design of a product
To design a successful product is an iterative process. How to get it right? Here are two pieces of advice. One is from the Gmail creator Paul Buchheit.
What’s the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product – the rest is noise. For example, the original iPod was: 1) small enough to fit in your pocket, 2) had enough storage to hold many hours of music and 3) easy to sync with your Mac (most hardware companies can’t make software, so I bet the others got this wrong). That’s it – no wireless, no ability to edit playlists on the device, no support for Ogg – nothing but the essentials, well executed.
By focusing on only a few core features in the first version, you are forced to find the true essence and value of the product. If your product needs “everything” in order to be good, then it’s probably not very innovative (though it might be a nice upgrade to an existing product). Put another way, if your product is great, it doesn’t need to be good.
Another is from Wil Chung’s Post: form follows function.
Underlying great creations that you love—be it music, art, or technology—its form (what it looks like) is driven by an underpinning internal logic (how it works). I noticed this pattern while watching a talk on cellular automaton and realized it’s “form follows function” paraphrased from a slightly different angle. Inventing a form is a hard task, so you must approach it obliquely—by first illuminating the underlying function.
When Bauhaus designers adopted Sullivan’s “form follows function,” what they meant was, form should follow function. And if function is hard enough, form is forced to follow it, because there is no effort to spare for error.
So in the end, who creates the future?
“The future is not shaped by people who don’t really believe in the future. Men and women of vitality have always been prepared to bet their futures, even their lives, on ventures of unknown outcome. If they had all looked before they leaped, we would still be crouched in caves sketching animal pictures on the wall.”
V for Vendetta
Alan Moore: We are told to remember the idea and not the man. Because a man can fail. He can be caught, he can be killed and forgotten. But 400 years later, an idea can still change the world. I have witnessed firsthand the power of ideas. I’ve seen people kill in the name of them. But you cannot kiss an idea… cannot touch it or hold it.
Ideas do not bleed. They do not feel pain. They do not love. And it is not an idea that I miss. It is a man.
A man that made me remember the 5th of November. A man that I will never forget.
People shouldn’t be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.
Behind this mask there is more than just flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea… and ideas are bulletproof.
David Graeber, Debt: the first 5000 years
Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly:
“Up in our country we are human!” said the hunter. “And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.
… The refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began “comparing power with power, measuring, calculating” and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt. It’s not that he, like untold millions of similar egalitarian spirits throughout history, was unaware that humans have a propensity to calculate. If he wasn’t aware of it, he could not have said what he did. Of course we have a propensity to calculate. We have all sorts of propensities. In any real-life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. No one is more real than any other. The real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity, and therefore, make the basis of our civilization.
David Graeber, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire
Traditional hedonism…was based on the direct experience of pleasure: wine, women and song; sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll; or whatever the local variant. The problem, from a capitalist perspective, is that there are inherent limits to all this. People become sated, bored…Modern self-illusory hedonism solves this dilemma because here, what one is really consuming are fantasies and day-dreams about what having a certain product would be like.
- hedonism: a family of philosophical views that prioritize pleasure
Dan Fischer: Living as if another world were possible
Graeber viewed neoliberalism as primarily a political project masquerading as an economic one, and he exposed the system’s convoluted methods of keeping people demoralized, resentful, and hopeless about building a better world. These instruments of hopelessness included debt (Debt: The First 5,000 Years), corporate bureaucracy (The Utopia of Rules) and pointless work (Bullshit Jobs: A Theory). Graeber aptly described that last book as “an arrow aimed at the heart of our civilization.” It argued that most of our working hours are not producing anything useful, and that the workweek could easily be reduced to fifteen or even twelve hours if it weren’t for capitalists’ drive to keep us perpetually busy. “The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger,” he wrote, “Think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the sixties.”
We know at the present time that all animals, beginning with the ants, going on to the birds, and ending with the highest mammals, are fond of plays, wrestling, running after each other, trying to capture each other, teasing each other, and so on. And while many plays are, so to speak, a school for the proper behavior of the young in mature life, there are others which, apart from their utilitarian purposes, are, together with dancing and singing, mere manifestations of an excess of forces—“the joy of life,” and a desire to communicate in some way or another with other individuals of the same or of other species—in short, a manifestation of sociability proper, which is a distinctive feature of all the animal world.
David Graeber: To live as a rebel—in the constant awareness of the possibilities of revolutionary transformation, and amongst those who dream of it—is surely the best way one can live.
Go and read some from the anarchist library
Rebecca Solnit: Flipping through Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology as I inadequately prepared myself for this event, I noticed that a decade ago it seemed like you had to be kind of defensive against the anti-utopian strain that was so strong then. Do you think that we’ve reclaimed utopia through Occupy and some of the other movements?
David Graeber: I think it’s starting to happen. I think there has been a war of the imagination over the last several years. I was thinking a lot about what there might be to be optimistic about. And I came to the conclusion that this feeling of hopelessness that everybody had was a manufactured product, and that’s what neoliberalism is really about. Neoliberalism isn’t an economic program—it’s a political program designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives.