For as long as I can remember, I’ve truly disliked gifts, both giving and receiving. Yes, I’m a scrooge of sorts. This is not because I don’t like ‘things’; I’m not some immaterial evangelist. Quite the contrary, I love things. I have a deep respect for thoughtfully designed, mindfully constructed products and the emotional role they play in our lives. I believe objects can have just as much cultural and artistic weight as a great film or a classic novel. It is because I love things so deeply that I so detest the brand of gift-giving that dominates the holiday season. It is a disservice to ourselves and others and a poignant example of how frivolous and wasteful we have become.

My guide is not a list of products, but rather some thoughts to help you give meaningful, or at least inoffensive, gifts to all those names on your list this year.

1. Give gifts that are more useful than they are burdensome. Every gift, no matter how perfect, comes with a responsibility. Do not underestimate or forget this burden. By giving something to someone, you are asking them to care for it, store it in their home, clean it, maintain it, charge it, and take it with them when they move. The things in our lives consume our space, our time, and our emotional capital. For this reason, weigh a gift’s usefulness against its cost, not in dollars, but in encumbrance. Is the recipient still going to love the gift in two years when they’re packing it into a box to lug to their new apartment? If not, does he or she really love it now?

2. Give humble gifts of excellent quality and design. Any gift should be measured by the same standards we use for all the objects in our lives. They should perform some useful task, demonstrate thoughtful design, and be built to withstand the test of time. They should be the best solutions to real, everyday problems. The best solutions. Often times, such items are expensive, so keep your gifts modest. It is far better to give someone the best bottle-opener on earth, one that will last a lifetime and can be handed down through generations, than a more complicated appliance of lesser quality. A foolish person may feel cheated by a humble gift, but time will prove it to be thoughtful beyond their initial comprehension.

3. Be mindful of the origins of your gift. Every time we buy a thing, for ourselves or others, we are casting a vote for the companies and infrastructures that have brought that product into the world. Buying locally manufactured items supports local economies, buying mass-produced items supports mass production. In our capitalist society, these monetary ‘votes’ decide which things flourish and which things flounder. Buying a gift for someone is, for all intents and purposes, casting a vote on their behalf, a responsibility which you should not take lightly. Take this opportunity to support independent craftspeople, local businesses, and sustainable products. Inform the recipient about where the product came from, even if he or she isn’t usually concerned about such issues.

4. Give used gifts whenever possible. The world is already full of wonderful things. With the notable exception of technology, you can find a better, more unique, and more affordable version of just about anything you would buy new on websites like eBay and Etsy. It will require more effort on your part to find what you’re looking for and plan ahead for slower shipping speeds, but that effort is as much a part of the gift as the physical product is. If you’re not willing to spend an hour or two finding a suitable gift, how can you expect the recipient to spend the rest of their life living with it?

5. Carefully consider why the recipient doesn’t already own the thing you’re giving him or her. The best case scenario is that you’ve found the perfect gift and the person you’re planning on giving it to doesn't even know it exists. However, thanks to the Internet, this is becoming extremely unlikely. Perhaps it is something indulgent, that the person would love, but never buy for themselves. Or maybe it is some expendable commodity such as food or film for a camera. If you can’t figure it out, more likely than not it is simply something that the person does not want and therefore chose not to buy.

6. Share a piece of art you love as a gift. Instead of trying to guess what the recipient might like, share your favorite album, book, or film with them. Give them their own copy, and include a note telling them why it’s meaningful to you. These gifts are about content and experience, so their physical manifestations are less of a burden. Once a book has been read or an album has been listened to, they can be disposed of or re-gifted without guilt.

It is far worse to have shitty things taking up space in our homes and minds than nothing at all. Please remember this when buying gifts for those you care about this year. If you’re lucky enough to be able to afford to give and receive gifts, don’t waste that prosperity by trafficking in cheap, mass-produced garbage. When in doubt, I always recommend donations to appropriate non-profits in lieu of physical gifts, especially for those gifts that you’re socially obligated to give, but don't actually care about.

I have largely been inspired by the email updates from Jack Cheng about his Kickstarter project These Days. I have been looking forward to them every week. I

I genuinely never thought I would resort to something as primitive as email to publish anything, but after feeling a void between the formal presentation of my blog and the fundamental brevity of Twitter, here I am.

