Mistake #1: We forget there are two kinds of problems.

The first kind are problems that reach full, reasonable, and logical solutions, because their answers are conclusive. Two plus three is always five, because it can be proven so. Better yet, the answer remains the same and context doesn’t really matter. That’s why math works and you can figure out calculations for physics in space while on Earth with a reasonable amount of certainty. Then, naturally, you shoot people into orbit in a tin can and get photos like this. I call these concrete problems. Aristotle, in all his writing about logic, called this domain a place where things can not be other than what they are. They’re consistent. Fixed. Concrete.

But, most problems are not concrete, and must be addressed in a less than conclusive fashion. Context matters, and it’s best one understands it. For example, consider how difficult it would be to make a design for someone in a culture much different than your own. Chances are whatever you make isn’t going to fly, unlike that tin can that got launched into space.

Aristotle’s described this other domain as a place where things can be other than what they are. They’re multidimensional. They shift and mutate. Things vary, because context matters. For instance, diplomatic negotiation strategy for one country doesn’t necessarily work with other nations. Internal communication software may work on one project and completely fail on a different project, even though it is the same company and people. I like to call these problems squishy ones. There is probably a better, more descriptive term, but I like squishy, because getting a hold of these problems is like trying to get a firm grip on a wet fish. It’s a temporary hold, and the problem has a will of its own, wriggling around all slimy and gross, trying to get away from you. Welcome to design.

Mistake #2: Aspects of a problem are a little bit concrete and a little bit squishy, and we mistake one for the other.

There’s another problem with problems: they usually are not totally concrete or squishy; they’re a mixture of both, and it’s damn hard to figure out which aspects are which. Out of all the disagreements I’ve had in work environments, I’d say half are from inefficient or unsuccessful communication (happens to the best of us), and the other half is from a disagreement or misunderstanding over whether a certain aspect of the job was squishy or concrete. I’ll use developing digital products as an example, since I’ve been working on that for the past couple years.

Working with information on computers is a grab bag of problems. Concrete criteria determine whether or not the technology functions. Does the code run? Is there a bug? Squishy criteria determines whether or not that technology is “useful” and “works.” Is the code elegant? Did it feel right? Did it provide enough value for the $5 the customer paid?

I suppose one of the biggest misconceptions about this sort of work and its problems is that development problems are strictly concrete and design’s are squishy. Sure, they’re weighted towards one quality or the other, but each is a combination of both. Developers make choices about database structure, development tools, and general programming approaches that are even more squishy than lots of design choices, because it’s an abstraction on top of an abstraction on top of another. Designers, on the other hand, have a set of concrete concerns that don’t get much mention: for instance, I had to change the value of a blue I was using in a comp last week because its contrast wasn’t high enough to be easily read by our visually-impaired users.

Where I (and I bet lots of other people) get in trouble is mistaking one kind of problem for the other. For instance, it’s foolish to assume that choosing a database’s structure is a solution to pick up fully-formed rather than a nuanced decision to develop. I had to learn that the hard way after a lot of kind hand-holding from a patient developer. It’s more complicated than looking at performance and choosing the fastest way forward. It’s also about future-extensibility, human-readability, and all sorts of other stuff that I don’t know about. It’s a murky choice, just like most my design choices—a squishy choice I mistook for being concrete.

On the other hand, I also got into trouble in the past for thinking concrete problems were squishy. Let’s revisit that blue comp I mentioned earlier. I thought color was a squishy choice tied up in emotions and branding, and they are to a certain extent, but an aspect of them is definitely concrete: either it has enough contrast for accessibility’s sake or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, the aesthetic quality of the palette doesn’t matter much, because our team agreed early on that what we’re building needs to be accessible to as many people as possible.

Anyway, watch out for the squishy/concrete flip-flop. I still constantly fall for this.

Mistake #3: We think there are solutions when there are none.

Allow me to rant for a moment.

We’re a culture that values logic, resolution, and our own self-efficacy, so when we mistake a squishy problem for a concrete one, we then assume that the problem has a solution. The trouble is that squishy problems don’t have solutions.

The presumption of an available solution is all over the place, and spreads the full gamut from supremely important problems to terribly mundane ones. One of the origins for this, as far as I can tell, is a certain brand of marketing: a classic way to sell a product is inventing a problem, then presenting your product as its solution. Once the sale is done, you’re absolved of responsibility, because all you had to do was make the sale.

