the logic of failure

from the book cover

We’re at the start of the 2010 CHI challenge, another “wicked problem,” and it reminds me of a book I read some years ago: The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations, by Dietrich Dörner. The author tells a story of a city council and its mayor trying to fix the volume of traffic, noise, and air pollution in their downtown area. To solve the problem they introduced speed bumps and the speed limit was reduced to 20 miles per hour. But the results were unexpected: 1) the speed bumps forced people to drive in a lower gear, thus increasing the noise and exhaust fumes; 2) but because of the reduced speed, people spent more time shopping, and this actually increased the number of cars in the downtown area; 3) eventually fewer and fewer went downtown because of these reasons; 4) people started shopping in a near-by mall; 5) downtown stores, once thriving, were facing bankruptcy, and 6) tax revenues were significantly down. “The fate of this environment-conscious town demonstrates how human planning and decision-making processes can go awry if we do not pay enough attention to possible side effects and long-term repercussions, if we apply corrective measures too aggressively or too timidly, of if we ignore premises we should have considered.” [p.2]

It seems we’re wired for this kind of ad hoc thinking. Hunting, building a fire, or chasing away a wild animal does not have much significance beyond the act; “…our prehistoric ancestors did not have to think beyond the situation itself. The need to see a problem embedded in the context of other problems rarely arose. For us, however, this is the rule, not the exception. Do our habits of thought measure up to the demands of thinking in systems? What errors are we prone to when we have to take side effects and long-term repercussions into account?” [p. 6]

As we build systems, we need to be aware of short-term, long-term, and unexpected consequences. Smart designers understand the motivations and needs of their target population. Who is your target population? What do you know about them? If you build a tool for them (to help them walk more or to enjoy their walks or…), what are the side effects? Might there be unintended consequences? Are you able to anticipate some of these and design for them?

How is your project avoiding the logic of failure? It may be impossible for us to avoid some of these unintended consequences, but we might mitigate against some of them through careful design.

It is far from clear whether ‘good intentions plus stupidity’ or ‘evil intentions plus intelligence’ have wrought more harm in the world. People with good intentions usually have few qualms about pursuing their goals. As a result, incompetence that would otherwise have remained harmless often becomes dangerous… Failure does not strike like a bolt from the blue; it develops gradually according to its own logic. As we watch individuals attempt to solve problems, we will see that complicated situations seem to elicit habits of thought that set failure in motion from the beginning…

— Dietrich Dörner, The Logic of Failure

design courage

Atul Gawande

I enjoy reading non-fiction, mostly around HCI issues, but occasionally in other areas. One such book was Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, by Atul Gawande. From the book jacket: “The struggle to perform well is universal: each of us faces fatigue, limited resources, and imperfect abilities in whatever we do. [Sound familiar?] But nowhere is this drive to do better more important than in medicine, where lives may be on the line with any decision.” Gawande describes three core requirements for success in medicine:

1. Diligence — attention to detail.
2. To do right — despite moral obstacles.
3. Ingenuity — arising “from deliberate, even obsessive, reflection on failure and a constant searching for new solutions.”

Medicine is a profession that involves risk and responsibility; and so does human-computer interaction design. As we consider Gawande’s core requirements for medicine, what are the parallels in hci/d?

We are half way through the semester; we are at an important turning point as we engage in the CHI 2010 International Design Competition problem: will we dig deep within ourselves to find our excellence, or will we simply do what’s necessary to complete the task?

Maya Lin

Maya Lin is a design hero. At the age of 21, while still an undergraduate at Yale she submitted her design to a competition: the 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. And, of course, we all know that she was the winner. What is less known is the political battle she endured, often ugly and filled with racist innuendos. Lin understood that to do right (in Gawande’s terms) meant to defend her vision of personal and national loss. Her design allowed the memorial visitor to enter a “pain of loss,” not to purge it but to contemplate it.

Get inspired.

Listen to Atul Gawande as he speaks to the Commonwealth Club of California.

Maya Lin’s design document is quoted here:

Walking through this park-like area, the memorial appears as a rift in the earth, a long, polished, black stone wall, emerging from and receding into the earth. Approaching the memorial, the ground slopes gently downward and the low walls emerging on either side, growing out of the earth, extend and converge at a point below and ahead. Walking into this grassy site contained by the walls of the memorial we can barely make out the carved names upon the memorial’s walls. These names, seemingly infinite in number, convey the sense of overwhelming numbers, while unifying these individuals into a whole.

The memorial is composed not as an unchanging monument, but as a moving composition to be understood as we move into and out of it. The passage itself is gradual; the descent to the origin slow, but it is at the origin that the memorial is to be fully understood. At the intersection of these walls, on the right side, is carved the date of the first death. It is followed by the names of those who died in the war, in chronological order. These names continue on this wall appearing to recede into the earth at the wall’s end. The names resume on the left wall as the wall emerges from the earth, continuing back to the origin where the date of the last death is carved at the bottom of this wall. Thus the war’s beginning and end meet; the war is ‘complete,’ coming full- circle, yet broken by the earth that bounds the angle’s open side, and continued within the earth itself. As we turn to leave, we see these walls stretching into the distance, directing us to the Washington Monument, to the left, and the Lincoln Memorial, to the right, thus bringing the Vietnam Memorial into an historical context. We the living are brought to a concrete realization of these deaths.

Brought to a sharp awareness of such a loss, it is up to each individual to resolve or come to terms with this loss. For death, is in the end a personal and private matter, and the area contained with this memorial is a quiet place, meant for personal reflection and private reckoning. The black granite walls, each two hundred feet long, and ten feet below ground at their lowest point (gradually ascending toward ground level) effectively act as a sound barrier, yet are of such a height and length so as not to appear threatening or enclosing. The actual area is wide and shallow, allowing for a sense of privacy, and the sunlight from the memorial’s southern exposure along with the grassy park surrounding and within its walls, contribute to the serenity of the area. Thus this memorial is for those who have died, and for us to remember them.

