Information & Information Architecture
A history of content and sources
Good annotation
Information displays should be annotated, combining words, images, graphics, whatever it takes to describe and explain something. Annotation calls out and explains information and, at the same time, explains to viewers how to read data displays. Good annotation is like a knowledgeable expert/teacher at the viewer's side pointing and saying, "Now see how this works with that, how this might explain that..."
An immense wordy diagram
In ~1560 Ettore Ausonia, a polymath with interests from mathematics to mirror-making, constructed an immense wordy diagram depicting reflections from concave spherical mirrors. Then, between 1592 and 1601, while teaching at the University of Padua, Galileo made this handwritten copy of the diagram, which was fortunate since Ausonio's original has since gone missing. Three helpful architectures for the off-the-grid sentences are deployed – word trees, stacklists, annotated linking lines.
No wonder you think it's complicated
We were very proud of our user interface and the fact that we had a way to browse 16,000 (!!) pages of documentation on a CD-ROM. But browsing the hierarchy felt a little complicated to us.
So we asked Tufte to come in and have a look, and were hoping perhaps for a pat on the head or some free advice. He played with our AnswerBook for 90 seconds, turned around, pronounced his review:
"Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care is a best-selling owner's manual for the most complicated 'product' imaginable – and it has only 2 levels of headings. You have 8 levels of hierarchy and I haven't stopped counting yet. No wonder you think it's complicated."
Infinite varieties of contexts
Over the course of 10 years of using Are.na, I have fully adopted the view that any piece of information can be important to a person given the right context. And on Are.na, pieces of information can be arranged in infinite varieties of contexts – their respective meaning shifts as the proximate information shifts. In other words, the more connections a block has, the more opportunities it has to be a nodal point.
Nodal points
I started thinking about all the other important “nodal points” (I don’t know what else to call this) of people, places, books, albums, websites, etc. that all played a part in shaping who I am as a person and what I think is important. These points are a combination of seeking things out myself and getting a recommendation that felt like it was actually for me. A mixture of both passive and active knowledge acquisition.
ultimately, it's the totality of those “nodal points” that indicate one’s own unique perspective. It doesn’t matter if you specifically sought out the nodal point or not, it’s the recognition that counts. When you encounter a piece of life-changing information (no matter how large the change part is), you are simultaneously discovering and creating “yourself,” becoming incrementally more complete. Your perspective (where your gaze is directed) is made up of a meandering line through these points. Learning (or maybe some precursor to learning) is a lot about developing the intuition to recognize when something you find in the world is going to be a nodal point for you.
What is a commonplace?
In all cases, a commonplace is a method of compiling knowledge for later use. In digital or analog form, this continued growth of stored ideas and projects is a key driver of intellectual development. Any time you decide to work on a project, you should attempt to collect and categorise all information that is relevant and useful.
Reveling in infrastructure
Hunstanton Secondary School (1954) in Norfolk, England, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson. Photo by Anna Armstrong (2011)
When the Smithsons placed the water heater for the Hunstanton Secondary School prominently above the school’s roofline, they weren’t just revealing the building’s infrastructure, they were reveling in it. What does it look like to do this on the web?
Of course there’s no single answer, because the web is simultaneously a physical and digital medium. It is material and it isn’t. It depends on how literally you interpret the question. But taking it somewhere in-between, seeing the web as primarily an information medium, we can ask the question a little differently: what does it look like to design something that is true to the material of digital information?
The quality of thought
It is the quality of thought and the information we use that determines yield, not the size or quality of the site.
A dot went for a walk
A dot went for a walk and turned into a line.
The dot, the line, the dance, the story, and the painting had found connections. Memory became learning, learning became understanding.Learning is remembering what one is interested in. Learning, interest, and memory are the tango of understanding.
Creating a map of meaning between data and understanding is the transformation of big data into big understanding.
The dot had embraced understanding.
Understanding precedes action.
Each of us is a dot on a journey.The need to record
With collecting comes the need to record. A specimen without a label is simply a (sometimes) pretty object. Without its associated data it is scientifically worthless.
