An Election Result As Participatory Design

Is the result of an election a design?

I’ve been pondering this quite heavily for the past week or so since I took a couple days to travel to Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design graduate thesis presentations. What got me thinking about this was Kyle Vice’s thesis project where he created a website/program where people could vote on a series of posters and the winning poster was to be projected on a huge wall on campus. To achieve this, he designed and built software and various web applications for people to use to vote on the posters. Location-wise, he envisioned placing kiosks in public places as well as voting through a traditional website or iPhone app.

What this (very cool) project got me wondering is this: Is voting, and its ensuing results, a form of design? Specifically, is it participatory design? Now, in his project, the only thing people were voting on was a poster to be displayed, and no one person had any ability to massively affect the group’s collective choice outside of their own vote, but it begs the question: Does collective input equal “design”? Certainly each poster was designed, the software to manage the posters was designed, the interface and user experience was designed, even the physical means by which to vote was designed, but what about the process of choosing a design? Again, is that design?

Honestly, I’m not sure. Without getting into arguments about collective (un)consciousness, one could easily argue that we have elections all the time that hardly anyone would consider the outcome of as a “design”. However, in a sense, we are choosing a design in an election. How? In the case of a politician, he has ideas—or designs—on how best to run a community or society. A politician also has a carefully crafted persona that one could easily argue is a design. (It’s a design because there’s normally a carefully considered end-goal—no matter how unconscious—and measured actions to meet that end goal.) And then, voters vote based on that politician’s design of how to deal with various competing interests.

But, is the result of an election a design? Or is it the process that is designed to facilitate an acceptable outcome the “design”? Think of it this way: Is President Obama a design? Was President Bush? Clinton? Certainly their policies are designed and, in a sense, we choose a certain design to present ourselves both back to the U.S. and to the rest of world. But, we didn’t design them to do anything just like we wouldn’t say we designed a poster result through a blind voting process.

Or would we?

You might be wondering why I’m even bringing this up if I am so unsure one way or another. (I wonder myself.) I bring it up because this debate is a possible line in the sand in the debate about what is design and what isn’t design. It seems to me that you can design for something—a process, service, information, persuasion, experience—all for a higher cause of enabling action, learning, belief, emotion, or thought, but the end result of these designs, is, in itself, not a design. It’s not a design in the same way that a car driver is not a design, he is merely enabled to make certain choices, have a feeling about a car, and live his life how he sees fit.

In short, there is no reflection and where there is no reflection, there is no design, there is merely action enabled.

But, going back to the poster voters: if you give those poster voters a voice, a means to organize and wage campaigns to influence what poster gets on the ballot, then that begins to bear the mark of design.

How so? In the happiest accident of feedback loops (and one I didn’t realize until I got here), where design is driven by audience, the audience demand drives new designs until they don’t have to reflect any more and are contentedly enabled again. And so, in some strange way, a result of an election seems to be a design. But only if we are allowed to participate in the feedback loop. Which sometimes happens. And sometimes doesn’t (which is both good and bad).

Weird. This brings up so many questions.

What is Design? (Not Again!)

In high school, when I would get in trouble for skipping class or being late for curfew or (gulp) was pulled over by the police while driving, I would design excuses to get out of the worst part of trouble. In this case, my close friend and I (whom I was often in these situations with), would think about what the discipliner was thinking, then we would think about how to shape the information, however truthful, to fit their worldview. Unbeknownst to me at the time, this was probably my first foray into the world of design, a talent that, given my various successes, I honed quite well.

Thinking about it this way, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that children design all the time. They spill their brother’s drink and, when confronted, will make up a story about how it happened. Whether or not it works is a different matter, but nonetheless, it’s still a design. The lack of sophistication in thought process is actually their undoing here, not their desire for a well-designed story. They simply don’t yet have the mental processes in place to make a story that fits their audience.

And so we come to the crux: What is (effective) design? (Not again!)

Quite simply it’s: You + Your Desired Outcome ≥ Your audience’s wants/needs.

Now, there are many ways to achieve this. The ways, shall we say, are mediums and actions being greater than or equal to your audience’s reaction. The medium is whatever form you choose: Web, Print, TV, Movie, Product, Software, Furniture, Writing, Architecture, and so on. The action is making in your chosen medium to be greater than or equal to your audience’s reaction.

