Today, Core 77 launched their annual Hack 2 Work series, essential tips and articles for the design professional. You should consider stopping what you’re doing right now, and going to check out posts from Michael Bierut on How to Make Your Client’s Logo Bigger Without Making Their Logo Bigger, Alissa Walker on How to Shower People With Gifts, Andy Polaine on 19 Books Every Design Professional Should Own, Steve Portigal on 5 Keys to Successful Design Research, Steve Heller on Beat the Clock, and many others—those are just a few.

I’m honored to have been asked to participate in the series, and had two posts to contribute:

Check Please: How to Learn About Your Clients From Their Table Manners

“There are a few dozen Emily Post rules about what the client should or should not have done with the napkin and his or her elbows before the food comes, but none is as important as what the client does with another two objects: the salt and pepper shakers. When the food arrives, does your client salt and pepper the food before he or she tastes it? If so, this is a clear sign that your client is potentially closed-minded, not open to new ideas, or set in his or her ways. If your client first tastes the food, and then adds salt or pepper, tremendous. This suggests your client has opinions, and is not afraid to exercise them—but only after the voice of the “creator” (in this case the chef) has been fairly given a chance first.” Read full article

5 Simple Ways to Let Go and Give in to New Digital Routines

“At this point, you’re web-sophisticated. You most likely engage some combination of online and desktop apps to Get Things Done, Get Real, strive toward a Four Day Work Week, or generally Life Hack. If you are prone to efficiency shortcuts, chances are fair to excellent that you’re routinely looking for ways to improve the way you manage your business. But we all get attached to routines—sometimes so much so that we miss the opportunity to streamline. If you run a small business in particular, you need to be a bit of everything. Being process-aerodynamic is crucial. The way to be a jack-of-all-trades is to have the right tools in place so you can spend more time on the things you’re good at.” Read full article

Backpacks, notebooks, and leather shoes in need of a firm breaking-in; even if years are significant since the days when there was a purchase protocol for attending school, the metaphors for tradition are no less vivid.

More than 60 years ago, Silas Rhodes and Burne Hogarth founded the Cartoonists and Illustrators School with three faculty members and 35 students, creating a model whereby faculty were working professionals and courses were held at night. This model allowed students to work during the days, brushing up on professional skills if desired. By blurring boundaries between the profession and academia, the founders set pace for art education going forward. They, simply, started a tradition.

The school changed its name in 1956 to the School of Visual Arts, but the tradition remains unchanged. This blurring of the lines between profession and academia still holds true today — more than 60 years later, SVA is a multi-disciplinary institution with more than 900 faculty members predominantly still professionals in the field.

Today, we added to this tradition the new MFA in Interaction Design program — a graduate-level program at the School of Visual Arts with 18 graduate students and 25 faculty members.

An article that will be published in the September issue of Interactions Magazine by Alex Wright (full disclosure: Alex is also on the faculty), reviews the following about the curriculum:

The SVA curriculum tries to give students a grounding in design fundamentals, while helping them cultivate the soft skills so often required in the modern workplace: strategic thinking, entrepreneurship, ethics, and communicating with clients. “Designers need to be rhetoricians, able to articulate the value of their work,” says Danzico. They must also be “improvisers” who can work with emerging paradigms like gesture, physical computing, and other still-emerging forms.

To that end, design is what we’ve come this far to do, and what we’ll carry forward after we leave. The pursuit of it involves unique skills crucial to shaping experiences and creating lasting value in our society.

I’m looking forward to watching this group build on their skills over the next couple of years — and our program both carrying forward a tradition and charting some new ones of our own.

Yesterday was a landmark day for type (and type enthusiasts everywhere), as Typedia, a shared encyclopedia of typefaces, was unveiled. Typedia has been in development since 2006 when Jason Santa Maria first had the idea, and I’ve been watching him masterfully pull together the project since.

It’s really an honor to have been part of this kind of team, having the privilege to watch structure and design unfold as ideas and form take shape. Weighing in on features like the Forum (how much do people want to participate?), the Add section (how many fields are too many?), and Good Deeds (how can we engage people to add more?) were enormously interesting to be a part of early on.

The team is planning more posts to explain the information architecture-to-design process in detail in weeks to come. For now, I’m delighted to watch it grow, so if you’re one of the few who hasn’t taken a look yet, you can follow Typedia on Twitter, or if you want to give feedback directly, drop the team a line.

Thanks to Jason for including me in the project!

When yesterday I got an email signed “rgds,” a trite valediction closing an email to a group of professionals, I stopped. Rgds? Really? Was the email author intending to communicate a familiarity with his audience by dropping the vowels, or simply just a level of tired sophistication with the keyboard—too familiar with typing that vowels were an interference and, therefore, a waste of time between us. Or was it simply that everything is now bound by constraints even when we are constraintless?

