How to make a toast

How to make a toast by Ergun Coruh

The Talk

In his inspiring TED talk, innovator Tom Wujec talks about power of collaborative visualisation.

A group of people is asked to draw “how to make a toast”. This sounds simple, until someone asks to draw the process step by step. The exercise is repeated, individually and in group mode using moveable stickies on a white board.

Collaborative visualisation is a powerful tool.

Firstly, it engages everyone in the design process, by empowering individuals, by giving them equal opportunity to contribute their ideas. This leads to a more fulfilling, happier employee engagement. Secondly, in group mode, it allows the team to understand the problem and facilitates reaching a consensus, a faithful agreement on design.

Style

Not everyone is good at drawing. Even people who are good at drawing may not articulate ideas equally well. Would that be a problem? Do we need a visual language?

It is important to realise that equal engagement is primary value in Collaborative Visualisation. Everybody should be encouraged to draw regardless of their talent, it should be a fun process, a celebration of bringing together ideas.

There are simple techniques I discovered that everyone can take advantage of when drawing ideas. I believe everyone can learn them and gradually become better as they draw more.

Take a look at my drawing of “how to make a toast”.

Keep it simple

Remember this is not a drawing contest. We need to reflect ideas in the simplest possible way so that everyone can quickly understand concepts.

Draw thick

Thick lines encourage to draw simple figures. Simple figures are easier to understand, they don’t clutter ideas. It is important to pick the right sized pen, for a given medium (white board or stickies).

Avoid 3D

Stick with 2D drawings, they are easier to draw. 3D drawings tend to clutter the design. Take a look at my 2D toaster.

Dots, lines and curves

These are the only primitives you would need to draw a shape. Take a look at my toaster drawing again. It has simple visual cues to make it look like a toaster. The curvy edges on top, the switch on the left, a thick base, are common elements to most toasters. Coupled with a slice of bread that looks like a bread, it is impossible to miss it.

Avoid perfectionism 

Do not get carried away by drawing a perfect something, a perfect toaster for instance. It is more important for people to understand you drew a toaster, as opposed to a perfect slab that does not look like a toaster.

Shades and animation

Since we opted for using thick lines, how would we articulate a brown toast?

Use parallel lines to darken the surface of bread slice. You should use this technique judiciously though, overdoing it will clutter the drawing. Don’t forget the idea is to draw a brown toast everybody can understand, not a perfect brown toast.

Simple animation showing spatial motions using cartoon style hyphens have enormous power in articulating complex ideas. Nothing can demonstrate a toast being chaotically thrown into air at the end of a toasting process better than a skewed, brown bread with hyphens showing a movement from bottom to top.

Nodes, arrows and areas

Nodes are group of objects representing a stage in your design process. Arrows let you articulate how you connect nodes and build up your design. Pay attention to area alignment. Make sure you sufficiently separate nodes from each other, you leave enough space between them, so that they don’t appear on top of each other.

Compartments

Seek for compartments in design and in life.

Principles to adhere:

•  Each compartment needs to be identifiable, movable, self contained, and elegantly handled.
•  Attend, handle and enjoy each compartment in isolation.
•  Avoid clutter, inter-dependencies and dominating compartments.
•  Regularly visit, evaluate, re-order, downsize and clean up your compartments.
•  Remove the compartments that create too much stress on you.
• If the time allocated is up and it is obvious that you are not going to make it, reschedule and move to another compartment.

These principles apply to below and many other cases:

•  Your best friend
•  Your job 
•  Furniture
•  Your child's issues
•  Management of your money
•  Your garden
•  Friends   
•  Software, regardless of you design them or you use them
•  Book reading
•  Google+ surfing
•  Broken things, accidents, health (car, refrigerator, plumbing, illness and so on)  
•  etc.

Craftsmanship

This video shows craftspeople creating hand made parts for an iconic brand Leica.



Hand-made products are still thriving in Italian, Swiss, German and Danish workshops and in other countries throughout Europe.

Yes they are in small numbers and they are mostly for wealthy who can afford them.

