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Humility, a designer’s essential value—that has a nice ring to it. What about humility, an office manager’s essential value? Or a dentist’s? Or a librarian’s? They all sound great. When humility is our guiding light, the path is always open for fulfillment, evolution, connection, and engagement. In this chapter, we’re going to talk about why.

That said, this is a book for designers, and to that end, I’d like to start with a story—well, a journey, really. It’s a personal one, and I’m going to make myself a bit vulnerable along the way. I call it:

The Tale of Justin’s Preposterous Pate

When I was coming out of art school, a long-haired, goateed neophyte, print was a known quantity to me; design on the web, however, was rife with complexities to navigate and discover, a problem to be solved. Though I had been formally trained in graphic design, typography, and layout, what fascinated me was how these traditional skills might be applied to a fledgling digital landscape. This theme would ultimately shape the rest of my career.

So rather than graduate and go into print like many of my friends, I devoured HTML and JavaScript books into the wee hours of the morning and taught myself how to code during my senior year. I wanted—nay, needed—to better understand the underlying implications of what my design decisions would mean once rendered in a browser.

The late ’90s and early 2000s were the so-called “Wild West” of web design. Designers at the time were all figuring out how to apply design and visual communication to the digital landscape. What were the rules? How could we break them and still engage, entertain, and convey information? At a more macro level, how could my values, inclusive of humility, respect, and connection, align in tandem with that? I was hungry to find out.

Though I’m talking about a different era, those are timeless considerations between non-career interactions and the world of design. What are your core passions, or values, that transcend medium? It’s essentially the same concept we discussed earlier on the direct parallels between what fulfills you, agnostic of the tangible or digital realms; the core themes are all the same.

First within tables, animated GIFs, Flash, then with Web Standards, divs, and CSS, there was personality, raw unbridled creativity, and unique means of presentment that often defied any semblance of a visible grid. Splash screens and “browser requirement” pages aplenty. Usability and accessibility were typically victims of such a creation, but such paramount facets of any digital design were largely (and, in hindsight, unfairly) disregarded at the expense of experimentation.

For example, this iteration of my personal portfolio site (“the pseudoroom”) from that era was experimental, if not a bit heavy- handed, in the visual communication of the concept of a living sketchbook. Very skeuomorphic. I collaborated with fellow designer and dear friend Marc Clancy (now a co-founder of the creative project organizing app Milanote) on this one, where we’d first sketch and then pass a Photoshop file back and forth to trick things out and play with varied user interactions. Then, I’d break it down and code it into a digital layout.

Along with design folio pieces, the site also offered free downloads for Mac OS customizations: desktop wallpapers that were effectively design experimentation, custom-designed typefaces, and desktop icons.

From around the same time, GUI Galaxy was a design, pixel art, and Mac-centric news portal some graphic designer friends and I conceived, designed, developed, and deployed.

Design news portals were incredibly popular during this period, featuring (what would now be considered) Tweet-size, small-format snippets of pertinent news from the categories I previously mentioned. If you took Twitter, curated it to a few categories, and wrapped it in a custom-branded experience, you’d have a design news portal from the late 90s / early 2000s.

We as designers had evolved and created a bandwidth-sensitive, web standards award-winning, much more accessibility-conscious website. Still ripe with experimentation, yet more mindful of equitable engagement. You can see a couple of content panes here, noting general news (tech, design) and Mac-centric news below. We also offered many of the custom downloads I cited before as present on my folio site but branded and themed to GUI Galaxy.

The site’s backbone was a homegrown CMS, with the presentation layer consisting of global design + illustration + news author collaboration. And the collaboration effort here, in addition to experimentation on a ‘brand’ and content delivery, was hitting my core. We were designing something bigger than any single one of us and connecting with a global audience.

Collaboration and connection transcend medium in their impact, immensely fulfilling me as a designer.

Now, why am I taking you down this trip of design memory lane? Two reasons.

First, there’s a reason for the nostalgia for that design era (the “Wild West” era, as I called it earlier): the inherent exploration, personality, and creativity that saturated many design portals and personal portfolio sites. Ultra-finely detailed pixel art UI, custom illustration, bespoke vector graphics, all underpinned by a strong design community.

Today’s web design has been in a period of stagnation. I suspect there’s a strong chance you’ve seen a site whose structure looks something like this: a hero image / banner with text overlaid, perhaps with a lovely rotating carousel of images (laying the snark on heavy there), a call to action, and three columns of sub-content directly beneath. Maybe an icon library is employed with selections that vaguely relate to their respective content.

Design, as it’s applied to the digital landscape, is in dire need of thoughtful layout, typography, and visual engagement that goes hand-in-hand with all the modern considerations we now know are paramount: usability. Accessibility. Load times and bandwidth- sensitive content delivery. A responsive presentation that meets human beings wherever they’re engaging from. We must be mindful of, and respectful toward, those concerns—but not at the expense of creativity of visual communication or via replicating cookie-cutter layouts.

Pixel Problems

Websites during this period were often designed and built on Macs whose OS and desktops looked something like this. This is Mac OS 7.5, but 8 and 9 weren’t that different.

Desktop icons fascinated me: how could any single one, at any given point, stand out to get my attention? In this example, the user’s desktop is tidy, but think of a more realistic example with icon pandemonium. Or, say an icon was part of a larger system grouping (fonts, extensions, control panels)—how did it also maintain cohesion amongst a group?

These were 32 x 32 pixel creations, utilizing a 256-color palette, designed pixel-by-pixel as mini mosaics. To me, this was the embodiment of digital visual communication under such ridiculous constraints. And often, ridiculous restrictions can yield the purification of concept and theme.

So I began to research and do my homework. I was a student of this new medium, hungry to dissect, process, discover, and make it my own.

Expanding upon the notion of exploration, I wanted to see how I could push the limits of a 32×32 pixel grid with that 256-color palette. Those ridiculous constraints forced a clarity of concept and presentation that I found incredibly appealing. The digital gauntlet had been tossed, and that challenge fueled me. And so, in my dorm room into the wee hours of the morning, I toiled away, bringing conceptual sketches into mini mosaic fruition.

These are some of my creations, utilizing the only tool available at the time to create icons called ResEdit. ResEdit was a clunky, built-in Mac OS utility not really made for exactly what we were using it for. At the core of all of this work: Research. Challenge. Problem- solving. Again, these core connection-based values are agnostic of medium.

There’s one more design portal I want to talk about, which also serves as the second reason for my story to bring this all together.

This is K10k, short for Kaliber 1000. K10k was founded in 1998 by Michael Schmidt and Toke Nygaard, and was the design news portal on the web during this period. With its pixel art-fueled presentation, ultra-focused care given to every facet and detail, and with many of the more influential designers of the time who were invited to be news authors on the site, well… it was the place to be, my friend. With respect where respect is due, GUI Galaxy’s concept was inspired by what these folks were doing.

For my part, the combination of my web design work and pixel art exploration began to get me some notoriety in the design scene. Eventually, K10k noticed and added me as one of their very select group of news authors to contribute content to the site.

Amongst my personal work and side projects—and now with this inclusion—in the design community, this put me on the map. My design work also began to be published in various printed collections, in magazines domestically and overseas, and featured on other design news portals. With that degree of success while in my early twenties, something else happened:

I evolved—devolved, really—into a colossal asshole (and in just about a year out of art school, no less). The press and the praise became what fulfilled me, and they went straight to my head. They inflated my ego. I actually felt somewhat superior to my fellow designers.

The casualties? My design stagnated. Its evolution—my evolution— stagnated.

I felt so supremely confident in my abilities that I effectively stopped researching and discovering. When previously sketching concepts or iterating ideas in lead was my automatic step one, I instead leaped right into Photoshop. I drew my inspiration from the smallest of sources (and with blinders on). Any critique of my work from my peers was often vehemently dismissed. The most tragic loss: I had lost touch with my values.

My ego almost cost me some of my friendships and burgeoning professional relationships. I was toxic in talking about design and in collaboration. But thankfully, those same friends gave me a priceless gift: candor. They called me out on my unhealthy behavior.

Admittedly, it was a gift I initially did not accept but ultimately was able to deeply reflect upon. I was soon able to accept, and process, and course correct. The realization laid me low, but the re-awakening was essential. I let go of the “reward” of adulation and re-centered upon what stoked the fire for me in art school. Most importantly: I got back to my core values.

Always Students

Following that short-term regression, I was able to push forward in my personal design and career. And I could self-reflect as I got older to facilitate further growth and course correction as needed.

As an example, let’s talk about the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC was designed “to help answer some of the fundamental open questions in physics, which concern the basic laws governing the interactions and forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time, and in particular the interrelation between quantum mechanics and general relativity.” Thanks, Wikipedia.

Around fifteen years ago, in one of my earlier professional roles, I designed the interface for the application that generated the LHC’s particle collision diagrams. These diagrams are the rendering of what’s actually happening inside the Collider during any given particle collision event and are often considered works of art unto themselves.

Designing the interface for this application was a fascinating process for me, in that I worked with Fermilab physicists to understand what the application was trying to achieve, but also how the physicists themselves would be using it. To that end, in this role,

I cut my teeth on usability testing, working with the Fermilab team to iterate and improve the interface. How they spoke and what they spoke about was like an alien language to me. And by making myself humble and working under the mindset that I was but a student, I made myself available to be a part of their world to generate that vital connection.

I also had my first ethnographic observation experience: going to the Fermilab location and observing how the physicists used the tool in their actual environment, on their actual terminals. For example, one takeaway was that due to the level of ambient light-driven contrast within the facility, the data columns ended up using white text on a dark gray background instead of black text-on-white. This enabled them to pore over reams of data during the day and ease their eye strain. And Fermilab and CERN are government entities with rigorous accessibility standards, so my knowledge in that realm also grew. The barrier-free design was another essential form of connection.

So to those core drivers of my visual problem-solving soul and ultimate fulfillment: discovery, exposure to new media, observation, human connection, and evolution. What opened the door for those values was me checking my ego before I walked through it.

An evergreen willingness to listen, learn, understand, grow, evolve, and connect yields our best work. In particular, I want to focus on the words ‘grow’ and ‘evolve’ in that statement. If we are always students of our craft, we are also continually making ourselves available to evolve. Yes, we have years of applicable design study under our belt. Or the focused lab sessions from a UX bootcamp. Or the monogrammed portfolio of our work. Or, ultimately, decades of a career behind us.

But all that said: experience does not equal “expert.”

As soon as we close our minds via an inner monologue of ‘knowing it all’ or branding ourselves a “#thoughtleader” on social media, the designer we are is our final form. The designer we can be will never exist.

I am a creative. What I do is alchemy. It is a mystery. I do not so much do it, as let it be done through me.

I am a creative. Not all creative people like this label. Not all see themselves this way. Some creative people see science in what they do. That is their truth, and I respect it. Maybe I even envy them, a little. But my process is different—my being is different.

Apologizing and qualifying in advance is a distraction. That’s what my brain does to sabotage me. I set it aside for now. I can come back later to apologize and qualify. After I’ve said what I came to say. Which is hard enough. 

Except when it is easy and flows like a river of wine.

Sometimes it does come that way. Sometimes what I need to create comes in an instant. I have learned not to say it at that moment, because if you admit that sometimes the idea just comes and it is the best idea and you know it is the best idea, they think you don’t work hard enough.

Sometimes I work and work and work until the idea comes. Sometimes it comes instantly and I don’t tell anyone for three days. Sometimes I’m so excited by the idea that came instantly that I blurt it out, can’t help myself. Like a boy who found a prize in his Cracker Jacks. Sometimes I get away with this. Sometimes other people agree: yes, that is the best idea. Most times they don’t and I regret having  given way to enthusiasm. 

Enthusiasm is best saved for the meeting where it will make a difference. Not the casual get-together that precedes that meeting by two other meetings. Nobody knows why we have all these meetings. We keep saying we’re doing away with them, but then just finding other ways to have them. Sometimes they are even good. But other times they are a distraction from the actual work. The proportion between when meetings are useful, and when they are a pitiful distraction, varies, depending on what you do and where you do it. And who you are and how you do it. Again I digress. I am a creative. That is the theme.

Sometimes many hours of hard and patient work produce something that is barely serviceable. Sometimes I have to accept that and move on to the next project.

Don’t ask about process. I am a creative.