This method is hilarious when the problems are truly mundane, and obviously not problems. The informercial is the most ready example of this. For instance, check out some of these fail gifs taken from informercials. There’s a Tumblr blog full of them.

The idea of having a solution for these problems is laughable here, but the same line of thinking has a middle ground: corporate communication and marketing.

• Adobe has solutions that “let customers produce, distribute, and realize value from great content.”
• Oracle has “solutions that minimize risk, streamline business processes, and reduce the cost and complexity of your IT infrastructure.”
• And if you simply visit solutions.com, you’ll find your “go to source for home organization, storage, and problem solving products.” Problem-solving products!

While infomercials are mostly harmless, and the worst marketing speak can do is waste money, this line of thinking can be damaging when more is at stake. For instance, look at this headline on NBC from just a few days ago:

From race relations to gun violence, presidents often seek solutions after tragedies

Now, this is an opinion piece without actual commentary by President Obama, but I still think it’s an accurate assessment of our culture’s view of problems: the problems are there, and they can be fixed, if we only could find the thing to do it. What kind of hubris makes one believe that they could ever do something to “solve” race relations and gun violence? Don’t get me wrong here: large amounts of work must be done to improve both of these damaged situations. And sure, this might seem like being nit-picky over words that mean the same thing, but I think words become clues to describe the way we think. And thinking a solution is necessary, instead of a response, does two really, really bad things:

• It presumes that the most effective response to the problem comes from one place, and downplays that the issues are truly complex, with many stakeholders and influences which must be considered and included.
• It presumes that the correct response is a one-and-done action—a silver bullet—rather than a communicative, iterative process.

In my opinion, both assumptions undermine the success of whatever you do, because it immediately sets you off in the wrong direction, looking for something that doesn’t exist. Then, you give up when the search goes too long without bearing any substantial results. I’m no public policy expert, but my lack of expertise should speak to the severe disadvantages of this approach.

Concrete problems have answers that are solutions, but the best one can hope for with a squishy problem is a temporarily successful response. Of course, no one wants to hear this from a politician about big ticket issues. I’m no dummy: a hearty portion of politics is marketing and telling people what they want to hear, but there’s also an obligation to reality and the truth that seems to have gone away. Big problems are squishy problems because they involve huge, complex systems, culture, and most importantly, people. The way those problems operate require separate ways of thinking and different metrics for success. Even if you hit the bullseye, the bullseye moves out from under you because the context changes. People’s opinions evolve. Culture adapts. Needs shift. What’s possible grows, and the world turns a little bit under your feet.

Again, back to Aristotle: things can be other than what they are. If your work is good, it changes the space around it and how people come to it, and that change undermines the successfulness of what you’ve already built. It means that for complicated endeavors, our actions more closely resemble steering things in the right direction, rather than fixing a problem and making it go away. There are no conclusive answers like a math problem, so your work becomes a constant call-and-response game of Marco Polo with the shifting nature of the problems. A successful response requires fostering and shepherding. You’re never done, per se, you simply choose an acceptable time to re-access your actions—hopefully, a time where the situation is improved, rather than as things get worse.

Mistake #4: We forget that our responses to problems create more problems.

One of the results of our reverence for solutions is that we have a tendency to forget that our responses to problems typically create more problems. That oversight can make us blind to the thing we actually need to do to more successfully respond to the problem. Worst case, that blindness can actually have a person act in a way that makes the original problem worse. Let me explain by giving an example. It’s about our email. (I’m sorry.)

Remember technology’s original promise of saving time and freeing us to do the things we always wanted to do? “Email makes sending messages quick and convenient. You can finish your correspondence by 3 and go sailing!” Well, the easier it is to do something, the more indiscriminate you can be in doing it. So, we sent more messages. And then more. Then we got robots to send us messages. And the pile of messages got bigger, until we couldn’t handle it any more. Some people went crazy.

Things have changed since paper letters and memos (and I’d argue things have gotten better, in general), but now we have a whole other problem with correspondence that’s possibly even worse than the original, because things are quicker, cheaper, and easier to send. So we’re writing alternate email clients, apps, and opinionated messaging services to help us deal with the glut of communication.

