Through the writings of technology journalists, word-of-mouth marketing proponents and authors such as Malcolm Gladwell, the traditional adoption curve now rests in the minds of many more than those in the advertising industry. We are told that trends start with one or two innovators, which then spread to early adopters, which then force the “tipping point” into the mainstream, where the trend distributes itself through a network of people in an exponential fashion, effectively saturating the majority of the market. Some sign on as late adopters, almost as the trend wanes; of course, some simply abandon the idea of trend-following at all, entirely apathetic to popular crazes for infinitely discrete reasons.

One book I’ve certainly been a late adopter to is Virginia Postrel’s The Substance of Style, a book on the commoditisation and value behind the aesthetics of an object. Postrel argues throughout the book that design does have economic value in itself, such values not being relegated only to the realm of function, which I’d certainly have to agree with as a working designer; thousands of us would be jobless if there was no monetary value involved in making things functional and beautiful. However interesting the point is, Postrel underscores a situation that many of us take as given yet rarely examine in detail: the true adoption curve behind aesthetic trends. Postrel’s example is dreadlocks:

“First adopted as an outré religious symbol… dreadlocks became over time an emblem of reggae music, Afrocentrism, or nonsectarian (as opposed to Rastafarian) spirituality. Over the past decade, the increasing popularity of dreadlocks has eroded even this symbolism.” (p. 97)

From an economic point of view, her point makes even more sense:

Consider the costs and benefits of adopting an unusual style. At first, someone who has no reason beyond taste to embrace a hitherto unpopular look won’t be likely to accept the risk of social ostracism (or the added expense.) Only those with a strong ideological or religious commitment — those who want to make a statement — will incur the cost.

Postrel continues, explaining that as the adoption curve of a specific style continues into the masses, it loses its original ideological meaning for the sake of an aesthetic that, in the end, is barely attached to the meaning it once had. As Postrel stated, in the case of dreadlocks, it went from the symbol of a fringe religion to eventually becoming a mainstream style; I’d agree that now, decades later, dreadlocks have become little more than a slightly nonconformist hairstyle for those who have hair that is easily moldable into true dreadlocks (as opposed to dreadlocks held together with hair adhesives or chemical processes.) For those who have hair naturally tending to dreadlocks, the hairstyle — cropped, long, and everywhere in between — is a full-blown trend, if not entirely on the downward slope of the late adoption curve.

Postrel’s argument, then, is split into two competing sections which revolve around the transfer of aesthetics and their attachment to the original symbolism involved with said aesthetic. At the transfer point, today’s critics go in two directions: that of the aesthetic theft and destruction of symbolism through trend adoption, and, on a different yet intersecting plane, the adoption of an aesthetic for the sake of pluralism and individual identity.

There is weight on both sides of the argument. It seems instinctive that, throughout the evolution of human societies, we have predominantly used aesthetic differentiation as a way of associating with certain social segments. When the aesthetics of social or cultural identity catch on in the mainstream, meaning is lost that ruins the original reason for that aesthetic development, an unintended cost on the true creators of the trend. In the case of dreadlocks, this was originally the Rastafari movement that lost the cultural symbol as it became further diluted.

From authenticity to artificiality

This social syncretism is evident in a case that is much less niche than dreadlocks, yet evolves in roughly the same geographic region as the hairstyle. Heavily influenced, once again, by the past aesthetic of African music as well as the Caribbean way of life, the world of Jamaican dancehall maintained a tradition of toasting, a rhythmic spoken word over an Afrocentric beat by a “Master of Ceremonies”. As these dancehall MCs, perhaps themselves influenced by African griots, interacted with African-American culture in New York City in the late seventies and early eighties; urban culture developed with the introduction of musical experimentation with sampling old records mixed with the novelty of electronic drum machines. Dancehall rhyming found its way over the broken beats of the greats of Motown and Southern jazz; coupled with the interest of others in the predominantly African-American community and the introduction and assimilation of African American Vernacular English into the rhyming patterns of dancehall MCs, hip-hop was born. Hip-hop formed the musical basis of a greater, expansive urban culture, with breakdancing and fashion following and evolving alongside the new musical experimentation. Hip-hop culture and its surrounding aesthetic became the voice of the people, its aesthetic confirming their group identity and acting as a method of solidarity for those sympathetic to the causes voiced by those in poverty-stricken urban areas.

It didn’t take long, however, for hip-hop to break into the mainstream. As advertisers began to recognise the buying power of those in urban culture, obsessed with the apparel that became a cultural identity, sportswear companies such as Nike and Reebok began to send their branding vanguard into the barred-window world of Harlem and Brooklyn, speaking with the youth involved at the forefront of hip-hop culture. Once big corporations were involved, with the distribution strength and advertising budgets of big record labels and apparel companies, corporations pitched the urban aesthetic to the mainstream. By that point, it was over; early hip-hop artists with their clean rhymes found a niche in the pop music sphere, with clean acts such as Christian minister (and Bay Area resident) MC Hammer writing raps that today sound like bubblegum pop. Inside, hip-hop culture revolted and emcees shifted toward the hardcore, gritty images of living on the urban streets; as West Coast artists such as NWA evolved with their kill-or-be-killed gangsta rap style, the image of hip-hop culture changed, but once again quickly bubbled to the mainstream. Hip-hop was cool and had hit popular culture with the force of a forty-five. Everyone, from the true inner-city youth to suburban gangsta wannabes was blasting Dr. Dre’s The Chronic.

By the 2000s, rap — mainstream, commercialised hip-hop — became the basis for nearly all pop music; charts were — and still are — dominated by the works of Timothy “Timbaland” Mosley, Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter and Sean Combs, the rapper with the amorphous pseudonym currently known now as “Diddy”. Driving through any affluent suburb, the antithesis of the drug-addled and poverty-stricken ghettos that hip-hop came from, Caucasian teenagers in BMWs listen to the latest songs released by Akon’s Konvict Muzic label, wearing their New Era 50Fifty caps and clothes from urban-culture clothiers such as Akademiks and Ecko. 17-year-old, semi-rural high school football players, perhaps in emulation of their favourite athletes, drive around in their pickup trucks while rapping along with Flo Rida, talking about their “niggaz” and how they handle their Glock semi-automatic pistols, entirely ignoring the connotations of the word nigger and the dark history behind the slur. The dilution to the aesthetic has blatantly occurred at this point, and, to most of rap’s consumers, the original meaning of hip-hop culture is long-gone in the decadent, blingin’ world of rap.