I am a creative. I don’t control my dreams. And I don’t control my best ideas.

I can hammer away, surround myself with facts or images, and sometimes that works. I can go for a walk, and sometimes that works. I can be making dinner and there’s a Eureka having nothing to do with sizzling oil and bubbling pots. Often I know what to do the instant I wake up. And then, almost as often, as I become conscious and part of the world again, the idea that would have saved me turns to vanishing dust in a mindless wind of oblivion. For creativity, I believe, comes from that other world. The one we enter in dreams, and perhaps, before birth and after death. But that’s for poets to wonder, and I am not a poet. I am a creative. And it’s for theologians to mass armies about in their creative world that they insist is real. But that is another digression. And a depressing one. Maybe on a much more important topic than whether I am a creative or not. But still a digression from what I came here to say.

Sometimes the process is avoidance. And agony. You know the cliché about the tortured artist? It’s true, even when the artist (and let’s put that noun in quotes) is trying to write a soft drink jingle, a callback in a tired sitcom, a budget request.

Some people who hate being called creative may be closeted creatives, but that’s between them and their gods. No offense meant. Your truth is true, too. But mine is for me. 

Creatives recognize creatives.

Creatives recognize creatives like queers recognize queers, like real rappers recognize real rappers, like cons know cons. Creatives feel massive respect for creatives. We love, honor, emulate, and practically deify the great ones. To deify any human is, of course, a tragic mistake. We have been warned. We know better. We know people are just people. They squabble, they are lonely, they regret their most important decisions, they are poor and hungry, they can be cruel, they can be just as stupid as we can, because, like us, they are clay. But. But. But they make this amazing thing. They birth something that did not exist before them, and could not exist without them. They are the mothers of ideas. And I suppose, since it’s just lying there, I have to add that they are the mothers of invention. Ba dum bum! OK, that’s done. Continue.

Creatives belittle our own small achievements, because we compare them to those of the great ones. Beautiful animation! Well, I’m no Miyazaki. Now THAT is greatness. That is greatness straight from the mind of God. This half-starved little thing that I made? It more or less fell off the back of the turnip truck. And the turnips weren’t even fresh.

Creatives knows that, at best, they are Salieri. Even the creatives who are Mozart believe that. 

I am a creative. I haven’t worked in advertising in 30 years, but in my nightmares, it’s my former creative directors who judge me. And they are right to do so. I am too lazy, too facile, and when it really counts, my mind goes blank. There is no pill for creative dysfunction.

I am a creative. Every deadline I make is an adventure that makes Indiana Jones look like a pensioner snoring in a deck chair. The longer I remain a creative, the faster I am when I do my work and the longer I brood and walk in circles and stare blankly before I do that work. 

I am still 10 times faster than people who are not creative, or people who have only been creative a short while, or people who have only been professionally creative a short while. It’s just that, before I work 10 times as fast as they do, I spend twice as long as they do putting the work off. I am that confident in my ability to do a great job when I put my mind to it. I am that addicted to the adrenaline rush of postponement. I am still that afraid of the jump.

I am not an artist.

I am a creative. Not an artist. Though I dreamed, as a lad, of someday being that. Some of us belittle our gifts and dislike ourselves because we are not Michelangelos and Warhols. That is narcissism—but at least we aren’t in politics.

I am a creative. Though I believe in reason and science, I decide by intuition and impulse. And live with what follows—the catastrophes as well as the triumphs. 

I am a creative. Every word I’ve said here will annoy other creatives, who see things differently. Ask two creatives a question, get three opinions. Our disagreement, our passion about it, and our commitment to our own truth are, at least to me, the proofs that we are creatives, no matter how we may feel about it.

I am a creative. I lament my lack of taste in the areas about which I know very little, which is to say almost all areas of human knowledge. And I trust my taste above all other things in the areas closest to my heart, or perhaps, more accurately, to my obsessions. Without my obsessions, I would probably have to spend my time looking life in the eye, and almost none of us can do that for long. Not honestly. Not really. Because much in life, if you really look at it, is unbearable.

I am a creative. I believe, as a parent believes, that when I am gone, some small good part of me will carry on in the mind of at least one other person.

Working saves me from worrying about work.

I am a creative. I live in dread of my small gift suddenly going away.

I am a creative. I am too busy making the next thing to spend too much time deeply considering that almost nothing I make will come anywhere near the greatness I comically aspire to.

I am a creative. I believe in the ultimate mystery of process. I believe in it so much, I am even fool enough to publish an essay I dictated into a tiny machine and didn’t take time to review or revise. I won’t do this often, I promise. But I did it just now, because, as afraid as I might be of your seeing through my pitiful gestures toward the beautiful, I was even more afraid of forgetting what I came to say. 

There. I think I’ve said it. 

In reading Joe Dolson’s recent piece on the intersection of AI and accessibility, I absolutely appreciated the skepticism that he has for AI in general as well as for the ways that many have been using it. In fact, I’m very skeptical of AI myself, despite my role at Microsoft as an accessibility innovation strategist who helps run the AI for Accessibility grant program. As with any tool, AI can be used in very constructive, inclusive, and accessible ways; and it can also be used in destructive, exclusive, and harmful ones. And there are a ton of uses somewhere in the mediocre middle as well.

I’d like you to consider this a “yes… and” piece to complement Joe’s post. I’m not trying to refute any of what he’s saying but rather provide some visibility to projects and opportunities where AI can make meaningful differences for people with disabilities. To be clear, I’m not saying that there aren’t real risks or pressing issues with AI that need to be addressed—there are, and we’ve needed to address them, like, yesterday—but I want to take a little time to talk about what’s possible in hopes that we’ll get there one day.

Alternative text

Joe’s piece spends a lot of time talking about computer-vision models generating alternative text. He highlights a ton of valid issues with the current state of things. And while computer-vision models continue to improve in the quality and richness of detail in their descriptions, their results aren’t great. As he rightly points out, the current state of image analysis is pretty poor—especially for certain image types—in large part because current AI systems examine images in isolation rather than within the contexts that they’re in (which is a consequence of having separate “foundation” models for text analysis and image analysis). Today’s models aren’t trained to distinguish between images that are contextually relevant (that should probably have descriptions) and those that are purely decorative (which might not need a description) either. Still, I still think there’s potential in this space.

As Joe mentions, human-in-the-loop authoring of alt text should absolutely be a thing. And if AI can pop in to offer a starting point for alt text—even if that starting point might be a prompt saying What is this BS? That’s not right at all… Let me try to offer a starting point—I think that’s a win.

Taking things a step further, if we can specifically train a model to analyze image usage in context, it could help us more quickly identify which images are likely to be decorative and which ones likely require a description. That will help reinforce which contexts call for image descriptions and it’ll improve authors’ efficiency toward making their pages more accessible.

While complex images—like graphs and charts—are challenging to describe in any sort of succinct way (even for humans), the image example shared in the GPT4 announcement points to an interesting opportunity as well. Let’s suppose that you came across a chart whose description was simply the title of the chart and the kind of visualization it was, such as: Pie chart comparing smartphone usage to feature phone usage among US households making under $30,000 a year. (That would be a pretty awful alt text for a chart since that would tend to leave many questions about the data unanswered, but then again, let’s suppose that that was the description that was in place.) If your browser knew that that image was a pie chart (because an onboard model concluded this), imagine a world where users could ask questions like these about the graphic:

• Do more people use smartphones or feature phones?
• How many more?
• Is there a group of people that don’t fall into either of these buckets?
• How many is that?

Setting aside the realities of large language model (LLM) hallucinations—where a model just makes up plausible-sounding “facts”—for a moment, the opportunity to learn more about images and data in this way could be revolutionary for blind and low-vision folks as well as for people with various forms of color blindness, cognitive disabilities, and so on. It could also be useful in educational contexts to help people who can see these charts, as is, to understand the data in the charts.

Taking things a step further: What if you could ask your browser to simplify a complex chart? What if you could ask it to isolate a single line on a line graph? What if you could ask your browser to transpose the colors of the different lines to work better for form of color blindness you have? What if you could ask it to swap colors for patterns? Given these tools’ chat-based interfaces and our existing ability to manipulate images in today’s AI tools, that seems like a possibility.

Now imagine a purpose-built model that could extract the information from that chart and convert it to another format. For example, perhaps it could turn that pie chart (or better yet, a series of pie charts) into more accessible (and useful) formats, like spreadsheets. That would be amazing!

Matching algorithms

Safiya Umoja Noble absolutely hit the nail on the head when she titled her book Algorithms of Oppression. While her book was focused on the ways that search engines reinforce racism, I think that it’s equally true that all computer models have the potential to amplify conflict, bias, and intolerance. Whether it’s Twitter always showing you the latest tweet from a bored billionaire, YouTube sending us into a Q-hole, or Instagram warping our ideas of what natural bodies look like, we know that poorly authored and maintained algorithms are incredibly harmful. A lot of this stems from a lack of diversity among the people who shape and build them. When these platforms are built with inclusively baked in, however, there’s real potential for algorithm development to help people with disabilities.

Take Mentra, for example. They are an employment network for neurodivergent people. They use an algorithm to match job seekers with potential employers based on over 75 data points. On the job-seeker side of things, it considers each candidate’s strengths, their necessary and preferred workplace accommodations, environmental sensitivities, and so on. On the employer side, it considers each work environment, communication factors related to each job, and the like. As a company run by neurodivergent folks, Mentra made the decision to flip the script when it came to typical employment sites. They use their algorithm to propose available candidates to companies, who can then connect with job seekers that they are interested in; reducing the emotional and physical labor on the job-seeker side of things.

When more people with disabilities are involved in the creation of algorithms, that can reduce the chances that these algorithms will inflict harm on their communities. That’s why diverse teams are so important.

Imagine that a social media company’s recommendation engine was tuned to analyze who you’re following and if it was tuned to prioritize follow recommendations for people who talked about similar things but who were different in some key ways from your existing sphere of influence. For example, if you were to follow a bunch of nondisabled white male academics who talk about AI, it could suggest that you follow academics who are disabled or aren’t white or aren’t male who also talk about AI. If you took its recommendations, perhaps you’d get a more holistic and nuanced understanding of what’s happening in the AI field. These same systems should also use their understanding of biases about particular communities—including, for instance, the disability community—to make sure that they aren’t recommending any of their users follow accounts that perpetuate biases against (or, worse, spewing hate toward) those groups.

Other ways that AI can helps people with disabilities

If I weren’t trying to put this together between other tasks, I’m sure that I could go on and on, providing all kinds of examples of how AI could be used to help people with disabilities, but I’m going to make this last section into a bit of a lightning round. In no particular order:

• Voice preservation. You may have seen the VALL-E paper or Apple’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day announcement or you may be familiar with the voice-preservation offerings from Microsoft, Acapela, or others. It’s possible to train an AI model to replicate your voice, which can be a tremendous boon for people who have ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) or motor-neuron disease or other medical conditions that can lead to an inability to talk. This is, of course, the same tech that can also be used to create audio deepfakes, so it’s something that we need to approach responsibly, but the tech has truly transformative potential.
• Voice recognition. Researchers like those in the Speech Accessibility Project are paying people with disabilities for their help in collecting recordings of people with atypical speech. As I type, they are actively recruiting people with Parkinson’s and related conditions, and they have plans to expand this to other conditions as the project progresses. This research will result in more inclusive data sets that will let more people with disabilities use voice assistants, dictation software, and voice-response services as well as control their computers and other devices more easily, using only their voice.
• Text transformation. The current generation of LLMs is quite capable of adjusting existing text content without injecting hallucinations. This is hugely empowering for people with cognitive disabilities who may benefit from text summaries or simplified versions of text or even text that’s prepped for Bionic Reading.

The importance of diverse teams and data

We need to recognize that our differences matter. Our lived experiences are influenced by the intersections of the identities that we exist in. These lived experiences—with all their complexities (and joys and pain)—are valuable inputs to the software, services, and societies that we shape. Our differences need to be represented in the data that we use to train new models, and the folks who contribute that valuable information need to be compensated for sharing it with us. Inclusive data sets yield more robust models that foster more equitable outcomes.

Want a model that doesn’t demean or patronize or objectify people with disabilities? Make sure that you have content about disabilities that’s authored by people with a range of disabilities, and make sure that that’s well represented in the training data.

