Stuntbox, my sometimes hobbyhorse, is now Stuntbox, LLC. I am officially in the design consulting business.

It started about two years ago, as a faint but undeniable itch, somewhere in the far back of my mind. “You have to do this,” it kept telling me. I kept putting it aside. Halfway through a stint running the interactive design department of one of the most (insert standard PR department superlative here) business publications in the world, it’s easy to distract yourself with the minutiae of daily humdrum, ignoring what better instincts are shouting. “Yeah, yeah,” I thought, “Someday. I know. I really should. I know! Now let me jam out this memo before the 2pm shows up.”

Fortunately for me, I caught a lucky break. I got laid off.

Yeah, I know what you might be thinking. Cognitive dissonance, lemons, lemonade, and some such blah blah. But in my case, believe me when I say the only genuine adversity was holding back the goofball grin during that most special of HR sessions. I’d known for a long time what the next step should be for me, personally and professionally. And I was being handed a corporate subsidy to get busy doing exactly that. The certain and unshakable notion that found purchase in my brain all those months before was being tossed the keys to the family hot rod, no questions asked, no curfew. So let’s get going, shall we?

For now, I’ll be sticking to what I do best, design and creative direction for the Web, with a bit of client-side code thrown in to keep things zesty. Have a need for something like that? Drop me a line, I’d love to hear from you. We might be the perfect fit for each other.

Yesterday, Wired’s Gadget Lab blog posted a speculative piece asserting that, in the wake of recent App Store takedowns, news organizations might want to take a cautionary approach when creating applications for the iPad, lest they unwittingly submit to potential censorship from Apple.

Trouble is, the post is shot through with the bizarro, “Tablets are the end of history!” assumptions that have gripped news organizations (and the publishing industry in general) since well before the iPad was even unveiled.

Where did we get this myopic assumption that in order to participate in the “iPad universe” newsrooms must author their own native applications? There’s already a phenomenal, censorship-free way to reach this new potential iPad audience: It’s called a website. (You know, that place where news venues already have millions upon millions of readers, most of whom they seem not to know what to do with.)

Beyond the haptic feedback bits, there is precious little in the iPad news app demos we’ve been seeing that can not be done in a Web browser, right now. Yes, really. But because this new gadget vaguely apes a form factor some folks are familiar with (“Hey, it’s shaped like a magazine now!”) the universe has suddenly been reinvented and all the rules have changed? Poppycock.

Don’t want Apple (or Amazon, or Sony, or whoever) controlling your delivery channel?

Then put some of that money into creating new and innovative features for your website, where it should have been all along.

Addendum

In a mildly amusing but important aside, I’ll mention that much of the Wired post is a complete non sequitor because news organizations have already been making apps for the App Store for some time now—for the iPhone—with nary a hint of the aforementioned censorship boogeyman. Just because the screen got bigger doesn’t mean the landscape shifted.

Facebook confirmed last April it has no less than 200 million users worldwide (and every indication is that number has grown since then). Roll that over for a moment.

Now consider the comments left by those lost souls on the ReadWriteWeb article who were genuinely seeking to log in to their Facebook accounts. (I say “genuinely” because there’s clearly some leg-pulling going on as the comments get out of hand.) How many comments on that page from users truly in distress? 200 or so? Okay.

So, just to keep things conservative, let’s say that only 5% of the “confused” users coming to this page actually took the time to leave a comment. A reasonable rate for a large-scale site (based on my own anecdotal experience) and well within the law of the vital few (aka, “the 80/20 rule”). What’s that make? 4,000 frustrated users. Wow, that seems like a lot. But hold on a second…

That’s 0.002% of Facebook’s confirmed user base.

A mere two thousandths of a single percent. Even if you run the tip-of-the-iceberg scenario and up the comments left to 500 while simultaneously dialing down the response rate to 1%, you only come back with 0.025%. A quarter of a hundredth of a single percent of Facebook’s community.

This is all to say—depending on how you like to run the numbers—that this may barely qualify as a statistically significant event. Act accordingly.

So we don’t need another different kind of institution that does 85 percent of accountability journalism. We need a class of institutions or models, whether they’re endowments or crowdsourced or what have you. We need a model that produces five percent of accountability journalism. And we need to get that right 17 times in a row.