But my point today is not to open a lengthy discussion about economic crisis, globalization, far-eastern sweatshops or wealth distribution. Plenty of that stuff is widely covered in media.

I would like to talk about something related to being a human.

When you watch the video you will notice something interesting. There is no music. There are sounds of hand making process and background noise of the workshop. There is no rush. There is buzz.

I could almost feel the cool sensation of creating something with your hands. An intimate bond is woven between you, the object you are bringing into life and the fortunate future owner.

Creating hand-made is a happy process under right conditions. It brings calmness, human touch and humanly sensations into air.

I would like to see hand-made arts and craftsmanship survive. There are indications that they may in fact. So long as Europe sticks to its centuries old brand names and keep authenticity they may hold on in niche markets. As a result we may be able to keep some of those beautiful art forms, craftsmanship and human experience for decades to come.

User Interface Development Tips

My over two decades long background is in real-time/server side programming. 


Nowadays I am working almost entirely on GUI products. I am building a Visual Studio like IDE at work. On the other hand MiniBluebox, the home-grown project I develop part-time also involves user interface design.

For years I had the usual conviction that "GUI programming is dumb". But I found that it is actually the opposite. It is equally hard if not harder than server side programming, not necessarily in programming terms though.

The hardest bit may involve a mindset change, a realisation in full humbleness that no matter how smart you are, your usability perception as a developer is a much smaller component than what users usability expectations are. 

You need to get interaction design right, and that often involves user engagement. It is not something you can imagine and expect it to work for everyone.

The ultimate tips I may disclose are, 

1. Get as many field trials as possible. Be humble and let users be brutal in their criticism. Make sure your product website attracts feedback from users. Be an observant and listener. Try to understand what makes them happy or stressed out and then groom out the UI accordingly.
2. There may be tensions between usability and performance. Almost always favor usability if performance penalty is bearable.
3. Don't be scared of cutting out controls. Think this way if I remove this button or replace it with a slider control what would happen. Would that make my user happier. 
4. Make sure to sketch out user personas. Will plumbers, house-wives, executives, game players be using your product. What is the persona or personality that will likely be using your product. There will always be tensions between their usability expectations. You need to come up with a persona that would serve all of them reasonably well. But your persona may be dominated by just one of them. This is more of an art form or a Director's job than a Developer's it may sound. But it is the extra mile that would make a difference. Draw cartoons of him/her. Try to imagine them in their daily life. Try to imagine them, what is crossing their mind, when they sit down before they start your program.

Finally my best kept secret is this and rather than being a mere tip deserves to stand on its own right:

Your ultimate design criterium should be to make users happy about themselves when using your product. They shouldn't feel stupid or unconfident.

Many beautiful things

How we organise things reflect our attitude towards life. These photos were shot during my holiday in Bodrum, Turkey in September 2011.  They show my desire to capture life from merchandise organised by simple shopkeepers.  

turkish delights

shoes

breads

seashells

glasswork

beads

beautiful charms from ayse and ali

sunglasses

herbs

flat bottles

RIP Google Wave

Google Wave, an online collaboration platform in its infancy is dead.

Broadly speaking the main issue with GW was ‘poor usability’.

GW was too stressful to use.

Consider this. If more than two people are talking to each other face to face you will notice that the quality of communication rapidly degrades as number of people increases.

Now imagine same group of people, trying to maintain an online conversation using a tool like GW. They would be struggling to think, comprehend, scroll to see the newest message, type their own message, cut and paste a video link, copy an image, hack each other’s sentences with simultaneous editing.

Geeks might like that. But not everyone would like that.

Way too many interactions. Way too many distractions on the screen.

GW screen looked like a glorious billboard as if designed for maximum distraction. Well who wants to be distracted while communicating?

I mentioned this before:

"We became gadget-obsessed anxiety-driven freaks and our urban society is running on a short attention span culture.

Just about everybody, every hardware device, and every software on the Internet is desperately trying to grab the shortest possible time span dedicated to comprehension and expression."