With that, effective design is ≥ your audience’s reaction and desired action. Less effective or ineffective design is ≤ your audience’s reaction and desired action.

How so? Design is merely moving your audience to your chosen destination through a medium. Yes, this is dangerous to say because you can take this all the way to those in obstructive and destructive power, like Hitler. Hitler was a great designer for a certain audience. Not so much for another audience (or two or three). Still, he anticipated his audience’s wants/needs and formed an entire ethos around that to unspeakably destructive ends.

But there are also good designs, those that foster life and love, independence and life-easing dependence. But it’s always a question of “Who is my audience?” Your audience needn’t even be human. Heck, it needn’t even be animated objects. Your audience could be trees and you design a way for trees to flourish.

Where design differs from strictly art is that oftentimes, the artist’s audience is him/herself. It is the audience’s responsibility, then, to come to the artist, not the other way around: The artist to the audience. Now, the artist can create baselines, guidelines, for the world of design, like the Bauhaus art, craft, and design movement. They broke things down to their simplest element, lending designers a baseline idea ever since. In this way, you could say they were artists for designers.

And who is a designer? Anyone who projects an audience’s needs and takes actions for a desired audience reaction and action. To me, anyway, it’s really that simple.

It’s just that some of us are better at anticipation than others. And some of us have better mastery over the making aspect in certain mediums. And judging effective or ineffective design is an extremely qualitative process and subject, but like the Supreme Court once famously said about pornography: I know it when I see it.

Throat-Clearing + Happy New Year

Some thoughts as we round up 2008:

• As some may have noticed, I have taken down nearly all my posts having to do with politics. While I greatly enjoyed writing about the election, in my current unemployed state, it seemed a tad reckless because, frankly, politics and work just don’t mix.

That said, I never really felt like I was “political”, per se, and yet, I’m still surprised at the reaction I got from some people. While I did have a candidate I personally supported more than the other, with my background in trial/courtroom communication and argumentation, my only real agenda was analyzing each candidates’ strategy and how it persuaded or affected the so-called moderate voter. Some of the reaction I got from people was pretty interesting, though. When I wrote something that I thought actually showed more support for one candidate, I got comments that suggested I was supporting the other. And vice versa.

I quickly realized that there’s no controlling how people will interpret your words, no matter how carefully you craft them, no matter how much you focus on the process of getting elected and ignore a hoped-for election outcome. Politics is just too hot-button of an issue. So, I took all those posts down except for one, because that post was about a personal experience regarding bigotry, hypocrisy, how we seek out those who agree with us and the collective need to challenge ourselves to be better. And if someone doesn’t want to hire me because of that post, then so be it.

•  In general, blogging has been tougher to keep up on than I thought it would be. I thought that, in my current state of unemployment, blogging would be fairly easy. But I’ve realized that you have to have experiences and conversations that make you want to blog about something on your mind. In this, my unemployed (read: broke) state, I don’t have a whole lot to write about. Most of my days involve either going to the public library to get out of the house, finding a corner of the house to get some privacy, or going for a run. My nights tend to be made up of going to the corner watering hole to play a few rounds of Golden Tee Golf. (The interaction design in that game is stupendous, by the way.)

In other words, I’m not visiting the richest of environments for new thoughts and experiences regarding designerly things. Quite the opposite of Carnegie Mellon, to be sure. For the most part, this is fine: It’s been healthy to not obsess too much over design, but it also means there’s not a whole to say, but when there is…

•  My posts tend to take longer to write than I mean for them to. I’m pretty obsessive about my thoughts and insights and writing and clarity. Basically, I don’t want to sound like a total schmuck and I’d rather be thorough and thoughtful than quick and controversial. For example, my Abilify post took a solid 14 hours of research and writing. (Yeah, I know, I need a job.) Why so long? I knew basically nothing about drug names, always had a curiousity about them, and had to get all my facts in line before spouting off about it (and I certainly had never thought about drug names as an ethos-pathos-logos thing. All that was made up on the fly, then hammered out, drawing on design school stuff that I never thought to apply in such a way.)

