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About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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Technically, this isn’t on Joel’s list, but he knows Seth, and several of Godin’s other books are on the shelf in the Fog Creek Library, so I’m counting it under a technicality. I happened to pick up this particular book a year ago in San Francisco from the discount rack in a book store. Seth Godin has some interesting ideas about marketing, and this book promised to relate the ideas of memetics and evolutionary biology to the world of business. But after I bought it, I got distracted, so I put it on my shelf, and it stayed there, unloved, for a long time.
Until last weekend. I was looking for something to read, and my new Amazon order had not yet arrived, so I picked it up. It’s great. Really well-written and easy to read, and completely relevant to where I am right now in my thoughts. Another one of those right-time, right-place kind of reads.
Seth Godin’s main point of this book is that change happens. And it is happening more and more. Therefore any company or person has to learn to deal with change. You can create a viable winning strategy, but that strategy will get overtaken, much like the dinosaurs got overtaken by those pesky little mammals (my analogy, not his). He points out that nature has already come up with a mechanism for dealing with continuous change in natural selection: constant change via mutation, evaluated by sexual selection and natural selection. So he recommends learning from evolution to deal with the phenomenon of accelerating change.
It was good for me to read right now, because I’m the midst of trying to change my own outlook on a bunch of things. He basically endorses the idea of rapid prototyping in life, and encourages ever faster feedback loops. Change all the time, but evaluate all the time as well. The only quibble I have with the book is that he (deliberately?) does not discuss what a proper fitness metric should be for a company or a person in evaluating which changes to keep. I think this is because it varies so much from person to person and company to company, but it does make it harder to apply his advice - I could easily see a misguided company apply all of his advice, but use the fitness metric of “reinforcing the things we have always done”, which would subvert the whole point of his other strategies.
One other point that I liked as a generalist is that he counsels against becoming an expert, because investing the energy and resources in becoming an expert means that you (or your company) has committed itself to a specific path, and therefore will be unwilling to change later. This can work for a while, and sometimes pay off spectacularly, but since all winning strategies eventually fail, it’s a race against time. If you are changing all the time, then one can continually evolve new winning strategies, and therefore not worry about when the current one will fail. Plan for the obsolescence of your strategies. It was good for me to read this perspective after reading the opposite take last month in The Only Sustainable Edge, as mentioned in this post.
So I recommend it - it’s a quick read, with a couple good ideas. I’ll probably borrow a couple other of Godin’s books from work when I get a chance.
P.S. I know I’ve said this before, but perhaps I will endeavor this week to catch up on my backlog of book reviews. My brain has been fried from too much tech support at work (new product release a couple weeks ago), so I haven’t had much in the way of original thought, and most of my brain has been caught in a fugue-like state of trying to figure out where I want to focus my energy at work. Maybe writing about my thoughts from the books I’ve been reading will help remind me what I think is important.
I was kind of skeptical of this book when Joel handed it to me, but it was surprisingly good. It doesn’t have any original ideas, and didn’t change how I think, but the book was well-written (apparently by Catherine Fredman) and did a good job of describing how Dell had taken some basic business precepts and actually implemented them at their company. Things like “Build a company of owners”, “Develop a customer-focused philosophy”, “Narrowing our focus”, etc. It’s all really basic stuff, but they spin a good story of how these principles apply to the growth of Dell the corporation.
Reading the book did provoke me into thinking about whether I believed in the principles Dell was laying out, and how I would apply the principles at my own company. I do find it a bit ironic that listening to the customer is emphasized so much in the book, yet a couple weeks ago it took us five hours on the phone to get Dell to acknowledge that a part they had sent us was broken and that they needed to replace it. Perhaps the principles are not as well disseminated as they once were.
Summary: Quick read, well done, nothing earth-shattering, but a nice reminder of some basics.
