The poem is titled Otherwise, written by poet Jane Kenyon.

Otherwise

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.

All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.

I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.

But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

“That’s not to say you don’t go for the talent if you can; of course you go for the talent. But the work only begins there. The solution to this too-many-cooks problem is leadership.” – Matt Drance

At HIVE 2011, Hillel Cooperman, Co-Founder of Jackson Fish Market, emphasized this idea in his keynote: most organizations don’t have design leadership. They’re using metrics they learned from B-school to apply to something they don’t get, and designers are rarely in decision-making positions.

At the most recent Seattle Info Camp, while Ario Jafarzadeh talked through 10 Observations from 10+ years in the Corporate UX Trenches, I noticed a theme: it’s not just the software and user experiences we work on that are broken, the corporate environment in which we’re working in is also broken.

Today, Marco Arment penned four steps on how to bring good design to a platform, and step one starts with the top, again.

“Demonstrate from the top that high quality and attention to detail are prioritized and appreciated above everything else, including being the first to market, having the most features, or having the most aggressive prices. If you can get those as well, that’s great, but quality will not be sacrificed to do so.” – Marco Arment

Are you seeing this pattern too? Is it too hokey to chant leadership, leadership, leadership? If there are people trying to improve the experience of the users, who’ll improve the experience of the corporations?

In any case, now I’m 29, it rings bitingly true.

“I think there’s a self defense mechanism that keeps my generation from having any real honest connection or commitment with our true feelings. We’re rooting for ball teams, but we’re not getting in there to play. We’re so concerned with failure and success like these two things are all that’s going to sum you up at the end”

The products we design are going to be ridden in, sat upon, looked at, talked into, activated, operated, or in some way used by people individually or en masse. If the point of contact between the product and the people becomes a point of friction, then the industrial designer has failed.

If, on the other hand, people are made safer, more comfortable, more eager to purchase, more efficient—or just plain happier—the industrial designer has succeeded. – Henry Dreyfuss, American Industrial Designer

Emphasis are mine. Something about the idea of friction is sticking with me. Also, I like this as an effect of a design: “or just plain happier”.

No, we don’t always have to merely be more productive or efficient. Happiness is a legitimate goal on its own.

“The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” – Steve Jobs. [Wired, February 1996]

The outpouring of love for Steve Jobs over the past couple days is summed up by Techcrunch writer John Biggs: “Apple and Jobs brought something to technology that it didn’t have before he began – irrationality.”

I can accept this view in the sense that you can’t explain it, people wonder why they’re crying for a complete stranger, and that you can’t understand it, some other people, mostly non Apple users, consider those of us crying crazy and ought to be committed.

Here’s my take: people love their Apple products, so they love the person(s) making it possible. Beyond word processing and making spreadsheets, they have an emotional connection to their devices. But don’t take my words for it. It turned out through neuroimaging that You Love Your iPhone. Literally.

But should we really characterize the intense consumer devotion to the iPhone as an addiction? A recent experiment that I carried out using neuroimaging technology suggests that drug-related terms like “addiction” and “fix” aren’t as scientifically accurate as a word we use to describe our most cherished personal relationships. That word is “love.” – Martin Lindstrom

Ok, love may be completely irrational. It’s also another thing: the third level in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

My questions: What are examples of products in each of Maslow’s level? What do they do? What are their characteristics? What works? What doesn’t work? Most importantly, how do we design to serve up the pyramid, all the way to the Self-Actualization level? 

Design is often viewed as a compromise between business needs, user needs, and technology capability. If we take out the business needs, which I’ll abbreviate as money and profit, and technology, which usually becomes possible in due time, we are left with user needs, or what Interaction Designer Jonathan Korman calls human sense.

Apple has aggressively worked on accessibility for users who are blind or deaf or have other limitations, an effort that makes no “business sense” but surely makes human sense if you read that or any of the countless other articles about what a boon the iPhone has been to the blind.