Point noted? There is no one-to-one, monolithic replacement for the existing media models waiting in the wings. Nothing that we can just swap in and be on our merry way. What’s eroding now was the product of intent mixed with historic coincidence, to a scale present economics won’t replicate.

The future will be small, messy, and enumerative. Now let’s get on with it, shall we?

The problems with this are myriad and ugly. Jeff Jarvis quickly dispatched a post covering the salient sticking points. (And, appropriately, there are good issues being raised in the comments.) I’m in agreement with Jarvis and others that this is an all-around bad idea.

Chalk it up to a failure of empathy.

Firstly, comment traffic is prized by many site owners. Especially those who take pride in the conversations happening around their content. Had Google wrapped their heads around this point of view, they might have foreseen how shifting the location and control of these conversations could be perceived as “stealing” something from site owners. The product (and the promotion of it) could have been adjusted accordingly, and fears assuaged.

Perhaps more importantly, Google seems to have failed to recognize how the audience’s changing notions about them might color this reaction. A company’s empathy for its users needs to be informed not just by its own sense of identity, but by whether that perception squares with popular sentiment.

Google might think users don’t have the right idea about their intent with Sidewiki, that these people just don’t get it this is so cool we’re trying to help them why do they hate it? But they need to remember they’re pulling in the kind of revenue that dwarfs the GDP of small nations now. With that reality comes an entirely different set of expectations about how they can and should behave. Simply by virtue of size and clout, actions formerly benign can now portend evil intent to the audience if handled badly.

Is that fair? Not terribly. Is that a psychological reality Google needs to recognize and deal with? Absolutely. Tone deafness isn’t an option. Not if they want to address the growing dissonance between how they think of themselves and what we see as users.

Good intentions aren’t enough for Google anymore. They just pave the road to, well, you know…

There are workarounds. Clunky at best and mostly proprietary, they’re seldom used by the third party agencies who audit the traffic claims of major sites (and thereby influence the rates those sites can charge advertisers). In other words, they don’t rate with the moneymen.

There have been efforts to emphasize other metrics, such as the amount of time a user spends on a site, but they haven’t amounted to much yet. At least not enough to free us from traffic woes when playing anywhere remotely near the bleeding edge.

It’s quite plain this state of affairs is holding these technologies, and the Web, back. Enough so that Adobe has apparently decided to take matters into its own hands, at great expense, by plunking down a king’s ransom to acquire Omniture, a major player in the business of counting site traffic.

With this purchase, Adobe clearly intends to construct a bully pulpit from which it can influence this state of affairs for its benefit, serving their deeply vested interest in Flash. Good for them.

So this begs a question.

Is anybody working on a solution for AJAX?

It would seem like the work currently underway on HTML5, a specification fittingly dubbed “Web Applications 1.0″ at one point, provides a choice opportunity to establish some clear guidance on trackable AJAX events in Web apps for everyone involved, and help steer the ship forward.

I’ve been scanning the spec-in-progress, but haven’t yet seen anything that seems to fit the bill. It’s a big spec. I could easily be missing something. Maybe we can use the ping attribute? Perhaps it’s in how resource fetching is defined? I don’t know. But I’m sure minds more knowledgeable than mine have some ideas. Ideas that wouldn’t constitute a proprietary hack.

The major sites won’t budge until the auditors move. The auditors won’t move until the corporate coalitions make some decisions. The corporate coalitions are comprised of the owners of said major sites. Lather, rinse, repeat.

What’s needed now is a standards body to break this stalemate. Otherwise we remain locked into a stagnant scenario where no one wants to be the first mover, and the proprietary solutions pass us all by.

For the sake of fitting it all in, we sometimes condense (or forget to expand) a design to the point of impinging on hierarchy and causality. Often, the pieces we’re putting together as web designers have relationships that cannot be effectively illuminated through proximity alone.

Debussy defined music as the space between the notes. So should it be with design.

Which Way?

So allow me to register a humble gripe with the print output of Google Maps. Traveling through the Adirondacks a short while ago I printed out some driving directions that made me and several other fairly sharp cookies do a double-take:

Detail view of a Google Maps printout.