No matter the reason, vowels are the victims, and it seemed fitting to compose a quick ode in response.

Ode To Vowels
To what consonant altar have we subscribed to?
       And what innocent A E I O or U has been sacrificed?
Thou still impoverished and vanishing ever more quickly,
       Dear friends! Who can now explain,
The reason more aptly than our current style:
       Why we’ve simply banished the unaware vowel?

Just as quickly as we forget E-I-E-I-O, we adopt truncation,
       In email, we sign “rgrds;” in retribution, we give “thx,”
Too much in a hurry to round out the fuller sounds.
       What mad pursuit do consonants offer? What ecstasy might they bring?
If “I before E except after C” is relinquished to “merely C,”
       What substance do we have left before?

Thanks to Keats.

When it’s clear summer has officially dethroned spring to become the sole proprietor of the season, my thoughts immediately turn to tradition. Tradition, as a condition of summer integrity, is crucial as it begets the connections between idleness and frenzy, between new and old, and between intellectual stimulation and lazy creativity. But no matter what the parameters, one thing is consistent from summer to summer — the critical nature of the prefix “re.”

You see, the prefix “re,” borrowed from Latin meaning “again” or even “again and again,” signals the critical cadence of summer, as summer is perhaps the underdog season of tradition itself. As footloose as we imagine ourselves in summer — barefoot and lightly clothed (apologies, San Francisco) — it’s actually replete with rituals as rigorous as the December shopping season. “Re” is affixed to just about every activity, signaling a return to familiarity, a reset, and our revelry in it.

As I received an email today about SXSW 2010, I’m reminded again of the importance of being invited back, being re-invited. More humbling than being invited to the most interesting barbeque/game/picnic/design conference/etc. is sometimes just being invited back a second, a third, a fourth time. This summer, I’m attending the tenth annual summer barbeque with friends here in New York City (a sentence I may have formerly thought an oxymoron). Re-invitation is the highest form of compliment.

To be part of a tradition, again and again, means we’re building something. Because we are all craftspeople, in this respect, summer is our time. Whether its re-reading the same paperback I’ve read for too many years or taking the same beach trip to the very same place with the very same view, I am building. Re-visiting, re-reading, repeating, re-inviting, and remembering are all forms of prototyping and critical to our craft.

Here’s to another summer of building.

Inbox Zero. To get to the unimaginable, unattainable place only reserved for the likes of those disciplined enough or courageous enough to manage it, one has to be comfortable with “delete.” Delete as a colloquial term is fairly recent, but as part of our language and social structure, the concept of deleting is clearly not. We’ve been promptly disposing of items that others have prepared for us for centuries.

Why then, does one feel like an utter failure when one must delete an email without having taken action on it? Are there precedents for these defeatist feelings in other aspects of our lives that we can draw upon?

Time, Work, and Value

I wanted to examine what other common goods that I typically receive, somewhat unprompted, and explore them across two axes: time (length of time I keep the goods) and work (the perceived effort it took the giver to prepare said goods). The hypothesis, of course, is that perceived work influences how long I might keep something. If I think someone spent a long time composing an email to me (e.g., it contains an original poem), I’m less likely to delete it immediately. Perceived value—both monetary and emotional—is another axis worth exploring that could influence decision making.

(With all due respect to my family) I present this chart, showing what is surprisingly a non-emotional relationship of goods to work. The higher or more intense the perceived effort (e.g., email from family member or work-related email), the more apt I am to delete it right away. Other items which require less work and whose trajectory is clearly going to be shorter-lived for me, stay around for close to a year before getting tossed. The exception to this pattern, it seems, is greeting cards. I have always had a difficult relationship with them, and keep them for up to a year, moving them around in disorganized piles from one surface to the next.

Permanent WayBacking

What I can only guess, then, is that items get deleted immediately if I am certain there is a formal or informal archiving system in place. Family members can be returned to, however insensitive it may be, to ask about something they said or intended in a heartfelt email. Auto-generated emails can be re-auto-generated. Work-related email is semi-disposable, as our co-workers can often be tracked down. And tweets, of course, are archived.

So the hurdle to deleting seems to be less about parting with something and more about retrieving the thing, should that need ever arise. And, therefore, the waiting period begins until the thing’s usefulness proves unnecessary.

When bright people such as Gordon Bell are recording a lifetime of data and Pattie Maes’ and Pranav Mistry’s work on the SixthSense are potentially allowing humans to augment the physical world with information from the digital, why does a simple, archaic-even, action like “delete” still feel like such a faux pas?