Want a model that doesn’t use ableist language? You may be able to use existing data sets to build a filter that can intercept and remediate ableist language before it reaches readers. That being said, when it comes to sensitivity reading, AI models won’t be replacing human copy editors anytime soon. 

Want a coding copilot that gives you accessible recommendations from the jump? Train it on code that you know to be accessible.

I have no doubt that AI can and will harm people… today, tomorrow, and well into the future. But I also believe that we can acknowledge that and, with an eye towards accessibility (and, more broadly, inclusion), make thoughtful, considerate, and intentional changes in our approaches to AI that will reduce harm over time as well. Today, tomorrow, and well into the future.

Many thanks to Kartik Sawhney for helping me with the development of this piece, Ashley Bischoff for her invaluable editorial assistance, and, of course, Joe Dolson for the prompt.

The same holds true for those of us who are currently employed in design and development. Having worked on the web for about three years at this point, I’ve seen the typical wax and wane of concepts, strategies, and systems. Every day we as developers and designers get into a routine pattern, a brand-new concept or technology emerges to shake things up and completely alter our planet.

How we got below

I built my first website in the mid-’90s. Design and development on the web back then was a free-for-all, with few established norms. For any layout aside from a single column, we used table elements, often with empty cells containing a single pixel spacer GIF to add empty space. We styled text with numerous font tags, nesting the tags every time we wanted to vary the font style. And we had only three or four typefaces to choose from: Arial, Courier, or Times New Roman. When Verdana and Georgia came out in 1996, we rejoiced because our options had nearly doubled. The only safe colors to choose from were the 216 “web safe” colors known to work across platforms. The few interactive elements (like contact forms, guest books, and counters) were mostly powered by CGI scripts (predominantly written in Perl at the time). Achieving any kind of unique look involved a pile of hacks all the way down. Interaction was often limited to specific pages in a site.

the development of online standards

At the turn of the century, a new cycle started. Crufty code littered with table layouts and font tags waned, and a push for web standards waxed. Newer technologies like CSS got more widespread adoption by browsers makers, developers, and designers. This shift toward standards didn’t happen accidentally or overnight. It took active engagement between the W3C and browser vendors and heavy evangelism from folks like the Web Standards Project to build standards. A List Apart and books like Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman played key roles in teaching developers and designers why standards are important, how to implement them, and how to sell them to their organizations. And approaches like progressive enhancement introduced the idea that content should be available for all browsers—with additional enhancements available for more advanced browsers. Meanwhile, sites like the CSS Zen Garden showcased just how powerful and versatile CSS can be when combined with a solid semantic HTML structure.

Server-side language like PHP, Java, and.NET took Perl as the primary back-end computers, and the cgi-bin was tossed in the garbage bin. With these improved server-side software, the first period of internet programs started with content-management methods (especially those used in blogs like Blogger, Grey Matter, Movable Type, and WordPress ) In the mid-2000s, AJAX opened gates for sequential interaction between the front end and back finish. Websites now no longer needed to refresh their webpages ‘ content. A grain of Script frameworks like Prototype, YUI, and ruby arose to aid developers develop more credible client-side interaction across browsers that had wildly varying levels of standards support. Techniques like image replacement enable skilled designers and developers to display fonts of their choosing. And technologies like Flash made it possible to add animations, games, and even more interactivity.

These new methods, standards, and technologies greatly boosted the sector’s growth. Web design flourished as designers and developers explored more diverse styles and layouts. However, we still relied heavily on hacks. Early CSS was a huge improvement over table-based layouts when it came to basic layout and text styling, but its limitations at the time meant that designers and developers still relied heavily on images for complex shapes ( such as rounded or angled corners ) and tiled backgrounds for the appearance of full-length columns (among other hacks ). All kinds of nested floats or absolute positioning were required for complicated layouts ( or both ). Flash and image replacement for custom fonts was a great start toward varying the typefaces from the big five, but both hacks introduced accessibility and performance problems. Additionally, JavaScript libraries made it simple to add a dash of interaction to pages without having to spend the money to double or even quadruple the download size for basic websites.

The web as software platform

The balance between the front end and the back end continued to improve, leading to the development of the current web application era. Between expanded server-side programming languages ( which kept growing to include Ruby, Python, Go, and others ) and newer front-end tools like React, Vue, and Angular, we could build fully capable software on the web. Along with these tools, there were additional options, such as shared package libraries, build automation, and collaborative version control. What was once primarily an environment for linked documents became a realm of infinite possibilities.

Mobile devices increased in their capabilities as well, and they gave us access to the internet while we were traveling. Mobile apps and responsive design opened up opportunities for new interactions anywhere and any time.

The development of social media and other centralized tools for people to connect and use resulted from this combination of potent mobile devices and potent development tools. As it became easier and more common to connect with others directly on Twitter, Facebook, and even Slack, the desire for hosted personal sites waned. Social media provided connections on a global scale, with both positive and negative outcomes.

Want a much more extensive history of how we got here, with some other takes on ways that we can improve? ” Of Time and the Web” was written by Jeremy Keith. Or check out the” Web Design History Timeline” at the Web Design Museum. Additionally, Neal Agarwal takes a fascinating tour of” Internet Artifacts.”

Where we are now

It seems like we’ve reached yet another significant turning point in the last couple of years. As social-media platforms fracture and wane, there’s been a growing interest in owning our own content again. There are many different ways to create websites, from the tried-and-true classic of hosting plain HTML files to static site generators to content management systems of all kinds. The fracturing of social media also comes with a cost: we lose crucial infrastructure for discovery and connection. Webmentions, RSS, ActivityPub, and other IndieWeb tools can be useful in this regard, but they’re still largely underdeveloped and difficult to use for the less geeky. We can build amazing personal websites and add to them regularly, but without discovery and connection, it can sometimes feel like we may as well be shouting into the void.

Browser support for CSS, JavaScript, and other web components has increased, particularly with initiatives like Interop. New technologies gain support across the board in a fraction of the time that they used to. I frequently find out about a new feature and check its browser support only to discover that its coverage is already over 80 %. Nowadays, the barrier to using newer techniques often isn’t browser support but simply the limits of how quickly designers and developers can learn what’s available and how to adopt it.

We can prototype almost any idea today with just a few commands and a few lines of code. All the tools that we now have available make it easier than ever to start something new. However, the upfront cost these frameworks may save in initial delivery eventually comes down as the maintenance and upgrading they become a part of our technical debt.

If we rely on third-party frameworks, adopting new standards can sometimes take longer since we may have to wait for those frameworks to adopt those standards. These frameworks, which once made it easier to adopt new techniques sooner, have since evolved into obstacles. These same frameworks often come with performance costs too, forcing users to wait for scripts to load before they can read or interact with pages. And frequently, when scripts fail ( whether due to poor code, network problems, or other environmental factors ), users are left with blank or broken pages.

Where do we go from here?

Hacks of today help to shape standards for the future. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with embracing hacks —for now—to move the present forward. Problems only arise when we refuse to acknowledge that they are hacks or when we choose not to replace them. So what can we do to create the future we want for the web?

Build for the long haul. Optimize for performance, for accessibility, and for the user. weigh the costs of those user-friendly tools. They may make your job a little easier today, but how do they affect everything else? What is the cost to the users? To future developers? to the adoption of standards? Sometimes the convenience may be worth it. It’s occasionally just a hack that you’ve gotten used to. And sometimes it’s holding you back from even better options.

Start with standards. Standards continue to evolve over time, but browsers have done a remarkably good job of continuing to support older standards. The same holds true for third-party frameworks, though. Sites built with even the hackiest of HTML from the’ 90s still work just fine today. The same can’t always be said of websites created with frameworks even after a few years.

Design with care. Consider the effects of each choice, whether your craft is code, pixels, or processes. The convenience of many a modern tool comes at the cost of not always understanding the underlying decisions that have led to its design and not always considering the impact that those decisions can have. Use the time saved by modern tools to think more carefully and make decisions with care rather than rushing to “move fast and break things”

Always be learning. If you constantly learn, you also develop. Sometimes it may be hard to pinpoint what’s worth learning and what’s just today’s hack. Even if you were to concentrate solely on learning standards, you might end up focusing on something that won’t matter next year. ( Remember XHTML? ) However, ongoing learning opens up new neural connections in your brain, and the techniques you learn in one day may be used to inform different experiments in the future.

Play, experiment, and be weird! This website we created is the most incredible experiment. It’s the single largest human endeavor in history, and yet each of us can create our own pocket within it. Be brave and make new friends. Build a playground for ideas. In your own bizarre science lab, conduct absurd experiments. Start your own small business. There has never been a place where we have more room to be creative, take risks, and discover our potential.

Share and amplify. Share what you think has worked for you as you experiment, play, and learn. Write on your own website, post on whichever social media site you prefer, or shout it from a TikTok. Write something for A List Apart! But take the time to amplify others too: find new voices, learn from them, and share what they’ve taught you.

Go ahead and create a masterpiece.

As designers and developers for the web ( and beyond ), we’re responsible for building the future every day, whether that may take the shape of personal websites, social media tools used by billions, or anything in between. Let’s give everything we produce a positive vibe by infusing our values into everything we do. Create that thing that only you are uniquely qualified to make. Then share it, improve it, re-use it, or create something new. Learn. Make. Share. Grow. Rinse and repeat. Everything will change whenever you believe you have the ability to use the internet.

The personalization space is real, between the dream of getting it right and the fear of it going wrong ( like when we encounter “persofails” in the spirit of a company that regularly asks regular people to buy more toilet seats ). It’s an particularly confusing place to be a modern professional without a map, a map, or a strategy.

There are no Lonely Planet and some tour guides for those of you who want to personalize because powerful personalization depends so much on each group’s talent, technology, and market position.

But you can ensure that your group has packed its carriers reasonably.

There’s a DIY method to increase your chances for achievement. You’ll at least at least disarm your boss ‘ irrational exuberance. Before the group you’ll need to properly plan.

It’s known as prepersonalization.

Behind the audio

Take into account Spotify’s DJ element, which debuted this year.

We’re used to seeing the polished final outcome of a personalization have. A personal have had to be developed, budgeted, and given priority before the year-end prize, the making-of-backstory, or the behind-the-scenes success chest. Before any customisation have goes live in your product or service, it lives amid a delay of valuable ideas for expressing consumer experiences more automatically.

How do you decide where to position personalisation wagers? How do you design regular interactions that didn’t journey up users or—worse—breed mistrust? We’ve found that for many well-known budgeted programs to support their continued investments, they initially required one or more workshops to join vital technologies users and stakeholders. Make yours count.

We’ve closely monitored the same evolution with our clients, from big tech to young startups. In our experiences with working on small and large personalization efforts, a program’s ultimate track record—and its ability to weather tough questions, work steadily toward shared answers, and organize its design and technology efforts—turns on how effectively these prepersonalization activities play out.

Effective workshops consistently distinguish successful future endeavors from unsuccessful ones, saving countless hours of time, resources, and overall well-being in the process.

A personalization practice involves a multiyear effort of testing and feature development. It’s not a switch-flip in your tech stack. It’s best managed as a backlog that often evolves through three steps:

1. customer experience optimization ( CXO, also known as A/B testing or experimentation )
2. always-on automations ( whether rules-based or machine-generated )
3. mature features or standalone product development ( like Spotify’s DJ experience )?

This is why we created our progressive personalization framework and why we’re field-testing an accompanying deck of cards: we believe that there’s a base grammar, a set of “nouns and verbs” that your organization can use to design experiences that are customized, personalized, or automated. You won’t require these cards. But we strongly recommend that you create something similar, whether that might be digital or physical.

Set the timer for your kitchen.

How long does it take to cook up a prepersonalization workshop? The activities we suggest including during the assessment can ( and frequently do ) last for weeks. For the core workshop, we recommend aiming for two to three days. Here’s a summary of our more general approach as well as information on the crucial first-day activities.

The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

Kickstart: This specifies the terms of engagement as you concentrate on the potential, the readiness and drive of your team, and your leadership.
1. Plan your work: This is the heart of the card-based workshop activities where you specify a plan of attack and the scope of work.
2. Work your plan: This stage essentially entails creating a competitive environment in which team members can individually present their own pilots that each contain a proof-of-concept project, its business case, and its operating model.