Why Email?

• Email is personal. I know that my message will share your inbox with emails from you mother, your lover, and your dearest friends. I think this context has the potential to be meaningful, and I want to challenge myself to write the email as I would write it to a close friend.
• Email is an active medium. By that, I mean that it seeks you out, not the other way around. Most of us check our email every day, sometimes constantly whenever in front of a computer. Many of us have phones with email capabilities and push notifications. Therefore, none of my recipients need to take an action, such as going to my blog or reading through their Twitter stream, to get my messages. To me this feels more like I am giving something to the reader, instead of yelling into a crowd with abandon. I can even, to a degree, choose when my message will be read. I consider this privilege an opportunity to surprise and delight.
• Email is universal and undesigned. I don't have the option of fretting over typography and layout as with my blog, and it doesn't require that the audience use a specific platform or technology like Twitter or RSS. It's intrinsically accessible and mobile optimized. It's easy to create and easy to consume. When this generation of social utilities is replaced by the next big thing, email will stubbornly still be there.
• The social web is noisy. Twitter is full of intelligent, thoughtful people that inspire, motivate, and challenge me, but they're mixed in with a much larger audience. It's like a big party and everyone is invited. You can have an actual one-on-one conversation if you want, but you're going to lose your voice and get interrupted by someone doing a bellyflop off of the roof. I hope these emails will allow me to have real conversations with some of the friends I have made online, and perhaps allow those friendships to grow.
• Most people don't like email. Although it seems counterintuitive, the fact that the average person doesn't want to receive any more email is a huge draw for me. This acts as a filter, so only the folks that are really interested in the content, that are actually going to read it every week, will sign up. Reaching a large number of people is something that's relatively easy with the web these days, but reaching quality audience, that truly cares about what you have to say and is willing to reply thoughtfully, is much harder. Using email as opposed to something more popular will help me weed out the riff-raff.

Rules:

I am imposing some constraints on myself to help make the emails easier to write, and to insure that they don't become the least bit spammy.

Rule 1: I will send emails regularly, at least every week. This is a promise to myself to practice writing more habitually. I also would like to be more comfortable putting incomplete, unpolished thoughts into the world, and keeping a schedule will force me to push my little fledgling ideas out of the nest.

Rule 2: No more than one idea per email. I make no promises about length, but I want them to be focused on a specific thought or sentiment. Hopefully this approach will produce some messages as short as a couple sentences and some as long as a few hundred words.

Rule 3: The emails will contain no links. Craig Mod's recent writing about edges is a good reminder that what seems like a harmless hyperlink is actually the lid on Pandora's box. For example, if you haven't read the two articles linked in the previous sentence, which you should, you will be left with the feeling that you didn't truly finish this post. I want my emails to be digestible and finite. I want there to be a clear end.

I understand that with all of the benefits listed above there also comes a considerable responsibility. The greater the potential to surprise and delight, the greater the potential to annoy and disappoint. Losing the trust of those on my mailing list would be easy, and earning it back would be near impossible. I do not take this trust lightly.

If you're interested, you can sign up here.

Though Fluxus art can take nearly any form, perhaps the most succinct and representative works are the performance pieces, often called “events”. These events are exceedingly simple by design, and were usually written down as a sort of script for performers, or published and distributed, with other materials, in “Fluxkits”. This week’s love letter is directed at a collection of Fluxus events available as a .pdf for free online called The Fluxus Workbook.

The pieces it contains are humorous, thoughtful, and always perfectly succinct. A few examples:

Rainbow No. 1 for Orchestra
Soap bubbles are blown out of various wind instruments. The conductor breaks the bubbles with his baton.
Ay-O — Date Unknown

Fluxus Piece for G.M.
Two events are advertised at two adjacent locations. Audience is brought into the same hall by separate entrances. The audiences are separated from each other by a curtain. For the performance, the curtain is raised.
Albert M. Fine — Date Unknown

Fall
Throw things that are difficult to throw because of their light weight.
Lee Heflin — Date Unknown

These performances are nearly everything I dislike about fine art — overly conceptual pieces that are ineffective at communicating their purpose and irreverent to that fact — if not for an important distinction. They lack deep, overwrought meaning; they are simply intended to confuse and delight. It’s not a man attempting to throw feathers and sheets of paper as a commentary on the futility of our lives, it’s a man attempting to throw feathers and sheets of paper because it’s strange and compelling. I imagine the performer, despite all his mass, thwarted by the light objects who refuse to behave as he instructs. Though he could easily destroy them, he can never truly throw them, no matter how hard he tries. The best “events” are concise observations about the inherent weirdness of the world around us, and pieces like Fall have stuck with me for years. Every time I see someone inadvertently performing it, I’m reminded of the workbook.

