book

Core strengths

Roy — Mon, 05 Feb 2018 23:28:07 +0000

Sub title

“Plan and model digital products for today and tomorrow.”

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The Designing Connected Content book has arrived. “Plan and model digital products for today and tomorrow.” I have yet to dive in but I see Drupal screenshots and lists of field types like entity reference, long text (formatted), boolean, number (float), etc.

Today a content strategist collegue asked me about that list builder thing in Drupal. Show items of type x, filtered by y, sorted by x and only show fields 1, 3 and 6 of each item. And is it available for Drupal 8 as well?

Yes, that’s 1. Field UI and 2. Views module, which are both part of the Drupal core package.

We take Drupal core features for granted that other systems are still struggling with. They are also features people struggle with in Drupal because of hard to use user interfaces. I would love to see research and design work happen around how we can improve Field UI and Views UI.

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book

designing connected content

drupalplanet

content modeling

Pragmatic Imagination notes, part 3

Roy — Sun, 04 Feb 2018 23:00:04 +0000

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Minding the gap / resolving the gap

Vygotsky: considers human perception as a triangular relation between Subject, Object and the cultural Medium the subject belongs to.

Subject to Object = direct experience (shape, color, smell, etc.)
Subject through Medium to Object = indirect experience, mediated by feelings, memories, cultural/social context

Both ways of connecting with the Object occur in parallel. The object can be more or less familiar to our cultural frame. The more unfamiliar, the wider the gap. The imagination is called upon to fill in the difference. Unfamiliar objects, events become more familiar over time. Objects and places develop patinas of meaning.

The imagination is used to close the gap, figuring out how to fit the novel into the known. In reasoning this happens in different ways:

deductive: small gap, closed easily & quickly
inductive: not all facts are know, the gap is wider. Might need analogy and metaphor to find ways to explain the novel/unknown.
abductive: critical pieces are missing. The gap is too wide to to close directly: we need to start to speculate. Instead of directly closing the gap, multiple options need to be generated to work on the space of the gap.

At the far edge of abductive reasoning, into speculation, the imagination shifts from sense-making to sense-breaking. The gap is widened first with multiple ideas, scenarios, hypotheses. Then, together with reasoning, these are worked upon to close the gap, assimilating the novelty into the known.

Pragmatic Imagination: imagination put to purpose

(The book changes pace here, outlining principles 3 to 6 in quick succession).

So, again: the imagination powers a whole range of cognitive processes. From know to novel, from sense-making to sense-breaking. Especially the poïetic part of the spectrum is needed to work on the challgens of a rapidly changing and interrelated world. (poiesis: the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before).

Making the imagination pragmatic means:

The actual must be seen in light of meaningful, purposeful possibilities and opportunities

Any event one experiences can be interrogated in terms of what it means and what other events, or relationships, it might lead to, what possibilities it might open up.

Thought and action are indivisible and reciprocal.

Thought and action for meaningful anticipation of the world. Thought and action for turning ideas into action.

The imagination must be instrumentalized to turn ideas into action

To move from “anticipating the world” to “turning ideas into action” requires envisioning and scaffolding of unfolding action, the imagination must be instrumentalized.

Because the imagiation is not under conscious control, we need to understand, find and design ways to set it in motion and scaffold it throughout meaningful activity.

We need new tools for setting the imagination in motion, scaffold its emergence and then instrumentalizing its products to accomplish real world things.

Setting the imagination in motion

Ways to overcome the fear of the blank canvas and trick the free play imagination into action.

The Surrealists invented methods to spark the imagination: cadavre exquis, nonsense, automatic writing, free association, etc.
Introducing chance as an agent for coming up with new ideas
Drugs
The derivé, an urban “drifting” invented by The Situationists.
Evocative objects and precedents

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Ann Pendleton-Julian

John Seely Brown

Pragmatic Imagination

book

Pragmatic Imagination notes, part 2

Roy — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 21:34:02 +0000

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Part 1: The imagination plays a role in a wide spectrum of cognitive processes, from perception to reasoning.

