feels like it's with this because this feels like, you know, what do you guys think?” You know? So, some back and forth, and there come up, put up, and this is very back - very interactive and conversational - and you're sort of, again, you're, you're swimming around in ambiguity together, and in this sort of neutral playing field or game board or whatever of all these things they've generated, it becomes a way of trying to accommodate everything, rather than trying to do - put one thing against another - for one thing - which is good. Which goes back to your intention models, right? And so you start glomming these things together, you start, and you end up with this sort of like rubrics that seemed to fit these clusters of function that they need something to do for them. And it's not about interfaces. It's not about features that we … You try to nudge that away from that right? So if one of those ideas comes up, I would, like, stick it in a parking lot, if it's a more literal solution right? You’re like, “Well, we need a chat room!” “Okay. Well, I'm to put that over here, but let's talk about what - why'd you say that?” “Okay, because well we need people to be able to blah blah. We need this. We need that.” [They didn't need a chat room, but it's just an example.]
Dan Klyn: [laughs]
Andrew Hinton: So what you're doing is, you're creating this big overlap-y Venn diagram-y kind of bubble diagram - which is a thing, and, look it up, you know, Google: “bubble diagrams and architecture” and you'll see all these beautiful pictures of all these bubbly diagrams that are really messy. They're not very logical. They're not hierarchical. They're not Visio. They're just mostly hand-drawn. It's a way for someone to wrap their head around what are the core functional needs that a place needs to provide and how do they relate to one another. And it's and it's not literal physical yet, but it starts to lean that way because, after a while you start realizing, well, you know, we tend to want to do similar things in the same place, you know and things like that, right?
So you got this functional model and then it turns into - it just starts - before you know it you're leaning into architecture, right, you're leading into structure. Because really what you need now is a structure that accommodates these clusters of function. And so the question is, okay, how can you translate that into, like, the machinery of, like a website right. And so .. read the question again because I didn't see it on the Twitter because…
Dan Klyn: It was about the real timing this with, with…
Andrew Hinton: okay. Yeah,
Dan Klyn: I'm presuming it's with stakeholders and maybe even other designers, that there's a democratization we can have
Andrew Hinton: yeah
Dan Klyn: building models together with technology nowadays.
Andrew Hinton: So, I think it's, that's just one method, right? And it's not even like, like some kind of formal method, but the principles are the same, which is, it’s collaborative sense making. So, you need good facilitation, and you need good activities that get people out of the monkey mind of - which is a Zen thing that I don't really know much about Zen Buddhism, but I picked it up two lifetimes ago as a creative writer, but it can, it can, when I would teach creative writing, right? I was like, “okay, I'm going to make you write sonnets because, having to wrestle with the form is going to keep the monkey mind part of your brain busy. So the other part of you can start cracking words apart in interesting ways and not being so goddamn logical. So similarly, right, giving people activities to do – giving them objects to work with, giving them crayons, at workshops now I only use crayons for most activities, because it keys people into an idea that, this is certainly not permanent. It's not even serious. This is by nature playful, right? So crayons, big pieces of paper, and Playdough. Right? So the reason I say all that is because, you want to get people out of the mindset of whichever Freudian part of the psyche this is. You know? But this part that's kind of like, it has to be right, and I have to be right, and it has to be useful right away, and this.. you know, you want to get them out of that, and give them things they're doing, so they're wrestling with meaning and purpose and intent in a way that, that makes them have to kind of mush around with it anew. So their preconceptions aren't so baked-in. And so… because the other thing is, structure is always political. So you want to do it in a way where it feels, like, “Well who cares what you say in this forum, because this is, we're just playing.” Right? Back to your thing about play, right? Let people play with it, and I think a lot of the best collaborative methods do this, you know, which one reason, too, why I think it's really important doing physical- physically together in a room makes a big…
Dan Klyn: Yeah. Well back to the, the, back to Christie's question. She was asking about the technological modalities and when I'm imagining you and your Workshop participants with crayons, I had this flash of, well, yeah Google draw or real-time board, but it's forced into - Comic Sans is the only typeface that it'll let you use.
Andrew Hinton: Oh
Dan Klyn: and the line weight is only 5 pixels fat or fatter. Some way to have it not be looking like a finished product while you're making it.
Andrew Hinton: Yeah, I mean, or one way - and we've talked about this when we’ve talked workshops before too – right, it’s like you can only use circles. Make people only use circles because squares want to be bricks and they want to line up and they want to be orderly and we're not ready for that yet. And so having these bubbles that can float around and float on top of each other and squish together, like, it's less, it's…This isn't like this isn't peripheral to the job. This is a central part of the job, is how do you get people coming together to do sense-making and understanding together in a way where it disarms them enough that they're not, that they can leave aside some of their preconceptions, that are not fighting over… because if you're talking about structure and you're starting with the global navigation on your website, you’re screwed.