Family Planning Event
Get pregnant for 18 months and have twins.
Ken Friedman — 1992

Having witnessed a number of the performances from the collection, and performed one myself, I find that the most effective medium for these events is the instructions, not the performances themselves. Many of them require significant setup, and some are not physically possible, such as Family Planning Event. These implausible and impossible events are intended to be read instead of performed, and even the more practical ones are better suited to words in many instances. The descriptions are timeless and faceless, which emphasizes the repeatability and banality of the performances. Many of the events are performed every day by thousands of unaware people, the intervention by the artist is the act of writing it down, giving it a title, and publishing it. We are meant to consider the event as art in the frame of the page.

One Ken Friedman piece, Cheers, would fit right in with one of Improv Everywhere’s sketches:

Cheers
Conduct a large crowd of people to the house of a stranger. Knock on the door. When someone opens the door, the crowd applauds and cheers vigorously. All depart silently.
Ken Friedman — 1965

What excites me so much about these events is their simplicity. Most are just a subtle twist to a common and understood interaction with the world around us, something pulled out of context or wrapped around itself. Yet, this juxtaposition is powerful and provocative. It serves to remind us of the importance of details, and that everything is an opportunity to delight and surprise. As designers, we conceive and build the systems that connect and empower people. We carefully craft experiences to be as low friction and invisible as possible. As artists, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, and the other Fluxists deconstruct these systems and show us how beautiful the unexpected can be. Can some of this delight be integrated in a way that doesn’t detract from or convolute a specific interaction? Can answering emails or paying bills be a joyful experience through some slight alteration?

These compact events lend themselves to being shared, and I thought it might be interesting to post favorite pieces, from the workbook or elsewhere, on Twitter with the hashtag #fluxustweets.

When I first discovered Dribbble a couple of years ago it was in its infancy and seemed like it might grow into a thoughtful and critical community. I felt (and still feel) that constructive criticism is missing from design discourse today, and I was hoping that Dribbble would fill that gap. This has not been the case, and it’s not by accident.

By design, Dribbble rewards style and aesthetics, not concept or context. A quick survey of the layout of the site itself can provide a lot of insight into the interactions Dribbble most encourages. The “like” button sits right next to the screenshot itself, at the top of a column of actions, above the fold on even the smallest screen. Hierarchically, this is what Dribbble has decided is important. “Liking” something is a gut, split-second reaction that doesn’t require or imply any critical thought. It is a simple binary and it only takes one click and a few milliseconds to register your approval.

Commenting however, the only way Dribbble provides for giving critical feedback on a shot, is treated much differently. The comment box is below the shot itself, and as soon as two or three comments have stacked up it’s off the bottom of the screen. Because of this, it’s not possible on most shots to look at the image while you’re typing the content of your comment. Additionally, the comment box itself is a perilously small five lines tall. Though you could hypothetically type a couple paragraphs of thoughtful critique into it, scrolling around the tiny box to re-read and edit, it’s certainly not designed to accomodate that sort of writing. In most cases, including this one, small boxes encourage small comments.

Shots are always displayed in a white frame, which makes them feel precious and complete. The user’s profile page is laid out like thumbnails in a portfolio. For these reasons, most users are uncomfortable uploading shots that are messy, imcomplete, or truly in-progress.