This is a classic book on negotiation, introducing the theory of principled negotiation. The idea is that most negotiations tend to become positional negotiations fairly quickly; I offer a book for sale for $20, you offer me $10, I go $18, you go $12, we end up at $15. Positional negotiations make sense in a zero-sum game, where a gain for one party is a loss for the other. However, in more complicated negotiations, positional bargaining can often obscure the real issues at hand and prevent win-win scenarios from occurring.
The idea of principled negotiation is that you let go of positional bargaining, and instead stand firm on your interests. How those interests are satisfied by various proposals can be negotiated. By focusing on the interests, rather than clinging to positions, there is more scope for creative solutions. For instance, the authors use the example of the negotiations between Israel and Egypt where both countries laid claim to the Sinai peninsula after a war. Neither side was willing to back down. Eventually, there were discussions over the interests at work on both sides; Israel did not feel comfortable with Egypt having the ability to mobilize its army at the border. Egypt had a strong nationalistic historical interest in the Sinai, and felt strongly that its historical claims to the land needed to be upheld. By focusing on the interests of both sides, principled negotiation arrived at the solution where Egypt kept ownership of the land, but agreed to make the Sinai a demilitarized zone as a concession to Israel.
There are lots of similarly good ideas in the book, such as separating the people from the problem (i.e. don’t get mad at your negotiating counterpart - be sympathetic to them, take the time to understand their position, and you may find they will do the same for you). Find ways to work together towards creative solutions. Spend the time to brainstorm ideas, but without committing to any of the proposals. Use objective criteria whenever possible, including a third party moderator if necessary.
I also really liked the one-text solution to negotiating. Have each side write out everything they would like in a final proposal. Turn over the two competing proposals to a independent third party to turn into a single proposal including the best ideas from both sides. Then everybody works together to improve that document. It’s rapid prototyping negotiation, with the proposal as the prototype undergoing iterations.
It’s a quick read. I can see why it’s a classic. Not sure how I’ll incorporate it into my daily life, but it was worth reading.
P.S. I’m going to try to catch up on my backlog of book reviews over the next little bit. I think I’ve got four or five that I’ve never written up.
As I mentioned last month, I was reading this book mostly because I enjoyed The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid so much. I finally finished it off last weekend, and figured I should at least do a perfunctory review.
It was pretty awful. The writing was terrible - I found it very difficult to read, not because the vocabulary was hard or anything, but because there was no flow to the writing. I’d read the same paragraph three times and still get no content out of it. The ideas were not that interesting either.
I did like the idea I mentioned in that other post: that specialization drives greater achievement, because if a company only does one thing, it has to do it really well, whereas if it is a conglomerate, each department is less crucial to the company’s success. However, in the future when Coase-ian transaction costs are reduced still further, there will be no advantage to a conglomerate over a loose “process network” of specialists.
One other idea I liked was their concept of “productive friction”: “When people with diverse backgrounds, experiences and skill sets engage with each other on real problems, the exchange usually generates friction - that is, misunderstandings and arguments - before resolution and learning occur. … Yet, properly harnessed, friction can become very productive, accelerating learning, generating innovation, and fostering trust across diverse participants.” Since I have generally worked in interdisciplinary environments and have witnessed the clashing worldviews firsthand, I appreciate both the downsides and upsides of such friction. The CellKey instrument would never have happened without a team of biologists, physicists and engineers working closely together for years, but we definitely had moments of friction - at one point, just after we’d gotten picked up by Sciex, the team spent a solid week in a conference room just getting all of our terms and definitions straight so that we were all speaking the same language.
One last idea that I thought had merit was how a company should plan strategy. Rather than the typical one to five year plan that many companies strategize for, they recommend looking at two time horizons - less than a year, and ten years or more. The ten years or more forces you to consider long-term direction and evolving trends. The year perspective forces you to start something today, as an application of those ideas. The example they give of a long-term mission statement is Microsoft’s: “Computing power is moving inexorably to the desktop. To succeed, we must own the desktop.” Bill Gates framed that as Microsoft’s goal in the 80s. It’s twenty years later, and it still applies. That’s a great vision. It sets a clear direction, but gives plenty of freedom to adapt to new markets and technologies as they arise.