The lapse of many years
At this point I wish to emphasize what I believe will ultimately prove to be the greatest purpose of our museum. This value will not, however, be realized until the lapse of many years, possibly a century, assuming that our material is safely preserved. And this is that the student of the future will have access to the original record of faunal conditions in California and the west, wherever we now work. He will know the proportional constituency of our faunae by species, the relative numbers of each species and the extent of the ranges of species as they exist today.
— Joseph Grinnell, 1910
Information imposters
Information imposters: This is nonsense that masquerades as information because it is postured in the form of information. We automatically give a certain weight to data based on the form in which it is delivered to us. Because we don’t take the time to question this, we assume that we have received some information.
My favorite example of this is in cookbook recipes that call for you to “cook until done.” This doesn’t tell you very much. Why bother? Information imposters are fodder for administravitis.
Like a prism
When you look at phonemes, you look through the perspective of morphemes, which are one linguistic level higher. The higher level is like a prism that splits the light in two. What was one thing, like ‘length’ at the phoneme level, looks like two opposite things ‘long’ and ‘short’ from the perspective of the morphemes. In practice, when you find both a word and its opposite, then the phoneme is not about either of these two things, but about what is common to them.
Thinking in terms of outputs
In our use of digital and analogue filing tools, we classify information through folders. An article about railway construction gets filed under ‘infrastructure’ or ‘transport’. In Evernote we tag it with ‘rail’ or ‘construction’. This is thinking like a librarian and not like a writer. We are classifying the information as an input. The reason you take notes as a writer is to produce content. It makes sense, then, to take notes in line with this goal.
Traditional filing like this tends to fail when you attempt to write your content. You are stuck trying to figure out which categories will be relevant for your proposal, paper or blog post. Interesting writing often comes from connecting separate fields through a common idea. By revealing the common denominator. By unifying two seemingly-contradictory ideas. How can you possibly achieve this if you’re looking in the same category for your information? The categories simply do not fulfil the function required by the writer.
The notes you take and indeed, the way you process information, should be with a specific project or idea in mind. You must classify information in terms of its outputs. When you take notes on a book, think about how this could apply to a specific idea you had or how it argues against a paper you read last week. The premise is that you should be organising by context and always trying to connect the dots between the content you're consuming.
Off to the races
"You get to the point where you're about to place your wager; the race is about to be run. You evaluate the sum total of the information, which has to do with how the money has been bet, what the horses looked like on the track, all this information—and it's like you run your hand over the race—I've had this happen so many times, it's the only way to explain it—you run your hand over the race. All the information is logically there, but there's something wrong. You don't know why something is wrong, but something is not correct. Then I have to reevaluate everything in terms of this feeling I have about the thing, which is derived from information, but which is so complex and so intricate and so subtle that there's no way you can put a tag on it."
The pie has been made
"In today's world, boundaries are fixed, and most significant facts have been generated. Gentleman, the heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of those facts. Classification, organization, presentation. To put it another way, the pie has been made—the contest is now in the slicing."
The Visual Information Seeking Mantra
There are many visual design guidelines but the basic principle might be summarized as the Visual Information Seeking Mantra:
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demandEach line represents one project in which I found myself rediscovering this principle and therefore wrote it down it as a reminder. It proved to be only a starting point in trying to characterize the multiple information visualization innovations occurring at university, government, and industry research labs.
Envisioning Information
A Book by Edward TufteBeautiful Evidence
A Book by Edward TufteThe Visual Display of Quantitative Information
A Book by Edward TufteThe Ladder of Abstraction
An Essay by Bret VictorThe Elements of Graphing Data
A Book by William S. ClevelandUnderstanding Understanding
A Book by Richard Saul WurmanVisual Explanations
A Book by Edward TufteInformation Visualization: Perception for Design
A Book by Colin WareThe Eyes Have It
A Research Paper by Ben ShneidermanLooseleaf
A WebsiteWikipedia
A WebsiteTinderbox
An ApplicationTinderbox is a workbench for your ideas and plans, ands ideas. It can help you analyze and understand them today, and it will adapt to your changing needs and growing knowledge.
Your Tinderbox documents can help organize themselves, keeping your data clean. We believe in information gardening: as your understanding grows, Tinderbox grows with you.