It implies that our best idea is to use technology to fix the problems amplified by technology. Should we laugh or cry about this? I’m not saying these approaches won’t work short-term, but long-term, it seems to only exacerbate the issue by asking people to be even more efficient in handling even more quantities of information. That doesn’t seem like a good way forward. Instead, we should try something we can do now, without inventing anything: recalibrate our expectations of one another, and educate each other of the demands placed on us. What if you could only change how you act? How far will you get if you simply reply back to people and ask them to send less email, because you get a lot of it already? I know that doesn’t work for everyone, but at least you’re trying to kill the root instead of pruning the branches.

One of the problems with the prevalence of solutions is it overvalues invention and undervalues behavior. We look for a gizmo, when changing how we act can have the desired effect. It seems like we’ve been hoodwinked into a trap of technological dependency.

But, technology is only as good or bad as what we use it to do, and I don’t think anyone who works in tech gets into the field with malice as their intent. In fact, usually the opposite, which is why I like this business. Hell, I’m one of the the folks in technology, so none of this criticism excludes me—I only suggest we stop looking at technology as the primary way to fix problems, and stop turning a blind eye to its negative consequences and to the new problems it produces.

Obviously, unexpected new problems are not limited to only technology: look at oil, look at the automotive industry, look at agri-business, and all the issues that orbit global warming. People are problem factories, which means we need to get just as good at thinking about problems and organizing ourselves to respond to them as we are at producing them.

I think it’s worth recognizing that the things we invent will probably create new problems of their own, and if we follow the same methods we’ve used in the past, it’s quite likely we’re only going to make things worse. That’s why we need to understand a problem for what it is, not for what we want it to be. We need to think ahead, talk to each other, stay on our toes, be responsive, and follow the problem. We can’t necessarily make the problems totally go away, but I’ll be damned if we can’t make things better for one another in a responsible, diligent, and elegant fashion.

That’s why I got into this, and maybe why you did, too. It’s also why I thought it’d be worth the time to sit down and think about all the mistakes I make when dealing with problems. I’m trying to improve, and I hope you will, too. So much depends on it.

I’m finally making my way through Robert Caro’s tome The Power Broker. One of the things that’s popping out is his use of repetition. This could be seen as a stylistic indulgence, but after reading about a fifth of the book’s 1200 pages, I’m realizing that Caro’s repetition becomes the thread that helps the reader through the book’s sprawling assessments, wide focus, and complex topics. Here is a bit from the beginning of the fifth chapter:

The wheels of the Tammany war machine might be greased with money, but the machine was pulled by men, the men who voted Democratic themselves, the men who rounded up newly arrived immigrants and brought them in to be registered Democratic, the men who during election campaigns rang doorbells and distributed literature to those immigrants and to their own friends and neighbors and on Election Day shepherded them to the polls to vote Democratic. And the most succulent of the carrots that lured these men forward, that kept their shoulders braced against the ropes that pulled the Tammany machine, was the carrot of jobs, jobs for themselves, jobs for their wives, jobs for their sons.

An easy read, since most of the words are the same words in different order, strung together to lead you on to the next idea and reiterate important points, strung together to reflexively reference previous ideas and build on top of those ideas. The first half of each new idea is the last half of the previous idea. Baby-stepping through a minefield of complexity.

Here is the same paragraph, with a few words left out:

The … Tammany war machine … machine… men, the men … the men … immigrants … the men … immigrants … the carrots … these men … the Tammany machine, … the carrot of jobs, jobs… jobs … jobs….

Sure, painfully close to beat poetry, but you still get the idea. I wouldn’t be surprised if The Power Broker’s page count were cut in half if you removed Caro’s repetition. But this would surely make the thing too dense for any normal reader.

Needless excess is, of course, the enemy of good writing, but that doesn’t mean all excess is needless. Sometimes a bit of padding is required. I’m reminded of the African drum communication described in the first chapter of James Gleick’s The Information:

No one spoke simply on the drums. Drummers would not say, “Come back home,” but rather,

Make your feet come back the way they went
make your legs come back the way they went,
plant your feet and your legs below,
in the village which belongs to us.