Anyway. A couple nuggets of interest, but overall, I heartily anti-recommend this book. Don’t read it.
This is a classic book in marketing, and therefore one of the books that Joel asked us to read. The main message of the book is that consumers have a limited mindspace. They can only pay attention to a certain number of things before they just lose track and don’t care any more. So it is vital as a company to make sure that your company marks out a clear position that is easy for the consumer to remember.
The most distinctive position to hold is to be perceived as the first or the best in a category. It’s a sign of distinction in the authors’ eyes to have one’s brand name confused with the category (e.g. Coca-cola for soft drinks or Xerox for copiers) because it indicates that your brand owns that category.
If you’re not on top, the authors describe a couple options. The best option is to create a new category; they use the example of Tylenol. Bayer dominated the aspirin market, so Tylenol started an advertising campaign as the non-aspirin pain reliever. It wasn’t a category that had existed before, but Tylenol’s marketing campaign created it, and by default, Tylenol was the leader of the category.
The other option is to use your secondary status as a plus. The canonical example they use of this is Avis, with its campaign of “We Try Harder”. Harder than whom? Well, obviously Hertz, although they never say that. Avis could paint Hertz as resting on its laurels as the market leader, so they spun their secondary status as a positive.
The other interesting point we got out of the book was the perils of line extension. It is all too tempting as a company to say “We have a successful brand, we want to move into a new area, let’s create a version of our brand for the new area”. The authors argue strenuously against this attitude. Returning to the example of Bayer, the authors pointed out that Bayer had a total grip on the aspirin market. Bayer equalled aspirin in the mind of the consumer. Then Tylenol did its end run creating a new category of non-aspirin pain relievers. Bayer reacted by creating a non-aspirin version of Bayer. Note the cognitive dissonance this sets up for the consumer; if Bayer equals aspirin, then a non-aspirin Bayer is a non-aspirin aspirin. It doesn’t make sense. It confuses the consumer, and ends up making them less likely to buy either version because it is no longer clear what Bayer means. Hence the authors highly recommend always starting a new brand for a new product category. Procter and Gamble are the masters of this; they have a phenomenal number of brand names, each of which is targeted to a specific product category.
I thought it was an interesting book with several good points. It’s highly opinionated, of course, and a bit dated (it’s over 20 years old), but the principles still make a lot of sense. After finishing the book, we had a spirited discussion in the company of how the lessons from the book apply to Fog Creek Software. And I’ve been thinking about how it applies to my own life; I think this positional attitude plays into my obsession with being the best at something. However, as Beemer rightly pointed out and as the example of Tylenol demonstrates, one can always create a category for one to be the best at by creating a new niche. More thoughts on this later.
P.S. I’ve added a new category of books, joelbooks, to indicate books that I’m reading for the Software Management Training Program. There’s a whole slew of books that are on the reading list that we’ll be working through.
I read this book once long ago, but Joel insisted I re-read it after starting last week. So I took it home for the weekend and read it while taking breaks from unpacking. It’s a quick read, with short chapters. And it’s excellent.
What’s interesting to me is that I totally didn’t appreciate the book the first time I read it. It seemed like a bunch of obvious platitudes which didn’t really matter. Upon revisiting it, though, I realized that this book contained many lessons that I had had to learn by doing things differently and suffering through the consequences.
To take a couple obvious examples, it took me many years to figure out that the best way to seem interesting is to ask open ended questions about things other people are excited about. Everybody likes talking about stuff that excites them. Carnegie laid it out for me, but I didn’t really understand. Or how offering genuine specific praise is always appreciated - I used to feel weird about bothering folks just to tell them they did something well (e.g. Telling guest soloists with the chorus how well they sang). But then I realized I always get a thrill out of such recognition (like when somebody cites one of my blog posts), so now I try to demonstrate my appreciation when I can. Another good example is Carnegie’s admonition to avoid arguments, because if you lose, you lose, and if you win, you still lose because you haven’t convinced them, just browbeaten them into submission. As those who know me can attest, my affection for confrontation and argument got me into all sorts of trouble at work for a while before I realized that perhaps arguing wasn’t the best strategy.
