machines
The dragline
A metropolis for hydrocarbons
An oil refinery suggests the image of a metropolis for hydrocarbons, the pipe manifolds like expressways, the distillation towers like skyscrapers.
A haunting, syncopated music
"Rappers" on the roof of the electrostatic precipitator knock the accumulated dust free, letting it fall into the storage hopper. Each rapper is the size and shape of a baseball bat. Inside is an electromagnet that pulls a steel plunger upward, then allows it to fall again, producing a sharp knock. The rappers are energized at seemingly random intervals, producing a haunting, syncopated music. (The rhythm seemed more modern jazz than rap.)
One-machine policy
Today population forecasts are based on extensive and reliable data. However, no such demographic base exists for the world's growing population of machines and devices. Now may be the time to take machine demography seriously and enter into real discussions about machine population control.
An enormous machine
The couple of years in question here saw one of the largest bureaucracies anywhere undergo a convulsion in which it tried to reconceive itself as a non- or even anti-bureaucracy, which at first might sound like nothing more than an amusing bit of bureaucratic folly. In fact, it was frightening; it was a little like watching an enormous machine come to consciousness and start trying to think and feel like a real human.
Skeleton, Organs, Circulation, Sinew, Skin
I’m concerned with how I witness the work of user experience practitioners getting treated: like it’s just a set of motions toward a product’s all-important implementation, and one that we try to compress, due to its ostensible superfluity. Once the implementation is finished, the UX work appears to usually get discarded.
Tracing the answer back
I submit that the materials that form the precursors to a product’s implementation have considerable value on their own.
My vision is that I will be able to ask a question as mundane as one about the wording of a single button, and trace the answer all the way back to the overarching business strategy to see that it makes sense.
The UX coral reef
It isn’t a site, or a service, or even an identifiable product at all, but rather a system for creating a skin around and connective tissue between things like:
Demographic studies
Contextual inquiries
Stakeholder and user interviews
Surveys
The business ecosystem
Personas
Scenarios
Sketches, storyboards, wireframes
Mockups, models and prototypes
Email and IM conversations
Meeting notes
Content inventories and audits
Concept schemes, taxonomies, thesauri
A UI style guide
A branding and visual identity guide
A voice and tone guide
A code style guide
...etcThe individual elements of such a corpus represent the work of half a dozen specialist sub-disciplines, and are useful for realizing a product’s implementation. But if you hook them all up together, they merge to become a strategic artifact that transcends products and operates as a critical control surface for the business. This is because what such an artifact represents is a coral reef of deeply-considered and hard-fought decisions, and a story of the process that yielded them.