Nineteenth-century Europeans were bewildered by the musical correspondence. How could the locals derive nuanced meaning from a drum beat?

The first hurdle was to understand the drums mimicked the tonality of many African languages, where a spoken word’s meaning is determined by its rising or falling tone in addition to the sounds of its consonants and vowels. Tonality is missing from most Indo-European languages (such as English and the rest of the Romance languages), but is famously present in Cantonese and Mandarin as well as many African dialects. Distinguishing between words while speaking takes a sharp tongue: boili said flat means “riverbed”, but emphasize the middle consonant and it turns to “mother-in-law.”

Drums do not have tongues, however, and can not make the sounds of consonants or vowels. They can only communicate through tone. So how does one say things with a drum, despite missing half the tools of the spoken language? The drummer reproduces the tone of the appropriate word, which limits the field of words to those with similar cadence, then he clarifies which of those words he intends through context. Gleick, again:

A drummer would invariably add “a little phrase” to each short word. Songe, the moon, is rendered as songe li tange la manga—“the moon looks down at the earth.” Koko, the fowl, is rendered koko olongo la bokiokio—“the fowl, the little one that says kiokio.” … Every ambiguous word begins in a cloud of possible alternative interpretations; then the unwanted possibilities evaporate.

Both the drums and Caro’s writing style are examples of people using redundancy and inefficiency to overcome ambiguity. Sometimes puffy writing is more efficient communication, because it’s the best way to get a complex idea through. I’m learning to appreciate that the clear thing isn’t always the simple thing, and that’s worth repeating.

Allow me to complain in bulleted points:

• I read an iPhone app review earlier this week that said the app’s design was “timeless.” And I went, “Ha. Ha ha ha ha ha.” The app was quite pretty. And Lord knows there’s plenty of good things about iPhones, apps, stores, and design. But an iPhone app is about as timeless as an ice cream cone given to a chimp on a hot day.

• It irks me that we’re throwing around the word “timeless” all willy-nilly. At this point, “timeless” is hyperbole for something with a shelf-life of a couple years. This bag of Doritos? Timeless.

  Our sense of time is all out of whack. When people link to older blog posts and articles, they’ll maybe call it “timeless” or say some other inane thing like, “Old, but good!” Two years old isn’t old! A two-year-old can’t even wipe his own ass.

  Let me let you in on a little secret: if you are hearing about something old, it is almost certainly good. Why? Because nobody wants to talk about shitty old stuff, but lots of people still talk about shitty new stuff, because they are still trying to figure out if it is shitty or not. The past wasn’t better, we just forgot about all the shitty shit.

• Ironically, most timeless design looks like it came from the 1962 Graphis Annual. It’s good stuff worth mimicking, but it sure isn’t timeless.

• I think “words” mean “things.” So when you say something is “timeless,” do you really mean it is not affected by the passage of time or changes in fashion? Would it spoil your day to say that timeless design is currently in fashion? (That doesn’t even make sense.) Regardless, perhaps you truly mean to say that a design is fundamentally sound, or that it is sturdy, or well-built. All great things.

• Why is timeless design always the goal? What’s wrong with making something look like it was made when it was made? Why do designers all of a sudden want to exist outside of time, like Scott Bakula in Quantum Leap? We’re already thirteen years into the 21st century, and I still don’t know what the hell is going on. One day you’re playing laser tag, the next Google’s making spy glasses to secretly record video of all your hot air balloon rides.

  Other people: can you help me understand what is happening in this world of ours? I want to know what technology is doing to my brain. How do I stay human in a digital world? I want to understand what all this technology does to my expectations of myself, other people, and the world. None of this is timeless. These problems are right now.

• Some might say that this blog’s design has some “timeless” qualities. I will let you in on a secret: I am lazy. I want to make as few decisions as possible, but I want those choices to be good ones. I don’t add cruft, because I’d have to make the cruft so that I could add it. And then I’d have to decide where it would go, when all I really want to do is find that chimp with the ice cream cone and hang out with him.

Thank you for reading my measured critique. Have a timeless day.

We already have plenty of thinking that celebrates the invisibility and seamlessness of technology. We are overloaded with childish mythologies like ‘the cloud’; a soft, fuzzy metaphor for enormous infrastructural projects of undersea cables and power-hungry data farms. This mythology can be harmful and is often just plain wrong.