Money and technology represent the first two Maslow levels and provide shelter, safety, food, water, sleep, sex(?), employment, property, resources, etc. User needs span the whole pyramid, and we address the most basic needs first: the functionality, ie. user must be able to input username.

We have User Interface Design Guidelines for non-functional needs, like consistency and appropriate error messaging. We have usability tests, we have user research data. Yet, how do you spec Love?

My questions: We already have guidelines to create passionate users, what does it take to create self-actualized, compassionate users?  In other words, what are products that make us feel fully human: more fulfilled, more self-aware? What are apps that do this today? 

“We tend to assume the problem is with us, and not with the products we’re trying to use. In other words, when our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole.” – Jonathan Ive

One more thing: Am I crazy for thinking about this in product design?

Apple.com screen shot. Wednesday October 5, 2011. 5pm. Steve Jobs, 1955 - 2011

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

 

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

It’s raining in Seattle. I am sitting in my car crying.

“It’s the festival your friend Hieu told you about that’s happening at his temple, she said.” “Do you want to go? I asked.” She took a short second to think, and said, “No, the temple is inside you, pointing to herself and placing her palm on her sternum.”

This is the kind of thing that, when I was younger, I would have immediately dismissed as “old people wives’ tales”. People who are dead are dead. There’s no heaven, no hell. Just good ol’ natural process of decomposition with some friendly bacteria. “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

What’s up with all this “tortured soul” returning to earth business, then? How silly is it to put food out to offer for these supposed wandering souls? Even if I suspend my rational mind and entertained the thought that they exist, they still can’t technically eat it. What is the point?

I want to know the point. I want to know where all this came from, and more importantly, what it’s for. How does this help me, an undead wandering soul? And so, relieved that I got out of going to temple, I jumped on Wikipedia to read more.

It turns out that the festival is called The Ghost Festival, or the Hungry Ghost Festival. You guys can read the Wikipedia entry for the full gory details, but this festival essentially boils down to this:

On the fourteenth day the realms of Heaven and Hell and the realm of the living are open and both Taoists and Buddhists would perform rituals to transmute and absolve the sufferings of the deceased. Intrinsic to the Ghost Month is ancestor worship, where traditionally the filial piety of descendants extends to their ancestors even after their deaths.

Are we Buddhists? I asked my parents. “70%”, said my dad. I smiled, because of this semi-random number my dad came up with, and because “being Buddhist” is not a binary thing in his mind. It’s a liberating thing for me, because what it means is I don’t have to be Buddhist to celebrate, or not to celebrate this festival.

“Is it to celebrate mothers or fathers?” I continued my inquiry. “Well, mothers and fathers are both Mothers.”, said my mom. Whaa? This is the kind of koan that I get from talking to my parents sometimes. I don’t know what that really means, but I wonder if the reference to “mother” goes beyond gender, instead referring to the archetype of mother, like Mother Earth.

I still don’t know what to make of the intertwined rituals and myths and traditions behind all this. But I’m willing to accept the gesture of Remembrance for those that have gone before me, and all those suffering, living or dead. If you feel the same, wherever you are and whomever you may be, have a good Vu Lan day, or Ghost Festival day, and if you don’t care for any of this, may you enjoy the full moon.

Moonrise over Richmond Beach, Washington.

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really.

How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.” — Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky)

It’s four minutes past midnight, and in 6 hours I will be on the road, in everybody’s least favorite jam: traffic. I really shouldn’t be up blogging, but, 1) I just had a big bowl of pho, 2) Hokai told us to (you don’t say no to Hokai), and 3) I want to capture a few things while they’re fresh on my mind before I procrastinate and *think* about writing but actually never do.

What are those things? In no particular order, they are:

1. Nerd/Geek culture and Buddhism
2. The concept of being a Buddhist
3. Getting in on the ground floor

Nerd/Geek culture and Buddhism

The two groups, or sub-cultures, I frequent the most are Design/Technology and Yoga/Buddhist. To break it down further, in the Design/Tech world, I feel most comfortable in the Internet culture of memes, web 2.0, and startups. In the Yoga/Buddhist world, I’m a mutt with a Vipassana bent. Without telling you my practice history, suffice it to say that I have been following Shinzen Young’s teaching closely for about 5 years.