I would argue that it shouldn’t.

All this time, we’ve been afraid of retrieval, not deleting. I would argue that whatever statute of limitations we’ve been working under has passed, and the etiquette around deleting is over.

I’m only doing a few conferences this spring and summer, as I’m focusing most of my attention on building the new master’s program. But starting tomorrow morning, I’ll be heading to the SXSW Interactive Festival, the not-to-be-missed get-together, where I’ll be attending for the fourth time.

Designers and Developers: Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?, Tuesday, March 17, SXSW, Austin, TX

Often times designers and developers’ relationships are contentious. Designers want features that would require two Googles to run and developers want features that nobody but the nerdiest of the nerds would care about. This panel will showcase some of the top designers and developers who have worked through their differences and feel they’re making better products as a result. Sometimes designers know users’ needs best and sometimes developers can enhance a feature with their innate understanding of the system. Knowing this, why can’t we all just get along?

I had the opportunity to do this same panel with these folks at FOWD in New York in 2008, and we’re being joined by a few others this year in Austin. Looking forward to the honor of mitigating the designer-developer waters again on stage with:

• Chris Lea, Media Temple/Virb
• Ryan Sims, Virb
• Joe Stump, Digg
• Daniel Burka, Digg/Pownce
• Andy Beaumont, Flutter + Wow
• Rob Corradi, NeonState

The AIGA Y Design Conference, Saturday, March 28, San Diego, CA

Joined by speakers such as Lorraine Wil, Yolanda Santosa, Mark Randall, and Shel Perkins. Debbie Millman is moderating this event.

The most important natural resource the world needs right now is creative energy; the force that develops ideas, discovers solutions and pushes business forward. During times of dramatic change, creative thinkers have always seized the opportunity to design the future; and now it’s your moment to shine.

Dot Dot Dot Lecture Series, Second Wednesday each month, New York, NY

While it’s not outside New York proper where I live, each month, I organize, curate, and run the Dot Dot Dot Lecture Series. In advance of the MFA Interaction Design program I’m building for fall 2009, these events are meant for broad explorations of interaction design, business, and aesthetic inspiration. Practitioners and thought leaders give short talks (10 minutes each!) in an informal setting (a bar). Wisdom is revealed and methods are shared in a environment intended to satisfy both social and scholarly pursuits.

We’ve been honored to be joined by the following 20 speakers over the past five months. If I’ve been a less frequent speaker at conferences and conference attendee, it’s because I feel like I’ve been organizing mini-conferences each month at the White Rabbit in the Lower East Side. And best of all: they’re free.

• Rachel Abrams, Creative Director, Turnstone Consulting LLC, and forthcoming faculty member, MFA Interaction Design
• Jake Barton, founder and principal, Local Projects, Forthcoming faculty, MFA Interaction Design
• Jen Bekman, Founder/Curator Jen Bekman Gallery + 20×200
• Nick Bilton, Design Integration Editor and User Interface Specialist at The New York Times and The Times Research & Development Lab
• Tom Bodkin, design director, New York Times
• Brendan Dawes, magneticNorth
• Elisabeth M. De Morentin, Illinois Institute of Technology, Institute of Design
• Christopher Fahey, founding partner, Behavior; forthcoming faculty, MFA Interaction Design
• Nicholas Felton, Graphic Designer, co-founder, Daytum
• Rebekah Hodgson, Forthcoming Faculty, MFA Interaction Design
• Chloe Gottlieb, Executive Creative Director of Interaction Design, R/GA, forthcoming faculty, MFA Interaction Design, SVA
• Adam Greenfield, head of design direction at Nokia and author of the forthcoming The City Is Here For You To Use
• Jeff Hoefs, littleBits, Smart Design
• Gary Hustwit, Director, Helvetica, Objectified
• Phil Kline, Composer and Public Sound Artist
• Jason Kottke, Blogger, Designer, kottke.org
• Jason Severs, Principal Designer, frog design
• Clive Thompson, Contributing Writer for New York Times Magazine and columnist for Wired magazine
• Andrew Sloat, graphic designer and videomaker
• Soo-in Yang, Founder and principal of The Living, adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture

I may sneak up on the train to CHI ‘09 for a day, and am disappointed to be missing the 10th anniversary of the Information Architecture Summit (but that’s what Twitter is for…).

I hope to meet some of you at one of these other events before too long!

January marks a fresh start for many, but for the MFA Interaction Design program, it marks a milestone in our development. We’re receiving our first round of applications January 15 — just under two weeks away. I’m delighted at the prospect of reviewing the first candidates for the MFA in Interaction Design program’s inagural class this fall. In the meantime, the department is busy with some upcoming events.