So I’m glad Joel suggested I re-read this book. My friend Adam who I had dinner with last night said that a friend of his recommends reading a chapter a day, and trying to apply it to one’s life; when he reaches the end, he goes back to the beginning and starts over. I’m not sure I’ll go quite that far, but it does have a lot of good advice that I can learn from. And having confirmed some of his observations the hard way, I value the others more.
One observation about myself is that although I recognize how well these techniques work and have even adopted several of them myself, they still don’t come naturally to me. I use them because they work, not because they’re how I actually feel; I haven’t really internalized them. For example, I know that showing interest in others is the best way to sustain conversation. And I can do it. But I’m sometimes not actually interested in what they’re saying. Carnegie would claim that if I continue to use the techniques, the attitude will follow, just as the best way to be happy is to force oneself to smile. We’ll see. I may just be a cynical cold-hearted manipulative person by nature.
Speaking of which, next up on Joel’s re-reading list is Cialdini’s Psychology of Influence.
P.S. Completely unpacked, pictures up, trash taken out. Visited Whole Foods yesterday and stocked up on fresh produce, yay! Started answering tech support emails today, and also helped to debug the office VoIP system at the end of the day. Tomorrow night I’m going to go check out an architect duel in Tribeca, cuz that seems like a wacky New York thing to do.
I’ve been meaning to read this for a while, and I added it to my last Amazon order, but didn’t get around to reading it until a few weeks ago. Jeff Hawkins was one of the driving forces behind Palm and Handspring, and now that he’s set for life, he’s indulging his childhood dreams of trying to understand the brain by starting the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, which is apparently now the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. In this book, he pulls together a layman’s overview of neuroscience literature that he finds interesting, and then espouses his own theory of how the brain (or at least the neocortex) works.
Here’s the basic idea of his theory. The neocortex is composed of pattern-recognition elements that are wired to remember events that occur together. It’s a hierarchy of pattern-recognition elements that breaks people’s perception of their environment into manageable chunks. In other words, when I look around the room, I don’t see ten million pixels; I see my desk, the computer, the wall, etc. Even if I look at my desk at different angles, my brain perceives it as a single object.
Another aspect of this is that these elements are learning new patterns all the time. When we learn to drive and first get out into traffic, it’s terrifying because our brains are overloaded trying to filter all of the myriad visual information around us. As we grow more used to the speed of traffic and learn what’s relevant, the visual load is automated and pushed down to a subconscious level of the hierarchy. The same holds true for recognizing positions on a gameboard. None of this is particularly novel (I espoused a similar idea in my cognitive subroutines proposal).
The novel bit is that Hawkins noticed that our brains do more than perceive - they are actually continually making predictions. Here’s an obvious example: when you’re scanning your home, you can notice when something is NOT there. How is that possible? It’s not there, so you can’t see it. But your brain has developed a model of what IS there, and is making a prediction for what it should see, and when something doesn’t match its prediction, it alerts the conscious mind that something is wrong. This makes a ton of sense. Our brain adapts to the familiar, but if something changes, it needs to turn all of its attention to understanding why there’s a discrepancy. I thought this insight alone made the whole book.
As an aside, this also explains why most people suck at estimating probabilities. Our brains are wired to remember the abnormal and outlandish because they break the routine patterns that we have learned. We don’t remember the 99% of the time when things go as we expect them to, because it’s all handled subconsciously. So we significantly overestimate outlandish risks because they break the pattern and come to our conscious attention.
