Movie review: UP IN THE AIR

About a week ago, Stacy and I saw Up in the Air for one of our cherished (and too seldom) nights out (well, it was an afternoon out, but close enough). I enjoyed director Jason Reitman’s Thank You For Smoking and felt that his Juno was better than the other 2007 best picture nominees that I had seen (yes, including No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood), and so was looking forward to his latest. And I knew a fair bit about the movie going into it — if you listen to public radio podcasts about movies and entertainment, Reitman had been on all of them.

This is probably his weakest effort of his three films. It’s not a bad movie, and I thought it was basically okay. I was never bored, and didn’t want to leave midway, which for me is a sign that the film has something going for it. But the idea that Up in the Air is seriously considered a Best Picture candidate, much less considered the odds-on favorite, is appalling. That such a trifle, a wisp of a film is accorded such plaudits confuses me (until I look at the other candidates and realize, Hoo-boy, this was a lame year for movies.)

My dad’s tweet about the film captures my feelings pretty well: “UP IN THE AIR is a balloon filled with the hot stuff; it justs floats aloft, going nowhere fast, then deflates and crashes with a dull thud.” And I don’t mind that for the first 2/3rds or so the film goes nowhere. But, yeah, when it decides that it needs a resolution, it turns a corner toward an unfulfilling climax and denouement.

I think where Reitman fell down was a matter of tone. As he explained in his various interviews, the film was first conceived in a pre-recession world, and was originally planned to play a lot more arch, perhaps more like Thank You For Smoking. The recession hits, and no longer can you play laying people off for laughs. However, Reitman couldn’t let go of the humor altogether (it’s clearly his natural inclination), and so you get this tonal mish-mosh, and the movie loses its emotional resonance. Compare that with The Informant!, a similarly-scaled film, also relying on a movie star to carry it, but where the director (Steven Soderbergh) unwaveringly struck the same amplified tone throughout the entire film.

All that said, there is one remarkably powerful element in Up in the Air, one that struck me on first viewing, and has haunted me since. As Reitman explained in interviews, most of the people we see getting laid off in the film are people who actually had been recently laid off, and were asked to re-create the horrible moment of their firing. There’s one guys in particular, an African-American man, who’s eye starts twitching uncontrollably, and asks the firer: “What are you going to do this weekend? You have money in your bank? You got gas in your gas tank? You going to take your kids out to Chuck E. Cheese?” That man’s performance (and it’s hard to call it a performance because it doesn’t at all seem “performed”) floored me. It’s the one thing in that entire movie that stuck with me more than a couple hours later.

Apple’s Tablet – Game Machine?

John Gruber’s lengthy and thoughtful take on what the Apple Tablet could be has been making the blogospheric rounds. His reasoning is solid I definitely think he’s onto something:

Do I think The Tablet is an e-reader? A video player? A web browser? A document viewer? It’s not a matter of or but rather and. I say it is all of these things. It’s a computer.

What I found surprising is that Gruber doesn’t say that the tablet will be a game machine. Apple has a checkered history when it comes to gaming — though encouraged with the Apple II, it wasn’t at all supported with the original Macintosh (Steve thought it would make it seem too much like a toy), and some think that’s part of the reason that PCs dominated the home market. With iPhone and iPod Touch, Apple has all but rebranded them as a gaming platform, after seeing which apps were the most popular.

So, along with being an e-reader, video player, web browser, document viewer, I would expect the new tablet to be a game platform, and a potentially game changing one at that. With a flat form factor, accelerometer, iSight (especially if there’s two iSights, one on the front, one on the back), and wireless, the gaming opportunities are remarkable. You could have a driving game where what you’re holding actually held like a steering wheel. You could have two lined up side by side and play air hockey. You could do some crazy augmented reality stuff, or body control stuff, and come up with game ideas no one has thought yet.

Anyway, yeah, games. Oh, the other thing I suspect is that the only way to get software on the device will be through an App Store. The model is just too attractive, especially if they sell it as a “not-computer” (yes, it will be a computer, but they will very likely sell it as some type of appliance).

Canadian Rock Pantheon

Listening to NPR’s All Songs Considered in the car, Stacy and I somehow got on to the topic of the Canadian Rock Pantheon. When it first came up, I thought the list would be long, but in our conversation, only two entrants qualified in my mind: Rush and The Guess Who. Stacy wanted to add The Tragically Hip, but I’m wary of including a band that had no significant uptake south of the border. We also dismissed the singer-songwriter folkies (e.g., Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen) as, well, not rock. We considered Neil Young, but while Canadian, pretty much his entire meaningful career existed in the United States.