Pluralism vs. pollution

Is this mainstream of the original meaning behind urban culture really dilution? Postrel’s primary argument does not seem to side with those arguing for the dilution of the aesthetic; instead, this mainstream dilution is in part praised for demonstrating modern society’s propensity toward aesthetic pluralism. While suburbanites have roughly accepted hip-hop clothing as merely a superficial style moreso than a group affiliation at this point, some of the affiliation still exists for many naïve to the mainstream: those dressed in urban clothing are still given a more suspicious eye by many in affluent suburban communities, the same eye a white-collar worker would be given in the urban community. There is no doubting that class division, regardless of the degree of aesthetic dilution, still exists. While many in the underground hip-hop culture revile rap music and the kids pretending to be “ghetto,” there are still many of those involved in today’s hip-hop culture that find the distribution of their music as a force uniting those outside of the urban plight to its condition, and with politically-charged messengers hitting the airwaves with their raps of the problems of America’s urban youth, there is an unmistakable advantage to having what little bit of authenticity is left in the mainstream. I have, in multiple occasions, found myself listening to local hip-hop mixtapes procured from the “hyphy” movement in San Jose and Oakland, either through friend with industry connections to big names such as E-40 and Mistah FAB to the purchases from aspiring rappers on street corners in the Bay Area. While mainstream rap may lose much of the authenticity, what little personal experience I have had with true urban culture, through MySpace, the tuner subculture, and the hyphy movement has been overwhelmingly positive. While the wealth of rappers seems absurd, many of the benefits given to those now long able to escape the urban life have, in many cases, caused greater sympathy for the urban cause and added to what little philanthropy the region receives. My research into urban culture is still fairly limited, so while I’m sure many disagree with me, I have found the urban world largely accepting of those sympathetic.

As for those that simply want the aesthetic, such as the semi-rural high schoolers, far detached from any true urban environment, it could be argued that this design pluralism is mutually beneficial. While in many cases the meaning has been lost at this point, the end economic point is feeding the machine that has made rap music popular. In this case, the pluralism attached with people taking the urban cultural aesthetic as part of their own identity — what Postrel refers to as the process I like that, an initial observation of an aesthetic by a so-called early adopter, and the transformation and personalisation of the aesthetic into I’m like that — is not the pollution of the existing urban culture. In this case, it is a personal growth and in some cases a sympathy with the group identity. As people drive themselves to aesthetic syncretism, in the beginning through the sympathy of early adopters tuned into the movement at a close level, there seems to be no intrinsic harm done to the “meaning” of the original aesthetic; while some dilution has evidently occurred as the early adopter is not in full urban uniform, there is still a reflection upon the initial meaning, whether or not the early adopter merely wants the aesthetic or a piece of the social identity.

Instead, there may be a crossover point at which the cost of the dilution outweighs the benefit, and this case is largely outside the realm of the early adopters. In many cases, the viral distribution curve we look at day to day has been simplified to a point where the discrete effects are no longer observational, although they are part of the greater model: the real argument of pluralism vs. pollution occurs at the network level, not the mass-market level. By the time the mass-market curve is applied to the adoption of an aesthetic, the pollution is most likely far too late, given Postrel’s cost/benefit analysis.

A basic model of adoption

To simplify the adoption of an aesthetic, let’s postulate that a man has inked his hand in a vivid fuchsia; it is sufficiently radical enough that most people would see these pink-handed citizens as a bit off if they were to visit other people outside of their social segments. This man has inked his hand pink because he is a citizen of Rhodamine, a mythical land where everything is pink. The original value of the meaning behind this aesthetic change is v = 100, since it has 100 percent of its original meaning, and this man, who we will name Peter, is node zero on a social network graph. As the other ten residents of Rhodamine back this idea to show group affiliation and pride that they live in Rhodamine, they, too, ink their hands. The meaning in this group affiliation is still v = 100, since the primary motive for these residents of Rhodamine is to show solidarity with their fellow residents.

Perhaps Peter has friends in San Francisco; when he visits his friends in the Marina District, he is laughed at by many that don’t know the original reason why Peter has inked his hand, although the cost of this district ostracism is far outweighed by the ideological purpose of the aesthetic. One of Peter’s friends, Sarah, sympathetic to Peter’s cause, also inks her hand in solidarity. At this point, Sarah has become the early adopter and is now the degree of separation between Rhodamine residents and the outer world. Because Sarah does not live in Rhodamine and cannot ever fully grasp the experience of someone that lives there, the value of the aesthetic meaning is decreased by 10 to v = 90.

This pattern increases as time progresses. As Sarah’s friends (as well as the friends of friends of other Rhodamine residents) catch onto the wave, eventually there is a point where, some degrees of separation down the line, the meaning of sympathy has long been eclipsed by those jumping on a bandwagon. While some of these adopters at separation degree n — the crossover point — still really do sympathise with the Rhodamine cause, and some even value the new aesthetic; however, it is those where the value of meaning v means next to nothing and the aesthetic is embraced due to the insecurities of the group that cause any aesthetic pollution whatsoever. It’s the point of mob think — where people aren’t inking their hands for their own sympathetic or even aesthetic pleasure, but rather because the cost of ostracism and not being “cool” far outweighs the aesthetic cost, where the cost of deviation, the original cause of the aesthetic, is too great. It’s this point where the aesthetic is destroyed, and this point is one that varies on the adoption curve depending upon the preferences and security of the aesthetic adoptee. I’d guess that it’s improbable that this is happening anywhere before the inflection point of the standard distribution curve, that is, the point at the standard deviation of the distribution.

A utilitarian counterpoint

Of course, the argument could be made that in the case of mob think even the adoption of the style is beneficial. Those fearing ostracism — the polar opposite of those starting the trends — are still gaining utility by mindlessly adopting the aesthetic trend, since in the state where they don’t adopt the style, their ostracism causes them negative economic utility, or psychological pain from ostracism for being “uncool”.

However, is this design pollution really that worthwhile? From the perspective of an existentialist, or perhaps simply that of a well-meaning guardian of the truth in subcultures from the aesthetic smog of the mainstream produced by the corporate machines in Hollywood and on Madison Avenue, I’d argue that those sitting at point n and beyond would be better off trying to push themselves into a more individual understanding of the world around themselves. Given the absolute apathy that seems inherent in a fair amount of American culture, however, asking people to follow their individual likes and dislikes (and to seek the truth in these underlying aesthetics) is probably too much to ask.

Because of this, the economic rebuttal to this counterpoint would instead be that while yes, perhaps the mob would feel alright by adopting the style in the present, the mob would feel better by shifting into a state of thinking for themselves. Sadly, this is not the way the Nash equilibrium in this case trends. The final solution, instead, is suboptimal unless there is a greater shift in awareness, care, or other such increase in knowledge of the actual subculture behind a mainstream, commercialised aesthetic trend.

Scrubbing the smog

Of course, given the above information, nothing has really been gained aside from an establishment of where this aesthetic pollution may occur and that, most likely, correcting the situation causing said pollution is practically impossible given the current state of broadcast media and the adoption curves inherent in a top-down structure. There are currently many different ideas floating around with which to at least fight back against the problem, none of which I feel holds the answer.