Another discussion that I liked was Hawkins’s description of “invariant representations” (which I allude to in my post on localized generalities). Basically, because the neocortex is hierarchical and each level is always making predictions, each level can notify the level below it what it should be looking for. In other words, if one level keeps track of things in my office, it can notify the level below it that it should be looking for a desk, and that it should figure out how to interpret the raw sensory input in such a way that it looks like a desk.
As another aside, this also explains why we often see what we expect to see. Our entire sensory system is designed around the principle that it should adapt its interpretation of raw sensory data to match what the levels above it think it should be seeing. This applies not only to physical things like desks, but also when we see patterns in random data, or “interpret” data in such a way as to support our point of view. Our brains are wired that way.
I thought the book was decent. The predictive aspect of the brain and the discussion of localized generalities were “Oh, wow” moments, as I immediately saw how they filled in gaps in some of my theories. Most of the rest of the book was an explanation where he handwaves how the current understanding of the neocortex can support his theory. There’s some minorly interesting stuff in there about how the various neocortical layers are connected in a way that might be hierarchical in the way he suggests, but that’s mostly of relevance to the neuroscience geeks.
I’m mostly kicking myself after reading it, though. I was moving along the same lines with my cognitive subroutines theory, but I was a couple years too late (as well as lacking any sort of intellectual rigor). And I’ve already discussed how my localized generalities post was the same idea as the “invariant representations”, without the neuroscientific backing. So I’ve got some good ideas; I just need to develop them, and do the legwork to support them more fully. In my copious free time.
P.S. Speaking of which, wow, that was quite a lull in posting for me. It’s been crazy. My company is trying to finish up projects for two different clients before Thanksgiving, so I’m spending a lot of energy there. I had the conference in LA a few weekends ago. Last weekend was a company outing to Monterey. There’s all sorts of other social stuff going on. So on the few nights that I’ve had at home alone, I’ve been so exhausted that I have just collapsed comatose onto the couch to watch TV rather than blogging. But I wanted to get up the CellKey prototype pictures tonight, and then figured I should clear out the backlog of book reviews that has built up. I actually finished all of these books a few weeks ago (and then spent last week catching up on my backlog of The Economist), but they’ve just been sitting on my desk since then.
Reinventing Comics, by Scott McCloud
I liked Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud a lot, because it had a really thoughtful take on why comics worked, and what the conventions were (representing the dimension of time in space, etc.). When I saw this sequel in the library, I picked it up. I didn’t like it nearly as much. Half of the book is a retrospective on the history of comics, which mostly seems like an excuse for McCloud to drop references to obscure comics to demonstrate his comic guru-hood. The book also explores the comics business and his disgust with it, as well as how the business perpetuates a lack of diversity within comics (few women, few minorities, very little work outside of the superhero genre). The last half of the book is an exploration of how the digital age may change comics. I think some of his ideas have some promise (check out I Can’t Stop Thinking!), but overall, nothing really grabbed my attention. I’d call the book a good effort, but not one worth reading unless one is truly obsessed with comics.
The Partly Cloudy Patriot, by Sarah Vowell
My local library branch has a bargain bin outside where they sell books for 50 cents, and this book of essays by Vowell was there, so I pounced on it because I knew and liked Sarah Vowell’s work on NPR’s This American Life. She’s got a wonderfully distinctive voice. And her voice is just as distinctive on the page. Her work is full of bon mots that make you want to turn to somebody and quote them aloud, e.g. “Along with voting, jury duty, and paying taxes, goofing off is one of the central obligations of American citizenship. So when my friends Joel and Stephen and I play hooky from our jobs in the middle of the afternoon to play Pop-A-Shot in a room full of children, I like to think we are not procrastinators; we are patriots pursuing happiness.” I read that line when I picked up the book to decide whether to buy it, and that sold me right there. She takes on a wide variety of subjects in these essays, from examining the political landscape, understanding the true quality of Al Gore’s nerdhood, patriotism, plus the aforementioned Pop-A-Shot. I don’t think Vowell is my new spiritual guru or anything, but she has interesting thoughts and she expresses them well, and that’s about all you can ask of an essayist. Highly recommended.