Therefore I believe new collaboration tools must make every effort to take stress out from the environment.

About a mouse

I have owned a Mac computer for a year now. My Mac came with a pointing device which Apple called “the mighty mouse”. The most distinctive feature of this device is its trackball’s silky sensitivity. The small trackball on the top moves in all directions and it responds to your fingertip’s faintest movements.

Yet to my sorrow the mighty mouse is far from mighty and it has a miserable design fault. After a short period of normal usage the trackball fails to move your mouse pointer on the screen (usually scrolling down fails).

As I was told by an Apple ‘genius’ later on, apparently the tiny gap around the trackball periphery sucks the smallest dust particles and in time they clog the trackball's gear. Within a month or so the mouse starts to fail in responding your fingertip’s commands. The mighty mouse turns into an ugly ordinary mouse.

The Apple guy whom I saw months back recommended to turn the mouse over and rub it against a piece of paper on a hard surface. So in a number of occasions I followed his instructions and the mouse recovered OK but only temporarily.

Over a week ago the mighty mouse failed for good, and despite my cleaning attempts it did not recover. In desperation I tried to open the mouse but instead broke plastic bearings around the rim and failed to fully open the lid at the back.

Frustrated I took the mouse to the Apple store in Chatswood, expecting some sympathy as I had an extended warranty worth of $268. I was refused to be looked at as I had to make an appointment with the ‘Genius Desk’  first (Apple calls their service people by that name).

I've made an appointment and a few days later I visited the same Apple store for the second time. This time ‘the genius’ turned the mouse over and rolled it on a paper, made some star and eight movements for about two minutes or so. And voila! My mighty mouse plugged in a MacBook test machine worked.

After mentioning him that I tried to open the mouse for a good clean up the genius said “I know. I noticed your mouse lid is broken. Your warranty is void.” I mentioned I did not really care too much if my warranty was void on a $69 mouse as at that point I just needed a functioning mouse. The genius recommended me to buy the new $100 wireless mouse.

Oh the wireless...

I said I found wireless mouses frustrating too as you had to change batteries every now and then. These were my last remarks. I walked out the store.

Don’t get me wrong I am in awe of everything Apple does. When I look at Apple products I can’t help but murmur “it’s a beautiful thing”.

However in this instance Apple failed to deliver the user experience they are so proud to fulfill.

First of all ‘the might mouse’ design is faulty. My work PC is a Windows machine and I have been using its mouse, oh I have forgotten, for so long, and never had to clean the damn thing. It just works.

So from my perspective compared to an ordinary PC mouse, Apple’s mighty mouse fails to deliver in a mighty way.

Secondly I can’t help noticing how we intelligent people in minority have to suffer from collective stupidity of majority opinion.

It appears that wireless mouse and wireless keyboard is nothing more than a marketing gimmick and majority has swallowed it. This was a foolish idea, it still is and it continues to frustrate many users like me.

The reasons why wireless mouse and keyboard is a bad idea are:

1. You have to bear the stress that any minute batteries can go flat.
2. You have to keep a spare pair of AA batteries around (you normally won’t).
3. You have to consume a bag-full of batteries every year and pollute the environment needlessly whereas your desktop machine through its USB port could have easily powered your mouse for nothing.

I now use a $20 ordinary Windows mouse on my Mac. The mouse has a cord, it works and I am happy.

Havaianas

Fashion is weird. I mean the fashion elements come to life purely by unexpected public endorsement as opposed to marketing pressure forced by commercial fashion houses. Take thongs for instance. Originated from Japanese zōri, thongs are cheap, simple and practical to wear in warm climates.

Thongs became a phenotype in human memetic evolution and today they are pushing boundaries of survival in unprecedented novel ways.

One such indication is the rise of black Havaianas among Sydney office women in recent years. I know this because I have been working mostly in CBD areas of Sydney for over twenty years now.

Business dress code for women hasn't changed much, mostly gray-scale suits, light color shirts and black court shoes.

Traditional corporate dresses are uncomfortable, people wear them either because of corporate pressure or for power. They are designed to erase your identity and make you a corporate slave.