The memorial’s origin is located approximately at the center of the site; its legs each extending two hundred feet towards the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The walls, contained on one side by the earth, are ten feet below ground at their point of origin, gradually lessening in height, until they finally recede totally into the earth, at their ends. The walls are to be made of a hard, polished black granite, with the names to be carved in a simple Trojan letter. The memorial’s construction involves recontouring the area within the wall’s boundaries, so as to provide for an easily accessible descent, but as much of the site as possible should be left untouched. The area should remain as a park, for all to enjoy.

[For Maya Lin's complete submission, see: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/MayaLinsubmission.jpg]

on grades and grading

I suspect that many of you were a bit shocked when you saw your grade for Project 1. How can this be? 61? 48? 72? (The average was 69 and there were many grades lower than that.) I’d like to give you some perspective on grades and grading.

Part of the shock, I suspect, emerges from the educational system in which we’ve been raised. We live in a grade-oriented society. From the earliest days of elementary school, parents and teachers conditioned us to value grades—from gold stars to monetary rewards to special privileges. Even our speech is filled with phrases like “making the grade.” Entrance into college or graduate school is based on grades. “What’s your GPA?” is an often-asked question by a program recruiter. So we’ve come to see grades as important and to associate our self-worth with these letter symbols: A, B, C, D, and F!

And those of us who have “made it” to an advanced undergraduate course or a graduate course (or program) has certainly learned how to play the grading game. We know what it takes to get an A or B in a class, and I suspect that we’re all very good at this game—at least compared to most people in the population.

But then comes along this course called “Interactive Design Practice” and the rules of the game seem to change. It appears to be more of a critique culture where positives and negatives are provided through commentary. It sometimes is difficult to know the basis for the comments or even if they’re valid. And to receive them from people who are hardly more advanced than we, makes it that more difficult to accept. There’s a new kind of game that’s being played and it’s not clear how it’s played or even if it’s worth playing. These are anxious feelings and, if we’re honest with ourselves, they evoke a little fear.

Why the fear? Perhaps it’s because the new game is not synchronous with our image of self. Our academically successful self (image) may be at odds with current messages. “Something is wrong,” we think; “it’s either the system (the course, the instructor, the mentors) or it’s me.” And accepting the later is a somewhat scary proposition.

My answer may surprise you. It’s neither. What you’re feeling is genuine learning—intellectual and emotional growth. You don’t recognize it because it’s not felt very often; but there it is.

And you will experience more genuine learning if you just allow it to happen. The more you resist it, the more you delay the pleasures of learning. Your tool is not perfection but failure. Fail early and fail often so that you may learn. A “how to” manual only hinders the insights; rather, experience and reflection within realistic settings are the paths to insight.

You are learning a complex skill. Even the simplest of designs requires a great deal of expertise. No real problem is simple; they’re messy and ill-structured; they’re wicked problems. And it takes a great deal of skill to both understand the problem and then to address it. How long does it take to develop that expertise? A long time; it requires a lot of practice. (Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, Outliers, claims that it takes approximately 10,000 hours to get good at anything.)

Look at this segment of Stephen Sondheim leading a master’s class to this young and talented singer, teaching her to sing his famous song “Send in the Clowns.” [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-VXXZLh2a0] What did you learn from watching this master teacher/student interaction? Notice that she began as quite an accomplished singer; to our untrained ear we may not have noticed anything wrong in her phrasing or pronunciation. But to the expert perception of Sondheim, subtle problems are exposed.

* * *

So here’s what you need to do to get better. Keep trying. A low score is just an indication of where you are today. It is as honest an assessment as we can make it. And fortunately, it’s not a particularly good predictor of where you’ll be at the end of the semester (and why this score is worth only 60 points out of 1000). What separates you from excellence is hard work and more practice.

The post-it notes are a set of judgments. With some you may agree. With others you may reject outright. Still others you may not be sure about. Keep the post-it notes with which you agree. Remove the post-it notes that you reject (but make sure you have a very good reason for the rejection). And for the comments that confuse you, talk to a mentor or me about them; learn from these comments.

Yes, some of the comments may appear contradictory. But that’s no different than two movie reviewers providing conflicting reviews of the same movie. Both reviewers understand their craft, but each chooses to focus on different things. Oddly, both are correct.

It reminds me of an old joke I heard years ago (and told by Meyer Levin, http://www.meyerlevin.com/joke.html):

In a small town in Russia, people brought their complaints to the Rabbi to settle their differences. This day, two men were before the Rabbi.
He listened to one man and said, “You are right.”
He listened to the second man and said, “You are right.”
When they left, his wife, who was listening in the next room, said to him, “You’re supposed to be some kind of judge? How can they both be right?”
He listened to her and said, “You know? You’re right, too.”

In the end we must develop our own truths about what makes for good design. As we progress through the semester you will learn some big concepts about good design (I refer to these as the “seven themes”). And you will learn a framework for creating a design rationale or a design argument (Eli Blevis and I refer to this as the PRInCiPleS framework). These tools will help you. But only through experience, hard work, and exploring alternatives under varying contexts will you begin to create your internal criteria for good design. And when you’ve done that, you can say, “I am a designer.”

[Postscript. In all the years I have talked to recruiters and employers, not a single one has asked me about a student’s grades. Instead, they ask me how this person gets along with others; how this person leads a team; how this person collaborates; and how this person designs. But not once was I asked, “What grades did this person achieve?” Ironically, after many years of being taught the importance of grades, they don’t matter. Performance does. Being a good human being does.]