Give yourself at least a day, split into two large time blocks, to power through a concentrated version of those first two phases.

Kickstart: Apt your appetite

We call the first lesson the “landscape of connected experience“. It looks at the possibilities for personalization in your company. A connected experience, in our parlance, is any UX requiring the orchestration of multiple systems of record on the backend. A marketing-automation platform and a content-management system could be used together. It could be a digital-asset manager combined with a customer-data platform.

Give examples of connected experience interactions that you admire, find familiar, or even dislike, as examples of consumer and business-to-business examples. This should cover a representative range of personalization patterns, including automated app-based interactions ( such as onboarding sequences or wizards ), notifications, and recommenders. We have a list of these in the cards. Here’s a list of 142 different interactions to jog your thinking.

It’s all about setting the tone. What are the possible paths for the practice in your organization? Here’s a long-form primer and a strategic framework for a broader view.

Assess each example that you discuss for its complexity and the level of effort that you estimate that it would take for your team to deliver that feature ( or something similar ). We categorize connected experiences in our cards according to their functions, features, experiences, complete products, and portfolios. Size your own build here. This will help to draw attention to both the benefits of ongoing investment and the difference between what you currently offer and what you intend to deliver in the future.

Next, have your team plot each idea on the following 2×2 grid, which lays out the four enduring arguments for a personalized experience. This is crucial because it emphasizes how personalization can affect your own methods of working as well as your external customers. It’s also a reminder ( which is why we used the word argument earlier ) of the broader effort beyond these tactical interventions.

Each team member should decide where they would like to place your company’s emphasis on your product or service. Naturally, you can’t prioritize all of them. Here, the goal is to demonstrate how various departments may view their own advantages over the effort, which can be different from one department to the next. Documenting your desired outcomes lets you know how the team internally aligns across representatives from different departments or functional areas.

The third and final Kickstart activity is about filling in the personalization gap. Is your customer journey well documented? Will data and privacy protection be a significant challenge? Do you have content metadata needs that you have to address? ( We’re pretty sure you do; it’s just a matter of recognizing the need’s magnitude and its solution. ) In our cards, we’ve noted a number of program risks, including common team dispositions. For instance, our Detractor card lists six intractable stakeholder attitudes that prevent progress.

Effectively collaborating and managing expectations is critical to your success. Consider the potential obstacles to your upcoming progress. Press the participants to name specific steps to overcome or mitigate those barriers in your organization. According to research, personalization initiatives face a number of common obstacles.

At this point, you’ve hopefully discussed sample interactions, emphasized a key area of benefit, and flagged key gaps? Good, you’re ready to go on.

Hit that test kitchen

What will you need next to bring your personalized recipes to life. Personalization engines, which are robust software suites for automating and expressing dynamic content, can intimidate new customers. Their capabilities are broad and potent, and they give you a variety of ways to organize your company. This presents the question: Where do you begin when you’re configuring a connected experience?

The key here is to avoid treating the installed software ( as one of our client executives humorously put it ) like some sort of dream kitchen. These software engines are more like test kitchens where your team can begin devising, tasting, and refining the snacks and meals that will become a part of your personalization program’s regularly evolving menu.

Over the course of the workshop, the final menu of the prioritized backlog will be created. And creating “dishes” is the way that you’ll have individual team stakeholders construct personalized interactions that serve their needs or the needs of others.

The dishes will be made from recipes, which have predetermined ingredients.

Verify your ingredients

Like a good product manager, you’ll make sure you have everything ready to cook up your desired interaction ( or figure out what needs to be added to your pantry ) and that you validate with the right stakeholders present. These ingredients include the audience that you’re targeting, content and design elements, the context for the interaction, and your measure for how it’ll come together.

Not just discovering requirements, it is. Documenting your personalizations as a series of if-then statements lets the team:

1. compare findings to a common strategy for developing features, similar to how artists paint with the same color palette,
2. specify a consistent set of interactions that users find uniform or familiar,
3. and establish parity between all important performance indicators and performance metrics.

This helps you streamline your designs and your technical efforts while you deliver a shared palette of core motifs of your personalized or automated experience.

Create a recipe.

What ingredients are important to you? Consider a who-what-when-why construct:

• Who are your key audience segments or groups?
• What kind of content will you offer them, what design elements, and under what circumstances?
• And for which business and user benefits?

Five years ago, we created these cards and card categories. We regularly play-test their fit with conference audiences and clients. And we still come across fresh possibilities. But they all follow an underlying who-what-when-why logic.

In the cards in the accompanying photo below, you can typically follow along with right to left in three examples of subscription-based reading apps.

1. Nurture personalization: When a guest or an unknown visitor interacts with a product title, a banner or alert bar appears that makes it easier for them to encounter a related title they may want to read, saving them time.
2. Welcome automation: An email is sent when a new user registers to highlight the breadth of the content catalog and convert them to happy subscribers.
3. Winback automation: Before their subscription lapses or after a recent failed renewal, a user is sent an email that gives them a promotional offer to suggest that they reconsider renewing or to remind them to renew.

We’ve also found that cocreating the recipes themselves can sometimes be the most effective way to start brainstorming about what these cards might be for your organization. Start with a set of blank cards, and begin labeling and grouping them through the design process, eventually distilling them to a refined subset of highly useful candidate cards.

The workshop’s later stages could be characterized as shifting from focusing on a cookbook to a more nuanced customer-journey mapping. Individual” cooks” will pitch their recipes to the team, using a common jobs-to-be-done format so that measurability and results are baked in, and from there, the resulting collection will be prioritized for finished design and delivery to production.

Architecture must be improved to produce better kitchens.

Simplifying a customer experience is a complicated effort for those who are inside delivering it. Beware of anyone who contradicts your advice. With that being said,” Complicated problems can be hard to solve, but they are addressable with rules and recipes“.

A team overfitting: they aren’t designing with their best data, is what causes personalization to become a laugh line. Like a sparse pantry, every organization has metadata debt to go along with its technical debt, and this creates a drag on personalization effectiveness. For instance, your AI’s output quality is in fact impacted by your IA. Spotify’s poster-child prowess today was unfathomable before they acquired a seemingly modest metadata startup that now powers its underlying information architecture.

You can’t stand the heat, unquestionably…

Personalization technology opens a doorway into a confounding ocean of possible designs. Only a disciplined and highly collaborative approach will produce the necessary concentration and intention for success. So banish the dream kitchen. Instead, head to the test kitchen to save time, preserve job security, and avoid imagining the creative concepts that come from your organization’s masters. There are meals to serve and mouths to feed.

You have a better chance of lasting success and sound beginnings with this workshop framework. Wiring up your information layer isn’t an overnight affair. However, you’ll have solid ground for success if you use the same cookbook and the same recipes. We designed these activities to make your organization’s needs concrete and clear, long before the hazards pile up.

Although there are associated costs associated with purchasing this kind of technology and product design, your time well spent is on sizing up and confronting your unique situation and digital skills. Don’t squander it. The pudding is the proof, as they say.

I’ve been fascinated by shows since I was a child. I loved the figures and the excitement—but most of all the reports. I aspired to be an artist. And I believed that I’d get to do the things that Indiana Jones did and go on interesting activities. I also came up with concept films that my friends and I could create and sun in. But they never went any farther. However, I did end up in the user experience ( UX) field. Today, I realize that there’s an element of drama to UX— I hadn’t actually considered it before, but consumer research is story. And to get the most out of customer studies, you must tell a compelling story that involves stakeholders, including the product team and decision-makers, and piques their interest in learning more.

Think of your favourite film. It more than likely follows a three-act construction that’s frequently seen in movies: the layout, the conflict, and the resolution. The second act shows what exists now, and it helps you get to know the figures and the challenges and problems that they face. Act two sets the scene for the issue and the action begins. Here, difficulties grow or get worse. The solution is the third and final work. This is where the issues are resolved and the figures learn and change. This architecture, in my opinion, is also a fantastic way to think about consumer research, and it might be particularly useful for introducing user research to others.

Use story as a framework for conducting research

It’s sad to say, but many have come to see studies as being inconsequential. Research is typically one of the first things to go when finances or deadlines are tight. Instead of investing in study, some goods professionals rely on manufacturers or—worse—their personal judgment to make the “right” options for users based on their experience or accepted best practices. That may lead some groups, but that approach can so easily miss the chance to solve people ‘ real issues. To be user-centered, this is something we really avoid. Design is enhanced by customer research. It keeps it on trail, pointing to problems and opportunities. Being aware of problems with your goods and taking corrective actions can help you keep ahead of your competition.

In the three-act structure, each action corresponds to a part of the process, and each part is important to telling the whole story. Let’s take a look at the various functions and how they relate to customer research.

Act one: layout

Fundamental analysis comes in handy because the setup is all about comprehending the background. Basic research ( also called conceptual, discovery, or preliminary research ) helps you understand people and identify their problems. You’re learning about the problems people face now, what options are available, and how those challenges impact them, just like in the films. To do basic research, you may conduct situational inquiries or journal studies ( or both! ), which may assist you in identifying both prospects and problems. It doesn’t need to get a great investment in time or money.

Erika Hall writes about the most effective anthropology, which can be as straightforward as spending 15 hours with a customer and asking them to” Walk me through your morning yesterday.” That’s it. Current that one ask. Opened up and listen to them for 15 days. Do everything in your power to keep yourself and your pursuits out of it. Bam, you’re doing ethnography”. According to Hall, “[This ] will definitely prove quite fascinating. In the very unlikely event that you didn’t learn anything new or helpful, carry on with increased confidence in your way”.

I think this makes sense. And I love that this makes consumer studies so visible. You can simply attract participants and carry out the recruitment process without having to make a lot of paperwork! This can offer a wealth of knowledge about your customers, and it’ll help you better understand them and what’s going on in their life. Understanding where people are coming from is what action one is really all about.

Maybe Spool talks about the importance of basic research and how it may type the bulk of your research. If you can supplement what you’ve heard in the basic studies by using any more user data that you can obtain, such as surveys or analytics, to make recommendations that may need to be investigated further, you might as well use those that can be drawn from those that you can obtain. Together, all this information creates a clearer picture of the state of things and all its deficiencies. And that’s the start of a gripping tale. It’s the place in the story where you realize that the principal characters—or the people in this case—are facing issues that they need to conquer. This is where you begin to develop compassion for the characters and support their success, much like in films. And maybe partners are now doing the same. Their business may lose money because users didn’t finish particular tasks, which may be their love. Or probably they do connect with people ‘ problems. In any case, work one serves as your main strategy to pique the interest and interest of the participants.

When partners begin to understand the value of basic research, that is open doors to more opportunities that involve users in the decision-making approach. And that can help item team become more user-centric. This gains everyone—users, the goods, and partners. It’s similar to winning an Oscar for a film; it frequently results in a favorable reception and success for your item. And this can be an opportunity for participants to repeat this process with different items. Knowing how to show a good story is the only way to convince partners to worry about doing more research, and story is the key to this method.

This brings us to work two, where you incrementally examine a design or idea to see whether it addresses the problems.

Act two: fight

Act two is all about digging deeper into the issues that you identified in action one. In order to evaluate a potential alternative ( such as a design ), you typically conduct vertical research, such as usability tests, to see if it addresses the problems you identified. The issues may include unfulfilled needs or problems with a circulation or procedure that’s tripping users off. More issues may come up in the process, much like in action two of a movie. It’s ok that you learn more about the characters as they grow and develop through this work.

Usability tests should generally consist of five participants, according to Jakob Nielsen, who found that that number of users can usually identify the majority of the issues:” As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again… After the second user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings regularly but hardly learning much new.”

There are parallels with storytelling here too, if you try to tell a story with too many characters, the plot may get lost. With fewer participants, each user’s struggles will be more memorable and accessible to other parties when presenting the research. This can help convey the issues that need to be addressed while also highlighting the value of doing the research in the first place.

Usability tests have been conducted in person for decades, but you can also conduct them remotely using software like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or other teleconferencing software. This approach has become increasingly popular since the beginning of the pandemic, and it works well. You might consider in-person usability tests like watching a movie as opposed to remote testing like attending a play. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. Usability research in person is a much more extensive experience. Stakeholders can experience the sessions with other stakeholders. You also get real-time feedback on what they’re seeing, including surprises, disagreements, and discussions about them. Much like going to a play, where audiences get to take in the stage, the costumes, the lighting, and the actors ‘ interactions, in-person research lets you see users up close, including their body language, how they interact with the moderator, and how the scene is set up.