Men ties are weird, they look stupid, uncomfortable and they serve no purpose other than indicating that you are an idiot to accept your miserable slavery.

Similarly women court shoes look hypocritical incarnations of suppressed female sexual identity. They have heels, yet their mostly dull and ordinary design, and lack of color erase reminiscences of sexual identity. And oh boy they must be uncomfortable, torturous to wear between work and home five days a week.

Office women understandably rebelled. First white sneakers appeared. Although they have no attractiveness whatsoever they looked comfortable, and women started to wear them between home and work, took them off and wore court shoes in the office.

The problem with business suit plus white sneakers combo is, it looks awful. For me the sight of this particular fashion disaster is so painful and unbearable that I avoided to look at them to the extent of breaking my neck (at one stage it pushed me to think maybe after all Mother Theresa was not that unsexy at all.)

So office women realised that they were on the wrong track. We all know they are better equipped with primal instincts of sexual realisation.

So one day one women took her Havaianas that she must have bought as beach-wear and wore them to work. To my relief that must have been the D-day abruptly ended white sneakers' undeserved hegemony. The next day more women copied this heroic and daring behavior of their 'leader', and over incoming weeks hundreds of women must have bought them. And the era of black Havaianas plus business dress started. They are now everywhere in the CBD.

Black Havaianas look cool under business suits. They serve the purpose yet they don't look awful, and their mild rebellious cheerfulness give back women their much deserved 'fun' identity stolen by corporate big brother. It is their way of saying 'hey this is my day job, but I am a beach girl I am cool and fun to be with'. Good on them.

Diminishing Patience

I don't blame teenagers. When I was a teen being a 'fool' was the norm, so is today. We used to speed in dark quiet country roads with headlights turned off, we adored Converse ALL-STAR sneakers despite their discomfort and unbearable smell, we wore tight Levi's jeans despite our reproductive organs crushed in them to the point of becoming a castrato, we suckled 1 lt. Coke bottles after we played basketball all day.

I have been lucky that I survived all this frenzy of nonsense with 5 stitches on my lower chin from a bicycle race without brakes, and chronic gum disease due to suckling too much Coke. I now pay 200 AUD to my periodontist every 6 months. Most of this stuff was of course done in order to impress girls. Incapacity to follow tidal waves of hormonal commands thanks to the median moral code of 'modern civilised society' resulted in adolescent DNA miss-triggering in confusion in all sorts of directions. So no, I don't blame teens. They have every right to be fools.

Since I am now following a self imposed rehabilitation programme for treating my own bullshit I feel obliged to explain in logical terms why I hate "modern" mobile phone.

I must admit, for a long while I unfairly accused mobile phone manufacturers of a conspiracy by deliberately over-designing and overloading the device with non-essential features.

My main problem though is to do with SMS and its implications of overuse. SMS stands for "Short Message Service"¹. A useful feature when first introduced, but turned into an unfortunate memetic⁶ accident in the evolution of human phenotype⁷. Today SMS acts like a virus to break communications between generations of human species.

Teens literally took SMS to an unprecedented level. They use SMS for many short messages, but not necessarily for sensible messages. Since teens' chronic bollocks of "not being understood" has never been addressed properly by their singlet wearing bear drinking fart-all-day-and-watch-reality-TV parents, somewhere along the line they discovered that they could use the mobile phone to develop their own language.

As a matter of fact "SMS teen language" is quite similar to the secret language I developed with Ali, my childhood friend. We developed a cryptic language from an alphabet of transposition cyphers². Our aim was to send each other cryptic messages written on a piece of paper, on serious issues such as whether it is possible to have sex with the most beautiful girl in our neighbourhood.

So SMS provided privacy, convenience and lots of opportunities to establish foolish conversations between fools. Again I have no problems with this.

Drama starts when a baby boomer like me had to put up with a design destined for generation Y.