This book is an attempt by Dourish to develop underlying design principles for user interfaces that take into account the situated nature of interaction. I’ve been mentioning Dourish’s book recently (e.g. here, here, and here), because I really like a lot of the concepts that he mentions throughout his book.
Dourish is explicitly building on Lucy Suchman’s work by examining the ways in which computing is becoming more of a situated action. Suchman’s book was written in 1987, when the prevailing mode of interaction with a computer was sitting at a desk. Dourish, writing in 2001, uses tangible computing and social computing as examples of how computing is breaking out of the user-computer interaction mode, and becoming more a part of the environment. By tangible computing, he’s referring to the increasingly ubiquitous presence of computing in every device, leading us towards methods of interaction other than a keyboard and mouse. In social computing, he’s referring less to Friendster-like services than to the increasing awareness of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field of the social matrix in which computing is embedded, as I discuss obliquely in this post.
After setting the stage for the rise of what he calls “embodied interaction”, he brings in the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, the most famous proponent of which is Heidegger. One might wonder what the relevance is of Heidegger, a philosopher whose work is nigh impenetrable, to user interaction, but I’ve already written a post about it. Phenomenology provides a framework of ideas which provide a new set of assumptions for interaction design. Or, as the book’s subtitle states, the philosophical ideas can provide the “foundations for embodied interaction”.
After the detour into philosophy, Dourish brings the book back towards practical considerations and attempts to formulate principles that take this design framework into account. One of the things I took away from his discussion of principles was that meaning resides on multiple levels. An example I’ve already discussed is the distinction between present-at-hand vs. ready-to-hand. But it can extend beyond that. The user needs to be able to flip between many ways of using the tool. For example, when developing a presentation, I may be:
Each level of how I relate to the presentation has different requirements for interaction. And I will flip back and forth between the levels, and there’s often no way for the software to know at which level I am working.
Another principle that is illustrated by this example is how the user creates meaning. Of those various levels I suggested, the last two are of meaning only to me, and how I make that connection to the software is only going to be of relevance to me. So both of these principles demonstrate how important it is for the software to be “accountable” in the sense of Garfinkel, meaning that the software’s workings are transparent and discoverable, such that the user _can_ construct their own levels of meaning on top of the software or, to use other terminology I’ve used, incorporated into the user’s cognitive subroutines or internal collective.
Latour’s idea of collectives is actually entirely relevant to this discussion, now that I think about it. The principles that Dourish is describing as being relevant to embodied interaction are the same principles that Latour observes as being important for the collective, that participants must be available for consultation such that proper decisions can be made by the collective, giving all elements due process. Huh. That connection just occurred to me, but I like it. I will have to think about it some more.
I’m going to wrap things up here. I’m sure Dourish’s ideas will continue to be crop up in my posts over the next few months. Apologies for this post’s semi-incoherence - I wrote it while watching football, so I was losing my train of thought every minute or so. That wraps it up for this week’s round of Book Review Weekend posts. I think the only book that I’ve finished but haven’t written up is still the Jane Jacobs book. One of these days…
Subtitled “The problem of human-machine communication”, this book debunked the prevailing philosophy in artificial intelligence at the time it was written in 1987, which was the belief that people worked by making a plan, and then executing it. Suchman examines this seemingly common-sensical idea and pointed out several of the flawed assumptions associated with it. In particular, she notes that we never fully specify a plan, because to do so would involve an excruciating level of detail. She quotes from Boden’s article “The structure of intentions”:
If one intends to buy bread, for instance, the knowledge of which bakers are open and which are shut on that day of the week will enter into the generation of one’s plan of action in a definite way; one’s knowledge of local topography (and perhaps of map-reading) will guide one’s locomotion to the selected shop; one’s knowledge of linguistic grammar and of the reciprocal roles of shopkeeper and customer will be needed to generate that part of the action-plan concerned with speaking to the baker, and one’s financial competence will guide and monitor the exchange of coins over the shop counter.” (Boden, p.28, cited on Suchman, p.44)
All of this detail is included in some sense when we make a plan to buy bread, but we rarely go into such a level of detail, because we don’t need to. It’s assumed by our familiarity with our surroundings that we understand the process of navigating through our neighborhood, of negotiating with the shopkeeper. In fact, the only time we even think about this level of interaction is when we are trying to explain it to somebody who is unfamiliar with the situation, whether a stranger or a child. These details are evoked for us by the environment.