I don’t, or at least didn’t, think there’d be a group of people who are so interested, informed, and invested in both of these worlds, that I could meet up and banter with. I know they are out there, but they are far and few in between. There are two others in the Seattle area that I’ve found who fit the bill: David Tolmie (@dtolmie) and Rommel de Leon (@c4chaos), and the three of us made the trek to Buddhist Geeks together. But really, that’s 3 of us, in a metropolitan area of 600,000+ people. That’s roughly 0.000005% of the population.

I even have two separate Twitter accounts, @yogageekgirl for all yoga and spiritual related stuff, and @dragonc for all occasions, including my life, technology, entrepreneurialship, design, rock climbing, soccer, etc. I have two blogs, one at nikkichau.com and one at nikkiyoga.com, and I actually had a hard time deciding where to publish this post (#firstworldproblems).

When asked why, I often say that it’s to not inundate one group of people with something that they at least don’t care about and at worst offended by.  (Insert your duality, non-duality jokes here.)

At Buddhist Geeks 11, however, my system fell apart, because the conference was a collision of the circles that I’ve drawn apart. It was now a Venn Diagram. David asked me what Twitter account I would be tweeting from, and I said I didn’t know. My confusion reached its height when Rohan Gunatillake mentioned the Satipatthana Sutta *and* Y Combinator in his talk. Mind. blown.

To demonstrate this to you, I sent a tweet earlier tonight asking if it would be obnoxious to have a shirt that says “Meditation, it works, bitches” in the same spirit as xkcd’s “Science, it works, bitches“. I tweeted as @yogageekgirl, and in hindsight, I should have tweeted from @dragonc. I should have known that some of my followers on @yogageekgirl would object to my use of “bitches”, but I was afraid that some of my followers on @dragonc would roll their eyes at the idea that meditation works (it does, bitches).

The results were what you might expect, from Works For Me (abbreviated, of course), to, “Omg so offensive and not yogic!”

In any case, being at the Buddhist Geeks conference, I felt… relief. I still had to figure out whom I was talking to, to some degree, but I felt more free talking about Ceiling Cat and Double Rainbows in the same sentence as dharma, and that, is a really great feeling. It’s like when Diane Musho Hamilton said, “It’s good I can say karmic in this room without explaining or apologizing.”

I’m thinking of that scene in X-Men, First Class, when the mutants found each other and realized that they didn’t have to hide who they are, or a part of who they are, and that they did belong to something.

The concept of being a Buddhist

I have never considered myself to be a Buddhist, and it’s possible I’m simply in denial. I’ve listened to Joseph Goldstein’s “Abiding in Mindfulness” in the past year in my car commuting to and from work until the CDs scratched up. Rommel and I once played a game where he asked me to identify when Shinzen Young said what in his 20-hour lecture: The Science of Enlightenment.

I don’t know enough—or as much as the tech pundits do—to dissect, slice, dice, julienne, and fry all the possible implications. I am for sure worried about the common concerns, like not being able to read all the Kindle books I’ve bought, or not being able to stream Netflix on my iPad or iPhone.

Until that happens, I’ve taken the sideline to see how things unfold as the tech world scrambles over itself.

I do have one curiosity, though, about how this affects “the average user”. As much as I’ve tried to put myself in the shoes of an average user, I have a hunch I’m not one, or at least in Apple’s eye. One night, I captured a picture of my parents sitting on the couch, my mom playing on her iPhone, and my dad browsing for news on an iPad, and it dawned on me that they might be considered more “average” than me.