If conducting usability testing in the field is like watching a play that is staged and controlled, where any two sessions may be very different from one another. You can take usability testing into the field by creating a replica of the space where users interact with the product and then conduct your research there. Or you can meet users at their location to conduct your research. With either option, you get to see how things work in context, things come up that wouldn’t have in a lab environment—and conversion can shift in entirely different directions. You have less control over how these sessions end as researchers, but this can occasionally help you understand users even better. Meeting users where they are can provide clues to the external forces that could be affecting how they use your product. In-person usability tests add a level of detail that is frequently absent from remote usability tests.

That’s not to say that the “movies” —remote sessions—aren’t a good option. A wider audience can be obtained from remote sessions. They allow a lot more stakeholders to be involved in the research and to see what’s going on. Additionally, they make access to a much wider user base geographically. But with any remote session there is the potential of time wasted if participants can’t log in or get their microphone working.

You can ask real users questions to understand their thoughts and understanding of the solution as a result of usability testing, whether it is conducted remotely or in person. This can help you not only identify problems but also glean why they’re problems in the first place. Additionally, you can test your own hypotheses and determine whether your reasoning is correct. By the end of the sessions, you’ll have a much clearer picture of how usable the designs are and whether they work for their intended purposes. Act two is where the excitement is at the heart of the narrative, but there are also potential surprises. This is equally true of usability tests. Unexpected things that participants say frequently alter the way you look at things, and these unexpected revelations can lead to unexpected turns in the narrative.

Unfortunately, user research is sometimes seen as expendable. Usability testing is also frequently the only research technique that some stakeholders believe they ever need, and too frequently. In fact, if the designs that you’re evaluating in the usability test aren’t grounded in a solid understanding of your users ( foundational research ), there’s not much to be gained by doing usability testing in the first place. Because you’re narrowing the scope of what you’re receiving feedback on without understanding the needs of the users. As a result, there’s no way of knowing whether the designs might solve a problem that users have. In the context of a usability test, it’s only feedback on a particular design.

On the other hand, if you only do foundational research, while you might have set out to solve the right problem, you won’t know whether the thing that you’re building will actually solve that. This demonstrates the value of conducting both directional and foundational research.

In act two, stakeholders will—hopefully—get to watch the story unfold in the user sessions, which creates the conflict and tension in the current design by surfacing their highs and lows. And in turn, this can encourage stakeholders to take action on the issues raised.

Act three: resolution

The third act is about resolving the issues from the first two acts, whereas the first two acts are about understanding the context and the tensions that can compel stakeholders to act. While it’s important to have an audience for the first two acts, it’s crucial that they stick around for the final act. That includes the entire product team, including developers, UX experts, business analysts, delivery managers, product managers, and any other interested parties who have a say in the coming development. It allows the whole team to hear users ‘ feedback together, ask questions, and discuss what’s possible within the project’s constraints. Additionally, it enables the UX design and research teams to clarify, suggest alternatives, or provide more context for their decisions. So you can get everyone on the same page and get agreement on the way forward.

This act is primarily told through voiceover with some audience participation. The researcher is the narrator, who paints a picture of the issues and what the future of the product could look like given the things that the team has learned. They provide the stakeholders with their suggestions and suggestions for how to create this vision.

Nancy Duarte in the Harvard Business Review offers an approach to structuring presentations that follow a persuasive story. The most effective presenters employ the same methods as great storytellers: By reaffirming the status quo and then revealing a better way, they create a conflict that needs to be resolved, writes Duarte. ” That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently”.

This type of structure aligns well with research results, and particularly results from usability tests. It provides proof for “what is “—the issues you’ve identified. And “what could be “—your recommendations on how to address them. And so forth and forth.

You can reinforce your recommendations with examples of things that competitors are doing that could address these issues or with examples where competitors are gaining an edge. Or they can be as visual as quick sketches of a potential solution to a problem. These can help generate conversation and momentum. And this continues until the session is over when you’ve concluded everything by summarizing the key points and offering suggestions for a solution. This is the part where you reiterate the main themes or problems and what they mean for the product—the denouement of the story. This stage provides stakeholders with the next steps, and hopefully, the motivation to take those steps as well!

While we are nearly at the end of this story, let’s reflect on the idea that user research is storytelling. The three-act structure of user research contains all the components for a good story:

Act one: You meet the protagonists ( the users ) and the antagonists ( the problems affecting users ). This is the plot’s beginning. In act one, researchers might use methods including contextual inquiry, ethnography, diary studies, surveys, and analytics. These techniques can produce personas, empathy maps, user journeys, and analytics dashboards as output.

Act two: Next, there’s character development. The protagonists encounter problems and challenges, which they must overcome, and there is conflict and tension. In act two, researchers might use methods including usability testing, competitive benchmarking, and heuristics evaluation. Usability findings reports, UX strategy documents, usability guidelines, and best practices can be included in the output of these.

Act three: The protagonists triumph and you see what a better future looks like. Researchers may use techniques like presentation decks, storytelling, and digital media in act three. The output of these can be: presentation decks, video clips, audio clips, and pictures.

The researcher plays a variety of roles, including producer, director, and storyteller. The participants have a small role, but they are significant characters ( in the research ). And the audience is the audience, as well. But the most important thing is to get the story right and to use storytelling to tell users ‘ stories through research. By the end, the parties should have a goal and a desire to solve the product’s flaws.

So the next time that you’re planning research with clients or you’re speaking to stakeholders about research that you’ve done, think about how you can weave in some storytelling. In the end, user research is beneficial to everyone, and all parties must be interested in the conclusion.

It began with a song that didn’t come out last year. It began with a song that didn’t come out in this century. But what a song to open the 97th annual Academy Awards: Ariana Grande threading a wilting rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The moment obviously was a nod to the other Oz-centric […]

The post Anora and The Brutalist Win Big at an Oscars Where Indies Reign appeared first on Den of Geek.

A science fiction spaceship is a lot like a house party. When I see one, the first thing I want to know is what’s going on in the kitchen. Interior designers are the unsung heroes of sci-fi worldbuilding, and a bit of carefully dressed set can do the work of a dozen dramatic exposition-filled voiceovers or lengthy opening text crawls. And this is nowhere more evident than the kitchen.

Take a look at your own kitchen. What appliances have you got? A kitchen-bound time traveler could quickly determine when they are with a look at your microwave and fridge. A look at how much the dirty dishes have stacked up tells you about the routines and temperaments of the people who live here. A glance at the fridge will tell you how many kids are here, or show you the nearby takeout favorites.

But more than that, the kind of food available will tell you about the world at large—how far the supply chains reach and how quickly produce can be moved along them, and what kind of cross-cultural pollination this setting is subject to. You can learn about water, power, and heating infrastructure, how much room the people who live here have access to in the rest of the home. The kitchen is a microcosm of everything else that is happening in a place or time.

When I was writing the Fermi’s Progress series—four novellas about an FTL ship that vaporizes every planet it encounters—the spaceship’s kitchen became a key setting for the story due to all of these reasons mentioned above. And in mapping it out in my head, I thought a lot about how kitchens have worked on other well-known spacecraft.

Nostromo (Alien)

We have talked before about the enormous influence the Nostromo’s kitchen and otherwise has had on spaceship set design in general. Alien’s impact on sci-fi aesthetics as a whole is incalculable, sometimes to the detriment of the genre, but that influence is felt strongest where movie spaceship crews eat.

And with good cause. The meat of the action in Alien does not take place on some bridge or control room, or in a laboratory or Star Trek-style space conference room. It doesn’t even take place in its many spacious air shafts. It all happens in the kitchen. This is where we meet the Nostromo crew for the first time arguing about percentages. This is also, of course, where John Hurt has the worst case of indigestion in film history. It is where plans are suggested, argued over and agreed on. It is where Ash attempts his brutal and terrifying murder of Ripley and the crew overpowers, interrogates and ultimately, cooks him.

The set for the Nostromo’s kitchen might also just be one of the most intricately designed film sets in movie history. It still places the bar for environmental storytelling, from Ron Cobb’s now legendary “Semiotic Standard” to the cereal station, the wall of cups neatly ensconced in their little cupholders. Everything has its place, its premade slot. 

But the gap between its intended and actual use is also clear—the stark white is everywhere covered in grime; the walls plastered with pin-ups, stickers, and notes. It is not just the room where the story action takes place, it is the room where the characters live, often despite the wishes of the employer that put them there, and that is visible in every detail.

One of the most illustrative elements is the food itself. There are no ovens or hobs visible, and certainly no fresh meat or vegetables. This is a place for out-of-the-packet living. The Nostromo crew drinks canned beer and scoop food out of Tupperware containers, eating big bowls of what looks like cheap noodles, although the crew “don’t know what it’s made of.” Frankly, the food tells you how much the crew’s well-being is valued by their employer, foreshadowing what will become of them.

Serenity (Serenity)

The kitchen aboard the workhorse spaceship of the series Firefly and its movie spinoff Serenity is probably the second best known spaceship kitchen out there. Before we go any further it is important to also acknowledge we’re not here to celebrate Joss Whedon (who by many accounts is a shit), but Firefly’s impact on the sci-fi genre is undeniable (even if arguably that impact is recycling a bunch of stuff from the Millennium Falcon and throwing in some ideas from Cowboy Bebop and Southern Revisionism of the American Civil War).

The Serenity has a lot in common with the Nostromo. It is a blue-collar spaceship in a setting so retrofuturistic that it borders on being just plain retro. The kitchen of that spaceship is in many ways its hero set. But Serenity’s kitchen is not your workplace cafeteria; it is the dining room in the homestead. As much as Nathan Fillion’s Mal Reynolds might seem like a salt of the earth working man, he is a salt of the earth working man who can afford an entire working spaceship.

Comparing the two, the differences are immediate. Instead of pin-up posters, the walls have flowers painted on. There are warmer colors, wooden furniture, a hob for cooking on, and a sink for doing the dishes in. This is a domestic space as much as a workplace. People here tell stories and celebrate birthdays as much as they argue percentages on the latest job.

When it comes to food, every meal is “protein,” reflecting a universe where food has to travel for longer than fresh produce can be expected to last. But that protein is prepared with care, with spices used to improve the flavor—and when they come by fruit, it is a delicacy.

But what Serenity most illustrates about the role of the kitchen is that it says a lot about who a space belongs to. The Nostromo’s kitchen belongs to the Company, its crew just eats there. The Serenity’s kitchen is ostensibly the property of its captain, but it is maintained and occupied by its crew, and their personalities shine through in this space.

Icarus II (Sunshine)

The kitchen and dining area in Sunshine will not pass the “Definitely Not the Nostromo” smell test. Alien’s design aesthetic is felt strongly here. Yet once you start looking for differences they start to mount up. The lighting is softer, and the crew’s well-being is more of a concern. There is room for personalization in the form of bookshelves and personal storage spaces, but unlike the expansive Nostromo set, here everything is packed in closely, bringing to mind the weight and space restrictions that are a concern on any real-life space mission.

But the really revealing bit of worldbuilding here is the food. The crew of the Icarus II gets to dine on things that the Nostromo and Serenity crews could only dream about. This is not because their spaceship is any more luxurious, but because the crew are eating the vegetables grown in their own hydroponic garden—the same garden that recycles their oxygen supply.

It shows us how a spaceship can be many different things. The Serenity is hopping job to job, resupply to resupply. The Nostromo is a cog in a vast machine, equipped with the cheapest mass-produced components necessary for it to complete its job. Icarus II, however, is on a true mission into the unknown. It is designed to be a self-contained world because its crew is not sailing to the next port, they are sailing into a place hostile to life, and so need to take everything they need with them.

Rocinante (The Expanse)

Like the Icarus II, the Rocinante is a ship designed with the practicalities of space travel in mind. Where most sci-fi spaceships are laid out like a maritime vessel with decks running horizontally from the fore to the aft of the ship, the Rocinante is more like a tower, with its control room at the top and the engines at the bottom. In this way, acceleration draws everything toward the engine-end of the ship, creating a simulation of gravity.

