This is a book about the language of service.” Editorial Values as a Zebra Feature They are social constructions, built in networks of requests and promises, and in trusting relationships between people speaking and listening to each other, today increasingly through electronic media. (And if you’re lucky, sets a honking big boat splashing into the water.)Īs product and experience designers working in systems - where services have now superseded objects - our ability to put these words in people’s mouths gives us just as much magic power as a Celtic bard, or the soprano finding the resonant frequency of a wine glass.Īs one reviewer of HTDTWW put it, “services are not constructed in the same way that clocks and automobiles are constructed. If you’re in the right place and given the authority, “I christen this ship,” confers a name and an intention onto many people’s hard work. If you’re a gambler, “I bet” creates a wager. The lectures chiefly focus on a certain type of speech Austin called a “performative utterance.” When you’re getting married, for instance, “I do,” in the right combination, starts the marriage. Austin specialized in de-abstracting both the language of philosophy and the philosophy of language, taking what people wrote and said at their word at a time when philosophy had become obsessed with interpretation. His title is an incredibly simple and lucid condensation of his ideas.
#Poncho the weathercat series
Austin gave a series of lectures at Harvard, compiled into a slim, dense blade of a book, “How to Do Things with Words.” Some would argue it’s their inherent power to compel without additional equipment or apparatus. What is it about words that contain such great potential? Here’s an even longer detour, a question to help answer our original question.
#Poncho the weathercat how to
Meanwhile, presenting this year’s Design in Tech report, design luminary John Maeda suggested that writing, along with knowing how code works, is another “unicorn skill” for designers.Īll this is a long trip around the garden path where I enlist people smarter than myself to help answer the big, obvious question: “Why’s an editorial director joining a product studio?” How to Do Things with Words James Cooper, the head of creative at Betaworks, the company that brought us Poncho the Weathercat, recently told an audience, “ the digital creation ecosystem has been dominated by design.
#Poncho the weathercat full
It felt good to have a room full of designers nodding at a simple tenet of my world.įast-forward a few years, and the growth of bots and other elements of conversational user interfaces has brought writing even closer to the forefront of design. It was good advice: pay attention to what works immediately. I remember watching Basecamp’s Jason Fried - a writer - give an audience of designers at SXSW some advice years ago: “Before you redesign, rewrite.” We speak in similar terms but don’t always understand each other. We writers view designers as strange cousins.
I’m very excited to join Uncorked Studios’ Semiotics Practice as its editorial director.Īfter a career in publishing, I’m now working at a full-fledged product studio, which calls for a little reflection.
0 kommentar(er)
