First, a little bit of context: Cornell was one of the first schools to get Facebook, and as a result I’ve been using it for about 4 years now. (In fact, I still remember when the URL was thefacebook.com, and facebook.com was something else entirely.) In that time period I’ve seen it go through some pretty drastic changes — most especially, the change from a closed, school-specific network to a wide-open network that anyone can join. This change has its good sides, definitely, but it also presents some problems.

In real life, we present ourselves differently to different people, depending on who they are. I act differently at work vs. when I’m on a date, vs. when I’m with my parents. When Facebook was limited to students at one college, this wasn’t so much of a concern, because it was more or less just one’s peer group. But if Facebook wants to become a social network for everyone, then maybe it should consider letting people do the same thing in virtual form.

Right now you have the ability to specify a limited profile, which is a subset of your full profile, and to show the limited profile to certain people. Why not take that even further, and give users the ability to create multiple profiles, with different subsets of information in each? So for example, one could create a full profile for college buddies and one’s peer group, a sanitized version for coworkers and professional contacts, a “flirting” profile for romantic interests, and so on. You could have different pictures in each profile — save the kegstand pix for your college buddies, and show colleagues a nice professional headshot. And you could show different applications, too.

This would be similar to one of the features of LiveJournal which I absolutely love, which is the ability to define subgroups of friends and to target your posts to specific friends groups. I use this all the time; in fact, it’s one of the reasons that I’ve kept using LiveJournal for the past several years.

On Facebook, when you approve a friend request, it would be easy to right then add that person to a class of friends. And each class of friends could be targeted by a different profile.

If Facebook is trying to become a tool for adults, as well as a toy for college students, it needs to consider how to balance the effects of its new openness by allowing users to do as we do in real life: present ourselves differently to our contacts depending on who they are. And doing this might also address some of the fuss about privacy that periodically comes up.

With this post, I’m inaugurating a new blog category: “Navel Gazing”. Like a good introvert, I tend to do a lot of that, and I thought I would share some of it with you.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about meaningful work, and about what that means to me, and how I can create meaningful work for myself. And I’ve been thinking about what Matters, by which I mean: solves a problem, helps people, or makes the world a better place in some way. These are the questions I’ve been wrestling with:

How much does design Matter, really?

And are there certain types of design that matter more than others?

I started out thinking that the answer was yes. That, since I’m so interested in this Whole Design Thing, maybe I just had to get into the right field and then I would be able to work on Things That Matter. I wrote this in my UX Week program while I was at that conference: “It seems like some types of design are pure nicety; others are beneficial but not essential; and others have the potential to impact real problems and make a huge difference.”

At that time I was thinking, maybe if I were an industrial designer, or a product designer, or an architect, maybe then I’d be able to work on Things That Matter and make a real difference.

And I was thinking especially that I needed to move away from interaction design, because how much does anything that happens on the Internet really matter in the grand scheme of things?

(Looking back, I’m tempted to turn that into a sarcastic statement. At the time, though, it really wasn’t at all.)

Then throughout the course of the conference, I was presented over and over again with examples of design that Mattered, that addressed real problems. In the keynotes, we learned about Charmr, Adaptive Path’s R&D project to redesign a medical device for diabetics. We got to hear about ClearRx, a redesign of prescription drug labeling to make it easier to understand and safer to use. And we saw a UI demo from One Laptop per Child, with its innovative new operating system created for schoolchildren in developing countries.

I was very impressed by all of these examples. And the thing about them that struck me the most was how they all came from different fields of design, from graphics design (ClearRx), to industrial & product design (Charmr), to interaction design (OLPC). And really, none of those projects was pure — they all drew on and mixed up all of those fields and more, to varying degrees.

The conclusion that I’ve come to, and where I’m at right now, is that it’s more the problem than the discipline that makes a design project Matter. It’s not an issue, in the broad view of things, what I end up calling myself, or even what my diploma says. Rather, it’s an issue of looking at the problems that are out there in the world, and looking at the skillset that I have and the skillset I could reasonably gain, and then applying the one to the other in order to try and fix some shit.

And we all know there’s a lot of broken shit that needs fixing.

(Stay tuned for Part II, in which I continue to gaze fixedly at my navel.)

Here’s something I’ve been pondering lately:

What does a portfolio look like for an information architect or an interaction designer? What sort of information should it contain, and in what media? How do you convey the “story” of an interaction that you designed, when an interaction is a narrative that may be different every time?

I get portfolios for graphics designers. “Here’s a poster, a layout, an icon, some graphics for a site that I designed.” And I get resumes for tech jobs. (In fact, I have one.) “I speak Java, Perl, Flex and SQL.” But how the heck are you supposed to impress anyone with sitemaps and Visio wireframes?

And if you do show examples of live sites, what if you didn’t design the visual layer? How do you tell people to focus on the right things that you’re trying to show?

I feel a little bit stuck on this at the moment. Any advice or examples out there???

I love the crazy light reflections off the keys.

This is damn cool.

Called Teleshadow the system pipes video of what people are doing at home via the net to their friends’ houses.

But instead of showing images in full motion and colour, Teleshadow turns them into shadow outlines projected on the inside of a small decorative lamp.

Creator Shunpei Yasuda said the shadow presence system aims to fill the gap between live video and static images.

I love products that incorporate modern tech without coming off as “consumer electronics”. Technology doesn’t always have to scream its presence; sometimes it can be more effective by making itself virtually invisible.

It seems like just about once a month or so, some article about women in IT comes up on Slashdot. I usually read them, figuring they may be somewhat relevant.