Suchman contrasts this sense of embedded detail with how people were trying to program robots at the time. She uses the example of a robot designed to “navigate autonomously through a series of rooms”, where the robot would first observe the rooms, plot a course through them, and then follow that course. Of course, if obstacles were moved after it had plotted its course, it didn’t take that into account. As humans, we take for granted our ability to continually evolve our plans in response to our situation, but computers illustrate how difficult such situation awareness is to describe. She points out that plans, rather than being a blueprint of action, make more sense as a resource for action. The idea is that we make plans before entering a situation, and we draw upon those plans while in the situation, but if circumstances change, we obviously do not continue blindly following the plan. They are a resource, not a complete description. The similarities to Klein’s Naturalistic Decision-Making are apparent.
Similarly, the specification of plans makes more sense after the action has occurred, because afterwards we can figure out what actions were relevant to the goal which we were trying to achieve:
Instructions serve as a resource for describing what was done not only because they guide the course of action, but also because they filter out of the retrospective account of the action, or treat as “noise,” everything that was actually done that the instructions fail to mention. (p. 102)
Because instructions (or plans) only mention the parts that are considered relevant at any given point in time, they provide an extremely filtered world view that depends on the reader sharing a similar situation. For example, a set of assembly instructions can refer to a specific screw and assume that the assembler will find the right screw, because it came with the kit. As a total aside, it seems like the field of studying instructions can be philosophically fruitful; I seem to remember that Pirsig rants about instructions for several pages in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which spurs him on to making the classic/romantic split. Anyway.
Suchman also draws on the study of ethnomethodology, a branch of sociology. Mainstream sociology made the assumption that there was an objective social order, which could then be observed and described by trained sociologists. Ethnomethodology, as founded by Harold Garfinkel, insisted that social order was constructed, and that studying how that construction occurred should be the goal of sociologists. As Suchman notes, “The interest of ethnomethodologists … is in how it is that the mutual intelligibility and objectivity of the social world is achieved. … the objective reality of social facts is not the fundamental principle of social studies, but social studies’ fundamental phenomenon.” (p. 58)
She uses these concepts to study the art of conversation and communication. The thing I found interesting about her take on conversation is that it is not a simple transfer of information, where one person says something, and the other hears it. Because what is said is only the smallest part of the conversation, the listener must actively try to construct meaning from what the speaker is saying. The listener constructs a model in their head, using cues from the conversation to build that model. This can lead to unfortunate misunderstandings if the mental models of the speaker and listener diverge, despite both of them participating in the same conversation. I use the example of people talking past each other in meetings in this post. However, when it is working well, the meaning of the conversation is continually being constructed by its participants.
She points out that the advantage of having such a conversation with humans is that eventually inconsistencies in shared meaning become apparent and the listener stops and says “Wait a second, what do you mean by
Yikes. This post is completely out of control. Obviously, there’s lots of good stuff in this book. I actually read the first half of the book while up in Portland, and then when I dug it out for my vacation a couple weeks ago, I tried picking up where I left off and couldn’t, so I ended up re-reading the first half and taking a whole new set of notes. It’s tough sledding in spots, but ultimately rewarding. Although I wouldn’t blame anyone for skipping straight to Paul Dourish’s book, which builds on Suchman’s work and describes her work in a couple concise pages. Mad props to Jofish for recommending both books.