The most hyped possible solution is the one I find myself most deeply involved in: social media. Many of the proponents of “Web 2.0″ and other social trends find that perhaps the democratic nature of the Web will eventually lead to a breaking down of a hierarchal, broadcast structure that currently generates demand for new products and instead places the control back in the hands of the consumer. In this way, it could be the individual that then becomes powerful again instead of the advertisers, as the individual, being unaffected by the same sources as the next given the specialised nature of online social networks, can make up his or her own mind as to what they wish to consume without being heavily influenced by a mass medium. However, the ochlocracy that occurs in the ways that we find social content simply shifts the authority to a different social group at the top of social, instead of broadcast, media’s long tail, which unless solved first seems to nullify the majority of the effects social media would have on breaking the adoption curve into something much less macro-scale.

Maybe the next solution isn’t to change the overall communicative model at all; instead, a small bit of demand from the market could spark greater change in the broadcast industry. This is already evident in ventures such as NBC’s Hulu or consumption-for-charity ventures such as (PRODUCT) RED, although the latter’s actual benefit has been criticised. Of course, all reasons for the broadcast to shift to a socially-responsible model are almost entirely financial, but regardless of the “patina of philanthropy” that appears out of this, even the most superficial of those on the aesthetic adoption curve are forced to think about a greater social cause than their own (relatively petty) social ostracism. Ironically, maybe our best shot at changing the increasingly anarchic, superficially hedonistic ways of American culture is through the very system that is causing the problem to begin with.

The last major solution worth outlining is a shift in American culture altogether. Given the media issues above, this seems absolutely unlikely. Instead of reinforcing the dichotomy between a socioeconomic elite and “everyone else”, a flattening of our perceptions of social structure would achieve the same goal: without people looking to those that may ostracise them from a popular social segment, instead they are free to draw their own conclusions. Unfortunately for the latter, the line between the elite and the masses is simply growing in the United States. The elite socialites of American culture want nothing more than to fortify their statuses although they would seem to suffer less at the hands of paparazzi if they did the opposite; meanwhile, those looking at the elite find themselves caring less about themselves and instead aspiring to unattainable images they see on television or Page Six. Considering social hierarchy has always existed, to magically hope it will go away is sadly worth less thinking about than which pair of shoes to wear out on the town on Friday night.

An inconclusive position

As for now, there appears little we can do other than attempt to stay objective. American culture appears to increasingly find masochistic solace in populism veiled as true pluralism, even in the wake of social media advances that allow for more diverse information consumption. We are sadly locked into an economic model that we as consumers have built for ourselves and will require true popular change to unravel, something which we have seen social media do to an extent. There does not seem to be an indicator that there will be a downfall of popular entertainment anytime soon, given that popular entertainment continues to find ways to either lobby itself into survival or adapt its traditional marketing business models to a world of social networking services and aggregated media consumption. Hopefully, as the innovators and early adopters that currently drive and feed a media revolution, we can maintain a truly pluralist perspective — if so, we may be of more benefit to society than the direct effects of our blogs, software and social actions. If we wish to succumb wholly to style, however, let the bacchanalia begin. Perhaps for our lifetimes America will be a riotous, hedonistic place, but for our children we will most likely leave a greater disaster than our worries over the latest crises in our favourite primetime shows.

Walking down the street in Palo Alto, one is bombarded by beauty: on University Avenue alone, I could furnish my apartment with Persian rugs, Barcelona chairs and new fixtures from Restoration Hardware before watching Some Like It Hot at the Stanford theatre. Chances are I’ve passed by over $1 million worth of luxury automobiles parked on the block, glistening in the California sunlight. The girl that passed me by was actually not 19 but rather cosmetically-enhanced at 39. Everyone has an iPhone. The bars are packed with wealthy twenty-somethings in styled clothes shrouding shaped bodies. Palo Alto is something out of an episode of Desperate Housewives, and my fourth-floor studio feels a few blocks over from Wisteria Lane. I think I saw Eva Longoria drive by in a Maserati.

As a lover of all things beautiful, I found myself falling into the superficiality head first, sucked into the charybdis that exists under the Caltrain station past Alma Street. I was design’s Dracula, and Palo Alto was quenching my thirst for anything at all æsthetic. I sipped my artisan mocha at Coupa Café and read Valleywag. I attended parties at venture capitalists’ houses in Atherton. I traded my old weapons — the Moleskine and Lamy Safari — for new, sleek Japanese writing gear. I nearly purchased a BMW, thinking that the Japanese cars just didn’t have enough prestige. I put a Louis Vuitton wallet in my back pocket. With affluence comes choice, and even though I make tens of thousands less than the median income in Palo Alto, I’m still a far cry richer than the $400-a-month student I was just four months ago. For a while, it was pretty cool, if not more than certainly pretty.

The last exam I took in April was Economics 496, a class on the history of economic thought. A perpetual cynic of Silicon Valley exuberance, I found myself interested in Thorstein Veblen, the sociologist/economist that wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class. It was Veblen’s Leisure Class that introduced the world to a critique of the status-seeking, style-obsessed upper-middle class of the 1920s he called “conspicuous consumers”. While Veblen’s definition of conspicuous consumption was more strict than it is used in today’s economic vernacular (Veblen used the term to refer to goods bought for the primary purpose of aspiring to a higher social status,) I couldn’t help but feeling a little guilty. When I drove my new Acura to the airport last week, a suitcase of new clothes in the trunk, listening to something trendy on XM, I think Veblen’s ghost smashed through my windshield on the 101. Veblen would have hated me.

When I finally ended up back in Ann Arbor for a friend’s wedding that evening, I returned to my old cheap-food haunts carrying my fountain pen and Moleskine. When I sat down to read Virginia Postrel’s The Substance of Style, analysing consumer culture and why it drives the American economy, I had finally come to the conclusion that somewhere between February and now, I had lost all direction. I had lost my true love of design, instead diluting that love into something that was a mere love of style; my Modernist roots had become little more than another asset in a stylistic toolbox. The commoditised world of ubiquitous æsthetics had gone from my source of inspiration and subject of constant examination to something that had swallowed me whole. I had broken the cardinal rule of anthropology. I had become one of my own subjects. Now, after being vomited back out of the whale, it’s time to get back to business. This time, certainly more than the last, I’m in need of forgiveness.

hyalineskies returns

Somewhere inside, I found my way back to modernism, and I revolted against Nightingale, the last version of hyalineskies. After taking a rather different artistic direction, I immediately set out to redesign all of hyalineskies from scratch. I needed something true to design, not an ephemeral style, and it was impossible to extract that from Nightingale’s bloated codebase and various JavaScript effects. Sticking with the classic laws of æsthetics, I rebuilt hyalineskies into something modern and minimalist. In keeping with the minimalism, even this theme’s name is minimal; it is simply Nine.

I’m somewhat convinced that the IA of single posts was perfected in ærial, version seven of hyalineskies. You’ll notice that the overall organisation of this page is similar, trading some of the content surfacing in ærial’s sidebar for an article abstract and (if available) metadata such as sources for footnotes or links to downloads.