A metaphor can clarify or obscure. The most dangerous ones do both. They illuminate one characteristic of a concept, but also throw another (usually less favorable) aspect into shadow. “The Cloud” is one of these complicated metaphors, because it’s a clear description of the user’s experience, but overlooks its costs by misrepresenting the situation. Storing data on servers is light, accessible, and omnipresent for the user. But The Cloud is not a dissolution of data’s “weight”; it simply outsources its handling, in much the same way your garbage doesn’t disappear when it’s picked up from the curb. It’s a complicated transaction, because the true implications are hidden. Still, I wouldn’t want to get rid of the Cloud or my garbage pick-up. All this stuff has to go somewhere, and generally it’s better if I’m not the one toting it around. So, my garbage goes somewhere in New Jersey, and my data goes to Douglas County, Georgia.

One of Google’s Data Centers in Douglas County, Georgia. Thousands of feet of pipe line the inside of the data center. The bright pink pipe in this photo transfers water from the row of chillers (the green units on the left) to a outside cooling tower. How industrial. Please note the strong resemblance to an oil refinery.

It’s worrisome that The Cloud as a metaphor clarifies the benefits of its user’s experience, yet hides the repercussions of that convenience. (Of course, it’s old hat in capitalism to conceal the unsavory bits of production behind a curtain.) What kind of energy does that data factory use? Where does it come from? And how does it compare to the energy used if we kept all this data locally? How does that building affect the community where it is built? And what are the repercussions of having all that data in one place?

The answers to these questions don’t need to be awful. For instance, many of these data centers are blanketed with solar panels to collect energy and offset or eliminate its dependence on the grid. Google’s not trying to hide anything. In fact, the image above comes straight from them. Yet, I believe it’s important for users to ask these questions, if only to understand their dependencies. Still, it is hard to know what to ask if the topic’s complexity and requirements (infrastructure) are concealed by the metaphor that names it.

All of this is well-trodden territory, so I’ll sheepishly confess that I’ve backed into the real reason I wanted to write a bit. There’s another loss from this kind of obfuscation, one more miraculous in nature, which also undermines the “invisible design” ethos.

Look back up. Isn’t the picture of Google’s data center marvelous, in a complicated Dr. Seuss machine kind of way? It is like a Pipe Dream level come to life. The ethos of invisible design suggests you shouldn’t see this design. I think you should look again.

Sometimes I wonder if the desire to obfuscate production and make the resulting design invisible or seamless to users diminishes their appreciation for the craft of building systems. I think there’s a strong likelihood that metaphors like “The Cloud” and sayings like “It Just Works™” reduce a user’s appreciation of the software/hardware they are using. “Magic” is a great word for selling product, but it also can cheapen all the sweat it takes to get there. If the seams have been covered, you can’t admire how things connect.

Design doesn’t need to be showy to prove its value, but it shouldn’t be invisible, either. Designers mistake invisibility for elegance and simplicity for clarity at their peril. The best design speaks not only so it can be understood, but also in a way it can be admired by those that use it. What if you were inspired by the things that you used, simply because they were impressive in a way that was evident to you? And why is it bad to try to build things like that? I don’t think it is.

This ceramic horse by Stig Lindberg

An illuminated manuscript from the British Library Catalog

That chubby horse from Looney Tunes’ What’s Opera, Doc?

Our beloved Shetland Pony from Hark! a Vagrant

That whack poo-brain horse from Adventure Time

Why is Greater Than How

A complex world has made us over-emphasize How-based thinking and education. Once the tools are understood, grasping why to do certain things becomes more valuable than how to do them. How is recipes, but learning a craft is more than following instructions.

How is important for new practitioners learning to avoid common mistakes. Why is for those who wish to push, are not risk-averse, and seek to improve. How is coulda, Why is shoulda. How is finishing tasks, Why is fulfilling objectives. How results in more, Why yields better.

Not More, Better

I am more interested in supporting individuals and companies that value quality and realize the difference between more and better. The taste of the food will always trump the serving size.

Better is attainable, superior products and experiences, not ivory towers. An appreciation for better sets you off on a mission to support fine craftsmanship by buying well-crafted, thoughtful goods and services.