The medium is the message
A Quote by Marshall McLuhanProduct Design Resources
A Reference Work by Brandon DornThings I‘ve read, people I‘ve tried to learn from, and things I‘ve done to become a better designer. This is an idiosyncratic list reflecting what has helped me along the way, rather than an exhaustive list of design classics.
Though the list leans toward theory — principles are more durable than technique — I offer a few ideas further down about how to practice design. It also leans toward information design, because the task of presenting rich, dense information in an accessible way is ultimately the task of any digital product.
Blogging with Version Control
An Article by Will DarwinI’ve been musing for a while now on the way blog posts are typically presented—in reverse chronological order. This format has never truly made sense and does not reflect the way good writing and thinking happens.
...The main issue with the ‘pile’ system is that this post is eventually buried beneath more recent pieces of writing; there is no incentive for revisiting or updating the work. Even worse, if an author does decide to unearth the piece and make some major changes, those who read the original piece are not made aware of these alterations. The sorting order is static.
Nobody gives a hoot about groupthink
An Article by Baldur BjarnasonTwo relatively common ‘fashions’ today are real-time collaboration and shared data repositories of one kind or another.
Both increase productivity in the naive sense. We work more; everybody is more active; the group feels more cohesive.
The downside is that they also both tend to reduce the quality of the work and increase busywork.
Two types of work
An Article by Jorge ArangoThere are two types of work: growth work and maintenance work.
Growth work involves making new things. It can be something big or small. In either case, growth work often follows a loose process.
Maintenance work is different. Maintenance work involves caring for the resources and instruments that make growth work possible. This includes tools, but also body and mind.
Maintenance is ultimately in service to growth. But effective growth can’t happen without maintenance. As with so many things, the ideal is a healthy balance — and it doesn’t come without struggle.
Open Transclude for Networked Writing
An Essay by Toby ShorinWebsites are not living rooms and other lessons for information architecture
An Essay by Sarah R. BarrettWhile there is a lot that IA can learn from actual architecture or city planning, websites aren’t buildings or cities, and they don’t have to work like them. Instead, they should be designed according to the same principles that people’s brains expect from physical experiences.
Web History Chapter 1: Birth
A Chapter by Jay HoffmannHow to Think About Notes
An Article by Will DarwinWhat we have known since long
A Quote by Ludwig WittgensteinThe problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.
Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think
A Book by Ben Shneiderman
The Craftsman
The great teacher
The good teacher imparts a satisfying explanation; the great teacher unsettles, bequeaths disquiet, invites argument.
The categories of good
We need to turn to a fresh page. We can do so simply by asking—though the answers are anything but simple—what the process of making concrete things reveals to us about ourselves. Learning from things requires us to care about the qualities of cloth or the right way to poach fish; fine cloth or food cooked well enables us to imagine larger categories of 'good'.
For its own sake
'Craftsmanship' may suggest a way of life that waned with the advent of industrial society—but this is misleading. Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.
The details of construction
The housing developments in the Moscow suburbs were built mostly in the decades after the Second World War. Laid out as enormous chessboards, the suburbs stretch to the horizon across flat land sparsely planted with birch and aspen. The architectural design of the suburban buildings was good, but the state had not been able to command good-quality work. The signs of poorly motivated workers appeared in the details of construction.
The technology shelf
Motorola developed what it called a 'technology shelf', created by a small group of engineers, on which were placed possible technical solutions that other teams might use in the future; rather than trying to solve the problem outright, it developed tools whose immediate value was not clear.
The lure of inspiration
The lure of inspiration lies in part in the conviction that raw talent can take the place of training.
I don't think you understand
The physicist Victor Weisskopf once said to his MIT students who worked exclusively with computerized experiments:
When you show me that result, the computer understands the answer, but I don't think you understand the answer.
Impossibly coherent
...what gets lost mentally when screen work replaces physical drawing.
Drawing in bricks by hand, tedious though the process is, prompts the designer to think about their materiality, to engage with their solidity as against the blank, unmarked space on paper of a window.
Computer-assisted design impedes the designer in thinking about scale, as opposed to sheet size. The object on-screen can indeed be manipulated so that it is presented, for instance, from the vantage point of someone on the ground, but in this regard CAD is frequently misused: what appears on-screen is impossibly coherent, framed in a unified way that physical sight never is.