That is reflected in the way the Rocinante’s dining and kitchen area is laid out—everything is functional and compact. The kitchen fittings and implements can tell you a lot about technology as well. Are the kitchen crowded with cups and jars, plates and sharp implements? Then this is a spaceship that has real faith in its artificial gravity and inertial dampeners. Alternatively, is everything locked down and strapped into place?

That hob we mentioned earlier, is it electric or is this crew willing to light a naked flame in a highly pressurised environment in the cold depths of deep space?

Everything on the Rocinante has a place to be put away—nobody leaves knives lying around that might become projectiles if the ship has to perform a tricky manoeuvre. Fresh herbs for long voyages are grown in small centrifuges that will keep them growing properly even during periods of Zero G.

But beyond the fittings, spaceship kitchens also tell us a lot because of the kinds of interactions they facilitate. Is this ship’s kitchen a space where a family all eat together at predetermined times of the day, or is it like a student dorm, where people rotate through one or two at a time to feed themselves?

The kitchen is the room on a spaceship where we are most likely to see the crew when they are not working or asleep. It is the room where characters get downtime, showing us how they relate to each other out of crisis mode. It shows us if people are eating three square meals, or are just grabbing snacks on the fly. The Expanse’s Rocinante was also home to one of the all-time great space kitchen scenes where we see the Rocinante crew get to sit down and share a meal. 

Unreliable (The Outer Worlds)

For fans of wandering around spaceship kitchens, poking into all the cupboards and nosing through the fridge, there are quite a few video games that scratch the itch. One of the best examples is the kitchen of the Unreliable in the video game The Outer Worlds. Clearly inspired heavily by Serenity’s kitchen, the Unreliable’s dining area tells stories through the detritus that gradually builds up over time, including scattered game pieces and cards, used dishes, and off-duty crew shooting the shit between missions.

The Millennium Falcon never showed us much of a kitchen (although expanded universe reference materials tell us Han Solo installed one as a wedding gift for Leia which is… a choice), but Star Wars games have proven an excellent hunting ground for space kitchen fans with the Jedi games’ Stinger Mantis and Outlaw’s Trailblazer both giving you a little kitchenette to sniff around. Mass Effect: Andromeda’s kitchen is pretty small and tucked away, but does give us the ability to watch the crew bickering through notes on the fridge.

USS Enterprise NCC-1701 (Star Trek: Strange New Worlds)

All of the kitchens we have looked at so far vary from the spartan yet homey to the grimy yet utilitarian. But all-out luxury can be just as revealing of a setting and its characters. Let’s thus take a look at the kitchen in Captain Pike’s quarters aboard Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Enterprise.

This is a matter of opinion, but as a big fan of both spaceship kitchens and Star Trek, I think I am qualified to say that Trek does not normally do it for me on the kitchen front. Its ships are, first and foremost, a living room-centred environment. The ship’s dining areas are usually sterile and gray, the only appliance they need is a replicator, and even Neelix’s kitchen feels like an afterthought rather than a facility capable of serving approximately 150 people.

But Captain Pike’s kitchen in the newest series shows the culmination of what cooking can become in Star Trek’s space communist future, even before the invention of the replicator. It is a leisure activity and a luxury.

The kitchen is spacious enough to contain three sets of crew quarters from Kirk’s Enterprise (and I still harbor a theory that Uhura assigned Kirk one of the crappier upper deck cabins before repurposing Pike’s room as a Lower Deckers clubhouse). But as well as being a social location, it also serves a work function. This is not the “family table” we see aboard Serenity. Here people are expected to stand, and more importantly, to mingle. For all the friendly bonhomie it evokes, it is a networking space, and Pike is assuming as much authority as he stands over the grill as he does sitting in the bridge’s Big Chair.

And of course, on Pike’s Enterprise people eat whatever they damn well please, because we might be in deep space, but Star Trek is the definition of luxury space communism. Once, during a talk, someone asked the beloved fantasy writer Terry Pratchett what he first thought about when designing a fantasy city. Pratchett reportedly answered that you should think about how the clean water gets in and the sewage gets out.

When you are designing your spaceship there are similar concerns—thinking about when, what, and how your crew take in food and water is a good place to start.

Except of course as a genre, space fiction is usually a good deal more reticent about where the sewage goes…

The post Why the Kitchen Is the Most Important Room in a Sci-Fi Spaceship appeared first on Den of Geek.

Picking a favourite Sherlock Holmes might seem elementary, but, when you consider just how many fantastic actors have donned the deerstalker over the years, you’re faced with a conundrum fiendish enough to daunt the master detective himself. Rathbone, Cumberbatch, Brett, Plummer…it was never going to be straightforward, was it? So, in the spirit of the […]

The post Sherlock Holmes Actors Ranked From Passable to Perfect appeared first on Den of Geek.

A science fiction spaceship is a lot like a house party. When I see one, the first thing I want to know is what’s going on in the kitchen. Interior designers are the unsung heroes of sci-fi worldbuilding, and a bit of carefully dressed set can do the work of a dozen dramatic exposition-filled voiceovers or lengthy opening text crawls. And this is nowhere more evident than the kitchen.

Take a look at your own kitchen. What appliances have you got? A kitchen-bound time traveler could quickly determine when they are with a look at your microwave and fridge. A look at how much the dirty dishes have stacked up tells you about the routines and temperaments of the people who live here. A glance at the fridge will tell you how many kids are here, or show you the nearby takeout favorites.

But more than that, the kind of food available will tell you about the world at large—how far the supply chains reach and how quickly produce can be moved along them, and what kind of cross-cultural pollination this setting is subject to. You can learn about water, power, and heating infrastructure, how much room the people who live here have access to in the rest of the home. The kitchen is a microcosm of everything else that is happening in a place or time.

When I was writing the Fermi’s Progress series—four novellas about an FTL ship that vaporizes every planet it encounters—the spaceship’s kitchen became a key setting for the story due to all of these reasons mentioned above. And in mapping it out in my head, I thought a lot about how kitchens have worked on other well-known spacecraft.

Nostromo (Alien)

We have talked before about the enormous influence the Nostromo’s kitchen and otherwise has had on spaceship set design in general. Alien’s impact on sci-fi aesthetics as a whole is incalculable, sometimes to the detriment of the genre, but that influence is felt strongest where movie spaceship crews eat.

And with good cause. The meat of the action in Alien does not take place on some bridge or control room, or in a laboratory or Star Trek-style space conference room. It doesn’t even take place in its many spacious air shafts. It all happens in the kitchen. This is where we meet the Nostromo crew for the first time arguing about percentages. This is also, of course, where John Hurt has the worst case of indigestion in film history. It is where plans are suggested, argued over and agreed on. It is where Ash attempts his brutal and terrifying murder of Ripley and the crew overpowers, interrogates and ultimately, cooks him.

The set for the Nostromo’s kitchen might also just be one of the most intricately designed film sets in movie history. It still places the bar for environmental storytelling, from Ron Cobb’s now legendary “Semiotic Standard” to the cereal station, the wall of cups neatly ensconced in their little cupholders. Everything has its place, its premade slot. 

But the gap between its intended and actual use is also clear—the stark white is everywhere covered in grime; the walls plastered with pin-ups, stickers, and notes. It is not just the room where the story action takes place, it is the room where the characters live, often despite the wishes of the employer that put them there, and that is visible in every detail.

One of the most illustrative elements is the food itself. There are no ovens or hobs visible, and certainly no fresh meat or vegetables. This is a place for out-of-the-packet living. The Nostromo crew drinks canned beer and scoop food out of Tupperware containers, eating big bowls of what looks like cheap noodles, although the crew “don’t know what it’s made of.” Frankly, the food tells you how much the crew’s well-being is valued by their employer, foreshadowing what will become of them.

Serenity (Serenity)

The kitchen aboard the workhorse spaceship of the series Firefly and its movie spinoff Serenity is probably the second best known spaceship kitchen out there. Before we go any further it is important to also acknowledge we’re not here to celebrate Joss Whedon (who by many accounts is a shit), but Firefly’s impact on the sci-fi genre is undeniable (even if arguably that impact is recycling a bunch of stuff from the Millennium Falcon and throwing in some ideas from Cowboy Bebop and Southern Revisionism of the American Civil War).

The Serenity has a lot in common with the Nostromo. It is a blue-collar spaceship in a setting so retrofuturistic that it borders on being just plain retro. The kitchen of that spaceship is in many ways its hero set. But Serenity’s kitchen is not your workplace cafeteria; it is the dining room in the homestead. As much as Nathan Fillion’s Mal Reynolds might seem like a salt of the earth working man, he is a salt of the earth working man who can afford an entire working spaceship.

Comparing the two, the differences are immediate. Instead of pin-up posters, the walls have flowers painted on. There are warmer colors, wooden furniture, a hob for cooking on, and a sink for doing the dishes in. This is a domestic space as much as a workplace. People here tell stories and celebrate birthdays as much as they argue percentages on the latest job.

When it comes to food, every meal is “protein,” reflecting a universe where food has to travel for longer than fresh produce can be expected to last. But that protein is prepared with care, with spices used to improve the flavor—and when they come by fruit, it is a delicacy.

But what Serenity most illustrates about the role of the kitchen is that it says a lot about who a space belongs to. The Nostromo’s kitchen belongs to the Company, its crew just eats there. The Serenity’s kitchen is ostensibly the property of its captain, but it is maintained and occupied by its crew, and their personalities shine through in this space.

Icarus II (Sunshine)

The kitchen and dining area in Sunshine will not pass the “Definitely Not the Nostromo” smell test. Alien’s design aesthetic is felt strongly here. Yet once you start looking for differences they start to mount up. The lighting is softer, and the crew’s well-being is more of a concern. There is room for personalization in the form of bookshelves and personal storage spaces, but unlike the expansive Nostromo set, here everything is packed in closely, bringing to mind the weight and space restrictions that are a concern on any real-life space mission.

But the really revealing bit of worldbuilding here is the food. The crew of the Icarus II gets to dine on things that the Nostromo and Serenity crews could only dream about. This is not because their spaceship is any more luxurious, but because the crew are eating the vegetables grown in their own hydroponic garden—the same garden that recycles their oxygen supply.

It shows us how a spaceship can be many different things. The Serenity is hopping job to job, resupply to resupply. The Nostromo is a cog in a vast machine, equipped with the cheapest mass-produced components necessary for it to complete its job. Icarus II, however, is on a true mission into the unknown. It is designed to be a self-contained world because its crew is not sailing to the next port, they are sailing into a place hostile to life, and so need to take everything they need with them.

Rocinante (The Expanse)

Like the Icarus II, the Rocinante is a ship designed with the practicalities of space travel in mind. Where most sci-fi spaceships are laid out like a maritime vessel with decks running horizontally from the fore to the aft of the ship, the Rocinante is more like a tower, with its control room at the top and the engines at the bottom. In this way, acceleration draws everything toward the engine-end of the ship, creating a simulation of gravity.

That is reflected in the way the Rocinante’s dining and kitchen area is laid out—everything is functional and compact. The kitchen fittings and implements can tell you a lot about technology as well. Are the kitchen crowded with cups and jars, plates and sharp implements? Then this is a spaceship that has real faith in its artificial gravity and inertial dampeners. Alternatively, is everything locked down and strapped into place?

That hob we mentioned earlier, is it electric or is this crew willing to light a naked flame in a highly pressurised environment in the cold depths of deep space?

Everything on the Rocinante has a place to be put away—nobody leaves knives lying around that might become projectiles if the ship has to perform a tricky manoeuvre. Fresh herbs for long voyages are grown in small centrifuges that will keep them growing properly even during periods of Zero G.

But beyond the fittings, spaceship kitchens also tell us a lot because of the kinds of interactions they facilitate. Is this ship’s kitchen a space where a family all eat together at predetermined times of the day, or is it like a student dorm, where people rotate through one or two at a time to feed themselves?

The kitchen is the room on a spaceship where we are most likely to see the crew when they are not working or asleep. It is the room where characters get downtime, showing us how they relate to each other out of crisis mode. It shows us if people are eating three square meals, or are just grabbing snacks on the fly. The Expanse’s Rocinante was also home to one of the all-time great space kitchen scenes where we see the Rocinante crew get to sit down and share a meal. 