On the contrary, I’ve never been happy with the way that WordPress has handled archives. Archives are not dead content; rather, they are constantly explored by those coming from search queries, and WordPress has never had any good built-in functionality to surface this content or make it remotely explorable. As a beginning to a solution to this problem, all archive pages in Nine share a common interface known as the Archive Explorer. With the Archive Explorer, one can search, browse by category, or browse by date. (The date exploration function is by far the most awesome, creating a relative frequency graph by month.) While the Archive Explorer is still primitive and will certainly see iteration, it does a better job of doing what archive pages should do, allowing you to really browse the ever-growing repository of past hyalineskies content.

On the visual side, Nine also maintains strict adherence to the classics. Nearly every proportion of the columnar layout grid is based upon factors of 1.618 to 1, an approximation of the classical golden ratio. To maintain strict compliance with the ratio, the grid is built entirely in pixel units, with ems used only when text sizes may need to fluctuate for accessibility purposes. I also kept type simple, sticking with the classic Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk for headlines and Helvetica for body copy. The site uses only one colour, a hexadecimal approximation of Pantone 381 C.

The backend has also been relatively optimised; as my coding skills improve thanks to the demands of Facebook, my own pages have become more efficient. Nine uses less MySQL queries than Gridlock, ærial, or Nightingale, with all static content cached using WP-Cache. All of Nine’s assets weigh in at less than 1.2 MB, including development libraries such as Mootools and Fuselage, with an average theme page weight of around 30K after caching common CSS and JS assets.

The fun category names have also been replaced by three parent categories, Social Research, Design and Tutorials, the core hyalineskies content. Gratuitous JavaScript effects have generally been cut, and other en vogue Web 2.0 styles have also been stripped for the most part. Beauty doesn’t require gloss text and wet-floor techniques; rather, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was right nearly 40 years ago: “God is in the details.”

Updated WordPress section

After much demand, I’ve updated the popular Gridlock to version 1.5, adding some new functionality such as centred pages and WordPress widget support. Nightingale and ærial are soon to follow, with the (ironically) simpler Nightingale probably being released around December 2007. Nine, of course, will eventually be released as well.

A while ago I wrote about Fuselage, a WordPress framework, that I followed up on in my last article. The original framework eventually grew to something so high-level with so much feature creep that the libraries became bloated. I’m using the slimmer parts of Fuselage on the backend of Nine; I’ll be releasing what I have of Fuselage soon, with Nightingale as its example theme, for use by developers needing more rapid development time and various design patterns for grids, typography and common WordPress hacks such as relative times.

Weekly scheduled content

Hopefully, I’ll be back to weekly content posts. I’m running hyalineskies on a two-week scheduled backup, with posts to pad against the off-chance that I won’t be able to write (or if I end up running out of creativity.) I used to follow this model roughly a year ago to much success; hopefully I’ll be able to stick with it this time. As a hint to next week’s content, I’ll be talking about the balance of utility in design, inspired by some of the designers at FontFont. I’ve also drafts on the social impact of Halo 3 in teenage circles, the impact of George Soros on the design of viral growth models, and the commoditisation of design, which all may or may not be eventually published.

Back to the publication

I’ve removed much of the little bits of hyalineskies content, with little idea of what I’ll add back. Most likely, I’ll re-add my del.icio.us linkblog, but my Flickr photostream, rarely relevant to hyalineskies, will probably not return.

I hope the few remaining hyalineskies loyalists will love the rebirth; if you do, tell your friends. After realigning myself and mitigating risk of content publication failure, I’m back. Seriously. I’ve learned an important sociological lesson, and I doubt I’ll ever fall into the same trap again.

However, Keepon is a perfect display of something more than just a cute novelty: it is a standing example of the human propensity to attach mammalian personality traits to entirely inanimate objects. The action is deeply embedded in language and history: large ships are given human names and referred to as “she”, we consider our computers and automobiles to be in bad moods when they break, and we constantly seem to attribute emotions of anger or other negativity to devices when they don’t function as planned. We place emotion in the personalities of devices with their personalities dictated by engineering error or physical malfunction, while we constantly design the outward appearance of our electronic devices to be increasingly clean, mechanical and otherwise futuristic. Within the sterility of our Macbooks and iPods, we place emotional tidbits and interfaces: we plaster our desktops with pictures of loved ones, we hold data dear to our human lives, and in some cases we build personalities for ourselves online in social networks or massively-multiplayer games. The personal in personal computer is not simply in the sense of it being built for one user as opposed to an enterprise; our computers and electronic lives are permanently bonded to our lifestyles and ways of being. They are a part of our real-life persona.

There is a point, however, at which it appears that we are not simply working with our devices as mechanical tools in our lives; we repeatedly attempt to attach greater emotive states to something that’s exceptionally emotionless. We name our computers human names or give them names we’d usually give our pets; we get frustrated and feel attacked when Word crashes, taking all of our work with it. While we superficially accept the mechanical nature of human creation, we secretly attach emotive states to it in a way to possibly somehow relate to the labyrinthine structures of silicon-based semiconductors. It appears that, in the end, we’re building devices, feeling unhappy with the interaction we have with them, and then actively searching to replace things with emotive states to make them more human-friendly, more organic. We want the mechanical æsthetic and the organic interaction.

What, however, is perpetuating this type of interaction? What emotive states are we actually seeking? No one would want a computer that was always ill-tempered or one that shared some other generally awkward human emotion (would you enjoy it if your MacBook Pro felt artificially sexually aroused?) There appears to be a point at which we stop the anthropomorphisation of the device underscored in pop culture: In Star Wars, thousands more are attracted to the naïve, traditionally cute demeanor of R2D2 than the rather obnoxious, worrysome one of C3PO. We find the cold mechanics of the liquid-metal T-1000 despicable while we exonerate the heroism of the older, more human-flawed Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2. We hate the inhuman, machine-like coldness of the agents in The Matrix but enjoy the cozy sociability of The Oracle. While all of these juxtapositions are between fictional machines, we love the machines that are more like us: flawed, slow to evolve, and technologically able to express emotions of sympathy, happiness, and, in some cases, love.

Keeping it optimistic: positive interaction

Because of this, we seem to desire only positive emotive states from our machines, leaving out any type of despicable feelings such as anger or envy, although life would certainly be more interesting if Outlook really did hate you when it crashed. This quick display of happy emotion, although entirely contrived, makes us feel better when we interact with the machine. Such an emotive state is easily seen in Susan Kare’s anthropomorphic iconography for the classic Macintosh boot screen, aptly named Happy Mac and Sad Mac. In both cases, we get a quick, extremely human analogy to the way the computer is operating upon boot: in the case of the happy Mac, we know all is well with our machine; in the case of Sad Mac, we know that something needs to be done to “comfort” (i.e. repair) the machine to get the data we need.