If Dribbble really cared about fostering a community of critical feedback and conversation, they could implement any one of countless changes to nurture that kind of behavior. They could highlight shots with the most dynamic conversation on the home page instead of the ones withe the most likes. They could move the comment box up next to the shot, and make it larger, to allow users to look at an image and leave feedback on it at the same time. They could reward users for taking the time to leave thoughtful and constructive comments. They could eliminate “liking” all together and rid the community of shallow, quantitative validation. They could do all of these things, but they won’t, and it’s probably not in their best interest to. I’m sure that Dan Cederholm and friends have thought of all of this and more, but they’ve already figured out what so many others are still struggling with: Dribbble is not a platform for critique. Dribbble is a way to showcase details of your work, document your style, connect with other designers, and from what I hear a decent way to find freelance jobs (if you’re popular). This is clearly the aspect of their product that they have prioritized.

Please believe me when I say that I am as thirsty as anyone for real criticism, but Dribbble is not the community or product to solve that problem. Instead of complaining about their culture of ego-stroking or criticizing trends that spread like wildfire through their community, let’s have a constructive conversation about where and how we can have the kinds of discussions Dribbble is not suited for.

I do not mean to demonize Emily. She seems like a good-intentioned young woman, and whether it was by courage or naiveté, her post is extremely poignant.

David Lowery, songwriter for the bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker and outspoken activist for Artist’s rights in the digital age, wrote a lengthy and thoughtful response to Emily’s post that has gotten a lot of attention. David is passionate about the subject, and even though he carefully reigns himself in every few paragraphs, his riposte is highly emotional and borderline hostile at times.

I think a big part of this issue is actually a matter of user-experience. The real truth of the matter is that it’s not just Emily that “never owned any music to begin with”; none of us have ever really owned music. Sure, we can own a record or a compact-disc or an MP3, but these are only mediums. The real content, that stuff that flows out of speakers and radios and instruments, that stuff cannot be owned.

Herein lies the issue. Earlier formats were physical manifestations of music that you could hold in your hands and show off on your shelf. More importantly, they were often times the only way you could listen to a particular artist or song whenever you liked. They enabled a rewarding and positive experience and through that repeated experience became meaningful objects. Every scuffed record sleeve and cracked jewel case was representative of your unique relationship to the music. Nowadays however, there are a whole host of different ways to listen to a particular song on-demand, be it through a streaming service or simply through YouTube. An illegally obtained MP3 is completely indistinguishable from a legally purchased one. No matter how many times you listen to that digital file, it will never become meaningful to you in the same way that old forty-five did. It’s got no soul and it can be copied infinitely; it should come as no surprise that piracy is such a problem.

I agree unequivocally with David that we have to be responsible for our own actions, regardless of the relative convenience or inconvenience of doing the right thing. I also feel that people have to be responsible for their own health, regardless of the relative convenience or inconvenience of eating properly. To look at the increase in pirated music and draw the conclusion that my generation doesn’t care about artist rights is to look at rising obeisity rates and draw the conclusion that my generation would prefer to get diabetes and die young. Like it or not, people’s behavior is largely dictated by the systems in which they exist. This is why design is so critically important.

One section near the end of David’s response was particularly compelling to me:

Many in your generation are willing to pay a little extra to buy “fair trade” coffee that insures the workers that harvested the coffee were paid fairly. Many in your generation will pay a little more to buy clothing and shoes from manufacturers that certify they don’t use sweatshops. Many in your generation pressured Apple to examine working conditions at Foxconn in China. Your generation is largely responsible for the recent cultural changes that has given more equality to same sex couples. On nearly every count your generation is much more ethical and fair than my generation. Except for one thing. Artist rights.

I could not help but think of Kickstarter as I was reading this. Despite existing in a culture where musicians and other artists have a harder time than ever making a living selling their life’s work, Kickstarter expects to provide more funding to the Arts than the NEA in 2012. I strongly believe (and have mentioned before) that a critical part of Kickstarter’s success lies in their constructed culture of “backing”. In reality, buying an album has always been “backing” the band that recorded it, but that feeling was cheapened and lost when the reward for your support changed from a physical object to a digital file. Kickstarter has brought this warm and fuzzy feeling back to the surface through careful attenion to design and interaction, and now it seems like it would be easier for a band to get support from their fans before they record their next hit album instead of after.

There is a staggering opportunity in all of this. Reconsideration of the experience of buying and consuming music (and movies and television and video games and software) could change people’s behavior for the better, and in turn reinvigorate these faltering markets. Kickstarter has already shown that people are willing to support the things they love, they just need to be reminded of how powerful buying, or refusing to buy, a product can be.

Since I've been on Wordpress, I have redesigned my site from the ground up four times. When the site was fresh, I was excited by the new format and would write new blog posts and take the time to photograph work and add it regularly. After a perilously brief two or three weeks, the shine would wear off and I would start to become frustrated and dissatisfied with little things about the site. After a month, I hated it, without fail, and would begin to plan a glorious redesign.

There was too much friction in making simple tweaks to the design of the site, and the layout was always too overwrought to just simply fix the little things that started to annoy me. My website was always a reflection of my sensibilities from six months prior, and it felt more like a liability than an asset.

As part of being a “graphic designer”, I always felt a need for my website to be primarily a showcase of my work. I had a tuition-sized chip on my shoulder and felt a need to justify myself and prove my worth. However, as time wore on, a portfolio began to feel like a shallow and somewhat meaningless representation of myself. Images are too easily pinned, reblogged, over-consumed, and taken at face value, and some of the work I am most proud of does not lend itself to being viewed this way. When I graduated a year ago (with an already out of date site) and started Friends of The Web I had even less of a reason to maintain an up to date portfolio. So, I decided to throw the whole thing out, for the first time, and start from scratch.

My biggest concern with my new website was not backing myself into a corner with a complex content management system such as Wordpress. I want to be able to move freely and easily to the next thing, whatever it is. Making small changes and having the design of the site evolve over time is also very important to me, so I am keeping things simple for now. I will style elements as I need them, and add sections and features if it becomes appropriate to do so. I spent this past weekend at the Baltimore Hackathon learning how to use Git and GitHub, setting up this blog on scriptogr.am, and moving over a few choice pieces of writing from my previous blog that I want to live on. I suspect I may soon outgrow scriptogr.am, which is in “super-beta-stage”, and move on to Jekyll, but I am going to give it a chance and see how it goes.

All of the code for this site is available on GitHub and free to fork, merge, spoon, and the like.

I am not alone in this qualm. In fact, I would venture to say that the majority of the design and UI community takes issue with the leather stitching, mandatory shine, and linen textures of iOS. But today I came across this thought from Oliver Reichenstein of iA that changed the way I think about the issue:

Half way through the Steve Jobs Biography, the biggest revelation for me so far is the clash between Raskin and Jobs. It’s a clash between serious design and selling design:

1. Serious design does not necessarily sell well. That’s why it needs to be expensive to even exist.

2. What sells is sentimentalism, nostalgia, solemnity—what sells is kitsch. That’s why kitsch can be so cheap. Because it sells so well.

That is true for any kind of design. And this is why iCal has this fucking leather surface that makes any user interface designer puke wet feverish dogs. And that’s why Apple has so much money in the bank. Not because of the mind blowing design of its hardware. (They always had the nicest hardware). But because people are sold through its nostalgic interface. The winning path started with OSX, the interface “you want to lick.” Kitsch interfaces makes the average user think:

“I know how to use this!” (which is always a false promise)

instead of

“Looks like I need to learn to use this.” (which is always the case)

In practice, Jef Raskin’s serious design approach would win hands down against the Jobs approach—but Jef would not even get the chance to compete, because no one cares about serious design before getting in touch with it.

I don’t agree with it all, but there is a big revelation in there for me. Some people believe that skeuomorphism makes an interface easier to use, or more intuitive for the user, and I simply don’t buy that. But what hadn’t occurred to me is that it doesn’t matter if it actually does make it easier to use, all that matters is that it makes the average person think it’s easier to use. In reality, a user must take time to learn any interface, whether clad in faux leather or not. The skeuomorphism in iOS plainly tricks people that might otherwise walk away, convinced that they can’t learn something new, into putting in the time required to get acclimated to a new interface.

For every one designer pointing out flawed and unnecessary ornamentation in iOS, one hundred non-designers, normal people, are tricked into thinking they understand something new.

Apple has become increasingly mainstream with the success of the iPod, iPhone, and now the iPad. They always appealed to the creative class, those with a trained eye and developed taste, but now they’re in the pockets of an incredibly diverse chunk of the population. They recognize this, and they’ve draped artificial linen over the eyes of the everyman so the future doesn’t scare or intimidate him too much. Skeuomorphism, in Apple’s case, is not a cute style or an attempt to make their interfaces easier to use, but instead a way to ease us on to the new frontier.