The spectrum

Perception
Reasoning
- Deductive – conclusion follows directly from given premises
- Inductive – some missing pieces for the conclusion
- Abductive – not enough facts available for a clear conclusion. Define “best guess” hypotheses that can be tested. See: Sherlock Holmes
Speculation
Experimentation
Free play

“At the far edge of abductive reasoning, as personfified by Holmes, we begin to sense a shift in our spectrum. Imaginations becomes an agent of more than perception and reasoning. It becomes fundamental to wellbeing and generative activities that aid the development of the individual in society and culture as well as the development of society and culture themselves.”

Speculation

Pragmatist philosophy, originating in the 1870’s in the US, was a “movement that sought to clarify meaning in terms of action”. Action and meaning as a continuous exchange. They understood the actual in light of the possible. Everything is understood as 1, what is in the here and now, and 2, the possibilities the imagination lets us see in it (speculation): “By generating a whole host of potential versions of what is present and actual today, it drives inquiry, which drives action, which in turn druves knowledge building that leads back to action”.

John Dewey’s concept of a ‘Moral Imagination’ extends “what could be” to “what should be”. Using empathy and creatively imagining possibilities to think through the consequences of a particular scenario as a way to find the ethical option(s).

“The purpose of speculation is to unsettle the present rather than to predict the future.”

Speculation is not fantasizing, the imagination is still grounded in present reality, then extended into possibilities. Speculative imagination is generative and can be used for:

Emphatic projection
Creatively exploring possibilities
Presenting possibilities as viable by giving them texture

The experimental imagination

Beyond speculation we arrive in the experimental domain: “trying things out in an emerging context”.

The experimental imagination is about “forming images in action”. Doing something driven by curiosity, looking for novelty. Supported by the individuals personal context, knowledge and skills, but these are held in the background so that the experiment itself can lead the way in a continous back and forth between imagining and doing. A.k.a. improvisation.

“A great irony of the improvisers lot is that there is an enourmous technical requirement to meet… yet there is also a need to transcend if not negate it in order to find something truly novel.” – Keith Jarrett

The difference with the speculative imagination is that the experimental imagination turns of self-monitoring, self-censoring.

“The experimental imagination builds momentum by turning off critical faculties so that improisational making/action can take over."

Free play imagination

The experimental imagination still starts from a question and/or an individuals creative context and skills. It’s focussed play. Instead, the free play imagination is after

Bondary crossing (or breaking) instead of boundary pushing
Disrupting versus experimenting
Breaking with one’s creative history
Surprise and awe

In the zone between abductive reasoning and speculation, the role of the imagination shifts from creating understanding through synthesis to generative creation of new possible understandings.

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Pragmatic Imagination

book

Ann Pendleton-Julian

John Seely Brown

Taking notes while reading Pragmatic imagination

Roy — Sun, 21 Jan 2018 21:39:15 +0000

Sub title

“Imagination is it own form of courage.”

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Reading Pragmatic Imagination by Ann Pendleton-Julian and John Seely Brown. A short but dense book that defines imagination as the instrument that can help us navigate a connected, changing and contingent world. It defines imagination as a wide range of activity that can be used for agency and impact in today’s world.

Defining imagination

“The power of humans to form internal images of objects and situations.” The imagination relies on stored images which can be activated and then worked on to form novel combinations. These stored images come from experiences in both the outside and inside world. The imagination adapts (combines, reworks) these images to create new ideas and new behaviour.

How imagination differs from creativity

“Novelty” as the shared defining criterium for both imagination and creativity. But:

Creativity

Is about invention, creation, producing something new in the “real” world: external
Happens over a longer, social, time scale
Introduces a change in the world with the capacity to effect social and cultural change
Has purpose and this is aware of definitions and constraints of the context it is produced in

Imagination

Is about creating mental images: internal
Happens in flashes of micro seconds
Because it is internal, it only affects the individual
Is not held to definitions or constraints because it does not aim to produce a specific outcome

Where creativity is purposeful and aims towards a “product” in the “real” world, imagination is emergent and the result is the newly created internal image itself.

Precisely because it is play over purpose and not beholden to constraints or definitions, the “products” of the imagination can be put to pragmatic use in an uncertain world.

A spectrum of imagination

Historically, the imagination was perceived as an undisciplined force for artistic creativity, fantasy, radical discovery, invention. Solving “real” problems in the “real” world would be better left to logical reason.