On Twitter, I posed the question “Who is in the Canadian Rock Pantheon? Obvi, Rush and The Guess Who. Whom else? Neil Young? BTO? The Hip? Bryan Adams?” For me, to be Canadian Rock Pantheon, the band/person must have: recorded primarily in Canada; played guitar-driven rock; and had a lasting influence and presence. The latter criteria rules out a number of indie bands (such as Arcade Fire, New Pornographers) — to be in a pantheon requires the test of time. Given the criteria, and the feedback I got from Twitter, this is what I believe to be Canadian Rock Pantheon:

And, for now, that’s it. Steppenwolf is disqualified as they didn’t become that band until the members had moved to the US. Alanis Morrissette has not demonstrated any meaningful longevity. Blue Rodeo and Bruce Cockburn have no presence south of the border. Loverboy is simply too one-hit-wonder. After seeing Anvil! The Story of Anvil, I’d consider them as a kind of special entrant given their awesome influence on an entire subgenre of rock.

I’m surprised at how few bands made it into the pantheon. The population of Canada 1960-2000 tracks very closely to the population of California in that time, yet in that time California has had many more Pantheon bands (off the top of my head: The Beach Boys, The Grateful Dead, The Doors, The Eagles, The Byrds, Metallica, Green Day (i think they qualify already) (and I’m sure these lists: Musical Groups from Los Angeles and Musical Groups from San Francisco would turn up many more.

Toddler Playgrounds and Dog Parks – Surprisingly Similar

Stacy updates the family about our son’s development with an occasionally updated blog. In the most recent post, she realized a striking similarity between toddler playgrounds (new for her) and dog parks (where she’s been going for years).

1. Everyone is there because walks around the block just aren’t enough stimulation and exercise.
2. In general, you get to know the kids’ names long before you get to know the parents’ – if you ever do.
3. There are cliques of parents who are local regulars, and who aren’t enthusiastic about chatting with parents from Other Neighborhoods.
4. On a weekday, more than half of those playing are there with “professional handlers” while their parents are at work.
5. Some of those playing are food-motivated and have good recall if you’re holding a treat. (this is not Jules)
6. Others are ball-obsessed. (this is Jules)
7. It’s time to go when your companion just wants to lay down in the sand.
8. A good run around the park means a big drink of water before heading home for a nap.

Mindset, not process; Outcomes, not methods (What I would tell interaction design students, #2 in a series)

I had originally planned to speak in SVA’s Interaction Design lecture series yesterday, but had to cancel because I’m needed in the SF Bay Area. So, I thought I might blog the things I would have said

In school, and, well, in most companies, product design and development is approached as a process. The problem with this is that people stop being able to see the forest for the trees — they get so focused on following the process that they lose site of why they’re engaged in the process to begin with.

What’s more important than process is mindset. And when it comes to interaction design, that mindset is having empathy for and understanding your users, and creating something great for them. If you and your colleagues have the right mindset, you’ll likely do the right thing, because you won’t be satisfied until your users are pleased. At UX Week 2009, Aaron Forth, the VP of Product for Mint.com, spoke. (You can see his talk here.) One thing that Aaron points out is that his team didn’t engage in anything resembling a user experience process, but because everybody at the company, from the CEO on down, cared about the user, they weren’t satisfied until they produced great results.

In Jared Spool’s talk “Journey to the Center of Design”, he claims that companies adopting a “user-centered design process’ actually produce less usable designs than those that don’t. What happens is that companies offload critical thinking onto the process, and assume that if they follow the recipe, good things will come out at the other end. It just doesn’t work that way.

Speaking of what comes out at the other end, that’s all that matters. Results and outcomes are what’s important, not the methods you use to get there. If a rigorous UCD process is what gets you to great design, awesome. If sketching on a napkin, then bringing that into Photoshop works, great. The proof of the pudding is in the eating — if people are happy to use the design, and it satisfies whatever tasks/goals/etc they seek to achieve, that’s what matters.

So, at most, use methods and methodologies as a scaffold to help you think and work through your problems. But don’t adhere to a process. Just use whatever works.