Macintosh hardware takes this human feeling to extremes, as well: closing an iBook or other newer notebook and suspending its contents is referred to as “Sleep” mode both semantically and actively: the LED on the front of the computer slowly fades in and fades out, mimicking the patterns of slow human inhalation and exhalation during sleep cycles, although the LED’s smooth effect is entirely useless during the Mac’s sleep cycle. Meanwhile, however, as humans we notice this sleep effect much more intuitively than we would a little yellow light. It evokes an emotional response in us as we almost feel as if we should be keeping quiet as to not wake the computer.

In these two examples, we are seeking positive emotive states as an indicator to interaction and well-being in status through emotional expression from the machine, much as we would see from another human. We can tell if another human is happy or sad from the same gestures; we can tell a sleeping human from one that is actively awake by their breathing patterns. Building the emotional interactive state both links the computer’s state to an organic cognate as well as bonds us more emotionally with a rather cold object. In this case, we seek positive interaction from the machine; by having human characteristics, the machine, half-anthropomorphised, appears to really be more than a complex calculator. Considering the immense amount of trust we put in the machine’s ability to maintain our real-life information, the positive feelings we receive from having the machine appear sympathetic to the human condition comforts us and makes us place greater trust in an object that is really something neither to be trusted nor distrusted.

Staying optimistic: positive feedback

While the idea that we want “feel-good” computing is evident in status events like Happy Mac, we want positive feedback from our machines just as parents give children: we want some type of emotive state of approval from the device. Keepon, the robot described above, has this ability to show approval, and the emotive state of approval has appeared to have a great effect on children in an experimental setting. Of course, a robotic system isn’t required for this type of approval for us to recognise it as approval: instead, the pure illusion of attentiveness allows for us to feel this way about our machines. The response times of a machine when we perform tasks makes us feel as if those that are faster are not only helping our productivity, but also somehow make us feel emotionally reaffirmed that the machine is working with us, not against us.

The converse of this statement is what I had described above: when the machine fails, we emotionally tie this to negative feedback; the machine’s failure, in some way, is an insult to us, a program crash accusatory as if we could have somehow prevented it through our own interaction. Such an “emotive state” causes us to become further alienated from the device: we cross an invisible border in which we begin to recognise the machine as mechanical rather than emotional as we call out the machine’s subordinacy. In this case, we are offended much as if someone we thought was close to us somehow forgot our name: the impersonality of the machine gets underscored to a point at which the machine itself is responsible for rebuilding rapport with the user. The attentiveness and reliability of the machine is not simply something we wish for for the sake of our own productivity; they are the same qualities we look for in fellow humans.

Emotion isn’t technical

In terms of usability and interaction design, we are constantly bombarded with all of the things we should never do, an ever-expanding list of design abominations such as the use of <blink> and broken code that only works on one browser or another. People such as Jakob Nielsen make huge amounts of money simply telling us what it is that we’re doing wrong as interaction designers, however, the list we are given by usability experts is always a discrete set of things that went awry when we designed one page or another.

Ironically, however, as complex as we make interaction design, as complex as we make the design of our interfaces and scalable, degradeable code structures, the user really doesn’t care. What the user wants in the end is nothing more than a little love from the machine. In essence, we want to evoke positive emotions when using our interfaces, not negative ones. We simply want machines that seem to care. All of the discrete rules we’ve learned on top of this, from building accessible web pages to applications of Fitts’ Law, can almost always be distilled down to the emotive state.

Emotional users are passionate users

Meanwhile, those of us building software, making names for ourselves online, blogging, or otherwise publishing content to the Internet and greater technological sphere seem constantly interested in gaining that one next reader: we want the traffic for profit in the case of businesses; we want the traffic for personal gratification in the case of non-”pro” blogs such as this one. We are always looking for the best way to make our users passionate about our cause or follow our philosophies in hopes of getting them to return sometime, and we stop at nothing to try to improve both our own techniques as well as our properties and products to get to the point necessary to gain the next new consumers.

However, in all of our complexity, the issue is very simple in the end: a passionate user is simply an emotional one. The best user experiences are not modelled on mathematics or patterns; they seem to be, in some huge way, based upon that fuzzy logic of Stephen Colbert: the feeling of truthiness goes a long way in building rapport with users or readers. While in many cases we are able to model these gut instincts with formulas and interactive patterns, they’re not always perfect predictors. Sites like Hampsterdance [sic] have been largely successful in the past not because they had awesome design: instead, some emotion was evoked within its visitors. MySpace, while horribly ugly, offers a social portal to an array of tons of people and evokes all sorts of emotion in its users, drawing them closer to the site as they become more addicted to the emotional rollercoasters of human-human, not human-computer, interaction. The best design, then, really has nothing to do with our theory: instead, theory is just our guide to building something that is generally regarded as beautiful. The best design is simply emotional.

Previously, the vitriol levelled at those in the blogosphere — as well as the obsession with negatively attacking public figures in their own sphere — was primarily the domain of celebrities and politicians. The Internet’s ability to spread negative information far and wide, such as the now-renowned Paris Hilton celebrity sex tape (link goes to Wikipedia), cause an array of problems for those living in the mainstream limelight. Lesser public figures, with less Internet exposure and material published online, have generally been able to avoid the worst of the drama.

However, blogs and other online publishing sources have, for better or for worse, given the reputable author both exposure to a large audience as well as all of the negatives that such fame brings. We see those obsessed with the popular in any social sphere; people are naturally attuned to following the popular. A July 2004 article in the magazine Psychology Today, Seeing by Starlight: Celebrity Obsession gives us a much greater look into what is is that’s making those obsessed tick. “Stars summon our most human yearnings: to love, admire, copy and, of course, to gossip and to jeer,” the author of the article states. “It’s only natural that we get pulled into their gravitational field.” Of course, this addiction to star power and position goes both ways: on one hand, those with influence have “fans,” who in some way cognitively resemble the star or find comfort in their material; to a blogger, these people are their biggest reader base. With any public notoriety, however, comes the other side, the side of those who wish to gossip and insult, or, in some cases, stalk and threaten. Periodically we are reminded of the dark side of public influence: just recently, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom was stalked by a 42-year-old obsessive fan, eventually leading to the arrest of the man. Anna Politkovskaya, a popular dissident of the Russian Federation and Chechnya, is certainly among the worst cases of threats levelled at her due to her significance: after multiple death threats in 2001 drove her to temporary exile in Austria, the journalist was assassinated in her central Moscow apartment last October.

While all of this negative attention eventually occurs to those extremely prominent, why, then, would someone attack a blogger like Sierra? She’s certainly not anywhere near as popular or exposed as Newsom or Politkovskaya. Before the threats were issued and publicised, Sierra’s name wasn’t broadcasted across all sorts of media when she does anything at all; instead, Sierra is little more than a pseudocelebrity, an influential person within a tiny network of web designers, information theorists and online marketeers. Not surprisingly, however, her enemies are born from the same industry, with people such as those that ran the now-defunct MeanKids.org, or Locke, who ran a similar blog called “Bob’s Yer Uncle,” causing a fair amount of her troubles. Obviously some people — equally important within the same social segment in their own right — found Sierra to be an utmost authority in the world that mattered most to them.