I am certainly not off to throw a linen texture on the apps we’re working on at Friends of The Web, but I am definitely thinking about skeuomorphism differently now.

Thanks to Cemre Güngör for turning me on to the post from Oliver.

On September 14th, they announced the “Subscribe” button which allows users to follow the updates of people they aren’t “friends” with. On the surface, this may seem a small update, a slight twist on the idea of “friending”, undoubtedly inspired by, if not directly taken from, Twitter. However, I think it is much more important than it may seem.

Every other aspect of Facebook is an emulation or facilitation of some common, normal interaction. Your Facebook friends are your real life friends; the service emulates the idea of sending them a letter (messages), having a conversation with them (chat), writing on their wall (posting), and now thanks to the newest updates, listening to music with them and sharing information about various media with them. Zuckerberg in his keynote states directly, multiple times, that the experience of going through someone’s Facebook page should mirror the experience of having a conversation with them. This is all well and good, but it is ground we’ve all trod thoroughly in the course of our lives. At the end of the day, none of these things are unique and meaningful interactions that take advantage of the immense potential Facebook and its 750 million active users have. To clarify, when I talk about the potential of digital media and communication, I mean the types of interactions that the internet can facilitate that would not be possible without it. No matter how cool it may be to listen to music with your friends on Facebook, it will never be as good as listening to music with your friends in real life.

This brings me to Twitter. I have been thinking a lot about Twitter, a service which I adore and use daily, and why it has been so successful. It’s a stupidly simple idea with its fair share of technical problems, way more in its formative years, and what must be the most childish and silly naming conventions of any mainstream website. (5000 tweets later, I still feel like an ass saying “I tweeted such-and-such” and “Follow me on Twitter“.) In spite of this, the service has grown speedily.

Twitter is one of the only truly new things I can think of. It facilitates interactions that would not be possible without digital communication. It allows its users to connect with celebrities, thought leaders, and other individuals that would never friend them on Facebook, and in an intimate way no less. In this massive web of leaders and followers, truly unique conversations occur, interactions that lead to amazing things. I have made friends on Twitter, true friends, whom I feel like I know on a personal level. When Anthony and I traveled to New York for the first Photo Hack Day, one of them kindly and without hesitation allowed us to stay at his place, having never properly met either of us before. Connecting with people that aren’t our friends is what gives Twitter its edge. It’s actually taking advantage of digital communication’s potential, and it’s exactly what Facebook is trying to tap into with the “Subscribe” button.

Twitter is a hard thing to describe to someone who hasn’t used it. This is because it is not an emulation of some other interaction like Facebook and every other major service out there. You can’t simply say “oh, it’s like X, but online!” The closest comparison I can draw is everyone in the world (on Twitter more accurately) standing together in one huge gymnasium, huddled tightly around the most charismatic and entertaining individuals, casually and heterogeneously spread out around the average user. Everyone is talking, some almost non-stop and some rarely. In real life, this would of course be madness without benefit; no one would be able to hear anything meaningful. But with Twitter, everyone can hear. That’s the magic of it. Everyone can hear every other person they care to listen to. Even the quietest individual can be heard by the most influential expert. Some are serendipitously amplified into communities they would otherwise be unaware of, wherein they discover meaningful interactions and relationships. The result is an incredibly nimble and reactive community; one that can turn a passing thought into front page news and respond more quickly and effectively than any institution or major media outlet ever could.

These are the kinds of things our social networks should be doing for us. Listening to the same song in real time with my friend is a cool novelty, but it still leaves so much potential on the table. The subscribe button is a step in the right direction, but perhaps only in the spirit if competing with Twitter. I suspect privacy concerns are one reason that Facebook will have trouble competing in this space. Twitter’s brilliant and simple solution is that there is no privacy (save direct messages, which feel tacked on anyway). Everything said is said publicly, and eavesdropping is encouraged. Any “privacy” on the internet is an illusion anyway, might as well play to it.

This was perhaps a bit messier than my usual posts, but I wanted to get these thoughts out.