From the Porch to the Street

Dear J,

To answer your question, I haven’t much felt like it. I’ve been quiet, because there hasn’t been much to say, and I haven’t been looking for things to say. Of course, Twitter is a megaphone, so there is a small temptation to say something into it, even if it is just braying to hear your own voice loud, so…

Whenever I log in to Twitter, I think, “Where did all my friends go?” Now, my feed is mostly the strangers talking. That’s fine: my friends and I find other ways to keep in touch. Although, I do miss having that bizarre, constant contact a feed gives you. Maybe too intense. Maybe unhealthy. Not sure. Having a Twitter account with a decent number of followers is a high-maintainence relationship. I can’t blame my friends for clamming up. I remember last year catching myself: I was composing a tweet in my head while eating breakfast. I felt sick to my stomach and couldn’t finish. Since then, I’ve clammed up, too.

Have you heard of evaporative social cooling? It says the people who provide the most value to a social group or organization eventually burn out and leave, undermining the stability and progress of the group. Most of my internet friends have been on Twitter since 2008, so they probably fall into this group. How much more is there left to say?

We concede that there is some value to Twitter, but the social musing we did early on no longer fits. My feed (full of people I admire) is mostly just a loud, stupid, sad place. Basically: a mirror to the world we made that I don’t want to look into. The common way to refute my complaint is to say that I’m following the wrong people. I think I’m following the right people, I’m just seeing the worst side of them while they’re stuck in an inhospitable environment. It’s exasperating to be stuck in a stream.

Here’s the frustration: if you’ve been on Twitter a while, it’s changed out from under you. Christopher Alexander made a great diagram, a spectrum of privacy: street to sidewalk to porch to living room to bedroom. I think for many of us Twitter started as the porch—our space, our friends, with the occasional neighborhood passer-by. As the service grew and we gained followers, we slid across the spectrum of privacy into the street.

Of course, the things you say on your porch are much different than what you’d say on the street. But if the porch turned into the street without you noticing, there’d be a few painful months before you realized you needed to change how you spoke. I remember the first few times I was talking to friends (forgetting the conversation could be viewed by those who followed both of us), only to have strangers piggy-back on our grousing. It felt like a violation. But that’s on me for participating in a kinda-private, kinda-public conversation.

For the better part of a year, I’ve been trying to make Twitter feel like talking on the porch again, but it just can’t happen. Twitter isn’t talking for anyone with more than 500 followers—it’s publishing or advertising. We’re all on the street, and it’s noisy.

This may be overstating or overthinking the situation. Twitter is just a website. Yet, I can point to many opportunities, jobs, and (most importantly) friendships that sprung from it. Some married friends met on Twitter. It’s tempting to give an importance to the service for those of us who joined early and were able to reap these benefits, but that doesn’t mean Twitter needs to stick around forever. It matters. Or mattered. To me, I’m unsure which just yet.

Frank

Frank Chimero Designing & writing

Hi, I’m Frank Chimero, a designer from New York. Currently, I’m on sabbatical walking NYC, investigating new creative tooling, and researching Brian Eno’s collaborations with machines.

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Portrait of Frank Chimero

The Shape of Design A short book for new designers about the design mindset

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Writing Selected essays
and lectures

An anvil tied to a balloon
Everything Easy is Hard Again Is it twenty years of experience in tech or five years, repeated four times? 2018
A grid of wood cubes
The Web’s Grain Design by thinking inside the box model 2015
Time lapse image of a galloping horse
What Screens Want Design as choreography instead of composition 2013
A rose growing out of a pile of dirt
Only Openings Some problems must be tended instead of solved. 2014
Two torn pieces of paper matched together
Designing in the Borderlands Designer as translator, integrator, and merchant of ideas 2014

Blog 2009–?

About CV and bio

Hi, I’m Frank Chimero, a designer and writer from New York.

Previously, I was Creative Director and Head of Brand at the payments platform Modern Treasury. Before that, I co-founded and led design at Abstract, a design workflow and knowledge base startup that was later aquired by Adobe.

I also spent fifteen years running a solo design studio and consultancy, designing across product and brand for technology and media companies. Clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Nike, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and many early stage startups. I helped design a few things during that time you’ve probably used, from NPR’s online audio player to Wikipedia’s article pages.

In 2012, I wrote, designed, illustrated, and published The Shape of Design, a little book for new designers about the design mindset and making things for other people. Since the book’s launch, it has become a staple text in design education and found an enthusiastic audience beyond the design community.

I have a big love for museums, beat-up pocket-edition paperbacks, ambient music, antique JRPGs, and Phil Collins. (Nobody’s perfect.)

Experience

  • Sabbatical
  • Creative Director and Head of Brand Modern Treasury
  • Creative Director Fictive Kin
  • Self-employed Studio Frank
  • Co-Founder and Head of Design Abstract (acq. Adobe)
  • Self-employed Studio Frank

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Awards

  • ADC Young Guns 8 Art Directors Club
  • New Visual Artist Print Magazine

Speaking

  • AIGA National Conference
    US
  • AIGA Regional Events
    US
  • An Interesting Day
    NO
  • Awwwards Conference
    DE
  • Build Conference
    UK
  • Creative Works
    US
  • Cusp Conference
    US
  • dConstruct
    UK
  • Design Speaks
    US
  • Design Thinkers
    CA
  • Do Lectures
    UK
  • Etsy
    US
  • Harvard University
    US
  • How Design Live
    US
  • Interlink Conference
    CA
  • Kerning Conference
    IT
  • Mailchimp
    US
  • Mirror Conference
    PT
  • New Adventures
    UK
  • Portable Series
    AU
  • School of Visual Arts
    US
  • Shopify
    CA
  • South by Southwest
    US
  • Substans
    NO
  • Webstock
    NZ
  • XOXO Festival
    US