Much to the dismay of our own egos, however, we as bloggers are certainly very unimportant when we look at our impact upon the greater world as a whole. Sure, we have made tools and theories, books and applications, but the overall influence any one of us has on the world of commerce or human culture is still very small compared to many others, including vapid celebrities and terrible political leaders. However, as publishers within our already limited social sphere, as well as the constant tracking of statistics telling us of our importance in Alexa or Technorati rankings, our egos are inflated and our skewed exposure to those joining the blogosphere for the first time or working within it for the past decade underscores us as being VIPs in a world that a select few really care deeply about. This mirage-like, mini-exposure causes our professional and personal personae to become intertwined, and, as we find the attention we get in the blogosphere attractive and/or profitable, we push more of ourselves out into the electronic space to move even further into the upper echelon of the electronic elite.

A rhetorical trap

Social tools, such as our blogs, Twitter accounts and MySpace profiles, give those wishing to follow, replicate, or insult our every action unprecedented access into our lives on a greatly expanded timeline, both in our personal and professional lives. The things we post, no matter how professional or how utterly banal (my Twitter account is a good example of rather meaningless posting,) are all somehow extremely attractive to those who are fans of our content: people naturally enjoy talking about the things that are going on in our lives. It is common knowledge that we enjoy talking about ourselves (and enjoy being revered as people,) and with social media outlets we are given a virtually unlimited space in which to express our feelings, desires and analytical thoughts. While we will generally share some shell of ourselves, be that a façade or a diluted version of our true personalities, we share closer information with our friends: I’m sure that, if I were a very good friend of Kathy Sierra, and I asked about personal information that she is now fighting to keep secret, she would gladly share such information. I do with my friends, as do most other people: we want to trust those who are around us. (The Psychology Today article referenced above goes further, stating that those who are obsessed with public figures inherently trust those figures as family or friends, causing a paradox where the trust is not reciprocal.)

There is little, however, that is keeping the social media author from trusting their own tools: aside from mechanical failure, I have no worries that my iBook — a rather simple machine — will run away with my secrets or other information. To do so would be silly: after all, what is it that an inanimate object is going to do? It can’t necessarily betray me. However, we place a fair amount of trust into the analogies that social media developers have placed into their applications, and while we trust our websites and content management systems to hold and protect our content, we quickly seem to forget just how public a fair amount of the information we publish into these systems really is. While it is, on some level, a fault of the way we are as humans, we cannot place all of the blame upon ourselves: the analogies and other rhetorical devices used in social media interfaces give us a blind trust in an untrustworthy social sphere, leaving us with an artificial feeling of protection by using common trustworthy language and methods of “privacy”. In some way, it’s our own software design that’s failing us.

1. Social media tools display a simplified relationship of large social networks.

At the core of a lot of social media tools we are given a linguistic familiarity: the friend. While this is seemingly innocuous, a thesaurus search for “friend” gives us a list of associated words — which we associate with “friend” in the real world — all of which highlight some type of true emotional connection of trust or romance. Instead, as a USA TODAY report shows on social networks, hardly anyone knows who the majority of their “friends” really are, diluting the definition of friend in the social media sphere.

Instead, the way we truly perceive friends in a real-world scenario is much less polar. We have some type of variable structure in how our relationships work, much more like relationships are in The Sims than Facebook, a quantitative, possibly relative-based scale as to how we perceive relationships around us. We have degrees of friends: some people we know as acquaintances and some we know as best friends; some we deal with only at work and others we care to see constantly. We give these relationship “points” to people who have gained our utmost levels of trust, and we have far more acquaintances than we do good friends, which take a lot more time and involvement to acquire. Most social media tools do little to highlight these different degrees of friendships; Flickr is one standing example that does a good job of realising the way we understand our true relationships.

Of course, we also have enemies, which social media rhetoric does almost nothing against. In the scale above, enemies would have negative points, being people we horribly hate (with zero as a stranger.) Instead of “Enemy” lists that are prominently built into our social networks, we instead are given “Privacy” lists, with more technical, less allegorical terms such as “Block User” instead of “Add as Enemy”. While we’ve built the technical terms into the part of the social network that, in rare cases, could be dangerous, we leave the “friends” part of the network — which is arguably the profitable part of such a social media system — in a wonderfully optimistic, naïve state.

One of the biggest real-world issues that social networks fail to replicate is that of reciprocity. Many social disasters occur when we perceive someone we know (or feel that we know due to celebrity status) in a different manner than that person actually does: look at the thousands of times history has recounted unrequited love, or, in the creepier cases, dangerous stalkers. On online social network services, generally this is supposed to be avoided by requiring the other person to approve you as a friend; however, the public nature of most information on said services allows for virtually anonymous contact and content consumption. Even with this rather limited (and rather ignored) issue with social networks, reciprocity is not always required: the geek-popular site Twitter takes this a step further than the most popular social networks, allowing you to “friend” anyone, even without their approval of you. On Twitter, the greatest celebrity could be your “friend”, even though to that user you are nothing more than a “follower”. Twitter’s unilateral, reciprocity-optional definition of a friend is both a terrible misrepresentation of friends in a real-world social circle as well as an ironically real definition of the way we psychologically view celebrities and role models.

2. Social media tools alter social network hierarchy and our traditional perspectives of publication.

As I have stated before when explaning social network hierarchy, we do not see much of a hierarchy at all: in the end, we are all the centres of our own social universe, connected by degrees of separation from one person to another. At the greatest extent of our entire social network, not just that online, is currently believed to be limited to Dunbar’s number, a statistical range of 100 to 230 people. For example the 2,220 feed subscribers at Bryan Veloso’s currently-defunct Avalonstar make up a nearly 1000% greater number than Bryan himself could ever consider being in his “true” social network, even at Dunbar’s upper bound of 230.

Furthermore, it appears that we generally do not witness our actions to be influential upon this first degree of separation, even within the blogosphere. Even if we recognise our own feed readers and blog statistics, we do not generally think of our content as having a great impact out beyond those readers and perhaps their friends. In the rare case that something “goes viral”, this perception changes for that specific content until the buzz dies down, but generally we do not think of the rest of our content as being influential to more than those directly reading it.

However, especially so in the connected world, who we generally seem to perceive as our audience is only an extremely small fraction of what it actually is, especially so in the case of heavily influential bloggers. Influential content is quickly referenced, sourced and otherwise “remixed” into posts by (generally) “lesser” bloggers, and, in some cases, that content is then referenced by other bloggers, leading into a cycle that is actually an exponential decay rather than a direct linear relationship. Instead of being a direct influence to those reading the content on-site, blogosphere content follows a system much closer to that of the macroeconomic multiplier effect rather than that of a 1:1 broadcast system that we are traditionally used to seeing with newspapers and other print publications. Because of this, our actual reader base spans infinite degrees of separation. The audience is much greater than we could ever imagine.