Unreliable (The Outer Worlds)

For fans of wandering around spaceship kitchens, poking into all the cupboards and nosing through the fridge, there are quite a few video games that scratch the itch. One of the best examples is the kitchen of the Unreliable in the video game The Outer Worlds. Clearly inspired heavily by Serenity’s kitchen, the Unreliable’s dining area tells stories through the detritus that gradually builds up over time, including scattered game pieces and cards, used dishes, and off-duty crew shooting the shit between missions.

The Millennium Falcon never showed us much of a kitchen (although expanded universe reference materials tell us Han Solo installed one as a wedding gift for Leia which is… a choice), but Star Wars games have proven an excellent hunting ground for space kitchen fans with the Jedi games’ Stinger Mantis and Outlaw’s Trailblazer both giving you a little kitchenette to sniff around. Mass Effect: Andromeda’s kitchen is pretty small and tucked away, but does give us the ability to watch the crew bickering through notes on the fridge.

USS Enterprise NCC-1701 (Star Trek: Strange New Worlds)

All of the kitchens we have looked at so far vary from the spartan yet homey to the grimy yet utilitarian. But all-out luxury can be just as revealing of a setting and its characters. Let’s thus take a look at the kitchen in Captain Pike’s quarters aboard Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Enterprise.

This is a matter of opinion, but as a big fan of both spaceship kitchens and Star Trek, I think I am qualified to say that Trek does not normally do it for me on the kitchen front. Its ships are, first and foremost, a living room-centred environment. The ship’s dining areas are usually sterile and gray, the only appliance they need is a replicator, and even Neelix’s kitchen feels like an afterthought rather than a facility capable of serving approximately 150 people.

But Captain Pike’s kitchen in the newest series shows the culmination of what cooking can become in Star Trek’s space communist future, even before the invention of the replicator. It is a leisure activity and a luxury.

The kitchen is spacious enough to contain three sets of crew quarters from Kirk’s Enterprise (and I still harbor a theory that Uhura assigned Kirk one of the crappier upper deck cabins before repurposing Pike’s room as a Lower Deckers clubhouse). But as well as being a social location, it also serves a work function. This is not the “family table” we see aboard Serenity. Here people are expected to stand, and more importantly, to mingle. For all the friendly bonhomie it evokes, it is a networking space, and Pike is assuming as much authority as he stands over the grill as he does sitting in the bridge’s Big Chair.

And of course, on Pike’s Enterprise people eat whatever they damn well please, because we might be in deep space, but Star Trek is the definition of luxury space communism. Once, during a talk, someone asked the beloved fantasy writer Terry Pratchett what he first thought about when designing a fantasy city. Pratchett reportedly answered that you should think about how the clean water gets in and the sewage gets out.

When you are designing your spaceship there are similar concerns—thinking about when, what, and how your crew take in food and water is a good place to start.

Except of course as a genre, space fiction is usually a good deal more reticent about where the sewage goes…

The post Why the Kitchen Is the Most Important Room in a Sci-Fi Spaceship appeared first on Den of Geek.

Mundy Flynn will be acknowledged. In the first full trailer for Doctor Who’s next series (number 15 or season two, depending on how you’re counting), we see Varada Sethu’s new companion Belinda Chandra looking puzzled at a picture of herself on the TARDIS scanner. She’s right to look puzzled, because the picture is of Mundy […]

The post Doctor Who Series 15 Trailer Breakdown appeared first on Den of Geek.

A science fiction spaceship is a lot like a house party. When I see one, the first thing I want to know is what’s going on in the kitchen. Interior designers are the unsung heroes of sci-fi worldbuilding, and a bit of carefully dressed set can do the work of a dozen dramatic exposition-filled voiceovers or lengthy opening text crawls. And this is nowhere more evident than the kitchen.

Take a look at your own kitchen. What appliances have you got? A kitchen-bound time traveler could quickly determine when they are with a look at your microwave and fridge. A look at how much the dirty dishes have stacked up tells you about the routines and temperaments of the people who live here. A glance at the fridge will tell you how many kids are here, or show you the nearby takeout favorites.

But more than that, the kind of food available will tell you about the world at large—how far the supply chains reach and how quickly produce can be moved along them, and what kind of cross-cultural pollination this setting is subject to. You can learn about water, power, and heating infrastructure, how much room the people who live here have access to in the rest of the home. The kitchen is a microcosm of everything else that is happening in a place or time.

When I was writing the Fermi’s Progress series—four novellas about an FTL ship that vaporizes every planet it encounters—the spaceship’s kitchen became a key setting for the story due to all of these reasons mentioned above. And in mapping it out in my head, I thought a lot about how kitchens have worked on other well-known spacecraft.

Nostromo (Alien)

We have talked before about the enormous influence the Nostromo’s kitchen and otherwise has had on spaceship set design in general. Alien’s impact on sci-fi aesthetics as a whole is incalculable, sometimes to the detriment of the genre, but that influence is felt strongest where movie spaceship crews eat.

And with good cause. The meat of the action in Alien does not take place on some bridge or control room, or in a laboratory or Star Trek-style space conference room. It doesn’t even take place in its many spacious air shafts. It all happens in the kitchen. This is where we meet the Nostromo crew for the first time arguing about percentages. This is also, of course, where John Hurt has the worst case of indigestion in film history. It is where plans are suggested, argued over and agreed on. It is where Ash attempts his brutal and terrifying murder of Ripley and the crew overpowers, interrogates and ultimately, cooks him.

The set for the Nostromo’s kitchen might also just be one of the most intricately designed film sets in movie history. It still places the bar for environmental storytelling, from Ron Cobb’s now legendary “Semiotic Standard” to the cereal station, the wall of cups neatly ensconced in their little cupholders. Everything has its place, its premade slot. 

But the gap between its intended and actual use is also clear—the stark white is everywhere covered in grime; the walls plastered with pin-ups, stickers, and notes. It is not just the room where the story action takes place, it is the room where the characters live, often despite the wishes of the employer that put them there, and that is visible in every detail.

One of the most illustrative elements is the food itself. There are no ovens or hobs visible, and certainly no fresh meat or vegetables. This is a place for out-of-the-packet living. The Nostromo crew drinks canned beer and scoop food out of Tupperware containers, eating big bowls of what looks like cheap noodles, although the crew “don’t know what it’s made of.” Frankly, the food tells you how much the crew’s well-being is valued by their employer, foreshadowing what will become of them.

Serenity (Serenity)

The kitchen aboard the workhorse spaceship of the series Firefly and its movie spinoff Serenity is probably the second best known spaceship kitchen out there. Before we go any further it is important to also acknowledge we’re not here to celebrate Joss Whedon (who by many accounts is a shit), but Firefly’s impact on the sci-fi genre is undeniable (even if arguably that impact is recycling a bunch of stuff from the Millennium Falcon and throwing in some ideas from Cowboy Bebop and Southern Revisionism of the American Civil War).

The Serenity has a lot in common with the Nostromo. It is a blue-collar spaceship in a setting so retrofuturistic that it borders on being just plain retro. The kitchen of that spaceship is in many ways its hero set. But Serenity’s kitchen is not your workplace cafeteria; it is the dining room in the homestead. As much as Nathan Fillion’s Mal Reynolds might seem like a salt of the earth working man, he is a salt of the earth working man who can afford an entire working spaceship.

Comparing the two, the differences are immediate. Instead of pin-up posters, the walls have flowers painted on. There are warmer colors, wooden furniture, a hob for cooking on, and a sink for doing the dishes in. This is a domestic space as much as a workplace. People here tell stories and celebrate birthdays as much as they argue percentages on the latest job.

When it comes to food, every meal is “protein,” reflecting a universe where food has to travel for longer than fresh produce can be expected to last. But that protein is prepared with care, with spices used to improve the flavor—and when they come by fruit, it is a delicacy.

But what Serenity most illustrates about the role of the kitchen is that it says a lot about who a space belongs to. The Nostromo’s kitchen belongs to the Company, its crew just eats there. The Serenity’s kitchen is ostensibly the property of its captain, but it is maintained and occupied by its crew, and their personalities shine through in this space.

Icarus II (Sunshine)

The kitchen and dining area in Sunshine will not pass the “Definitely Not the Nostromo” smell test. Alien’s design aesthetic is felt strongly here. Yet once you start looking for differences they start to mount up. The lighting is softer, and the crew’s well-being is more of a concern. There is room for personalization in the form of bookshelves and personal storage spaces, but unlike the expansive Nostromo set, here everything is packed in closely, bringing to mind the weight and space restrictions that are a concern on any real-life space mission.

But the really revealing bit of worldbuilding here is the food. The crew of the Icarus II gets to dine on things that the Nostromo and Serenity crews could only dream about. This is not because their spaceship is any more luxurious, but because the crew are eating the vegetables grown in their own hydroponic garden—the same garden that recycles their oxygen supply.

It shows us how a spaceship can be many different things. The Serenity is hopping job to job, resupply to resupply. The Nostromo is a cog in a vast machine, equipped with the cheapest mass-produced components necessary for it to complete its job. Icarus II, however, is on a true mission into the unknown. It is designed to be a self-contained world because its crew is not sailing to the next port, they are sailing into a place hostile to life, and so need to take everything they need with them.

Rocinante (The Expanse)

Like the Icarus II, the Rocinante is a ship designed with the practicalities of space travel in mind. Where most sci-fi spaceships are laid out like a maritime vessel with decks running horizontally from the fore to the aft of the ship, the Rocinante is more like a tower, with its control room at the top and the engines at the bottom. In this way, acceleration draws everything toward the engine-end of the ship, creating a simulation of gravity.

That is reflected in the way the Rocinante’s dining and kitchen area is laid out—everything is functional and compact. The kitchen fittings and implements can tell you a lot about technology as well. Are the kitchen crowded with cups and jars, plates and sharp implements? Then this is a spaceship that has real faith in its artificial gravity and inertial dampeners. Alternatively, is everything locked down and strapped into place?

That hob we mentioned earlier, is it electric or is this crew willing to light a naked flame in a highly pressurised environment in the cold depths of deep space?

Everything on the Rocinante has a place to be put away—nobody leaves knives lying around that might become projectiles if the ship has to perform a tricky manoeuvre. Fresh herbs for long voyages are grown in small centrifuges that will keep them growing properly even during periods of Zero G.

But beyond the fittings, spaceship kitchens also tell us a lot because of the kinds of interactions they facilitate. Is this ship’s kitchen a space where a family all eat together at predetermined times of the day, or is it like a student dorm, where people rotate through one or two at a time to feed themselves?

The kitchen is the room on a spaceship where we are most likely to see the crew when they are not working or asleep. It is the room where characters get downtime, showing us how they relate to each other out of crisis mode. It shows us if people are eating three square meals, or are just grabbing snacks on the fly. The Expanse’s Rocinante was also home to one of the all-time great space kitchen scenes where we see the Rocinante crew get to sit down and share a meal. 

Unreliable (The Outer Worlds)

For fans of wandering around spaceship kitchens, poking into all the cupboards and nosing through the fridge, there are quite a few video games that scratch the itch. One of the best examples is the kitchen of the Unreliable in the video game The Outer Worlds. Clearly inspired heavily by Serenity’s kitchen, the Unreliable’s dining area tells stories through the detritus that gradually builds up over time, including scattered game pieces and cards, used dishes, and off-duty crew shooting the shit between missions.

The Millennium Falcon never showed us much of a kitchen (although expanded universe reference materials tell us Han Solo installed one as a wedding gift for Leia which is… a choice), but Star Wars games have proven an excellent hunting ground for space kitchen fans with the Jedi games’ Stinger Mantis and Outlaw’s Trailblazer both giving you a little kitchenette to sniff around. Mass Effect: Andromeda’s kitchen is pretty small and tucked away, but does give us the ability to watch the crew bickering through notes on the fridge.

USS Enterprise NCC-1701 (Star Trek: Strange New Worlds)

All of the kitchens we have looked at so far vary from the spartan yet homey to the grimy yet utilitarian. But all-out luxury can be just as revealing of a setting and its characters. Let’s thus take a look at the kitchen in Captain Pike’s quarters aboard Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Enterprise.

This is a matter of opinion, but as a big fan of both spaceship kitchens and Star Trek, I think I am qualified to say that Trek does not normally do it for me on the kitchen front. Its ships are, first and foremost, a living room-centred environment. The ship’s dining areas are usually sterile and gray, the only appliance they need is a replicator, and even Neelix’s kitchen feels like an afterthought rather than a facility capable of serving approximately 150 people.

