2014

Good design

In the 1970s industrial designer Dieter Rams famously wrote his ten principles for good design which is a powerful way of evaluating the quality of any product. Many methodologies exist on how best to design in order to achieve a certain kind of product, but I have yet to come across any other methodology on evaluating the end-product. In a way that final evaluation is all that matters, even though many companies can get away with tricking customers into buying lesser products. Setting a standard of good products will be a tremendous boost for overall wealth in the world, since this will most surely inspire others to strive for similar goals.

The products by Apple are known to be adhering to these principles of good design, whether or not they intended it to. The way in which products adhere to these principles unfortunately can’t be measured quantitatively, making it also hard to define a ‘best’ product. This especially holds true because these principles aren’t in any way limited to industrial design. Just think about how Wikipedia has established not only their product but also their underlying mission making it so that now all these ten principles can considered met.

Privacy and security

Considering how issues related to privacy and security map on these principles, I believe that principles 6, 8 and 9 call for the implementation of proper security and privacy, whilst principles 1, 2, 5 guide the right way of implementing privacy and security. This user-friendly approach of privacy and security has luckily been called upon in the community many times over.

• The 6th principle ‘good design is honest’ calls for a product to clarify what security and privacy is given and also what isn’t. If say back-doors are purposely added to a product, this should be clear to the user. If on the other hand the product is as secure as possible, users should be informed what threats exist however unlikely.
• The 8th principle ‘good design is thorough down to the last detail’ calls on designers (and engineers, which are also designers) to leave no aspects undecided, and therefore requires them to take a stance on matters like privacy and security.
• The 9th principle ‘good design is environmentally friendly’ goes a long way of addressing all issues that are related to a product but also go way beyond the scope of a single product. The main argument here is the generalization principle of ‘what if all products were like that’, which calls on even the most limited product to respect the bigger picture. Examples included in the original principles are resource conservation, minimizing physical pollution and minimizing visual pollution. All of these examples of course hold for the complete product cycle, since this is needed to even grasp the bigger picture. Personally I’d like to believe that respecting privacy and security are part of this 9th principle, since if all product would violate privacy and security, a fearful society described in George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four might become a reality. This is the referred bigger picture this principle adheres to.
• The 1st principle ‘good design is innovative’ calls on designers to refrain from solely relying on ‘common standards’ and consider new innovations to be incorporated in their products. If everybody just keeps saying privacy and security are hard and leaves it at that, society will only deteriorate on this issue.
• The 2nd principle ‘good design makes a product useful’ and the 5th principle ‘good design is unobtrusive’ emphasize the importance of not putting the burden of security and privacy on the users. Most users don’t like to fiddle with that and will mess things up eventually regardless of intention. These issues should be for the designer to solve, not for the user to worry about.

Conclusion

These powerful principles might some times seem to be in conflict with each other and often times products are designed for short-term gains despite best intentions. It is however up to involved designers to improve the products and make the hard compromises required, not only to suit target customers but to suit society as a whole. This holds for privacy and security just as it holds for aesthetics and sustainability. Designers have to power to shape our world and with great power comes great responsibility.

Down the path with Emacs

Just about a year ago I started using Emacs and I’ve now come to the conclusion that it is about time to get out of the Emacs-world.

I used to make use of Zim and GTG for both my notes and tasks, but as I was using ever more shortcuts, I was keen on employing more advanced tools, especially with a lot of conversion formats in order to liberate my content. After an extensive search I started using Emacs Org mode. I must admit that Org mode is brilliant and very powerful. Adopting Org mode as a non-Emacs user meant I had to learn the most common Emacs shortcuts and get a sense of the considerations underlying Emacs. Having gotten up to steam, it is a brilliant way of managing notes and tasks intertwined, living in a flat file system. Being able to create overviews of all the different tasks allowed advanced overviews to be generated and allowed me to test various management styles like GTD and Kanban. By far the most powerful example of using Org mode was about half a year in: I had only a couple of days at an external company to work out a project outline. Being able to keep notes and tasks with blinding speed was already incredible, but being able to export a draft outline to both a neatly styled LaTeX report and LaTeX presentation was a great time-saver which made quite an impression.