3. Social media tools offer very little reaffirmation that the use of said tools is extremely public even if the use of the tool is not publicised.

At this point, most social media developers believe that the concept of social content as public information is implied in using the tool, although it seems that very few people, regardless of how heavy their use of the tools are, recognise this as a hard fact of socially-generated content. Of course, even to those who realise that the tool is effectively public, we seem to fall back on the cognitive desire to be able to trust the people we are broadcasting to, although this is not always the actual case. Because of this ignorance and the compounding psychological desire, we feel a much greater comfort in an “anonymous” public sphere like the Internet.

Generally speaking, the way we should be treating social media tools is with the public speaking test: would we say this in person to a group of thousands at a conference? If the answer is yes, then it is probably something that would be fine to post online. Most everything I currently post on hyalineskies is something I would certainly lecture about to a general audience, although I can’t say that has always been the case.

Even with recognition of some information being public, we still seem to have some idea that we can effectively hide this content in plain sight due to the sheer size of the Internet and the rate at which new content is produced by other social media users. This is also not the true case. Just recently, I had an entirely unknown person “friend” me on Flickr and favourite photos of mine deep within the stack of 900 photos in my photostream. While this type of behaviour is certainly regular, the same user found my Twitter page — entirely unpublicised, with only three updates at the time of the user’s friending me — and even now I have little clue as to how he found it other than simply going to Twitter to see if I was on that, too. The Twitter account, which I was keeping private until I had done enough research on the application (for this post and possibly a following one,) had effectively been discovered by a member of the public, even though I had never openly advertised the profile’s existence to anyone. To me, it had lived outside the canon of my “official” electronic life, but this obviously wasn’t what was actually true.

We are all celebrities.

Our own ignorance and false comfort with social media tools, as well as our own human impulses to be exhibitionists constantly requiring greater influence and approval, cause us to spread our own information across the globe in an easily-archived public sphere. Our lives are just as public as those of celebrities; the ironic difference is that we are essentially our own paparazzi. We are the ones pouring gasoline onto the fires of our own reputability and influence online, ignoring the fact that some of the residual vapour is also causing us to feed the flames of our enemies, detractors and stalkers.

As if the issue wasn’t complex enough, there is no simple solution to solving this social paradox from a user’s perspective. We have cemented the social media vernacular by now, and changing the rhetorical architecture would take time and most likely only be adapted to newer social platforms, where users would already require some type of learning curve. Meanwhile, there is little we can do to change the way that we as humans perceive the social media sphere from our rather ignorant psychological constructs; instead, we can only hope to improve understanding as well as the interfaces with which we interact to publish user-generated content online. At the very least, the best we can do as bloggers is to recognise that, in some social segment, no matter how small, we are celebrities in the psychological sense, if not so in an influential one: maybe it is time for us to step out of our own inflated egos and recognise that maybe, for once, that little delusion of important inside of us is actually half of the reality.

Perhaps the most socially malleable of our society exists as teenagers: at that time, we are in a constant state of testing, shaping life philosophies and self-images, experimenting with substances, society and sex, eventually — hopefully — finding who we are sometime through high school and the earliest years of college. Meanwhile, teenagers, pulled at from every direction by parents, friends and love interests, torn apart by their own psyche internally, are potentially the most fragile members of America.

It is within the teenage years that we generally gain the greater grasp of a worldly aesthetic: those not following the high-school social ideal are quickly ostracised into the strongest of social cliques; those plagued with little interest toward trends of teenage self-image become the persecuted, the dejected, those limited to a teenage social wasteland where the greatest, most aspirational positions go to those on top of the mainstream trend ladder: those at the top of the superficiality become the alphas of an already microscopic social hierarchy, the everything and nothing of high school, gaining not only the date to the high school prom, but the self-confidence that stays with them long after graduation day.

One of the biggest issues that plague adolescents is that of acne vulgaris, the rather harmless skin disease that does little but create an aesthetic nightmare. Acne causes a disastrous amount of stress for girls and boys alike; it is the quintessential uglifier in high school society aside from obesity. The blemishes caused by acne are a cultural disaster, evoking mental images of squalor and sub-standard social class, a stereotypical condition of the societal rejects in high school life. In the 1800s and early twentieth century, acne was considered the marque of a chronic masturbator, a sign of potential venereal disease and sexual promiscuity, signals that could ruin the image of a respectable girl and cause some ridicule (although much less in the time) to boys.

With the release of tretinoin cream, known to most with any dermatological exposure by its brand name of Retin-A, a miracle drug became available to the sufferers of acne and its associated stigma. Although expensive compared to non-prescription cosmetics, Retin-A offered the plagued teenager a new lease on a social life, gradually working to clear the skin of its users. Since the drug’s initial release in the 1967, tretinoin is still the standard for an array of skin issues. The New York Times devoted a whole column to sing its praises on 30 November 2006, describing its use as a skin rejuvenation tool for not only acne but for that other awful skin blemish: wrinkles.

The adolescent issue of tretinoin may seem trivial, but its creation and widespread use, as well as its extended use by those far outside its original generational use underscores the self-conscience that we maintain throughout our lives. The tretinoin example, although seemingly much more “medical” than other social improvements, really does nothing to help someone physically; the effects are almost entirely aesthetic.

However, the aesthetic obviously carries social consequences: with the person’s own aesthetics improved and some stigma set aside, their overall happiness increases. They are given more social opportunities than would have been previously attainable under the uglier model. Tretinoin is, in the end, a good whose sales are marketed by the cultural pressure of aesthetic improvement. It is, in essence, an item of design, not really changing any core part of the self directly, instead simply giving a superficial improvement to that self.

Of course, those superficial improvements mean everything to many, especially in a high-school environment. One high schooler I know is the owner of a perfect black iPod nano; this same student, however, has no access to the Internet — or even a computer at all — from his rural home. Instead, the nano is populated with hundreds of pirated music files on friends’ or relatives’ computers. Why, then, does the student own an iPod? Even in the most rural of American towns, where broadband infrastructure is largely non-existent, the iPod has become a symbol of social class. No portable CD player or alternative digital audio player will do.

Even the most trivial of things, such as owning a pair of the little white earbuds, mean everything to the social mobility of the teenager. The iPod — as well as other common devices such as the cameraphone — are requirements of life for the teenage socialite.

Like tretinoin, the iPod phenomenon spans more ranges than that of teenage angst. On campus and in the city, the white iPod earbuds are e-bling, declaring to the world that you’re hip. The iPod has positioned itself (rather inadvertently) as an aesthetic ornament first and audio player second. The exterior aesthetic of the device is as much for the enjoyment of others as it is for its owner, and its simple aesthetic is a primary factor in the user experience of the item. The iPod is the tretinoin of tech, an item that, while it has intrinsic utility, is leaps and bounds above a competitive user experience because others say so. To compete with iPod cool, you have to outdo it on the self-consciousness front.