The number one problem is I have to pay for the features I never or hardly use, SMS, video, Internet, ring tones, you name it, all sorts of rubbish. It has now become a science to learn how to use the mobile phone to make a voice call, and how to respond to an incoming call out of the box. This is absurd, and I have every right to protest it to the extent of becoming grumpy.

To make things worse according to second law of thermodynamics the battery eventually becomes flat and can no longer be charged and we are forced to take our grim trip to a store to face the mobile phone sales person. This is a man usually in his twenties and there is no way of understanding what he is talking about. You just give in, say "give me the damn phone kid", sign the contract and hastily get out of the store only shortly after to realise that the new version is designed to drive you mad. The half-Chinese, half-English manual is written in the smallest possible font just to mean "your time is over grandpa" and to push baby boomers into a mass suicide. The phone now has full of traps. Any wrong key pressed will take you to a web site the service provider designed to charge you from accidental hits.

The number two problem is to do with the generation gap. Cliche it may sound, I have always admired the fact that we had "the generation gap". Baby boomers have all sorts of darn things to worry about in terms of feeling themselves useless, for example occupying public toilets much longer than their fair share thanks to an unfortunate mutation on genes controlling the prostate function somewhere back in the evolution of human males.

So by engaging communications with teens it might occur to boomers that they are in fact useful and they are now paying their debt to a larger group they belong to for being pain in the ass, this is something their DNA put together so we should not resist against it³. Unfortunately with SMS the generation gap turned into a "generation black hole", SMS sitting in the event horizon⁸.

The implications of a "generation black hole" could be far worse than one might think.

Today's teens in alarming rates read less, exercise less, watch reality TV, hyper-click every link they see on the Internet, develop attention deficit and anxiety disorders at a very early age thanks to SMS, MySpace, Facebook, MSN messaging, Twitter, and Red Bull. To a large extent they do not bother at all to communicate with older generations.

This is in contrast to older generations who also hated the conversation with their parents but nevertheless used to put some effort to maintain the communications started usually by their parents. Perhaps they had less distracting stuff surrounding and bombarding their attention span and they did not have choice.

Historically maintaining the virtue of "patience" has always been a problem in teen generations. Again I cannot blame them for this. We society as a whole is guilty of creating a culture of "diminishing patience". Our society feeds on anxiety and attention deficit disorder.

Exponential advances in technology, globalisation of former state economies and shareholder greed are pushing "the pace of life" to warp speed levels in a frenzy of mutual positive feedback loops. And there are many indicators to support this. Take rock music for example which died in 70's.

There are no longer groups like Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd spending a year on an album, and teens who are biting their nails off for the release -usually a masterpiece- and eventually rushing into a store, appreciating its eternal flavours on a precious vinyl record. Today music, including other art forms became disposable like toilet paper. Diminishing patience is to blame.

Diminishing patience inflicts older generations too⁴. Today hyper-clicking⁵ on the Internet created a culture in which it is no longer possible to construct complex, intelligent, sustained and meaningful conversations.

We might have a chance though. Rising sea levels may push our species to slow down. We might go back to drawing board and create new memes, or bend old ones to prevent an environmental catastrophe. For that we would need patience and the virtue of "listening". We need to slow down, and re-learn "listening" and "reading" each other.

(1) SMS
(2) Transposition Cipher
(3) Passing on the wisdom
(4) Why do we need to rush -inspiration from Carl Honore-
(5) Hyper clicking
(6) Meme, memetic
(7) Phenotype
(8) Event horizon of a black hole

Mobile

Every time my mobile phone can no longer be charged, I end up "upgrading" to the next worse model. Mobile phone manufacturers do their best to drive me crazy. I know I would end up with an over-designed junk, a hyper-loaded teenage toy, which would be far worse than the previous model.

Is this too impossible?

A low cost two-color touch screen with scroll function, a translator to translate numbers to names (I don't care how this can be achieved, but I am sure one day human race will get rid of alphabetical non-sense on keys), a simple keypad with just numbers (like an old phone), a simple three line screen with names, an OK button to select or lock/sleep when pressed long enough. The machine will remember the last person talked and positions the cursor to that when wakes up.