Head and hand
The blueprint signaled a decisive disconnection between head and hand in design: the idea of a thing made complete in conception before it is constructed.
Bodily reality
To do good work means to be curious about, to investigate, and to learn from ambiguity.
In the Fordist model of medicine, there must be a specific illness to treat, the evaluation of a doctor's performance will then be made by counting the time required to treat as many livers as possible and the number of livers that get well. Because bodily reality doesn't fit well inside this classifying model, and because good treatment has to admit experiment, a not insignificant number of doctors create paper fictions to buy themselves time from the bureaucratic monitors. Doctors in the NHS often assign a patient a disease in order to justify the time spent on exploring a puzzling body.
Awareness and knowledge
In the higher stages of skill, there is a constant interplay between tacit knowledge and self-conscious awareness, the tacit knowledge serving as an anchor, the explicit awareness serving as critique and corrective.
The journeyman
The apprentice goldsmith was place-bound while learning how to smelt, purify, and weigh precious metals. These skills required hands-on instruction from his master. Once the apprentice had locally presented his chef d'oeuvre, however, he could move from city to city as a journeyman, responding to opportunities. The traveling goldsmith journeyman made his presentation élevé to the corporate body of master craftsmen in foreign cities. Through his managerial talents and moral behavior he had to convince these strangers that he could become one of them. This migratory dynamism was built into medieval goldsmithing.
Sedentary guilds, by contrast, appeared to him insert and 'corrupt'. The good master, in his words, "presides over a traveling house."
Building generations
How did the builders of Salisbury Cathedral achieve this astonishing construction? There was no one single architect; the masons had no blueprints. Rather, the gestures with which the building began evolved in principles and were collectively managed over three generations. Each event in building practice became absorbed into the fabric of instructing and regulating the next generation.
A thousand little moves
Missing in these analyses is a reconstruction of the workshops of the master—more precisely, one element that has irretrievably gone missing. This is the absorption into tacit knowledge, unspoken and uncodified in words, that occurred there and became a matter of habit, the thousand little everyday moves that add up in sum to a practice.
The most significant fact we know about Stradivari's workshop was that he was all over it, popping up unexpectedly everywhere, gathering in and processing those thousand bits of information that could not signify in the same way to assistants who were doing just one part.
Mirror tools
A mirror-tool is an implement that invites us to think about ourselves. There are two kinds of mirror-tools. These are the replicant and the robot.
A quiet and contented mind
The Encyclopedia sought to get its readers out of themselves and into the lives of artisan craftsmen in order to clarify good work itself. Throughout, the volumes illustrate people engaged sometimes in dull, sometimes in dangerous, sometimes in complicated labor; the expression on all the faces tends to the same serenity. About these plates the historian Adriano Tilgher remarks on the "sense of peace and calm which flows from all well-regulated, disciplined work done with a quiet and contented mind."
The limits of language
The question of human limits was posed to Diderot the moment he, as it were, rose from his armchair. His method for finding out how people worked was, like a modern anthropologist, to ask them:
We addressed ourselves to the most skilled workers in Paris and the kingdom at large. We took the trouble to visit their workshops, to interrogate them, to write under dictation from them, to follow out their ideas, to define, to identify the terms peculiar to their profession.
The research soon ran into difficulty, because much of the knowledge craftsmen possess is tacit knowledge—people know how to do something but they cannot put what they know into words. Diderot remarked of his investigations: "Among a thousand one will be lucky to find a dozen who are capable of explaining the tools or machinery they use, and the things they produce with any clarity."
What we can say in words may be more limited than what we can do with things. Language is not an adequate 'mirror-tool' for the physical movements of the human body.
The wisdom of the apprentice
Diderot's solution to the limits of language was to become himself a worker.
Become an apprentice and produce bad results so as to be able to teach people how to produce good ones.
This is how I lived
Rather than convey "be like me," better parental advice should be more indirect: "This is how I lived" invites the child to reason about that example. Such advice omits "Therefore you should..." Find your own way; innovate rather than imitate.
