a. natasha joukovsky
journal
RAPID-PROTOTYPING LIFE
We are all the end-users of our own lives, but what we think we want often turns out to be different from what we actually want. I decided to test a few things before going into the next round of production.
When my husband and I started talking this past summer about going on a "sabbatical" of sorts for a few months I was deep into an ilab project for a client and couldn't help thinking about our potential leave in the language of innovation.
The advantages of rapid prototyping in the context of business and technical innovation are well-documented, the biggest perhaps being the ability to test end-user reaction without the up-front investment to actually create the product or service. What you're creating with a prototype is, essentially, a simulacrum of the product or service--something that seems real, mimicking at least one aspect of the real product or service you'd like to test--but is actually just a shell of the real thing that is faster, cheaper, and easier to produce.
One big challenge with rapid prototyping is that there tends to be an inverse correlation between ease of prototypability and the stakes involved. In general, the bigger the investment the actual product or service will require, the harder it is to get people to try to simulate and test it. It's a lot easier to prototype, say, a digital app than a nuclear power plant, so we're often inclined to prototype the app but just take our best guess on the power plant, even though the consequences of making a bad decision re: the power plant are like to be astronomically harder and more expensive to correct downstream.
I spend a lot of time trying to convince people that it is worth the effort to try and prototype the power plant; that--while you should absolutely prototype the app too--it's actually more important to prototype the power plant; that just because something is hard to prototype does not mean you can't or shouldn't try; that low-fidelity is infinitely better than no-fidelity.
Life--that is, where you live, in terms of city, neighborhood, and apartment/house--seems to have way more in common with the power plant. Decisions tend to be long-term, expensive-to-get-out-of, and difficult to try-before-you-buy--it's something, in short, we should absolutely make the effort to prototype but almost never do. It usually takes years if you want to "try out" a few different cities in any meaningful way. No one lets you live in an apartment for a few weeks before you decide whether you want to rent or buy it (kind of a cool idea though). Decisions are often highly-influenced by glamour--by persuasive cognitive illusion.
We are all the end-users of our own lives, but what we think we want often turns out to be different from what we actually want.
I was excited to try it, to rapid-prototype life before making any kind of long-term decision. My husband and I factored in a few weeks of designated "vacation" time into the sabbatical, but built in three month-long stays. A month is long enough to really "live" somewhere vs. traveling; it's long enough to have days where you want to do precisely nothing and, perhaps more importantly, days where you will have to do things you don't want to do (e.g., laundry, grocery shopping). It's long enough to strip the glamour from a place and see it for what it really is. But it's short enough that, if you see something you really don't like, you don't have to live with it for too long; it's short enough to log these preferences and try to correct them fairly quickly in the next monthly iteration. We spent a month in (1) a rural town - Belfast, Maine, (2) a small-mid-size city - Nice, France, and (3) a non-NYC big city - Paris, France. Simultaneously, we experienced living in (1) a residential neighborhood, (2) an "old city" pseudo-residential neighborhood, and (3) a primarily commercial neighborhood, and (1) a huge house, (2) a studio even smaller than what we had in NYC, and (3) a very spacious one-bedroom apartment.
It was low-fidelity, of course. Life is just different when you don't have a day job, and while I spent a fair amount of time writing, we didn't really even try to control for this. Not working is kind of the point of a sabbatical. We definitely did some touristy things outside of designated vacation time.
But even so, in terms of developing a more informed perspective, a deeper personal understanding of what I want in a city/town, a neighborhood, and an abode, I think the experiment resoundingly supported my ongoing hypothesis that a low-fidelity prototype is way better than no prototype at all. I now know, for instance, that I infinitely prefer having a washing machine but no dryer inside an apartment to having both in a communal space shared by the building. I care more about specific neighborhood than greater city. Light and views matter a lot. Size, less than I would have thought (mess, like work, expands to fill the space you allow it), but it is important to have at least one very comfortable, cozy place.
We're leaving Paris tomorrow, and I have no regrets. I recognize how unusual it is and fortunate we were to be able to do something like this, but for anyone who can, I highly recommend it.
IN WHICH DFW & I EXPLORE CHINESE BEAUTY APP MEITU
The IPO of Chinese "Aspirational Beauty App" Meitu is an irresistible conflux of innovation, glamour, and recursion--straight from the pages of Infinite Jest.