So, yes, this is why there are not as many posts as I’d like there to be. But hopefully, they have some quality to them, even if they sometimes verge on pedantry.

• I’m pleasantly surprised that I get any traffic at all and find myself intensely flattered when I get occasional unforeseen boosts in traffic. It’s like I’ve won an Emmy every time anyone reads a post. Thank you all for reading!

• If anyone knows of any design jobs you think I’d be good for, please let me know. The poor economy has made the job hunt much worse than it was, even as recently as early November.

Happy Holidays and Have A Wonderful 2009!

A Conglomeration of Relationships

Just so you all know that I’m not dead, I do have a post for you. Unfortunately for me, after taking a fair chunk of time writing this the past couple days, further research showed me that most of what I propose below is, in some way, already mostly a part of facebook’s profile privacy management. The problem is that facebook’s process for profile privacy management isn’t straightforward and could be much, much simpler with an easy re-design. So, all is definitely not lost with my post, as having a simple, satisfying, and useful user experience is still the name of the game. Also, because I realized my half-blunder after spending so much time already writing, I’m not going to proofread it very closely. ‘Tis what ’tis. Thank you and enjoy.

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According to facebook, I have 246 friends. This is one of the most ego-flattering, preposterous lies that’s ever been told about me. If I really stretched the limits outside of facebook, I might have 18 friends, 5-6 of which are close friends, and 2-3 that I would consider “best friends”. Instead, what I really have on facebook is a conglomeration of relationships, made up of family members, close friends, friends, acquaintances, old flames, co-workers, classmates, colleagues and one person I’ve never met nor talked to, yet I admire his writing, so I friended him and lucky for me, he accepted (It seems he accepts everyone. Oh, this is not a “fan page” either, it’s his actual profile.)

My situation is not unique. Actually, it’s the norm for facebook. This is a problem. You see, for most of these relationships, I don’t mind these friends seeing my life and catching up a bit—it’s like a constant reunion—but I don’t want all of them in my private life. Yet, I can’t control what my conglomorees can see, to the point that I’ve considered deleting my facebook account. (I know, I know, I’m addicted to facebook, I know. But hear me out.)

To their credit, facebook does offer some semblance of privacy from exposing yourself, especially with things like photos. Facebook gives control to the user through allowing the easy creation and management of friend groups. Facebook also has ways for you to control what gets published in your friends’ news feeds and has ways for you to tailor what you get in your news feed as well. Lastly, there are also ways to protect your information from non-friends and you can always choose to show a limited profile to someone. But no one, I mean no one, keeps someone out in the cold with the barebones limited profile.

Why we don’t keep potential “friends” at the limited profile view is, mostly, out of guilt. We don’t want to be mean, shafting someone who wants to see some recent pics of us, some pics of our family, etc. But the problem is that this makes you make a choice: Heed the friend request or not.

Now, I’ll be the first to say that I’ve been denied facebook friendship, although I’ve never denied one friend request. I’ve cringed when accepting a friend request and later “defriended” some people, but I realize this is a choice that I make, whether to allow these people so far into my life. And I know I could just not be on facebook or limit what I put up or really prune back the old conglomeration of relationships. But the problem is that I even have to consider doing any of these moves. Facebook is a free site that wants users, users, and more users because the more users and friends we all have, the more entrenched facebook becomes in our lives, making it a bigger fixture, making it nearly indispensable.

Not to mention, part of what makes it fun is the public forum-ness of the whole mess, the free voyeurism, the, well, socializing. Openness keeps facebook from becoming “clique-y”, your friendships egalitarian. Exclusivity is for private messages.

However, I’m here to say that facebook has reached a threshold, a critical mass of societal penetration where facebook can now shift to overdrive, to the next level in friendship control. The next level includes a simple, pre-designed, user-friendly solution to allow for different levels of conversation between friends: A group called “Inner Circle” and the others, simply “Friends”.

These distinctions are made by you, the user about whom you deem a close friend, and they apply to your status updates, your photos, posted items, live feeds, etc. You can choose your Inner Circle who you want to get specific updates from and if your friend has chosen you back for Inner Circle status, you get their specific updates. This allows conversation among close friends, weeding out old acquaintances, co-workers, and yes, family members.