Plato was suspicious about the irrational imagination and found it inadequate for achieving real knowledge. Aristotle saw the imagination as the necessary but not particularly creative mediator between sensory perception and building an understanding about those perceptions.

Which turns out to be an unproductive split without any scientific basis. To the contrary, the imagination plays an important role in a wide spectrum of cognitive activities.

Role of the imagination in perception and reasoning

Modern philosophy and cognitive research has greatly expanded the role of imagination, including “the capacity to form images that aid the various processes of reasoning, and to form images that integrate sensory data in the process of perception, itself”.

Via Hobbes (17th century) and Kant (18th century) the imagination, as a tool for transferring experience into memory, becomes foundational to all meaningful experience.

20th century congnitive psychology further expanded the role of imagination by showing that the imagination is necessary for first order perception, itself. Because humans are embedded in culture. This culture influences the human and thus it also impacts how sensory information gets translated into perception. The mental images we form from perception are influenced by the culturale frame or lense we use for making sense. Different people will have different perceptions about the same event or object. (See also: different or even conflicting eye witness accounts of a single event).

So, imaginations supports a wide spectrum of activities, from perception through reasoning to novelty.

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N.K. Jemisin – The Fifth Season

Roy — Sun, 07 Jan 2018 19:22:00 +0000

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Almost done reading The Fifth Season. It’s as good as people say it is.

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book

4 types of IT work in The Phoenix Project

Roy — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 22:56:13 +0000

Just finished reading The Phoenix Project for the third time. I’m fascinated. So many important concepts. One of the more enlightening ones for me are the four types of IT work:

Business projects

Projects around delivering direct customer value.

Internal IT projects

Infrastructure and operations projects, internal improvements. The production line for delivering the above business projects.

Changes

Fixed, changes, improvements generated by the two above.

Unplanned work

Incidents, fixing problems in the three previous types of work. Unplanned work can significantly reduce the amount of time available for planned work.

One simple insight: in order to deliver the product or service you need to work on and improve the tools you use to deliver.

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book

devops

Summary of Lean UX

drupal — Wed, 17 Feb 2016 09:23:14 +0000

Sub title

A book by Jeff Gothelf, with Josh Seiden

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3 Foundations

Design thinking (User centered design, using design approaches to innovate and solve business problems)
Agile software development (individuals & interactions, working software, collaboration, responding to change)
Lean startup method (build, measure, learn)

Principles

Cross functional teams
Small, dedicated, colocated
Progress = outcomes not output
Problem focussed teams
Remove waste
Small batch sizes
Continuous discovery
Getting out of the building
Shared understanding
Antipattern: Rockstars, Gurus & Ninjas
Externalising the work
Making over analysis
Learning over growth
Permission to fail
Getting out of the deliverables business

The Lean UX loop:

Declare assumptions
Create an MVP
Run an experiment
Feedback & research
Goto 1

Process

Vision, framing and outcomes

Start with assumptions instead of requirements. Create and test hypotheses:

Assumptions: what we believe to be true
Hypotheses: morge granular descriptions of our assumptions that target specific areas of the product or workflow
Outcomes: the signal we seek from the market to help (in)validate the hypothesis
Personas: models of the people for whom we believe we are solving a problem
Features: the changes or improvements we believe will drive the outcomes we seek

Collaborative design

Everybody gets to design
Low fidelity artefacts increase collaboration
Build shared understanding

Techniques:

Design studio
Style guides and pattern libraries
Collaboration for distributed teams

MVP’s & Experiments

Determine product focus: deliver value or increase learning
MVP: Do people need it? Will it provide value? Will it be usable?
Prototype: Who will interact? Learning what? Time available?
Experiments without prototypes: email, google adwords., landing page, button to nowhere

Feedback and research

Collaborative research techniques
Continuous research techniques (3 users every thursday)
What to test, what results to expect
Incorporate the customers voice
A/B testing
Reconcile contradictory feedback

Lean UX & SCRUM

Making organisational shifts

Shift from output to outcomes
From limited roles to collaborative capabilities
Embrace new skills
Create cross functional teams
Crate small teams
Create open, collaborative workspaces
Not relying on heroes
Eliminate big design up front
Speed over aesthetics
Value problem solving
Embrace UX debt
Shift agency culture
Work with 3rd party vendors
Navigate documentation standards
Being realistic about your environment
Managing up and out

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