Surprise + Clarity = Delight

Design can have a myriad of purposes: to inform, persuade, sell, or delight. To delight means to present something with a different point of view, while retaining clarity. It makes others see the world in new and different ways.

We are taught a set of skills important for our growth and survival: communication, arithmetic, wellness, and many others. But no one teaches us how to perceive the world. Perhaps this is a job for delight: to delight someone is to give a small lesson in how to see the world as something good.

Sincere, Authentic, Honest

Increasingly, our way is to fake it and assume that others are doing the same. We fein interest in work, speak sarcastically, buy things that are new reproductions of old things, and often presume someone is selling us something. Skepticism as a default state is a hell of a thing. We’re a hungry culture starved for sincerity, authenticity, and honesty.

What does fixing it look like? It doesn’t look cool. In fact, it probably involves being so passionately enthusiastic about something that it is the exact opposite of cool. By caring intensely, we can connect to one another in more meaningful ways.

No Silver Bullets, No Secrets

Long ago, some one figured out that people love shortcuts. They also figured out that if you have a secret, you can sell it. Then came the business of inventing secrets that could be used as shortcuts to help someone get to a desired point without much effort.

Most anything worth doing is difficult. And any one that tells you there’s a cheap or easy way to get what you want is probably trying to sell you something. You can’t download experience—you can only live it. So, stop waiting and go out and try something. You’ll feel empowered.

Quality + Sincerity = Enthusiasm

Enthusiasm becomes the currency of an ecosystem where things are free (like a lot of the internet). Quality is important because it gives people a legitimate reason to become excited. Sincerity is what creates the line between real enthusiasm and empty hype.

Things are better if creative people produce work that incites excitement in both the creative and the audience. Don’t be shocked if something fails because it lacks fervor and passion. Build those in, if you can. If you can’t, consider starting over.

Everything is Something or Other

I don’t know what the hell is going on. Neither do you, and neither does any one else. We’re all lost and improvising, making things before we know what they do, and breaking stuff before we know what replaces it. We’re all tinkering and speculating, listening to see if our shovels hit something hard while we’re digging. I suppose that’s what world-building is, though, so let’s get used to it. We need to learn to tolerate ambiguity.

We are consistently between two things. Welcome to the borderlands.

I wonder how much of their [lawyers] time is actually spent dead alone, producing hard solitary thought for hours a day. That’s what writing is and in that way it’s very hard work and it absolutely requires all the conditions that make one a bore: You have to be alone a lot, you have to be rather sedentary, you have to be a creature of routine, you have to fetishize your solitude, and you have to become very, very selfish about your time.

From this charming and revelatory Paris Review interview with writer Tobias Wolff. If you haven’t read any of Wolff’s work, go out and find yourself a copy of his short story The Liar.

I’ve always known writing to be one of the solitary arts, and similarly painting, drawing, etc. I always envisioned design, however, to be much more social. Collaborative. This is true to an extent, but the headphones always go back on. A solitary mode of working, of course, isn’t the only way, but it seems to be my way—with the working on my own, thriving on large blocks of uninterrupted time, and being a recluse who needs to be lured out of his den with small bits of chocolate like some kind of shy animal.

Anyway, Wolff’s list is familiar. And to think I write to get away from the design. Oof.

You would think a skilled technician would be willing, ready, and able to perform their work. Yet, as we spoke with the doctor that came so highly regarded, I noticed he was very cautious about how he used his skills. The choice for surgery was the patient’s, but he always cautioned against invasive treatment like his, unless he was certain there would be beneficial outcomes, or if it was an emergent situation and there was no other choice.

I’ve come to respect this viewpoint so much in the past few weeks. What does it imply? A hesitancy to practice means that a practitioner is confident in the potency of their work. It means that they realize this sort of effectiveness is not something to take lightly. Their reluctance is recognition that reconstruction is invasive, that transformative progress is worth thoughtful, reflective consideration. And lastly, it means that caution in the lead up also implies a high amount of carefulness in practice. Simply put: the surgeon you want in the operating room is the one who is usually least willing to do the surgery.

Perhaps it is not a perfect parallel, but I am drawing conclusions for my own practice. I think design would be better if designers were much more skeptical about its applications. If you believe in the potency of your craft, where you choose to dole it out is not something to take lightly.