Dan Klyn: Well back to politics, what you said earlier Andrew and there's a question from, a text from James about “How do you deal with the politics of naming things - or more interestingly the politics of naming problems - and how that implies the ownership/expertise of the solution space, if you are the namer” Is what I pull out of this question. And I'm thinking of doing the bubble diagrams with other participants on the internet in real-time and thinking, “well, anybody can type a name for the bubble.” So does that, does that help push against that sense of the master, you know, sort of taking over the conversation about structure if you're the one generating the names?
Andrew Hinton: So, you know, but back when you and I were working together, and I was always in earshot when you around talking about Louis Kahn and things like that, and I can’t remember if you, or where this came from, or if I found it, or but I know we talked about it, so there's this one great case study of Louis Kahn the architect working with, I forget what church it was but it's the..
Dan Klyn: Oh, it's the Rochester Unitarian Church.
Andrew Hinton: There you go. Yeah, so he designed it their worship center, right? And or really, almost the whole campus I think, and this is really getting to the creator/created, you know stuff right? So here is this, this luminary, this, this famous architect, but everything he came up with didn’t get built, right? Like if it's going to be a building then it has to go through this entire journey of, other people have to be bought in on things, or they're not going to make them. I mean unless he's some sort of totalitarian, you know autocrat, which we know, all of them by definition have bad taste, so, or obvious taste…
Dan Klyn: [laughs]
Andrew Hinton: so, right? [laughs] Sorry. Unless you hire like a Hugo Boss in which case it's just too bad that… Anyway.
Dan Klyn: [laughs] Did he build a plane for Trump?
Andrew Hinton: No, but he did the Nazi uh…
Dan Klyn: Oh God.
Andrew Hinton: But, was it Boss wasn't those … maybe I'm mixing something up. Anyway, alright. Totally, man, it's a Sunday, I'm all over the place.
Dan Klyn: Yeeaa
Andrew Hinton: More than usual. But anyway, this idea is so. He had an idea. So he went and he had a program right, he had an idea. He had talked to these people. He really try to understand this church and what they do and how they are and what their values are and what their sorta personality was, as a body.
Dan Klyn: Yep.
Andrew Hinton: And he had a hypothesis about what's going to work well for this. And he had a point of view on it, and he created this thing where the sanctuary is in the middle, but you've got this sort of ring around it, which sort of you going to be in this liminal, “you're in the sanctuary, but you're not” space. Because you're not actively worshipping with people in the middle, but you're still in the sacred space as an observer, and, or transition through it. I think they kept that part, but there were some other things about the difference between learning…
Dan Klyn: It was the purity of the separation between the ambulatory and the sanctuary that got…
Andrew Hinton: Yeah
Dan Klyn: Sort of watered down through the committee process of building.
Andrew Hinton: Yeah. Yeah, and the thing is is that, what got made was still a good thing and it could be, maybe, if they had followed exactly what he wanted, but it might have been better for them. I don't know. I don't know enough about it. But back to the politics, right? So, in our business, the way we name something, especially the way we name something and identify it or even define it in relation to something else, that's our, that's our, right pillars, right? That's our version of, “I'm going to put a wall here and an empty space here and a door here,” right? Because as soon as you make those decisions physically, you're, I mean, you're just, you're, now deciding the door isn't somewhere else.
Dan Klyn: Yeah,
Andrew Hinton: Right? So in order to make something you have to not make all the other things.
Dan Klyn: [laughs]
Andrew Hinton: And, right? And the thing is, is that some people want those other things. So now… so it's one thing to do that with physical material. When you add language - which has got all this cultural bullshit attached to it - and identity and stuff, like, it gets crazy.
Dan Klyn: Yeah
Andrew Hinton: So, like, imagine if you come in here and, if Louis Kahn had gone in and is like, “okay, but we're not going to call this an ‘altar’ we're going to call this speak… a ‘speaking stand’” or something, you know what I mean? And it's like because of some idea that he had about it. And there like “No. No because it's been called that for… That has meaning to it. It has to be what we call it.” So humans are linguistic species. And so we're very attached to language and so we can get really bent out of shape about it. So I'm not really answering your question very well, because I'm just trying to describe, this is why it's hard. So I think the first thing we have to do, in terms of how do you deal with it, is you really need to look at it and understand the politics of what's actually happening. So you need to understand how is language being used currently? What are the shibboleth; what are the sacred cows? What are the things that, right? I can't… Probably people listening to this have had these circumstances too, but like, years ago, I was working with, in a company where they were simply implementing customer relationship management or CRM, but they were going to call it that because five years earlier, they had done something that was called CRM and it was a total dumpster fire. So even though the actual thing they were buying from like SAP or Sie… whoever it was, Siebel, I think, was literally a “CRM platform,” they're like, “no, we're not calling it that here.” Okay.