Entropy
Imperfect, handmade glass has virtues: these are irregularity, distinctiveness, and what the writer refers to vaguely as 'character'. The two sets of images for glassblowing are thus inseparable; only by understanding how something might be done perfectly is it possible to sense this alternative, an object possessing specificity and character. The bubble or the uneven surface of a piece of glass can be prized, whereas the standard of perfection allows no room either for experiment or for variation.
Against the claim of perfection
We should not compete against the machine. Rather, against the claim of perfection we can assert our own individuality.
Seven lamps
Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture provided seven guides, or 'lamps', for the troubled craftsman, guides for anyone who works directly on material things. These seven are:
- The lamp of sacrifice: The willingness to do something well for its own sake.
- The lamp of truth: The truth that 'breaks and rents continually'; Ruskin's embrace of difficulty, resistance, and ambiguity.
- The lamp of power: Tempered power, guided standards other than blind will.
- The lamp of beauty: Which for Ruskin is found more in the detail, the ornament—hand-sized beauty—than in the large design.
- The lamp of life: Life equating with struggle and energy, death with deadly perfection.
- The lamp of memory: The guidance provided by the time before machinery ruled.
- The lamp of obedience: Obedience to the example set by a master's practice rather than by his particular works; otherwise put, strive to be like Stradivari but do not seek to copy his particular violins.
I am here
I am here, in this work.
A maker's mark is a peculiar sign. Ancient brickwork established presence through small details marking 'it': the detail itself.
The great historian of bricks, Alex Clifton-Taylor, observes that what most counts about them is their small size, which just suits the human hand laying a brick. A brick wall, he says, "is therefore an aggregation of small effects. This implies a human and intimate quality not present to the same extent in stone architecture."
Get a grip
The hand is the window on to the mind. — Immanuel Kant
American slang advises us to "get a grip"; more generally we speak of "coming to grips with an issue." Both figures reflect the evolutionary dialogue between the hand and the brain.
Focal awareness
The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes what she experienced as "being as a thing." The philosopher Michael Polanyi calls it "focal awareness" and recurs to the act of hammering a nail:
When we bring down the hammer we do not feel that its handle has struck our palm but that its head has struck the nail.
We have become the things on which we are working.
Sublime tools
Getting better at using tools comes to us, in part, when the tools challenge us, and this challenge often occurs just because the tools are not fit-for-purpose. In both creation and repair, the challenge can be met by adapting the form of a tool, or improvising with it as it is, using it in ways it was not meant for.
The all-purpose tool seems a special case. In its sheer variety, a flat-edged screwdriver admits all manner of unfathomed possibilities; it, too, can expand our skills if only our imagination rises to the occasion. Without hesitation, the flat-edged screwdriver can be described as sublime—the word sublime standing, as it does in philosophy and the arts, for the potently strange.
Crafting repair
Repair is a neglected, poorly understood, but all-important aspect of technical craftsmanship. The sociologist Douglas Harper believes that making and repairing form a single whole; he writes of those who do both that they possess the "knowledge that allows them to see beyond the elements of a technique to its overall purpose and coherence. This knowledge is the 'live intelligence, fallibly attuned to the actual circumstances' of life. It is the knowledge in which making and fixing are parts of a continuum."
Put simply, it is by fixing things that we often get to understand how they work.
When history moves on
Much twentieth-century urban planning proceeded on the principle: demolish all you can, grade it flat, and then build from scratch. The existing environment has been seen as standing in the way of the planner's will. This aggressive recipe has frequently proved disastrous, destroying many viable buildings as well as ways of life bedded into urban fabric. The replacements for these destroyed buildings have also, too often, proved worse: big projects suffer from overdetermined, fit-for-purpose form; when history moves on, as it always does, tightly defined buildings can soon become obsolete.
Details first
The identification a good craftsman produces is selective, that of finding the most forgiving element in a difficult situation. Often this element is smaller, and so seems less important, than the larger challenge. It is an error in technical as in artistic work to deal first with the big difficulties and then clean up the details; good work often proceeds in just the opposite fashion.
Walls and membranes
All living things contain two sites of resistance. These are cell walls and cell membranes. The cell wall is more purely exclusionary – a boundary; the membrane permits more fluid and solid exchange – a border.