The external user experience

Most geeks and technical reviewers wax poetic about iPod + iTunes, the simplicity of the iPod scroll wheel UI, and the great music store integration. The iPod really does offer a gold-standard user experience out of the box compared to the Sansa or Zune; however, these devices — sans the Zune’s initial product installation hurdles — have built devices that can compete with iPod on some level. Setting iPod’s market saturation and consequent DRM lock-in aside (both of which we will tackle to some degree later,) competing device hardware could technically stand a chance against the iPod.

Suppose, however, we were able to match the the iPod’s user experience exactly with a competing device. What if someone was able to build what effectively was an iPod clone with a different aesthetic? (Think Zune without its issues.) Then what? Chances are, even if the user experience between our iPod clone and the real iPod would still favour the iPod, it winning in the hearts and minds of users because of its trendiness. The iPod’s user experience comes with an easy-to-use device plus social fluidity and the idea that you’re “with it.” Apple’s pricing certainly reflects this to some extent.

In economics, this trend of buying things as status symbols is called conspicuous consumption and the idea of buying goods to increase social status is certainly nothing new; the original research into such patterns was done by economist Thorstein Veblen in 1899. If people buy iPods to succumb to fads instead of because they fit their utmost functional requirements, they’re effectively creating market distortions by pretending to be part of a higher socioeconomic class. The consumer is paying an extra “membership fee” to (temporarily) jump up the social ladder.

For the math geek This membership fee equates to economic rent, the price a consumer pays for an object that in this case forces them into a higher socioeconomic class perception over another device with the same functional purpose. In this case, this rent would be the price of an iPod minus the price that the user could’ve paid if working entirely toward the practical goal of satisfying functional requirements (without the status symbol, er, status.) Note that this is the rent that they have to pay to maintain that status perception at that time; if the iPod becomes obsolete or otherwise uncool, the rent must be paid again with another status symbol to regain that socioeconomic perception. This differs from consumption of people on that social class such that their consumption on those goods is not done for the purpose of “status symbols,” instead, it is done because it is the most efficient device within their income range.

This iconic status of the iPod is no doubt a large factor in its user experience today, and the extra benefit of this UX comes without any user interface design knowledge at all. Apple’s design team gave the iPod its base aesthetic, but in the end it was society that gave the iPod the popular cachet that it has today.

This utmost trendiness, where the iPod has become something of a materialist obligation, may certainly be part of the product scope that its competitors simply fail to recognise as an extant competitive hurdle, and unfortunately it is one that non-design-oriented electronic manufacturers may be entirely helpless against. It’s part of the brand scope that Zune hoped to fix with their device aesthetic, “cool” taglines and “social” device behaviour; it is the same cultural chic that Grey attacked in its failed iDon’t campaign. Any audio player manufacturer would fail in attempting to dethrone the iPod in a swift revolution. Instead, the competitive edge that would work in this instance would be to build great, beautiful hardware today to send the iPod to the guillotine tomorrow. In doing so, the device would need to match the existing iPod hardware on the core UI / hardware / software level (including Fairplay or maybe iTunes transparency via iPod emulation) as well as extra features like those found on the Zune. Even then, the lead time to start an MP3 player revolution would take a few years. All of iPod’s competitors to date have attempted to assassinate the king through clever marketing today, totally disregarding what could happen tomorrow.

Create today, attack tomorrow

You can’t make chic today; the failures of others have made that painfully evident. Traditional evidence, however, says that you can create chic tomorrow, thus blowing open the market for competitors now. Those marvelling at the iPod user experience — as well as engineers, marketers, and others at competing companies — should be examining their enemy today. Copy everything and improve on it. Build your own innovations into the standard iPod feature set. Test the prototype and return if you don’t end up with something slightly better than the current available products of today. If you don’t end up building it right, re-examine and go. In the process, the device developed is fundamentally superior to the iPod, yet is still inferior in the moment due to the brand cachet of the iPod.

In the iPod analogy, this is what Zune could have been. The device works, looks alright, and the on-device UI works great; however, its overall experience got killed by its just-oversized form factor and terrible desktop software. It isn’t fundamentally superior to the iPod and dies in the light of its rockstar competitor.

This working for tomorrow by solving today’s problems isn’t a random business idea from the mind of an admittedly business-naïve student; it has been fundamentally proven in multiple industries with multiple products. This process, ironically, was the same that Apple followed with the iPod.

Very few non-techies remember the Creative NOMAD Jukebox, the Discman-sized, hard-disk-based digital audio player released by Creative in 2000. The NOMAD Jukebox offered a then unheard-of five gigabytes of space, vastly over that of other flash-based devices of the time such as the Rio series by Diamond Multimedia, which had upper-end capacities of around 128MB. This extra storage capacity gave power users reason to buy the large blue box; those wanting portability sacrificed the enormous size for the flash-based players.

The market changed on October 23, 2001 with the release of Apple’s original iPod. Available in 5 or 10GB capacities, the iPod was a FireWire-based, Macintosh-only device in the days when OS X was just over 10.1 and OS 9 was still the primary operating system for Macintosh users. What did the iPod do? It built itself into a device that matched competitor strategies and outdid the current devices on the technical front. It built a solution for the day, a companion for Macs, and put a drastic amount of UI and industrial design behind their new venture, building an innovative navigation structure while making the hard-disk-based player drastically smaller than the NOMAD Jukebox. Meanwhile, given the iPod’s hacks-only support for Windows, the first-generation iPod was largely a geek’s toy.

The original iPod had no outward pretence of taking over a market dominated by flash players. In Mac and geek communities, the iPod’s first and second generations became that of a hot geek item over the course of two years, with Windows users confined to MusicMatch Jukebox, then the Windows standard. With the second-generation release in 2003, Apple wasn’t being forward-thinking or trying to capture tons of market share; competitors still couldn’t match the iPod’s aesthetics, and it was not really considered much of a threat to the flash-based dominance of the digital audio player market. Eventually, with the release of the third-generation iPod and subsequent release of iTunes for Windows in 28 April 2003 and 16 October 2003 respectively, the iPod began to catch the eyes of those not within the technology community. By the fourth generation in 2004 — nearly three years after the original iPod design — the iPod caught on and became a must-have fashion item throughout America. The white earbuds became ubiquitous. Those with other players were fashion-clueless. By October 2004, the iPod had seventy percent of the digital audio player market share.

Time-scaled user experience

The end result is that user experience matters on a device level, but the UX designer for a competing product needs to be looking at the tortoise pace. The object is to beat the device, not the craze, and the craze will eventually follow in the future. Set fashion aside and let the iPod win now; market the device, but not aggressively. Most of all, beat the iPod hardware every time on every front (yes, including iTunes.) The early adopters, not afraid to jump off of the bandwagon they once led, will follow the better product.

As for the insecure, the teenagers, the trendwhores and the conspicuous consumers, let them continue on the road of the competitor. It is that same person that misses the minute-improvement method in their own products, tretinoin, technology or otherwise. Those that do know better, however, are the ones that matter, and, in a few years, you may end up on top.