My mom and dad on their iPhone and iPad

After all, they’re not going to jailbreak and root anything. They’re not going to try to run Android as a dual boot. They just need to be able to turn their devices on and off, and send a picture, a message, or read the news. While I am trying to squeeze all the features out of my devices, demanding and constantly asking “What more can you do for me?”, I don’t think it’s the same for my parents. They don’t think of their devices as something to hack and do surgery on.

What do these devices mean for an average user? Specifically, how do they read news and magazines? Curious about this, I went to the App Store and looked up what I consider the quintessential average user—busy moms and busy women who still want to stay current with all the trends, tips and tricks for that much promised Best Life—Oprah fans.

Here are some comments about the Oprah Magazine app for February 2011:

“I have subscribed to O Magazine since the beginning 10 years ago. I love this new app! I have the January and February issue on my IPad. I have one suggestion. Make the app a subscription price instead of $3.99 per issue. I now trying to decide to cancel my magazine subscription or download monthly to my iPad.”

“Give us an annual subscription price and I’d gladly sign up and go green. A reluctant 4 stars for a 5 star app.”

“It could be 5 stars if new issues was [sic] and “in-app” purchase rather than purchase one app every month. “

“Please please please make make this a subscription and load it into one app.”

What I see here is a clear desire to have  content from a trusted source in the easiest way possible: one app, one subscription. As I mentioned, I have no idea how this will pan out, and for the sakes of all my Kindle books, I hope Gruber’s right: “You’ll seldom go wrong betting on Apple doing something that’s good for Apple and good for its users — no matter what the ramifications for everyone else.”

Let me take you through a roundabout way of explaining why. The TL;DR version will be at the bottom.

Last night, I introduced a concept from Yoga Philosophy called svadhyaya to my Intro to Yoga students. Translated from Sanskrit, it means self-study, self-inquiry, or self-reflection.

A student asked, “So, self-study, like, spiritually?”

I explained that one way to self-reflect is to notice where our feet and knees and shoulders are, how we’re breathing, and what general feedback our body is giving us in our movement. This habit can show up in other areas of our lives, like if we’re slumping at our desk, or our breath shortens when we’re pissed that someone cuts us off. If being aware of things turns out to be useful in other areas of your life, great.

“But, I don’t pretend to know how you should reflect spiritually.” I told her.

I see a lot of yoga teachers talking about feelings and emotions with their students, and I’m not that brave. It’s not my business to tell someone how to “feel”. If I suggest that you ought to feel divine bliss in a yoga pose, and you’re actually in pain, both of us might be trying to impose someone else’s reality on ourselves. In other words, my user experience is not your user experience.

The only thing I can do when I teach yoga is to make sure the surface is even and the floor is clean, that you feel assured that I will not hurt you, and that I will tell you where your feet and knees and hips and shoulders are, so that you can de-stress, so that you can get strong and flexible or whatever it is that you needed from yoga.

Similarly, in product design, it’s my business to do everything I can to provide and fine-tune all the factors necessary for a good time. It’s my job to make sure that my design is useful and understandable and all these things. But, as Kim Goodwin, author of Designing for the Digital Age said:

Since each person brings her own attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions to any situation, no designer can determine exactly what experience someone has.” – pg 5, Designing for the Digital Age.

We don’t have to look to far to see evidence of this. For some people, the iPhone and iOS devices provide a superior user experience. For others, it’s Android. For yet some others, it’s Windows Phone. I love my Mac to a disturbing degree, but I’m sure there are those who will enrage at the sight of the glowing fruit.

For a non techy example: while I love a juicy Portabella sandwich, my boyfriend won’t touch a fork that’s been in the same zipcode as a mushroom.

So, I get that we need a word to rally around and to communicate, and there’s no reason to be pedantic about the semantics. I’ve come to fully accept it. But, I’m also aware that the user experience is likely never going to be 100% my own doing.

TL;DR: We can’t really design an “experience”, since everyone’s experience is based on their attitudes, behaviors, perceptions, and choice of fruit. The best we can do is to set up the environment in which a person’s experience can be optimized.