Bodies in bodies of water

Photos of flora with hazy focus

Black-and-white photos of celebrities of my father’s generation, doing normal, every day things.

Old aerial photos of New York City

Anything novel with a bird

At this point, many of these subjects are beyond cliché, yet I still find myself drawn to them. The pattern in my collection suggests that I am under the thumb of something big. The fact that those patterns are wide-spread clichés says I am not alone.

I am a person who makes pictures for a living, yet I find myself so ready and willing to be manipulated by them. I know the methods, but I will still fall heart-first into the illusion. This really shouldn’t be a problem, but some photographs hurt. In Roland Barthes’ book Camera Lucida, he calls it punctum. Literally, to pierce. These photographs possess acuity to the point of absurdity. They used to be rare, with plenty of space and time between them. Now, on Tumblr, on Instagram, on Pinterest, on Vine, on the network, they are consolidated and stacked on top of one another. It can easily become a habit to seek and collect these things, if only for the pangs they create. And when that collection is public and shared, our memory boxes become a kind of mediated performance. These places are towers of poignancy. They’re machines that amplify punctum, and seed the feeling of memories that were never more than smoke.

Is this feeling nostalgia? I don’t know. Perhaps it is not even a bad thing. But it does trouble me that a photograph can create the bittersweet sensation of missing something I never knew.

The brief is: awesome things that exist in the world. A small print, suitable for framing. It can be one thing, or many things, or an idea or concept. It has to be real and it has to be awesome. It should plausibly pass this test: that someday it would be the catalyst for a conversation with a child that starts with “What’s that?” and ends with “That’s awesome.”

This must be a special time in his life. He’s a freshly minted father, and though I’m not a dad myself, I suppose one of the most important and fun things to do these first few months is to begin to plot how to introduce the world to this little person. It’s absolutely fitting that he’s chosen to dress the world up as an amazing place. The world is wide, wide.

So, what’s so amazing here? I eventually have to draw something, so I went for a walk to think about it. As far as I can tell, there is plenty of amazing in this world, and after a few blocks, I realized what impresses me can usually fall into one of three categories.

The first is natural amazingness. Animals and nature are truly awesome, in the literal sense. Redwoods grow as tall as skyscrapers from little seeds, because that is what redwoods do. Mountain goats live miles up and stand on surfaces the size of Coke cans without a hint of worry. Iguanas’ eyes move separately like two ball-bearings spinning around. Cicadas sleep in the ground for years, then all spring up at the same time to clutter up the sky. All of these qualities are exceptional to us, yet they are simply the way of life for these creatures. Natural amazing is a quiet amazing, since gloating is the opposite of being natural. Nature very rarely flaunts itself; it is patient and will wait for you to discover it.

The second kind of awesome is the technology with which we surround ourselves. The electric grid. The microwave that excites the water in my food to heat it. Building the pyramids to perfect coordinates by measuring the stars. The vibrating atoms behind your screen. Goodness: we put a man in a tin can, had the moon’s gravity grab him, then sling him around to shoot him back home. Technology is loud, brash, and brazen. It wishes to boast, if only to call attention to the distance between where we were and what is now possible. It is surprising how often new technology must begin with an act of showmanship, from Franklin’s kite, to Tesla’s electricity demos, to Jobs’ Apple keynotes. While nature is perfectly content without our gaze, it seems that technology demands our imaginination to fuel it. That imagination is to credit for everything that’s happened since our stone tools.

The last kind of amazing is our behavior. People choose to do awesome things all the time, simply because they will it to be. People run marathons. They swim the English Channel. Bounce around their city and learn parkour. Write novels about life and death and love. Walk a tightrope between the Twin Towers. Teach themselves guitar and pair lines with rhyming words. Even small things, much less in stature than these, but so much more important. Every day people choose to be kind. To be selfless. To sacrifice personal convenience and gain for the greater good. Which is all a miracle, if you really think about it.

It may seem small, but this last sort of awesome is the most profound. Technology will always be based on the dream of what we haven’t got. Nature is fixed, and a redwood has no say in whether or not it grows big. But behavior? All you have to do to get what you wish is to choose to act differently, which means you already have everything you need. A form of amazingness completely based on how you choose to think and act? That is, indeed, awesome.