Online, Elsewhere

This past fall, we had the opportunity to work with the venerable Airbag Industries on crafting a new department website. Working on the design with Greg Storey and Ethan Marcotte, Ethan on programming, and Ryan Irelan on development was a treat, as we’ve been a fan of the interactive work they do, as well as their insights on design and development, for quite some time. The site uses the identity developed by The Heads of State. As a platform, it has served as a critical communication tool for the department on topics from curriculum, to critical questions for prospective students, to information on events and lectures.

Upcoming Lectures

Some eighty or so enthusiasts of interaction design have been attending the intimate Dot Dot Dot Lectures in New York City, the MFA Interaction Design lecture series — a venture we started in November. The series is meant for broad explorations of interaction design, business, and aesthetic inspiration. Practitioners and thought leaders give short, 10-minute talks in an informal setting.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

“The Urbanists”
New forms of public space are emerging. Through an exploration of new definitions of urban environments, our four lecturers will examine the time when public space is more personal, ubiquitous computing is allowing cities to have an impact on users’ experiences, and the design of services can truly be vibrant and meaningful. As inhabitants of a city, these things are often invisible in the way we craft experiences. Learn from four practitioners how to be more aware and discerning of their presence around us.

Featured Speakers:

• Rachel Abrams, Creative Director, Turnstone Consulting LLC, and forthcoming faculty member, MFA Interaction Design
• Adam Greenfield, head of design direction at Nokia and author of the forthcoming The City Is Here For You To Use
• Phil Kline, American composer
• Soo-in Yang, Founder and principal of The Living, adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture

More details and RSVP for this event

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

“The Modularists”
The insight required to craft modular systems requires designers to think through several variations of form and function — often beyond the original intent of an object, product, or service. How much does the design of discrete modules affect the integrity of the larger system? Should designers expect to wield control over any part of a user experience of modular systems? Four guest lecturers will examine a range of projects and trends in modular design, culminating in a discussion of the role of modularity among a group who value putting the power to create in the hands of everyone.

Featured Speakers:

• Nick Bilton, Designer, User Interface Specialist, Technologist, Journalist, Hardware Hacker, Researcher
• Brendan Dawes, Magnetic North
• Jeff Hoefs; littleBits, Smart Design

More details and RSVP for this event

Past, Future

Over the past couple months, recent speakers have included Gary Hustwit, Jason Severs, Principal Designer, frog design; Clive Thompson, Contributing Writer for New York Times Magazine and columnist for Wired magazine; Elisabeth M. De Morentin, Illinois Institute of Technology, Institute of Design; Tom Bodkin, design director, New York Times; Jake Barton, founder and principal, Local Projects; Andrew Sloat, graphic designer and videomaker; and Christopher Fahey, founding partner, Behavior; forthcoming faculty, MFA Interaction Design.

If you find yourself in New York City, please join us for an upcoming lecture!

Salutations have three simple purposes in email. They are the greeting, the email handshake. They set the tone and tempo for the communication that follows. And they establish a hierarchy, depending on whether the writer attaches a title (e.g., “Professor,” “Miss”), thereby creating a formal separation, or a lack thereof.

We know this; many of us have been writing some form of email now for nearly two decades.

But what we may not realize is that when an individual offers a salutation, he or she is not going through some formal motions. He or she is engaged in an activity of relationship-building. A variety of salutations will likely be used over the course of an email correspondence, and their evolution reveals something about the developing relationship (or the perceived one) between the correspondents. Just as you wouldn’t ignore body language that indicates whether someone is intending to shake your hand or high-five you, nor should you ignore email-greeting intentions — no matter how well you know someone.

Components of a Salutation

A quick review:

The components of a salutation are simple. The salutation of “Dear” is common in both formal and informal correspondence, as in “Dear John,” both in British and American English. While this is still standard in email communication, it is more acceptable to drop the “Dear” in email even with a stranger. A comma, colon, dash, exclamation point or other favorite punctuation mark follows the name, depending on formality.

Professional titles (“Doctor,” “The Honorable ____”) tend to increase the formality of the email immediately, while social titles (“Mr.,” “Mrs.”) are formal without being stuffy. Titles, however, when used between peers, should be dropped after one subsequent thread unless the intention is to make visible a difference in age or professional hierarchy.

Dropped Salutation

With the ability to directly message through services such as Twitter, salutations can be dropped altogether (more on that in a moment). In places where salutations are still being used, I was interested to study how a greeting evolved over the course of a single communication stream between two people or two parties.

In the second cycle of an email correspondence, it’s typical for writers to switch to a less formal greeting or drop the greeting altogether, depending on the relationship between the corresponders. In the third cycle, writers may drop the greeting altogether. Writers who start out with “Dear,” are more likely to drop the initial greeting, and writers who begin with the strong “Greetings!!” are most likely to be met with a non-salutation from their responders.