Experience (and services and systems), not products (What I would tell interaction design students, #1 in a series)

I had originally planned to speak in SVA’s Interaction Design lecture series today, but had to cancel because I’m needed in the SF Bay Area. So, I thought I might blog the things I would have said

This is a subject I’ve talked about at length before, perhaps most notably in the essay, “Experience IS the Product… and the only thing users care about”, the slidecast “Experience is the Product”, and it was a main theme in Adaptive Path’s book Subject to Change. So I won’t go into in detail again, but it’s worth acknowledging that most people still approach product development very much from a features-and-functionality standpoint, and most design work gets so focused on the specific outcome that the designers lose sight of the ecosystem in which their work must fit.

In this increasingly complex world, product design is really systems design. A number of elements must be marshaled and coordinated. But it doesn’t make sense to design a system for the sake of it.

So, a system to what end?

I would argue, a system to support great experiences for people. And from figuring out how to support the delivery of great experiences, then design the interactions, identify the touchpoints, and build the systems that support that.

More thinking about “design thinking”

I have a… complicated relationship with the phrase “design thinking”. Over 4 years ago, I wrote a post, “The Dark Side of Design Thinking” that looked at the shortcomings of the designer’s perspective, and even earlier, lamented how the phrase “design thinking” was being used to mean “thinking that I like,” and not really about design.

But then I also co-wrote a book that addresses the value of design approaches (and I’ve been known, in person, to say that it’s a book about “design thinking” that never uses the phrase “design thinking”).

I most recently blogged on Harvard Business about “Why Design Thinking Won’t Save You”, because I find myself, again, fed up with how people use this phrase in such a way that it’s essentially meaningless, and it seems to serve little more than helping sell design firms trying to be more strategic, or sell business magazines in desperate need of appearing hip.

The problem I faced in that post is that there’s no good alternative term for the kind of thinking I promote, which is a wildly multi-disciplinary approach. Dev tried with “hybrid thinking”, but I found that phrase too limiting. I considered “integrated thinking,” but it’s too vague, and too similar to Roger Martin’s integrative thinking. Perhaps the best term I found was “post-disciplinary,” ironically enough from IDEO’s Jane Fulton Suri (ironic because the rise of the phrase “design thinking” is pretty much all due to IDEO).

Something I don’t address in my post, but where I think there’s a real opportunity for exploration, is to identify how this wildly multi-disciplinary thinking actually does contribute to organizational success in the 21st century.

Synesthesia

Boing Boing recently pointed to a video that explains the neurology and experience of synesthesia, the condition where some people’s sensory perception crosses wires, where numbers and letters have colors, flavors have shapes, words have tastes.

At UX Week a couple weeks ago, we had a day devoted to perception, keynoted by Dr. Temple Grandin. Before she spoke, I showed a very strange short film I had found online, also called “Synesthesia.” It’s not really worth describing in detail — it’s a four minute art piece that tries to capture the synesthetic reality in a highly impressionistic fashion, photographed beautifully.

I’m surprised that the film hasn’t gotten more traction online — it strikes me as the kind of thing that folks would love. And good for Sunday web viewing!

Awesome. And congrats!

Over 8 years ago I blogged about LineDrive, a mapping technology that attempted to simulate the types of maps humans draw. I was even emailed by it’s creator, Maneesh Agrawala.

This morning, as I read the SF Gate, I found out that Maneesh just won a MacArthur fellowship! I hadn’t kept up with him, but he’s now teaching at UC Berkeley, and continues to endeavor to understand how people process visual information, including maps. Lots and lots of maps. I’m probably fooling myself if I think I’ll find the time to look over what he’s done the past few years, but it sure seems worthwhile!

Unsee

Today’s “On Language” column in The New York Times addresses the rise of the prefix “un” in the time of increased computer use and social networking.

A word unmentioned in the article, but which I’m growing to love, is “unsee“. It’s a strange word, because, as the phrase goes, once you’ve seen something, you can’t unsee it (I think I was introduced to this unfortunate reality when someone showed me tubgirl. Which I will not link to. As I don’t want you to see it, much less vainly try to unsee it.)

A different use of “unsee” comes in China Mieville’s latest novel The City and The City, set in a geography where two cities literally overlap and integrate in space, and residents of one are raised from birth to “unsee” what goes on in the other. It’s a concept that appears bizarre at first, until you realize, as a city-dweller, just how much you unsee of what’s around you (homelessness, squalor, nefarious activity).