Spending a lot of time in Emacs already, it only seemed logical to point more activities towards Emacs, which is the eventual consequence of such a tightly integrated editor with all its versatility. It didn’t took long for me to strictly use Emacs for my writing, coding, news reading and even browsing. Emacs really became my operating system, just the way as it has been joked by the community.

Emacs however isn’t an operating system. And Emacs isn’t a windows manager either. Emacs is just a legacy editor with many powerful modes which can be tailored to suit a lot of use-cases. Having adopted Emacs as my main tool, I became quite aware of its limitations. Limitations which aren’t around when using other programs for the job. Also the integration of Emacs with other programs wasn’t very good. Copying content from Emacs to other programs often required another editor like gedit to bridge the gap.

Now I’m steadily moving my activities and content back to my favorite GUI applications, which have a large user base and are dedicated to a particular set of tasks.

In retrospect I would describe Emacs as Swiss army knife combined with a pile of wood: you’ll be able to achieve a lot with the tool alone and by creating your own set of tools from to wood you can achieve even more. Nowadays there are however more tailored tools for the various jobs and making everything yourself just seems pointless.

A minimum level of sharing capabilities

Lately it has struck me how the sharing of content we were used to, is now slowly being taken away from us, without most of us noticing. Remember how anyone was able to lend out their books, CD’s and DVD’s, even just a couple of years ago? Today there is a totally different paradigm. More and more the content is becoming strictly contained in the domains of the service providers via forms of DRM. Streaming services like Spotify and Netflix keep their content stored online and programs like iTunes and Adobe Digital Editions make sure that even the local storage is in the hands of the service provider. Now, this movement in itself is not as bad as it might seem, since you could for example still lend somebody the account credentials or share an e-reader. However simultaneously there is trend towards a strong tie between devices and their users. Just imagine swapping smartphones with a friend for a week so you can enjoy each others e-books, it is unthinkable since that smartphone is tied to your email, your apps, your passwords, your phone number and your other media. Spending a little money on buying an e-book rather than sharing devices is therefore the only sane option. Apple currently seems at the forefront of pushing this paradigm of devices belonging to only a single user by focusing on a seamless experience between devices and by linking it all to your Apple ID. It is not without reason that better content sharing options were most-requested and recently adopted in the form of Family Sharing. However the scope of lending out content is still far more limited than it ever was in the previous decades.

Apart from sharing, we in Europe have also agreed on several rights people have for legally copying content. In the Netherlands this mainly entails making a private copy of legally distributed content and making a private copy for studying purposes. Depending on the media copying was done with a photo-copier, an audio tape recorder or a video tape recorder. With content being restricted end-to-end, the only real way of making a copy seems to be at the side of the human accessing it. This means recording the audio using a microphone, recording the video using a video-camera and copying an e-book with a camera or photo-copier. Granted, other methods exist but these mainly require someone technical to circumvent these restrictions. So the conclusion to be made, is that with the digital revolution, copying content in the way you are entitled to by law has become harder and not easier.

How can it be that as a society we have agreed on what a person should and should not be able to do with content in terms of lending and copying, but that the main content distributors and their technology are not supporting these rights in any way? Since ultimately the desire for content outweighs the ethical considerations for most consumers, it is up to the governments and related institutions to demand the implementation of the level of freedom we have agreed on. Since the law is the ultimate restriction, code needn’t be and shouldn’t be more restrictive than the law.

Novena laptop as an open-source booster

Most people in the open-source community will already have heard about the Novena project as it is a well supported move for building an as-free-as-possible laptop. Just last week a video was published from a keynote given by Sean Cross about the project. It is worth the watch, especially since it shows the ‘hidden’ process that resulted in the final design. The way in which the Novena laptop is able to support and empower hardware and software projects is stunning and it is probably this feature-set that aspires to all hackers out there and helps make the effort such a success.

Website revamp

Having run a low-key website for a couple of months now, I came to the conclusion that I had to restructure it in order to take it to the next level. Underlying was a self-built (php) back-end which took care mostly of presentation and not on content management. By using a WordPress back-end advanced functions for presentation and content management become available. In a couple of hours I was able to build a custom theme, which covers the functionality I need.

Having set the structure for my new website, the next task will be to add preceding content and fine-tune the theme to display correctly on all devices. New content can therefore be expected soon.