In an informal survey of my recent inbox, it appears that it takes approximately 3.5 emails for a responder to drop the greeting. Depending on the initial greeting and intent of the writer, the pattern appears as follows:

What’s consistent is really just the second email; the responder seems to match the perceived attitude of the note and respond with a greeting. The exception, however, is time. After even a bit of time has passed, the cycle must begin all over again.

Response Responsibility

If one party fails to respond in kind to the salutation he or she’s been dealt, the return email lacks empathy. Each salutation must match the attitude and subsequent cadence that’s unfolded over the course of the conversations. (This, assuming there is time to pay attention to such things. Carrying on as if there is time to do so.)

In the 1898 book, A Guide to Letter Writing for Ladies, which has some fairly stringent instructions on how to compose a salutation as a woman: “If they wish to cultivate your acquaintance, the fact will soon be evident from the tone of their letters to you. Then, but not until then, you may respond, if you wish to, with proportionate friendliness.” A party should change the salutation (and valediction for that matter) to match the growing relationship and increased informality that’s being introduced by one person over a series of threads.

Emerging Etiquette

Today, among friends and close colleagues, skipping the salutation is accepted — preferred even — and quick email communication has been all but abandoned for the 140 characters of Twitter direct messages, bypassing the email client altogether. The job of salutations is now done by the pre-qualification of Twitter Followers and, therefore, no greeting is necessary. Relationships expedite as a result, is one theory. So there is a Twitter/Email divide forming that will be interesting to watch.

Relationships, not Rigmarole

Clearly the 1898-style advice is far outdated, but what is still imperative, even today, is that one not ignore the signs of a salutation. A salutation is the beginning of an emerging relationship, and the signs have to be reciprocated as such. Whether it be guidelines from Henry Dreyfuss in Designing for People (1955) on mapping the human body to forge ergonomic interfaces, or Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) on interpreting facial gestures, or Donald Norman in The Design of Everyday Things (1990) on observing people to create natural affordances, we’ve been urged to pay attention to human responses so we can better design for people. It would be interesting to pay that same attention to our own communication with one another as relationships continue to evolve in new ways.

Melissa Pierce, the documentary filmmaker who is exploring the link between authenticity and creativity, recently sat me down to inquire about my own take on the matter for her upcoming film, Life in Perpetual Beta. Whether there is a link between finding what is authentic and what is creative, I’m still not certain.

To me, part of the answer is vaguely reminiscent of John Dewey’s pursuit of the link between perception and recognition, a topic I’ve brought up too many times to mention again here. For my own creative moves forward, however, I know I’m remaining authentic if I don’t get too comfortable, which it seems became the focus for the cut for the film clip here.

I was thrilled to spend time with Melissa, Adrienne Brawley, and Jane Quigley. A fine group of film enthusiasts who surely had a lot to teach me on the value of intuition. More on the project here.

This summer, I announced we’re putting together a new program — an MFA in Interaction Design at the School of Visual Arts. While I continue to be busy with the details of putting the program together, I wanted to pause for an update of how things are coming together:

Applications Open

This week marks the official start of online applications opening for fall 2009. Prospective students can apply online through January 15, 2009, although we’ll continue to take applications on a rolling admissions basis afterward until all spaces have been filled for the program.

You can find out more on the program’s application requirements or go directly to the application here.

Well-Informed

Whether you’re interested in applying to the program (or if you’re going to be in town for Future of Web Design on November 3-4 and know someone who may be) come join us for our first Information Session on November 1 from 2-4PM. I’ll be giving an overview of the program and curriculum, and will be joined by some of the faculty for an afternoon of informal presentations, open audience Q&A, and discussion.

Register here if you’d like to stop by.

Look, Feel, Etcetera

We’ve been working with talented The Heads of State (whose work is also seen on the covers of Rosenfeld Media book covers) on identity for the program. You’ll start to see the identity being used — as it is in this poster to the left — everywhere program materials appear.

Location Location

SVA has the advantage of being located across one of the more beautiful horizontals of Manhattan — with departments and buildings from Gramercy through Flatiron and beyond. We’ve finalized the plans for a department space on the west side of the Flatiron District. In addition to classrooms, a convertible lecture hall, and necessary kitchen/hang out spaces, each student will have his or her own studio space for the duration of the two year tenure. During an upcoming information session at SVA, I’ll be showing the specifics of the plans for the space.

Following Us

We’ve had a number of new faculty additions over the past few weeks that I almost can’t contain myself waiting to announce. OK, not quite fair I know. But I’ll be revealing them on our mailing list later this week. You can always sign up here.