There would still be regular status updates to all of your friends if you so choose, but having an extra layer to be able to communicate with a handful of friends without email and not having to worry about what you’re writing about or posting would be priceless. After all, I don’t mind if my “friends” see innocuous pictures of me with my family, but what I want is to be able to have the same user-friendly experience of socializing among my close friends as it currently is for everyone.

Having this type of control is, I believe, the key to the next level of facebook membership and site usage. I say this because those who are not on facebook often cite the lack of information control as one of their top reasons for not joining up. Sure, these non-facebookers don’t want to connect with all those old friends, but more so, they don’t want their laundry aired to the whole world. Further driving my proposition that allowing more communication control will drive facebook usage is that the current lack of control is one of the main reasons that current facebookers don’t use it more: Everything’s too public, too out there. And most people aren’t that exhibitionistic.

The bad news is that facebook probably will never change their current set-up. Why?

Facebook’s entire platform, its entire service, is based on openness, its egalitarianism. Being so open limits how much amount a user has to think or act while limiting the social stress of choosing who is part of your “Inner Circle” and who is just a “Friend”. They’re all friends. By making everyone equal, it shifts the stress and guilt of deciding who is a friend-worthy instead to a question of what is socially acceptable in a public forum. In other words, the facebook society is its own policeman: If you’re ashamed to post it, you shouldn’t be posting it. This is happy times for facebook.

Next, keeping the communication channels wide open keeps facebook from becoming “clique-y”. If you all of a sudden have 300 million users choosing not only what does or doesn’t get published but also to whom something gets published, then you create pockets of friends and possibly mute the very thing that makes facebook so fun: its sociability-ness, its sense of open voyeurism, if you will.

These are definitely problems. But facebook has all the tools to manage two levels of friendship and they have reached the critical mass where such tools wouldn’t stunt their growth, it might actually turbocharge it. After all, I would be inclined to post more updates if I knew that my colleagues, my Mom, and that girl from my 8th grade science class weren’t going to read it. But please don’t make me de-friend them.

The Mount Everest of Drug Names: Abilify

As a son of a doctor, my dad would often bring home random swag branded with drug names that left me as the only college kid I knew who would wear a shirt for anxiety medicine while using a pen with a Viagra logo on it. (Feel free to make inappropriate jokes about the relationship between ink and pens.) However, having all that swag around led to a familiarity and a mild fascination with all the different drug names and how the drug companies come up with them.

So, over the years, I’ve casually taken note of how the names of drugs have slowly changed from names that sounded scientific, like Amoxil, to names that sounded like a brand of bedtime tea, like the sleeping pill Lunesta. A few weeks ago, though, I sat stunned when I saw a television ad for the new drug Abilify. After initially laughing at the name and cheap-looking logo, I soon realized that the paradigm of drug names may have just shifted quite dramatically and it deserved a little more thought and research.

The first paradigm shift is in the phonetics of the name, “Abilify”. More often than not, drugs contain the letters V, X, Y, or Z, which make for interesting syllabic twists and unique names. As my dad would soon inform me, in the past 10 years, a lot of drugs started sounding the same (with names like Zyrtec, Zantac, and Xanax; Prevacid and Prevacol; Lotrel and Lortab—and on and on), making it clear that Abilify stood out in this context. Abilify obviously only contains the letter Y, and it’s at the end of the word. This is the only drug I found that ends in a Y.

Consider, out of the Top 199 drugs, the names contain:

43 instances of X
15 instances of Z
42 instances of V
25 instances of Y

That’s 62.8% of drugs with an X, Y, V, or Z in them. I don’t know for sure, but I’d bet that’s 100 times more common than those letters occur in a standard English dictionary.

The second shift is that it’s the first prescription drug name that’s a verb. Yes, the very first one. (Aleve works as a verb also, but it’s over-the-counter). What makes Abilify a verb? According to Oxford American Dictionaries, adding the suffix -fy to a noun “form[s] a verb denoting making or producing”. (Think: Amplify, Falsify, Deify, Horrify.) So, you are no longer taking a drug, you are actually making your body/self/life “able”, allowing you to “Abilify your body/self/life”.

