Work

Just get started

“The muse visits during the act of creation, not before” – [Roger Ebert](http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-muse-1999)

Too busy to rest

Elizabeth Kolbert summarizes the new book [Overwhelmed](http://www.amazon.com/Overwhelmed-Work-Love-Play-When/dp/0374228442) with [a comparison to what John Maynard Keynes expected our society to become](http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2014/05/26/140526crbo_books_kolbert?currentPage=all).

> By 2028, he predicted, the “standard of life” in Europe and the United States would be so improved that no one would need to worry about making money. “Our grandchildren,” Keynes reckoned, would work about three hours a day, and even this reduced schedule would represent more labor than was actually necessary…

> In the future, Keynes imagined, the fruits of capitalism would redeem capitalism…

> It is, to say the least, disappointing that things haven’t turned out that way—that inequality has grown, that leisure is scarce, that even the rich complain of being overwhelmed. And yet so much of what we do, collectively and individually, suggests that we still believe more wealth is the answer. Reexamining this belief would probably be a good idea—that is, if anyone had the time for it.

Why isn’t software beautiful?

It feels to me that software design, despite its intense cultural focus, huge business opportunity, and worldwide effort, isn’t as beautiful, elegant, or compelling as other forms of art and design. Held up against films, music, fashion, physical products and even video games, almost all software feels flat, utilitarian, and uninspired. Why is that? I have a few hypotheses:

* Not enough people are designing software – This is changing fast, but software design has been a very small and elite field for most of its history. When a larger and more diverse set of a population gets involved in something, the results quickly get better. Think about how most top runners are Kenyan; many top baseball players Puerto Rican–in each case, that is the dominant sport and goal for the youth of the country. We need more people to design software.
* We don’t yet have the right tools – We admire the very first cave painters, movie makers, and book publishers because the act of creating anything was hard for them. But we’d hardly call that artwork “beautiful” by today’s standards. The tools to create paintings, films, and prints today are so advanced that almost anyone can learn and practice those art forms. Software, however, is still impossible to create without significant technical training.
* Beauty isn’t useful – My friend Chris often invokes “the Pepsi Challenge”–namely, the difference between liking something for a minute and living with it for weeks. The same design that looks great up on a foamcore board, or in a science fiction movie, starts to grate on you when its ornamentations get in your way for the hundredth time. That’s the reason we had, and abandoned, long cool Flash intros on websites.
* Utility isn’t sexy – Similarly, a design that quickly and efficiently takes care of things and gets out of your way doesn’t even give you a chance to admire it. You might feel satisfaction with the results, but that’s a long way from awe and lust at its form.
* We don’t have the right support and organizational structures – Painters and writers generally work alone; filmmakers and video games have a producer/director split. But most software is designed by a triad of project managers, software engineers, and interface designers.
* We don’t really try – This is a tough one to swallow, but I think it’s fair to say that right now most software designers don’t really pursue beauty as a central goal. Many designers care deeply about elegance, simplicity, and craft, but I’ve rarely met one who speaks about the emotional journey of the viewer, or who thinks about the storyline of their interactions.

Overall, it does seem that software design is quickly improving. Perhaps it will just take more time to get to the place that these other mediums have reached.

Some hair on it

[Obama, in David Remnick’s New Yorker article](http://m.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/01/27/140127fa_fact_remnick?currentPage=8):

> I have yet to see something that we’ve done, or any President has done, that was really important and good, that did not involve some mess and some strong-arming and some shading of how it was initially talked about to a particular member of the legislature who you needed a vote from.

> Because, if you’re doing big, hard things, then there is going to be some hair on it—there’s going to be some aspects of it that aren’t clean and neat and immediately elicit applause from everybody. And so the nature of not only politics but, I think, social change of any sort is that it doesn’t move in a straight line, and that those who are most successful typically are tacking like a sailor toward a particular direction but have to take into account winds and currents and occasionally the lack of any wind, so that you’re just sitting there for a while, and sometimes you’re being blown all over the place.”

Working inside the barn

“I had some time on my hands, I wasn’t working much in my, ahem, chosen profession. An aspect of fortune is that, when it’s raining, then you gotta work inside the barn, you know?” – [Robert Downey Jr.](http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2013/12/19/robert-downey-interview/?iid=EL) on recording an album

Philip Glass on caring about your job

[An interesting perspective](http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/interviews/philip-glass-i-think-im-built-for-this-kind-of-life-i-train-like-an-athlete-1688870.html):

> Glass didn’t earn a living from his music, in fact, until he was 42. Until then, he drove cabs, shifted furniture and worked as a plumber. “I was careful,” he explains, “to take a job that couldn’t have any possible meaning for me.”

Fortune’s favor

Most of doing great design work is preparing for great design work.

Will our grandchildren have “jobs”?

[A few interesting quotes](http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/07/should-we-fear-the-end-of-work.html) from [Cornell’s recent Employment and Technology roundtable](http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/ICS/InsightsAndConvenings/EmploymentSustainabilityInitiative/). As a new father this is even more interesting to me than it used to be…

The likely false hope of everyone moving to “creative” jobs in the future:

> If you’re talking 100 years, there’s no doubt in my mind that all jobs will be gone, including creative ones. And 100 years is not far in the future — some of our children will be alive in 100 years. – [Hod Lipson](http://lipson.mae.cornell.edu/)

And the thought of what careers would even support 8 billion people all working:

> I have a question for those of you here that are more optimistic about the future. What specifically do you think might be the future economic domains in which there might be large-scale employment? I’m not interested in the cases where there’s a cool new job that really, really smart people who read Wired magazine can do. What I am interested in are new occupations that hundreds of thousands of people could do, in game-changing ways like when the automobile industry once opened up. – [Gary Marcus](http://garymarcus.com/bio/bio.html)

I’m with the skeptics–it’s hard to imagine a world where technology continues to advance and people still have jobs. The question is whether we can steer society more toward [The Culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture) and away from [Player Piano](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_(novel)).

My other baby

…had its birth announcement today:

Glad to finally share more information about our design!

Drive your Google to the Google

This comment has stuck in my head for years…and seems to become truer each day:

> With Google branching into so many fields, one day you’ll [drive your Google](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car) to [the Google](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17VHr6rsPAw) to buy some Google to eat while you [watch Google](http://www.youtube.com) on [your Google](http://www.google.com/tv/). – [TheGatekeeper on Slashdot, 2004](http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=126072&cid=10555532)

Guess we’ve got to get cracking on that edible Google.