I may continue to post updates here, but will be moving all program-related posts to the new site we’re working on. In the meantime, looking forward to meeting some of you November 1!

Even if you’re trying to find one, the connections among Elliott Malkin’s body of work are hard to see. Part family history, part science project, part home-movie, his projects span genres that, initially, seem incidental. Yet many of his web-based projects—whether they investigate “butterfly vision” or install digital graffiti throughout lower Manhattan—are connected in one simple way: they all explore unofficial signals in public space. Taking on the invisible and the imagined, his projects invite viewers to imagine things that operate beyond their perception.

His latest project, Graffiti for Butterflies, is even further afield from his typical subjects as it deals with natural science. By directing Monarch butterflies to urban food sources it “is the equivalent of a fast-food sign on a highway, advertising rest stops (waystations) to monarchs traveling through the area.“

At the upcoming IDEA conference, Malkin will discuss some of his more renowned projects, as well as some material not yet seen online. I recently got some of his time to find out more about it.

Liz Danzico: As an artist, your work investigates the overlap between memory, information, and physical space. How did you begin investigating memory as a key part of your subject matter?

Elliott Malkin: I’m actually not that interested in memory in the abstract. I’m more interested in what’s stored there, namely, the memories. For a time I was obsessed with reconstructing the life of someone I had never met, my great-grandfather Hyman Victor. I enjoyed the process—excavating memories from those who knew him. But I was probably more interested in the traces of him that remained in the physical record, first at his gravestone, then on microfilm inside government archives.

Ultimately, I found much of the information about Hyman on genealogical websites. While the memories continued to disintegrate everywhere else, on the Internet they seemed fairly well preserved (though even these will fade.) I compiled the results of this investigation at Everything I Know About Hyman Victor. I also created a device called Cemetery 2.0 that attempts to address the limitations I saw in the way that information about people is preserved.

LD: What kinds of limitations were you seeing, and how did Cemetery 2.0 intend to remedy them?

EM: Mainly that gravestones tend to provide little information about the life of a person beyond their name, date of birth, and date of death. Almost all other information about the person’s life is decaying in public archives, dispersed in fragments across the Internet, and, sadly, fading away in survivors’ minds. My idea for Cemetery 2.0 was to bundle all surviving information with their actual grave. I did this by establishing a wireless connection to the world’s most comprehensive online genealogical database, where amateur genealogists are constantly uploading and revising records about their forebears.

LD: How has an investigation of your family helped you explore information and memory? Do they mind being the public subject of your art?

EM: I suspect Hyman Victor would have appreciated his great-grandson taking an interest in him. But I take it you’re asking me about my video projects, such as Family Movie, in which I have my parents reconstruct scenes from our trove of Super 8 home movies from the 1970s. They’ve seen themselves on the big screen and on my website, and seem to get a kick out of it. As for my interest in my family, it’s probably an expression of self-absorption. That said, I tend to widen my definition of self to encompass broader categories, such as American Jew. But not all of my work deals so directly with myself or my family. I have a feeling that when I finish Mother’s History of Birds, my autobiographical streak will be satisfied.

LD: Your latest project, Graffiti for Butterflies, seems to deviate from your previous work in that it deals with natural science. How does this project fit within the larger evolution of your work, if at all?

EM: Well, it uses graffiti, which are unofficial signals in public space, something I’ve dealt with numerous times in my previous work.

In eRuv I put semacode stickers on various street corners to reconstruct a sacred space that once existed on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In Modern Orthodox I took it a step further, using graffiti to demarcate conceptual boundaries directly onto the surface of the city. In both of these cases, my audience was human. In Graffiti for Butterflies, my audience included butterflies. And there is a further connection to my other work dealing with the invisible or the imagined, in that the ultraviolet aspect of the graffiti operates beyond our perception.

LD: What are the differences between designing for humans versus designing for, well, non-humans? How can you understand your audience when there’s no empathy, or possibility for empathy, between you and them?

EM: It can be argued that I don’t have much empathy with my human audience, but that’s a separate question. When designing for butterflies, I make assumptions about butterfly behavior based on my 7th grade-level understanding of Monarch butterflies. I know that they can see ultraviolet light and that they migrate through massive swathes of North America on their way down to Mexico each winter. So I created Graffiti for Butterflies to instigate some thinking about forms of interspecies communication that are, so to speak, symbiotic: aesthetically stimulating to humans, nutritionally beneficial to butterflies.

LD: What will you be talking about at IDEA?

