Cybernetics is one of the most widely misunderstood concepts. The word itself seems sinister and futuristic, but the term has ancient roots — the Greek word kybernetes, meaning steersman. Cybernetics was famously defined in more recent times by Norbert Wiener in 1948, as the science of “control and communication, in the animal and the machine.” Words like “control” may seem to have creepy overtones, but at its heart, cybernetics is simply the study of systems. “Cybernetics is the discipline of whole systems thinking…a whole system is a living system is a learning system,” as Stewart Brand put it in 1980.
Some 80 per cent of US households own and operate a tumble dryer, with millions more of us going down the street to a laundromat. The average American household dries eight loads of washing a week; over 2 million households do 15 loads a week or more.
Further, there’s a stigma to the display of a clothes line in America:
Clothes lines are viewed as flags of poverty, yet we could be saving 10 percent on energy costs if we did our laundry the green way. Clothes lines evoke a negative emotional reaction from many Americans, who view them as flags of poverty. Property owners often fear that a clothes line in their neighbourhood will lower the value of their house.
There’s also a strange brand of prudery at play. Middle-aged men, prone to scanning the web for all manner of scantily clad beings, do not want to see oversized bloomers out their window.
Projects like Project Laundry List could be turning things around and studies such as Pew giving insight.
[Image: “Original wooden pegs. The two on the left, the oldest of the collection, are known as ‘gipsy clothes pegs’ from the beginning of the 20th century.]
The show’s research team developed an annotated document, or “Writer’s Notebook”, which provided extended and developed definitions of the researchers’ curriculum goals. The notebook assisted the writers and producers in translating their educational goals into televised material. Suggestions in the notebook were free of references to specific characters and contexts on the show so that they could be implemented as openly and flexibly as possible.
After receiving the curriculum focus and goals for the season, the writers met to discuss ideas and story arcs for the characters, and when a script was completed, the show’s research team analyzed it to ensure that the goals were met. Then each production department met to determine what each episode needed in terms of costumes, lights, and sets. The writers were present during the show’s filming, which for the first twenty-four years of the show took place in Manhattan … to make last-minute revisions when necessary.
Joey Mazzarino, head writer in 2008, has described the writing process as a “collaboration.” Cooney has called this collaboration an “arranged marriage.” The show’s staff work to ensure that the relationship between producers and researchers is not adversarial, but that each side contributes “its own unique perspective and expertise.”
Arranged marriage or not, it’s hard work: “Fifteen writers a year worked on the show’s scripts, but very few lasted longer than one season. … most writers ‘burn out’ after writing about a dozen scripts.”
[Letters] have a shape and life of their own outside of legibility. This is the birth of typography as a profession, which is akin to the birth of recorded music. Before music could be captured and reproduced, musical performances were heard once by whoever was present, just as typographic works could only be performed once by the scribe and had a limited audience. After recorded music, one performance could be distributed and heard by millions of people. After Gutenberg, one typographer could create letters that made content for millions of people to read.
Over at Lined & Unlined, there’s reference to a 1960s debate that raged over records versus live music, and a famous radio documentary and article by Glenn Gould, “The Prospects of Recording.” Gould relates live concert musicians to the protests of the typesetters’ union:
Automation: a crusade which musicians’ union leaders currently share with typesetters and which they affirm with the fine disdain of featherbedding firemen for the diesel locomotive. In the midst of a proliferation of recorded sound which virtually erases earlier listening patterns, the American Federation of Musicians promotes that challenging motto “LIVE MUSIC IS BEST.”
This all means that a lone designer can draw a letter, put it on her blog and have the world see it instantly. She is part of the massive design and typography explosion, and also part of a long conversation. Every stroke she makes is an evocation of history and a direct ode to Gutenberg taking the hand-inked letters of his time, and turning them into lead soldiers that print and print and print and print, five-hundred and fifty-four years and counting.
I’m a stoop dweller. No matter the season, this marginal space functions as a break between inside and outside, between familiar and unfamiliar, between recognized and anonymity, between private and public, between lost and found. Or perhaps it’s just a place to watch from.
Josh Owen moves the essence of the stoop off of the typical urban grid, so the stoop can be translated to a park or a district without places to sit:
Like a bench, the stoop is a marginal space. There is no way to know whether its occupants are coming or going. And in fact this does not matter. The stoop is a liminal site — it is a place which is as much about transition as it is about pause. I wondered if it would be possible to capture the essence of that indigenous behavior, so entwined with its site-specific nature, in order to have more flexibility to invite similar social behavior in other contexts than the entry to the home, on a block of homes on the grid.