Dan Klyn: [laughs]
Andrew Hinton: One thing I found is that in IT, because IT works with abstraction, by definition, they tend to eat up all the good words for everything. So in the last company I was with, they grab the word “interaction” and they had to define interaction in a very specific way because it was in their architectural models for business rules around things like, you know, “well, where we going to keep the database of all the interactions we have with our customers?” and to do that you've got to define it very specifically in a way that isn't colloquial in the way that we think of it. Right? So I ended up grabbing onto the word touch… so there are lots of words like that, like “channel” and other things that they had already kind of figured out. Here's how we mean them behind the scenes. And I was like, “okay, well, we need a word to be the hinge between the experience stuff in the machinery that you're making, and so can we have “touch point” because that can be our, right?
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Andrew Hinton: Our, boundary object between the way people are observing their environment, interacting with it, versus the way sort of like the steering wheel is a touch point in the car, the, but the automotive engineers have figured out how all that stuff under the hood works, and unless I just want to dig under there and do it myself, I don't have to think about. Right? Or the face of a clock, versus the works of the clock, right? So language I think is similar. So I think you have to contextualize it for people and understand, “okay, well if you want to use this word this way, that's fine. Let's talk about where that's being used, and who's seeing that word, and who needs to understand that word that way, and it, but then, how might the same word. Does it need to be understood differently by a customer for example?” And it could be a does. It could be we need to have a formalized way of having that language out there for the customer on the navbar or whatever because that was what makes sense to them, even if behind the scenes we break it down differently, right? So think again putting all this in context helps like making it very pragmatic like okay words are things people are using. Who's using them in what ways and how do we need to disambiguate between. If you make it practical like that, it can it can sometimes get you away from all the turmoil of the all the other political associations because otherwise they have nothing else to go on other than the language, right? So they're bringing all their baggage to the to the semantics. Yeah. So that's the only thing that's worked for me, is just, first really understanding how what are their motivations? What are the needs of all the different stakeholders that might have a say in this language and I think that a really brilliant thing that I haven't been able to really do, fully, yet in any job, is something that Patrick Lambe and his book on organizing called Organising Knowledge [organising with an "s"] is really really good. It's the best thing I've ever read on taxonomy. And I talk about it all the time. But a thing they do is, they do this massive taxonomy, like inventory, where they basically just find out what are all the different ways people are using language, even if they don't think of them as taxonomies. And that gives them, again, the sort of MRI-like .. the underlying function.. the endocrine system of that organization, in a way that almost nothing else can. It's powerful.
Okay. I know we're almost out of time. That was a long..
Dan Klyn: No, we've got two minutes left. So I think this would be a good time to just wrap it up and thank everybody who joined us. The recording and machine transcript of these conversations will be turned into a podcast that you can subscribe to via however you consume podcasts.. And I'm really excited about the next go-round of this. I'm going to try to do this once a month. Next month, July 14. That's very soon at 11 a.m. Abby Covert, author of How To Make Sense Of Any Mess will be here with me, and we will do this again. And one last note before I let everybody go here and thank you Andrew for joining us today..
Andrew Hinton: Oh, thank you, this was awesome.
Dan Klyn: ..we at The Understanding Group are teaching workshops at our offices in the state of Michigan, and every couple of months we do them in the other office. We have two offices, so next month, the 16th through the [what does it say: the 18th? Yeah.] Over three days, we're going to have four workshops: Two full-day workshops, two half day workshops. The first day is a full day of "what is information architecture?" [basically]. The next day, we have a morning session on designing user research with Amy Goldmacher, who's got a PhD in business anthropology. And in the afternoon, I will teach a stakeholder alignment workshop. And then, apropos what we talked about today, two of my colleagues from The Understanding Group are teaching a Modeling Workshop, which is a full-day workshop. I think a lot of what Andrew and I talked about today, if you want to be able to help. establish context, to use it to your advantage, to make what's complex in your world clear, that modeling workshop will be great. And we have a 75% off discount for students, or people who are unemployed. So, we would love to see you either next month in Grand Rapids here, or in the coming months in Ann Arbor. Thank you all and..
Andrew Hinton: Thanks everybody! Bye bye!
Dan Klyn: See you next time.