But Captain Pike’s kitchen in the newest series shows the culmination of what cooking can become in Star Trek’s space communist future, even before the invention of the replicator. It is a leisure activity and a luxury.

The kitchen is spacious enough to contain three sets of crew quarters from Kirk’s Enterprise (and I still harbor a theory that Uhura assigned Kirk one of the crappier upper deck cabins before repurposing Pike’s room as a Lower Deckers clubhouse). But as well as being a social location, it also serves a work function. This is not the “family table” we see aboard Serenity. Here people are expected to stand, and more importantly, to mingle. For all the friendly bonhomie it evokes, it is a networking space, and Pike is assuming as much authority as he stands over the grill as he does sitting in the bridge’s Big Chair.

And of course, on Pike’s Enterprise people eat whatever they damn well please, because we might be in deep space, but Star Trek is the definition of luxury space communism. Once, during a talk, someone asked the beloved fantasy writer Terry Pratchett what he first thought about when designing a fantasy city. Pratchett reportedly answered that you should think about how the clean water gets in and the sewage gets out.

When you are designing your spaceship there are similar concerns—thinking about when, what, and how your crew take in food and water is a good place to start.

Except of course as a genre, space fiction is usually a good deal more reticent about where the sewage goes…

The post Why the Kitchen Is the Most Important Room in a Sci-Fi Spaceship appeared first on Den of Geek.

A science fiction spaceship is a lot like a house party. When I see one, the first thing I want to know is what’s going on in the kitchen. Interior designers are the unsung heroes of sci-fi worldbuilding, and a bit of carefully dressed set can do the work of a dozen dramatic exposition-filled voiceovers […]

The post Why the Kitchen Is the Most Important Room in a Sci-Fi Spaceship appeared first on Den of Geek.

A science fiction spaceship is a lot like a house party. When I see one, the first thing I want to know is what’s going on in the kitchen. Interior designers are the unsung heroes of sci-fi worldbuilding, and a bit of carefully dressed set can do the work of a dozen dramatic exposition-filled voiceovers or lengthy opening text crawls. And this is nowhere more evident than the kitchen.

Take a look at your own kitchen. What appliances have you got? A kitchen-bound time traveler could quickly determine when they are with a look at your microwave and fridge. A look at how much the dirty dishes have stacked up tells you about the routines and temperaments of the people who live here. A glance at the fridge will tell you how many kids are here, or show you the nearby takeout favorites.

But more than that, the kind of food available will tell you about the world at large—how far the supply chains reach and how quickly produce can be moved along them, and what kind of cross-cultural pollination this setting is subject to. You can learn about water, power, and heating infrastructure, how much room the people who live here have access to in the rest of the home. The kitchen is a microcosm of everything else that is happening in a place or time.

When I was writing the Fermi’s Progress series—four novellas about an FTL ship that vaporizes every planet it encounters—the spaceship’s kitchen became a key setting for the story due to all of these reasons mentioned above. And in mapping it out in my head, I thought a lot about how kitchens have worked on other well-known spacecraft.

Nostromo (Alien)

We have talked before about the enormous influence the Nostromo’s kitchen and otherwise has had on spaceship set design in general. Alien’s impact on sci-fi aesthetics as a whole is incalculable, sometimes to the detriment of the genre, but that influence is felt strongest where movie spaceship crews eat.

And with good cause. The meat of the action in Alien does not take place on some bridge or control room, or in a laboratory or Star Trek-style space conference room. It doesn’t even take place in its many spacious air shafts. It all happens in the kitchen. This is where we meet the Nostromo crew for the first time arguing about percentages. This is also, of course, where John Hurt has the worst case of indigestion in film history. It is where plans are suggested, argued over and agreed on. It is where Ash attempts his brutal and terrifying murder of Ripley and the crew overpowers, interrogates and ultimately, cooks him.

The set for the Nostromo’s kitchen might also just be one of the most intricately designed film sets in movie history. It still places the bar for environmental storytelling, from Ron Cobb’s now legendary “Semiotic Standard” to the cereal station, the wall of cups neatly ensconced in their little cupholders. Everything has its place, its premade slot. 

But the gap between its intended and actual use is also clear—the stark white is everywhere covered in grime; the walls plastered with pin-ups, stickers, and notes. It is not just the room where the story action takes place, it is the room where the characters live, often despite the wishes of the employer that put them there, and that is visible in every detail.

One of the most illustrative elements is the food itself. There are no ovens or hobs visible, and certainly no fresh meat or vegetables. This is a place for out-of-the-packet living. The Nostromo crew drinks canned beer and scoop food out of Tupperware containers, eating big bowls of what looks like cheap noodles, although the crew “don’t know what it’s made of.” Frankly, the food tells you how much the crew’s well-being is valued by their employer, foreshadowing what will become of them.

Serenity (Serenity)

The kitchen aboard the workhorse spaceship of the series Firefly and its movie spinoff Serenity is probably the second best known spaceship kitchen out there. Before we go any further it is important to also acknowledge we’re not here to celebrate Joss Whedon (who by many accounts is a shit), but Firefly’s impact on the sci-fi genre is undeniable (even if arguably that impact is recycling a bunch of stuff from the Millennium Falcon and throwing in some ideas from Cowboy Bebop and Southern Revisionism of the American Civil War).

The Serenity has a lot in common with the Nostromo. It is a blue-collar spaceship in a setting so retrofuturistic that it borders on being just plain retro. The kitchen of that spaceship is in many ways its hero set. But Serenity’s kitchen is not your workplace cafeteria; it is the dining room in the homestead. As much as Nathan Fillion’s Mal Reynolds might seem like a salt of the earth working man, he is a salt of the earth working man who can afford an entire working spaceship.

Comparing the two, the differences are immediate. Instead of pin-up posters, the walls have flowers painted on. There are warmer colors, wooden furniture, a hob for cooking on, and a sink for doing the dishes in. This is a domestic space as much as a workplace. People here tell stories and celebrate birthdays as much as they argue percentages on the latest job.

When it comes to food, every meal is “protein,” reflecting a universe where food has to travel for longer than fresh produce can be expected to last. But that protein is prepared with care, with spices used to improve the flavor—and when they come by fruit, it is a delicacy.

But what Serenity most illustrates about the role of the kitchen is that it says a lot about who a space belongs to. The Nostromo’s kitchen belongs to the Company, its crew just eats there. The Serenity’s kitchen is ostensibly the property of its captain, but it is maintained and occupied by its crew, and their personalities shine through in this space.

Icarus II (Sunshine)

The kitchen and dining area in Sunshine will not pass the “Definitely Not the Nostromo” smell test. Alien’s design aesthetic is felt strongly here. Yet once you start looking for differences they start to mount up. The lighting is softer, and the crew’s well-being is more of a concern. There is room for personalization in the form of bookshelves and personal storage spaces, but unlike the expansive Nostromo set, here everything is packed in closely, bringing to mind the weight and space restrictions that are a concern on any real-life space mission.

But the really revealing bit of worldbuilding here is the food. The crew of the Icarus II gets to dine on things that the Nostromo and Serenity crews could only dream about. This is not because their spaceship is any more luxurious, but because the crew are eating the vegetables grown in their own hydroponic garden—the same garden that recycles their oxygen supply.

It shows us how a spaceship can be many different things. The Serenity is hopping job to job, resupply to resupply. The Nostromo is a cog in a vast machine, equipped with the cheapest mass-produced components necessary for it to complete its job. Icarus II, however, is on a true mission into the unknown. It is designed to be a self-contained world because its crew is not sailing to the next port, they are sailing into a place hostile to life, and so need to take everything they need with them.

Rocinante (The Expanse)

Like the Icarus II, the Rocinante is a ship designed with the practicalities of space travel in mind. Where most sci-fi spaceships are laid out like a maritime vessel with decks running horizontally from the fore to the aft of the ship, the Rocinante is more like a tower, with its control room at the top and the engines at the bottom. In this way, acceleration draws everything toward the engine-end of the ship, creating a simulation of gravity.

That is reflected in the way the Rocinante’s dining and kitchen area is laid out—everything is functional and compact. The kitchen fittings and implements can tell you a lot about technology as well. Are the kitchen crowded with cups and jars, plates and sharp implements? Then this is a spaceship that has real faith in its artificial gravity and inertial dampeners. Alternatively, is everything locked down and strapped into place?

That hob we mentioned earlier, is it electric or is this crew willing to light a naked flame in a highly pressurised environment in the cold depths of deep space?

Everything on the Rocinante has a place to be put away—nobody leaves knives lying around that might become projectiles if the ship has to perform a tricky manoeuvre. Fresh herbs for long voyages are grown in small centrifuges that will keep them growing properly even during periods of Zero G.

But beyond the fittings, spaceship kitchens also tell us a lot because of the kinds of interactions they facilitate. Is this ship’s kitchen a space where a family all eat together at predetermined times of the day, or is it like a student dorm, where people rotate through one or two at a time to feed themselves?

The kitchen is the room on a spaceship where we are most likely to see the crew when they are not working or asleep. It is the room where characters get downtime, showing us how they relate to each other out of crisis mode. It shows us if people are eating three square meals, or are just grabbing snacks on the fly. The Expanse’s Rocinante was also home to one of the all-time great space kitchen scenes where we see the Rocinante crew get to sit down and share a meal. 

Unreliable (The Outer Worlds)

For fans of wandering around spaceship kitchens, poking into all the cupboards and nosing through the fridge, there are quite a few video games that scratch the itch. One of the best examples is the kitchen of the Unreliable in the video game The Outer Worlds. Clearly inspired heavily by Serenity’s kitchen, the Unreliable’s dining area tells stories through the detritus that gradually builds up over time, including scattered game pieces and cards, used dishes, and off-duty crew shooting the shit between missions.

The Millennium Falcon never showed us much of a kitchen (although expanded universe reference materials tell us Han Solo installed one as a wedding gift for Leia which is… a choice), but Star Wars games have proven an excellent hunting ground for space kitchen fans with the Jedi games’ Stinger Mantis and Outlaw’s Trailblazer both giving you a little kitchenette to sniff around. Mass Effect: Andromeda’s kitchen is pretty small and tucked away, but does give us the ability to watch the crew bickering through notes on the fridge.

USS Enterprise NCC-1701 (Star Trek: Strange New Worlds)

All of the kitchens we have looked at so far vary from the spartan yet homey to the grimy yet utilitarian. But all-out luxury can be just as revealing of a setting and its characters. Let’s thus take a look at the kitchen in Captain Pike’s quarters aboard Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Enterprise.

This is a matter of opinion, but as a big fan of both spaceship kitchens and Star Trek, I think I am qualified to say that Trek does not normally do it for me on the kitchen front. Its ships are, first and foremost, a living room-centred environment. The ship’s dining areas are usually sterile and gray, the only appliance they need is a replicator, and even Neelix’s kitchen feels like an afterthought rather than a facility capable of serving approximately 150 people.

But Captain Pike’s kitchen in the newest series shows the culmination of what cooking can become in Star Trek’s space communist future, even before the invention of the replicator. It is a leisure activity and a luxury.

The kitchen is spacious enough to contain three sets of crew quarters from Kirk’s Enterprise (and I still harbor a theory that Uhura assigned Kirk one of the crappier upper deck cabins before repurposing Pike’s room as a Lower Deckers clubhouse). But as well as being a social location, it also serves a work function. This is not the “family table” we see aboard Serenity. Here people are expected to stand, and more importantly, to mingle. For all the friendly bonhomie it evokes, it is a networking space, and Pike is assuming as much authority as he stands over the grill as he does sitting in the bridge’s Big Chair.

And of course, on Pike’s Enterprise people eat whatever they damn well please, because we might be in deep space, but Star Trek is the definition of luxury space communism. Once, during a talk, someone asked the beloved fantasy writer Terry Pratchett what he first thought about when designing a fantasy city. Pratchett reportedly answered that you should think about how the clean water gets in and the sewage gets out.

When you are designing your spaceship there are similar concerns—thinking about when, what, and how your crew take in food and water is a good place to start.

Except of course as a genre, space fiction is usually a good deal more reticent about where the sewage goes…

The post Why the Kitchen Is the Most Important Room in a Sci-Fi Spaceship appeared first on Den of Geek.