Welcome screens from the Meitu app.
I am not the first to gape at the remarkable prescience of David Foster Wallace's largely standalone conceit on the rise and fall of videophony buried inside Infinite Jest. But with the IPO of Chinese "Aspirational Beauty App" Meitu all over the New York Times and Fortune etc. it was such an irresistible conflux of innovation, glamour, and recursion I couldn't forgo the opportunity to explore it a little bit.
If you cobble together some extracts from the Meitu IPO coverage vs. Infinite Jest, it's almost impossible to discern fact from fiction, which is, of course, the purpose of the app itself. Try identifying the sources of these four quotations: Meitu, a (1)"High-def mask-entrepreneur," (2)"allows users to aggressively retouch their faces in photos," for (3)"aesthetic enhancement--stronger chins, smaller eye-bags, air-brushed scars and wrinkles." (4)"A touch can taper your jaw. It can slim your cheeks. Widen your eyes. Of course, it can make you thinner." It runs together seamlessly, but only (2) and (4) are from the news (Fortune and the NYT respectively). (1) and (3) are from Infinite Jest, published in 1996.
Obviously I had to download Meitu and try it. (Is the app's name intentionally an English homonym for "me too"?)
"Get ready for a new you!" the first screen instructs, followed by, in what seems to me a more foreboding admonition than intended, "Get ready for hundreds of emotions!" I found the original color version of my LinkedIn photo, which I consider to be, you know, a pretty good photo of myself, uploaded it to the app, and started tinkering.
Original photo (left) and Meitu-ized version (right)
There was something almost apotheotic about the ability to make pores evaporate, slim down my face, and up the ratio of eyes-to-nose. The whole process took about 30 seconds. It was terrifying, but mesmerizingly so, even if I found the results strange and alien-like--the aesthetics, by default, lean small-woodland-creature. I couldn't help but wonder, if the tweaks were geared toward American beauty standards rather than Chinese, if I would have felt differently. Per the NYT article, this is very much in the works--and will be more or less automated via geolocation usage algorithms. I shudder with "videophonic stress" and vanity--not hundreds of emotions, only two--just thinking about it, about expectations moving from Kim Kardashian to Bambi.
Meitu can "reject[] the idea that its business model relies on people’s insecurities or cultural pressures" and insist "It’s about making you happy," but I don't buy it. In the most flattering light I can muster, it's about getting caught up in DFW's "storm of entrepreneurial sci-fi-tech enthusiasm." Without a filter, of course, it's about Meitu making $$$. Precisely, $629M in the Hong Kong IPO this week and a $4.6B valuation. If DFW's clairvoyance holds, it will be a short-lived boom. Meitu already fell short its target $5B valuation, per the Wall Street Journal. "The question is whether the world wants Meitu’s idea of beauty," the NYT notes. But when innovations are rejected and their markets collapse, there can still be sticky effects:
"Even then, of course, the bulk of U.S. consumers remained verifiably reluctant to leave home and teleputer and to interface personally, though this phenomenon’s endurance can’t be attributed to the videophony-fad per se, and anyway the new panagoraphobia served to open huge new entrepreneurial teleputerized markets for home-shopping and -delivery, and didn’t cause much industry concern."
As a business and innovation strategy consultant, I'm no luddite and have few objections to companies making money. Personally, I also love a good Instagram filter. But Meitu just feels different; using it, I'd crossed one of those invisible lines that you know when you see. I deleted the app immediately.
POLITICAL MYTHOLOGY AND GOAT YOGA
When I read this article on "Goat Yoga," in the New York Times last week, my immediate thought was, this is it, this is why Donald Trump won the election.
When I read this article on "Goat Yoga," in the New York Times last week, my immediate thought was, this is it, this is why Donald Trump won the election. We thought freedom and human rights, diversity and respect, different and weird had already won--we still had some unconscious biases to weed out, sure, but we were comfortable enough that at least formally, consciously, aspirationally, America was a country of reason and respect and humanism for us to allow ourselves this kind of kumbaya capitalist decadence.
Of course it's more complicated than that, but it was my first thought. It falls in line with numerous Rome-analogy pieces like this one from March 2016--disturbingly far in advance of the election--that are taking on a knew significance now, as the hogwash but powerful Mythology of Trump bleeds into full-on garish hyperreality.