While I don’t mean to denigrate someone’s needed medicine to balance themselves mentally, I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

But all of that doesn’t constitute a paradigm shift until this last part is factored in. After this research, I began parsing out how drug names are created. (For all you branding, marketing, and design dorks like me, you should get a kick out of this.)

In general, the history of brand-name prescription drugs goes like this: Prior to the mid-to-late 1980s, the prescription drug brand name was often a derivative or shorthand for what the scientific name of the drug is. For example, the drug Amoxicillin was given the brand name Amoxil, while the drug Naproxen was given the brand name Anaprox. These sorts of names made the drug easier to pronounce, yet still sounded “scientific”.

Somewhere in the mid-to-late 1980s, the names started changing, This time, the drug names were derived from what the drug did. For example, the drug “Prevacid” is a drug for those with ulcers or persistant heartburn. It works by preventing your stomach from making acid. Take the words “prevent” and “acid” and you have “Prevacid”.

Not too much later, in the late 90s, drug companies changed the name game again. Only this time, they went for how the drug will make you feel. “Celebrex”, for example, is derived from “celebrate”. In Italian, the drug “Allegra” means “Cheerful, Lively”. On the further reaches of this movement is the sleeping drug “Ambien”, derived from “Ambient”, which connotes relaxation.

The reason these shifts are significant is because brands tell stories, they have an implicit and/or explicit meaning and we consciously and/or unconsciously absorb these meanings. Basically, it’s rhetoric. So, as the drug companies have fought to be heard above the noise of the marketplace, they’ve become increasingly savvy in telling the story of their drug through unique names that appeal to different aspects of the human psyche. And since the names tell stories, they all follow Aristotle’s ancient storytelling techniques of Ethos, Pathos, and Logos to a surprising degree.

The Ethos of a drug name is that of phonetics. That is, the credibility of the name is tied up in the sound of the name, that it sounds like a thing of science.

The Logos of a drug name is what the drug does, or treatment, like Prevacid.

The Pathos of a drug name is appealing to how the drug will make you feel, your emotion, like Celebrex.

Of course, not every name fits neatly into one of these boxes as there are crossover names. But, each drug name so far fits somewhere in this spectrum. Which brings me back to Abilify.

Abilify does not sound scientific in any way, shape, or form, so it loses on Ethos/Phonetics. As Logos/Treatment, it also fails gloriously because the name doesn’t tell you what it does. As a matter of fact, any drug that helped you in any way could be called Abilify. Think about it: Headache? Abilify. Muscle Tear? Abilify. Diarrhea? Abilify. High Blood Pressure? Abilify. The name literally means nothing. You could “Abilify” your car, for God’s sake.

So, that leaves us with how the name of the drug makes you feel, its Pathos/Emotion. Making yourself feel “able” is definitely a feeling—a good feeling, which is nice. (As an anti-psychotic medicine, it hopefully makes those people feel very good.) The feeling it connotes is one of empowerment. But, as a verb instead of a noun, it shifts the paradigm from a “thing” to consider to something to “do” to get better. And with that, it becomes not about Phonetics, Treatment, or Emotion, it becomes an Idea, which, in turn, requires action to make real.

The risk with a drug name that requires action, is it shifts the customer out of the realm of passive story-receiving to one of active story-making. A story where you are the active player, not the name telling you the story. And I have absolutely no idea how this fits into branding as storytelling or if I’m way off-base, but my immediate feeling is that making the customer an Actor brings a brand name into a form of Interaction, which really complicates things. And it also places it at great risk for being a total and complete failure, the kind of thing that goes down in medical history as “The thing to never do”.

However, on the other side, if Abilify has any success, then drug names could change drastically from here on out. In other words, drugs could then be named anything that doesn’t sound medical or scientific and doesn’t have a direct logic to a treatment, but is just an abstract Idea.

Finally, if my analysis is way off-base, then at the very least, Abilify sits at the highest tippy-top peak of Emotion, the Mt. Everest of drug names, either daring and smart, or risky and stupid, but where there is room for only one flag: Abilify.