Most pervasive in the modern city is the inert boundary established by highway traffic, cutting off parts of the city from each other. Working with resistance means, in urbanism, converting boundaries into borders.
The ground plane
Whereas Corbusier relegated streets to traffic functions, the ground plane represented to Van Eyck the realm in which people 'learn' cities. The placement of benches and bollards, the height of stepping-stones, the ill-defined separations of sand, grass, and water are all tools in that learning, an education in ambiguity.
Most cities were mostly built by improvisation
In Architecture Without Architects, Bernard Rudofsky documented the ways in which most cities were mostly built by improvisation, following no consistent formal design. Building was added to building, street to street, their forms adapting to different site conditions in the process of extension.
Rudofsky thought that this hidden order is how most settlements of poor people develop and that the work of improvising street order attaches people to their communities, whereas 'renewal' projects, which may provide a cleaner street, pretty houses, and large shops, give the inhabitants no way to mark their presence on the space.
The aspiration for quality
To arouse the aspiration for quality and make good on it, the organization itself has to be well crafted in form. It needs, like Nokia, open information networks; it has to be willing to wait, as Apple is, to bring its products to market until they are really good.
Oddity and peculiarity
The experienced doctor, as one would expect, is a more accurate diagnostician. This is due in large part to the fact that he or she tends to be more open to oddity and peculiarity in patients, whereas the medical student is more likely to be a formalist, working by the book, rather rigidly applying general rules to particular cases.
Relentlessness deformed it
I am not interested in erecting a building, but in presenting to myself the foundations of all possible buildings. — Ludwig Wittgenstein.
But in a note of 1940 to himself he wrote that the building "lacks health" or "primordial life".
In the construction of a house for his sister in the Kundmangasse, Wittgenstein's striving for an ideal perfection rendered the object lifeless. Relentlessness deformed it.
Necessity
Loos's need to respond positively to the difficulties he encountered appeared in the errors that occurred during the construction of the Villa Moller. When the foundations were not laid as specified, he could not afford to dig them up and start again; instead, Loos thickened the form of one side wall to accommodate the mistake, making the thickened wall and emphatic side frame for the front. The formally pure properties of Villa Moller were achieved by working with many similar mistakes and impediments Loos had to take as facts on the ground; necessity stimulated his sense of form. Wittgenstein, knowing no financial necessity, had no such creative dialogue between form and error.
The narrative of its making
Getting things in perfect shape can mean removing the traces, erasing the evidence, of a work in progress. Once this evidence is eliminated, the object appears pristine. Perfection of this cleaned-up sort is a static condition; the object does not hint at the narrative of its making.
The good craftsman
The good craftsman...
...understands the importance of the sketch—that is, not knowing quite what you are about when you begin.
...places positive value on contingency and constraint.
...needs to avoid pursuing a problem relentlessly to the point that is becomes perfectly self-contained.
...avoids perfectionism that can degrade into a self-conscious demonstration.
...learns when it is time to stop.Your life adds up
Weber's German word for a vocation, Beruf, contains two resonances: the gradual accumulation of knowledge and skills and the ever-stronger conviction that one was meant to do this one particular thing in one's life.
An English locution roughly conveys what he meant: your life 'adds up'.
To do just one thing well
The skills society is bulldozing the career path; jobs in the old sense of random movement now prevail; people are meant to deploy a portfolio of skills rather than nurture a single ability in the course of their working histories; this succession of projects or tasks erodes belief that one is meant to do just one thing well.
Manual labor
Artisanal craftsmen have proved particularly promising subjects for job retraining. The discipline required for good manual labor serves them, as does their focus on concrete problems rather than on the flux of process-based, human relations work. For this very reason it has proved easier to train a plumber to become a computer programmer than to train a salesperson; the plumber has craft habit and material focus, which serve retraining. Employers don't often see this opportunity because they equate manual routine with mindless labor.
Multiple choice
Intuitive leaps that open up a problem are impossible to test using multiple-choice questions. These leaps are an exercise of associating unlikely elements. There is no correct answer to the question "Are city streets like arteries and veins?"
Hephaestus
The clubfooted Hephaestus, proud of his work if not of himself, is the most dignified person we can become.