Parting thoughts

It's Friday, and I'm leaving my computer alone over the weekend. It's here at the end of the week I thought I'd give a quick status update on things big and small ;

• Sam's first steps;
  
  
• Some more family tidbits; Lilje just turned 5, and started barnehage (kindergarten) which she just loves! Grace is going great at school, with lots of friends, and she now speaks a very tolerable Norwegian. We've started to use Norwegian as our main means of talking these days. Sam is a social little rascal, and now of course wants to walk everywhere. Julie is still too far away from her family to really be happy, but at least we have a few favourite things to make our exsistance herer good, such as solskinnsbolle (a kind of layered horizontal whirly bun, with a yummy egg-cream center) at Godt Brød (great littel bakery), coffee at Kaffepikene (the absolutely, without a doubt, the best darn coffee in town!), norwegian bread (how can we ever go back?) and ice-cream. Oh, and my beloved woods. I can't rave enough about the woods! We all love it. We all love Norwegian nature; it's simply stunning, even the simple stuff.
  
• My RESTful Topic Maps framework lumbers ahead. I'll be using it for two major real-world projects, and will verify its success or failure from that. I'm sure it will be tweaked a lot.
• The kids are doing well, the parents not so much; the other side of the planet is somewhat problematic, as our values and views have changed so much in the last 5 years. The Norway I came back to isn't the Norway I left. We're contemplating leaving for Australia sooner than first thought.
• My eyes have been a painful nightmare the last 6 or 7 years, slowly but surely disintegrating my quality of life (and, sadly, those around me; my nickname lately is "grumpy". I'm so sorry!) where either my glasses have caused a pressure and hence headaches, or the lack of glasses makes me squint to the point of getting headaches, or contacts itch my eyes so much that I fall asleep (probably with a headache). Last month it became unbearable, with headaches (as in migraines; really painful headaches with a center right inside my eyes), and I didn't know what to do. I've so far seen 7 eye specialists (4 in Australia, 3 in Norway), including a full scan of my head and sinuses. Nothing. Until last week, where in a casual conversation between my sister and my wife, the option of allergies to pollen came up, and lo and behold, there seemed to be a pattern match between my worst periods of headaches with pollen outbreaks. Last Sunday I raced to the pharmacy and got anti-histamine pills, and - ladies and gentlemen - I haven't had a single headache since; the pills probably reduce the inflammation in certain pressure-points (top of nose, and the forehead) so the headaches don't develop. As you can imagine, I am over the moon about this result, and I hope there might be some answers as I get myself to a doctor in July for a full checkup on this.
• I'm doing an interesting UCD project on the side. I had forgotten how much fun and enjoyment I get from facilitating projects and meetings. I have of late immersed myself in coaching (course given through work; I've been doing stuff like this for years, but this time I've formalized it a bit more, and getting a Norwegian translation of the stuff) which seems to come naturally to me. Presentations, meetings, sessions ... I'm having a blast, with good results to boot.

Ok, have a great weekend. See you on the other side.

Designed by stupidity, built by ignorance, approved by incompetence

Note: I wrote this piece back in 2006, and just scrubbed it up. Enjoy.

"Stupidity" from Wordnet:

- a poor ability to understand or to profit from experience
- a stupid mistake

Design is the process of taking a set of constraints, and make something out of it. These constraints can be a number of things, from trivial wishes to strict rules. Sometimes it's about a color, other times about functionality, and then again about its basic concept, maybe a marketing angle or perhaps changing some stuck process. It could be anything.

However, a lot of the time you're left with that compelling feeling of "Qua?" while reading through your constraints; he wants me to do what!? They think we should put in that!? She likes what color!? marketing wants to sell this to whom!?

One definition of something stupid is when you can't see what is obvious to others. Sometimes this can have as much to do with your definition of a problem as a personal viewpoint, but quite often this "stupidity" certainly points to things we overlook or just plainly can't see but what we certainly should address.

Good design is about seeing things from as many angles as possible, and find the best possible compromise between them.

"Ignorance" from Wikipedia:

Ignorance is a lack of knowledge, or a willful lack of desire to improve the efficiency, merit, effectiveness or usefulness of one's actions. Ignorance is also a "state of being ignorant" or unaware (not knowing).

Building systems (applications, processes, buildings, societies, anything) is a complicated thing, relying as much on the goodness of the designers as the intelligence and skill of the builders.

Some people willfully ignore things. Maybe they feel they know enough, or maybe there are fears involved. Whatever the case, you see it all the time; people walking on a red light, smoking where not allowed, slightly speeding while driving, daydreaming while in meetings, outsourcing for the sake of instant capital gains, eating unhealthy food, not practicing what you preach, ignoring global warming signs, keep investing in oil consumerates, draw red buttons for safe functionality, never test your assertions and so on. The list is endless. People ignore things because of the normally low frequencies of events.

When builders ignore the time effects on setting concrete and make a too thin layer for your foundation, a layer without skeleton, and a few years down the track the building may simply collapse. If you don't fully understand the difference between alcohol and methanol it just might be the difference between life and death. If you ignore warning signs, whole cities might be flooded, or buildings blown up, or kids will use guns on other kids.

Good design is to preempt what warning signals has taught us.

"Incompetence" from Wikipedia:

Incompetence is the condition of a person who is unable to properly perform his assigned duty. Incompetence is the essential ingredient of the Peter Principle, which states that in a hierarchical organization, every employee tends to evolve through promotions towards a position in which he is incompetent.

Approving systems tends to happen after it has been built as opposed to something that happens in parallel. That being a flawed strategy from the beginning I guess is hard to overlook, but let's focus more on the common way we approve the systems we design and build.

First, approval is mostly a binary thing, no matter how much history teaches us otherwise. If it still is running and does what it says on the tin, that's considered a success, even if you don't fully understand why it was written on the tin, nor what the tin was supposed to contain or should contain.

Then there's approving things because your job is to approve things instead of guiding things or cancelling crap things. If you and your team spent months on a project you're not going to be self-reflective enough to call yourself out in public.

Good design is to allow for failure.

To shift things around

In order for us to shift things around when they are going pear-shaped (hang on, what's wrong with pear-shaped? I love pears, and I love pear-shaped women, what gives?) we must focus a bit harder on design from the middle principle. I'm a bit tired of both top-down (we know upfront all there is to know) and bottom-up (we know only know so little) approaches. Could we please start somewhere in the middle, and work ourselves out from there? Thanks.