However, a couple of things about this article bothered me, although it took me awhile to figure out why.

The gist of the article seems to be that many women leave the IT profession because of issues with work/life balance, specifically around parenting. Much of the advice given is about how to balance children and a career.

In her early years as an IT professional, Monique McKeon found that work/life balance was a struggle. Two of her early employers — a large software firm and a Big 6 consultancy — were somewhat unclear on the concept. At the consultancy, her travel schedule kept her out of town more than she was comfortable with. Then, when her first child was born, the bottom fell out.

First off, shouldn’t this then be “Making IT Work for Parents”, or even “Making IT Work for People With a Life”? Why point the finger at women in particular, as if only women have family responsibilities?

My theory about that one is that women are just the biggest and most visible group of “non-stereotypical” IT workers. But using “women” as a shorthand for “people with lives and responsibilities” creates two problems.

I. It’s not just women.
This article creates the impression that these problems are specific to women, which ignores men who are dealing with the same issues of balancing family and work.

II. It’s not all women.
The article seems to imply that “woman” is synonymous with “mother” and that all women need some kind of special accommodations that men don’t require. That perception could actually penalize women (like me) who don’t want kids and are more career-minded.

I feel like there’s a tricky line here to walk. On the one hand, parenting is obviously important, and I have nothing but respect for anyone who choses to become a parent. And I strongly believe that workplaces should not penalize anyone for doing so. I believe that IT (and every other field) should be made to work for people with real lives. (Fortunately, the place I work right now seems pretty good about that.)

On the other hand, those of us women who are not parents, and who do have different priorities, shouldn’t have to face reduced opportunities.

I’m just starting to get really burnt on these “Why There Are Never Any Women in IT Anywhere Ever” type of articles. I feel like the intention is good, but the execution often just contributes to harmful stereotypes.

Right near the beginning of the Yoga Sutra, there’s this verse that basically says that continual practice without attachment to the results leads to peace of mind. (I’m paraphrasing heavily, of course.) Patanjali’s talking about spiritual practice and meditation, but lately I’ve been thinking about how well this idea also applies to work and the process of design.

I’ll try to explain what I mean by looking at this statement in three parts.

continual practice
Personally, I find it liberating to think of the process of designing as practice; and not only practice, but continual practice, a process that never ends. Designing is never done, you’re never actually there; at some point you stop and move on to the next problem, but there are very few (if any) design problems that are ever really truly solved. Designing is a lifelong (or at least careerlong) process of practicing and getting better, using the lessons from one problem to solve the next, and responding to the continually-changing demands of environment, tools, and user expectations.

without attachment to the results
At least where I work currently, design is very collaborative. Not keeping an attachment to your results, to the specific details of “your” design, is an important trait for any designer who wants to function well in these critiques and brainstorm sessions. Even better, if everyone continually practices design but remains unattached to their particular results, the best ideas will be able rise to the top through discussion and collaboration. This can only happen if no one is so strongly attached to an idea that they’re unwilling to look at it from other points of view.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t strongly advocate for ideas that you think are the best. However, that advocacy has to be backed up with a good rationale, which you can use to persuade others. Again, that goes back to the idea of continual practice, which (ideally) leads to good designs backed up by research and good rationale.

leads to peace of mind
Let me tell a story. For the past ~5 months, I’ve been in an Information Architect rotation, as part of this entry-level training program. During that ~5 months, I think that one thing out of everything that I’ve designed has actually been implemented. I could let this bother me, and I won’t lie, sometimes it does. I like to joke that if you want a project killed, just put me on it; it’s sure to get canceled soon after. But that’s life, at least in a large corporation with shifting priorities and lots of stakeholders, and especially when you’re a more junior type of person.

Nonetheless, I’m a basically optimistic (though impatient) person, and thinking of design in the ways I described above helps me feel better about the situation. If designing is a continual practice, then nothing that I’ve done has really been wasted, because every step leads into something else, and the act of designing itself gains some kind of value. And trying to remain unattached to my specific ideas keeps me from becoming discouraged or resentful. Hence, the two together lead to peace of mind.

I definitely don’t manage to attain this attitude all or even most of the time. But I think that, as an aspiring designer, it’s an excellent attitude to strive for. It’s also an interesting variation on a very old idea. Who knew that ancient spiritual insights could have practical relevance in the modern world?

I’m back! Well, sort of.

I’m in the process of rethinking this blog at the moment, trying to develop some more focus in terms of what I write about. Now that I’ve lost all of my two previous readers anyway, due to not updating for more than a month, it seems like an ideal time for a site redesign.

Some of the things that I have written about in the past will probably go away. I haven’t really felt comfortable writing about religion here, even though I have a lot to say on the topic — this doesn’t feel like an entirely safe or appropriate space for that. I may at some point start another blog that’s a religion blog, or just move all that into my LiveJournal space. Also, since I’ve moved out of Philadelphia proper, I don’t really have an engagement with the urban environment in the way that I did before, so that topic’s going to go away as well.

Of the ones I have now, that leaves writing and technology. Writing is really the broader topic of “creative stuff”, as I’ve been shifting back into a more visual art mode lately and away from creative writing. Technology will stay, which really leaves two topics: design/technology, which will be more essays, thoughts and commentary, and creativity, which will be my chance to continue to inflict my own personal art hacking on all (two) of you. That’s how I’m thinking about it right now, anyways.

I also want a visual redesign too, because the current one is wearing on me. It’ll be at least a month before I can get to that, though.