Jonathan Harris shares a series of powerful vignettes about both the current state of the digital world, as he sees it, and his vision for its future:
You could argue that people will do what people will do, and that trying to change people’s behavior is arrogant and foolish. There is truth to that, but people’s behavior is largely influenced by the context in which they live. People who live near a ski slope are more likely to ski, as people who live in a city are more likely to hang out at bars. When we design spaces (real or virtual), we need to take responsibility for the types of behavior those spaces are likely to encourage.
We cherish our capitols, cathedrals, museums, monuments, and parks, but who will build structures of this stature in the digital world?
Speaking especially to young students of computer science, art, architecture, and design — I would encourage you, as you imagine what you want to become, to consider becoming digital world builders.
Help construct our future digital world. Build honestly, naturally, authentically, beautifully, not motivated by page views or ad revenue but by what the digital world should be, in its purest, noblest sense. Articulate digital spaces that nurture the soul and the spirit.
…. Don’t leave it to today’s companies to solve these problems, as they will only perpetuate the same habits they have already adopted. There needs to be a new vision for the future of the web, one that is sensitive both to the human individual and the human collective, just like real life.
I read this as I returned from time away from New York City where I was on land and space designed by an architect who’d carefully considered how people interact with the surroundings in a natural way. Authenticity, in particular, was intensely important to him. And every time I return from this place, I get to see the digital work I do differently.
An added challenge, as I see it, is to build worlds without having to leave our place — to gain objectivity and authenticity while staying home — wherever that may be.
[Image: “The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Making of the Modern Museum” designed by Abbott Miller. via.]
The motifs of the book are inspired from the museum’s architecture and Wright’s iconic style:
The design translates the famous Guggenheim spiral into an iconic typographic composition, its concentric circles evoking the view from the top of the rotunda. A collage of news clippings and correspondences of important events and players adorns the endpapers. The distinctive rusty red color throughout the book is inspired by Wright’s palette. …. Red bars striping the page edge create a visible band along the fore-edge of the book’s pages.
Miller has worked with the Guggenheim for nearly 15 years on everything from its publications to the website. In ‘96, he asked Jonathan Hoefler to create a typeface based on the lettering found on the façade of the building — “Guggenheim,” now called “Verlag.” The font is now the display font in the book.
While the coin may be eventually in danger of going extinct in the United States, it is still at large and very much in play. And while it is, there is a bad habit that needs to be acknowledged. Cashiers the country-over are guilty of it, and it’s the violation of the coin order.
Let’s agree: there is a right and a very wrong way to receive change from a cashier. Whether you’re standing, sitting, or crouching through a double-paned plexiglass window, if your change involves at least one bill, and one or more coins (a receipt is a variant), there are simple rules. And when they’re broken, the common laws of user-centered courtesy come undone.
Each time I purchase something, I watch the laws come undone a bit more. Cashiers hand patrons coins on top of our bills time after time. The coins-on-top method is awkward and wrong: the coins slide off the bills, onto the counter, pennies (which we didn’t want back in the first place, frankly) roll onto the floor, nickels one way, dimes the other, and we are left standing with a somewhat wrinkled set of bills in hand. Do we pick up the coins? Were they of value? Why couldn’t we have had them in our hand in the first place?
We’ve all seen this happen to the most dignified of folks, and it’s not only painful to watch, but unnecessary.
The royal order
Certain countries use dishes to distribute change in retail shops. Their counterparts in other areas, MUJI for example in the United States, follow this dignified tradition.
Giving change the right way, like any service design process, takes an understanding of the human, and here it’s no different — cashiers are clearly missing what happens when customers receive change. Men throw change in pockets or a tip jar. The end. Bills and receipts get categorized differently depending on their various organizational strategies and attention to detail.
Women tend to carry wallets with change compartments with varying complexities and organizational strategies — zippers, snaps, velcro. Wallet must be retrieved in a larger bag, which itself is a multi-step process. Once retrieved, a woman may deposit the coin(s) in the wallet.
Cases of use
Knowing this coin-deposit process (and any cashier who has encountered at least one man and one woman before has seen these use cases), cashiers should never distribute change bills-first. But they do. This is a design problem.
The cashier, it appears, gives no thought to how the customer puts the money away. If he did, he would simply hand us:
Coins first
Bills second
Receipt third
The coin-first order is a more human-centered way that makes it easy to, well, get on with our day, leaving the store with what we came for: some sort of product, a bit of money left over, and a shred of dignity. Otherwise, we’re just playing a game of point-of-purchase rochambeau each time.
These nine exhibits were donated by a group studying Interactive Media Design, who lovingly restored each to working order. Their discoveries were made whilst researching examples of interaction design that pre-dated digital technology. They also uncovered archive film, photography and packaging which places each artefact in its historical context.
In 1900, the Richophone was a multi-player based game found in prestigious hotels and cafes in and around London. The game was played from special Richophone booths, where players connected to the game through a system of telephones. The prizes to be won were very generous.