I’m going to discuss my projects that deal with information and public space. I’ll start with some of the work I alluded to above pertaining to the eruv, a symbolic boundary erected around Jewish neighborhoods as part of the observation of the Sabbath, including eRuv and Modern Orthodox. I’ll also discuss Cemetery 2.0 and Graffiti for Butterflies, with plenty of material not seen on my website.

LD: By day, you work as an information architect for NYTimes.com. How does your work as an artist influence your work as an information architect?

EM: It’s not clear how they might influence one another in any explicit sense. At The Times I work within a set of organizational requirements. In my personal work, I define my own requirements. At The Times I iterate on established design patterns to help produce a consistent, quality user experience (and help invent entirely new patterns when necessary).

In my own work I think I see patterns, though I am able to control or distort these patterns in ways that would be absurd and unproductive in a professional context. And to me this draws an essential distinction between design and art. Design has a functional purpose. Designers have clients and external requirements. Art has any or none of the above. It has distortion for the sake of distortion, if I want it to. Or it can solve real-world problems. It’s up to me.

First published in Boxes and Arrows | View original

You can spot the novices immediately. Any expert emailer knows when to (and when not to) use a proper email signature when composing a mail. That automatic addendum that mail clients allow makes emailers both creatures of efficiency, and freaks of a sort, revealing personal datapoints to recipients without pause. Phone number, fax number, mobile number, home number, company name, job title, favorite inspirational quote — all at once. Most times, frankly, it’s a bit too much too soon.

Dress For The Job You Want

I like the premise of the email sig file; its etymology tied, loosely, to paper stationery itself. And since the Victorian era, stationery’s venerable purpose has been to uphold a certain social etiquette. The style and form the letter takes reveals much about the writer’s character and relationship to the recipient. According to Crane’s Blue Book of Stationery: The Styles and Etiquette of Letters Notes, and Invitations:

“As with the clothes you wear, the stationery you use makes a statement about you. When you create and assemble a stationery wardrobe, it will be helpful to keep in mind the impression you hope to make. Your stationery should reflect both your personality and the type of correspondence that you are sending.”

I can’t help but hold email sig files to the same standards. Does the signature seem pompous and unnecessary or modest and streamlined; exhaustive and repetitive or informative and direct; flowery and decorative or plain and simple? Whatever its contents, the signature is a devil of a revealer, uncovering details of an individual or organization that are typically not carefully considered. And the opportunities to be revealed continue to grow. Around 2006, a new form of signature started to appear: the mobile signature.

Briefly

I started to see the mobile sig file first appear as a default on the Blackberry, stating channel and carrier. Both information about delivery method and a bit of free marketing to the end receiver of the message, “Sent via BlackBerry from Cingular Wireless.”

But unlike desktop sig files, mobile sigs have emerged as a method to excuse and educate, rather than to provide a curriculum vitae. Mobile sigs report from the field, bringing information and apologies. Here are a selection some I’ve saved over the last several months:

By Device

• Sent from my iPhone
• Sent from my BatPhone
• Sent from my eyePhone
• Sent from my BlackBerry.
• Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile
• -message sent from handheld device.
• Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
• Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

By Location

• Sent from the road.
• Sent remotely with index fingers.
• Sent from the streets of New York

By Shortcoming

• Tapped with one finger on an iPhone. Please forgive any typos.
• Apologies for brevity and any blunders in spelling; this was sent from my iPhone.

For Brief’s Sake

There’s no poetry in these signatures, but there is an admirable attempt at clarity and brevity. My own mobile signature used to read, “Note: Sent from iPhone” until I realized its fundamental issue. Walking around San Francisco after judging an award competition, I was emailing back and forth on my phone with a co-juror I’d just met to coordinate meeting up for drinks. The last message in a multi-threaded email conversation (each punctuated with my standard mobile sig file) said, “I want to call you, but I don’t know your number.”

It occured to me that with all the finagling and informing that we want mobile sig files do, the potentially single-most useful piece of information, the mobile phone number, is not included. I could email, text, and exchange photos with this co-juror, but he couldn’t give me a call. That just seems wrong.

I now proudly display my phone number in my mobile sig file. But please, don’t call. I probably won’t answer, as I’ve always been more of an email person anyway.

At least now people know where to reach me.

Is saying goodbye really that hard? Apparently, yes: yes it is. Instead of following through and cutting ties properly, I have to admit, I’ve been taking the easy way out.

For longer than I feel comfortable discussing, I’ve been relying on Apple Mail’s Junk filter to be the bad guy. Instead of taking the few extra seconds to unsubscribe from unwanted email newsletters, I’ve trained Junk to inauspiciously hide mail I’m too lazy to deal with myself.