Goat Yoga has everything you could possibly want in a news story right now to comfort the reeling elite liberal ego: off-beat intrigue, factual reporting, adjectives like "hummocky"; a hip way to get healthy exercise with a global internet community and a mantra of inclusion (despite its definitionally-expensive actual physical requirements).* It's comfortable and warm; the mere existence of such an article leads us to feel like we're living in a Hillary Clinton world. It's the very feeling that, perhaps, prevented us from actually living in one.
We need a better MacGuffin, sadly, one farther removed from detail and fact. As different as Trump's and Obama's objectives and ideologies, and as measured and pragmatic as the latter has been as President, as candidates, they won the same way: with a general, blanket feeling you could twist to build your own narrative on. It's a rhetorical platform you can use to incite discord as well as harmony, for anger and fear as for hope. They both, notably, tapped into a fervent desire for change. We now need a new mythic counter-mechanism, another unifying, positive emotion with the power to override things like goat yoga for our attention. I'm not sure yet what the the right MacGuffin-myth is--i think, maybe, Bernie hit a chord close to it--but I have my eyes peeled.
*When I re-read this sentence I realized it sounded like Stefon from SNL reviewing the city's hottest new club, but decided to stand by it, yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.
STRATEGIC DESIGN AND THE 2016 US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Peter Thiel notwithstanding, Clinton is the innovator's candidate. And not just because she's Silicon Valley's choice.
One of the most important ideas in Dan Hill's Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary is that of a MacGuffin. It's a Hitchcockian appropriation, a critical plot trigger with little to no value in and of itself. Hill explains, first quoting Hitchcock:
"'A MacGuffin you see in most films about spies. It’s the thing that the spies are after. In the days of Rudyard Kipling, it would be the plans of the fort on the Khyber Pass. It would be the plans of an airplane engine, and the plans of an atom bomb, anything you like. It’s always called the thing that the characters on the screen worry about but the audience don’t care… It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story.'
According to the British Film Institute’s Mark Duguid, the MacGuffin, is 'the engine that sets the story in motion.' In Notorious, it’s uranium ore hidden in wine bottles. In North by Northwest, it’s the entirely vague 'government secrets.' There is a long history to the idea of the plot element that kick-starts and drives the narrative but is somewhat inconsequential in the end. More obviously, the golden fleece is what drove Jason and his Argonauts through multiple narrative scenarios in Greek mythology. More recently, the briefcase in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is a good example."
Hill then goes on to provide an extended example of how this works in strategic design, recounting a building development project that acts as a MacGuffin for larger, systemic changes, for example, to the Finnish fire codes.
I thought a lot about Dark Matter and Trojan Horses, strategic design, and MacGuffins specifically reading this Vox article on the deceptively ambitious scope of Hillary Clinton's platform--almost too perfectly summed up in the rhetoric of innovation as "a plan for a minimal viable product of social democracy."
The image of Hillary Clinton as strategic designer, using a collection of incremental fine-print policy changes as MacGuffins that together create a colossal societal paradigm shift, fascinates me for several reasons:
- MacGuffins tend to be bottom-up strategies, often specifically designed to trigger the powerful into enacting systemic change by those who lack the power and political clout to do so themselves.
- It goes against the candidate mythology that's been built up in this election, pitting Clinton as an entrenched "Washington elite" contra Donald Trump as the "outsider who would stir things up."
- Dark Matter and Trojan Horses is written from a Nordic perspective; Hill is specifically interested in how to allow for the extreme positive outliers you find in US-style capitalist societies while maintaining the Nordic floor. Clinton faces precisely the opposite challenge. (In the Vox article, Lane Kenworthy posits: “I think a lot of Clinton’s proposals are very much a step in the direction of a Nordic-style or social democratic welfare state.")
Peter Thiel notwithstanding, Clinton is the innovator's candidate. And not just because she's Silicon Valley's choice. She may not be very likable, but she seems like a shrewd strategic designer aimed at the same no-ceiling-high-floor spot Dan Hill describes. As the most powerful person in the world, she might just be able to prototype and pilot it. Given the alternative ("Make America Great Again" is, incidentally, the ugly flip side of futuristic nostalgia), I sure hope she gets the chance to try.