I’m well aware of Training Mode and respect Mail’s ability to learn. But no matter. The Flavorpill newsletter I signed up for in hopes of being the first to know? The Daily Candy list I subscribed to in hopes of being first at the sample sale? The Threadless announcements I subscribed to hoping to never have to deal with Women’s Medium being sold out again? No slight against these fine texts (and they really are), but I just lost interest. They’re all junk to me now.

In an overwhelming Inbox that, on any given morning, holds upwards of 100 emails, anything extraneous must go. So instead of hunting for the inconsistent Unsubscribe link, I coolly click the Junk button to remedy repeating newsletters, and Mail takes care of the rest.

Coming to Junk Terms
Recently though, in an effort to get organized as I take on additional responsibilities, I did the right thing and officially unsubscribed from most lists. And what I found was surprising: even after the CAN-SPAM Act five years ago, we’re still a far way off from a consistent user experience in experience of unsubscribing. Language, number of clicks, interaction, and data input differ wildly.

Here are just a handful of the differences:

Approach #1: Enviable Etiquette

The iTunes unsubscribe process is Emily-Post perfect: polite, concise, and mindful. While there is plenty of comforting text kindly describing the process, the calls to action are clear and simple. (If pressed, I would suggest that “change my email address” belongs with the actual email address, but I won’t hold it against them.)
Unsubscribe requirements: One click; optional radio button selection

Approach #2: Hands-off

Unsubscribers to the Very Short List, otherwise a perfectly delightful publication, are required to remember which email address they used to subscribe, then decide whether comments are required to get through the process. Nothing is pre-populated, and the cognitive wherewithal required to simply decipher what’s required may drive users back to simply clicking Junk next time.
Unsubscribe requirements: One click; email address; patience to read instructions

Approach #3: Anonymity

This example from a sports-supply store, Jack Rabbit Sports, demonstrates how some brands choose to wipe their hands of the whole process. After clicking Unsubscribe, users have no indication of which newsletter they unsubscribed from, which email address was used, and where they are now. In my process of mass-unsubscribing, I repeated the process three times.
Unsubscribe requirements: None, but lack of feedback is a barrier itself

Approach #4: Research-Minded

Because Flavorpill kindly unsubscribes users on click without requiring additional steps, the site can get away with asking users to give feedback on why they might be unsubscribing. It would be useful, however, to see an unsubscribe confirmation.
Unsubscribe requirements: None

Approach #5: Intrigue

Lastfm keeps your current subscriptions a secret by suggesting that you might be subscribed to something interesting, but to see what it is before you opt out of it, you have to visit another page, warmly called the “notifications page.” The super-long form button is an especially nice touch as it achieves intimidation, the next strategy, as well.
Unsubscribe requirements: One click; no text entry

Approach #6: Intimidation

Thrillist uses tough love to intimidate users into changing their minds. With playful language though, they may have a good chance of doing so. Because the field’s already pre-populated, users need only press a button to unsubscribe, and the experience remains consistently on brand throughout.
Unsubscribe requirements: One click; optional text entry

Remember the Last Impression
Like the forgotten error message, the unsubscribe process serves as a pretty critical part of the experience users have with a product or service. Quite possibly serving as the last memory a user will have with a brand, unsubscribes’s job is not inconsequential; it’s potentially full of creating lasting meaning. Last impressions are important too.

Today, the School of Visual Arts in New York City is unveiling a project we’ve been working on for some time: a new Master of Fine Arts in Interaction Design, a program to launch in Fall of 2009. The program was jointly concepted by Steven Heller, co-founder (with Lita Talarico) of the renowned MFA Designer as Author program, and me over the last several months. I’ll be charting a new path of sorts in coming months, taking on the position as Chair of the program, while continuing to foster my own information architecture and user research practice in parallel.

The program is in the early stages of development as we shape the curriculum and work with faculty and potential faculty. The caliber of the instructors so far is quite staggering even to me, and I’m thrilled to see what is emerging with each new component. The diverse faculty roster includes in part: Christopher Fahey, David Womack, Jason Santa Maria, Karen McGrane, Khoi Vinh, Paul Ford, Matt Owens, Rachel Abrams, Jeffrey Zeldman — just to name a few. (Many more on the faculty will be announced later this summer.)

Masters programs at SVA have a history of focusing on the intersection of design and business, creating projects founded solidly on application. In 2005 as part of the Designer as Author program, for instance, Deborah Adler exemplified how design can transform the interaction between humans and information; this new program intends to lead the way for its counterpart in digital media.

No matter where you stand on the interaction design spectrum, if you’ve followed the maturation and growth of the field, this is potentially a pretty an exciting step for the the design community and the larger profession. I’m going to be working with designers of all capacities this summer to find out answers to the key question: what are the critical skills needed to foster a landmark understanding of interaction design?