It’s the distance bit. Are those distances on the right end of the rows from the locations on the same line, or the distances to them? After a moment of troubling, you can figure it out, sure. But figuring things out is not what you should be doing while winding your way through traffic on a high speed six lane highway.

“Wait. How far until the next—Fudruckers! We missed the turn…”

This layout takes what should be a straight-up linear relationship and introduces a tedious moment of forced cognition—and subsequently doubt—by failing to expand and clearly define the relationships between items.

Change of Direction

While it won’t win any beauty pageants, here’s one possible take on expanding Google’s layout to clearly suss out the connections:

Detail of a revised Google Maps printout design.

An exhaustive, deeply explored treatment this ain’t. And I’m sure any number of bright young design things could pick it up and turn it into something better. But the point should be clear.

By expanding the design, we’ve allowed the opportunity to clearly flag relationships between data in a way that’s unmistakable. You wouldn’t print out this version and be left wondering which way is up.

Give that design a little room to breathe, and we might all find our way.

Echoing points made by Rob Walker towards the end of the documentary, it wasn’t long before someone put the doomsday scenario to the trio: If the hurricane was barreling down upon you, and you only had seconds to save a few treasured items before you dashed out the door, what would you take?

It occurred to me that my own answer really shelves the kind of personal nostalgia this question is typically hunting after, probably saying less about me than it does about the times in which we’re just beginning to live.

I’d grab the same three objects I check are on my person before I walk out the door every morning:

Smartphone. Wallet. Keys. In that order.

That’s it.

Why? It’s about access—and to a slightly lesser degree, authentication—in a world of distributed systems.

These are the means, in compact form, by which I can obtain the vast majority of the other material goods, services, or vital information I might need, both in crisis and everyday life. (Provided the systems that support them are still functional. Which, granted, as of now can still sometimes be a very big “if.”)

Life among truly distributed support systems is predicated on information about the system itself. I’m not as concerned with the items the system delivers as how they can be delivered because, if things are working, the objects can ultimately be replaced at one cost or another. (Touching on sustainability, this also implies the system should be able to reabsorb and redistribute objects and their constituent components accordingly—something we obviously have a lot of work to do on.)

For objects that are truly so imbued with personal stories that the real value in them can not be duplicated at any cost (think, “I’d take Uncle Fred’s old golf clubs. It’s a funny story…”) well, at the risk of sounding cold, better to have saved yourself and ensured you have the means to conduct your affairs and aid others.

Credit to Rashim, the designer of the trio, for pointing out as much. Ultimately the objects are replaceable, he noted, “You are not.”

Surprising, one might think, given that his life revolves around creating so many of the items I’m cavalierly talking about abandoning at a moment’s notice. But perhaps being such a prolific creator as he is, he’s well aware that the object itself is not where irreplaceable value lies.

I hope this meme comes out in the wash. I tried the club soda trick and everything, but no dice.

Okay, so I’ve been tagged for Seven Things. Normally I’d turn my daintily elitist Northeastern nose up at such a thing and demand the house staff see it out posthaste, but this tagging comes by way of drinkerthinker, and hot on the heels of a sensibly populist rationalization from her robotic counterpart. Who am I to refuse?

So let’s make with the reciprocity…

The Rules

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post, leaving their names and links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged.

The Goods

1. I got my first job at age 14, working as an undocumented farm laborer. We were paid in cash every Tuesday (to ensure our return) and transported to the fields via a van held together with carpet remnants and spittle. Nothing teaches a 14-year-old the value of hard work like shoveling raw manure into an industrial dirt grinder for a fraction of minimum wage.

2. I was accidentally stabbed in the hand by a co-worker at the aforementioned job (no lasting ill effects) and received the second best tan of my life (thus far). I also acquired an aloe plant from my employers that nearly achieved sentience before collapsing under its own colossal mass. It spawned several sequels. 

3. Grace incarnate from an early age, I bear a faint scar on my chin from when I fell off a balance beam in elementary school. Yeah, I’m butch. (Seriously, what kind of sociopath puts a balance beam on a school playground?) 

4. I once broke my ankle in two places and tore the cartilage off the bottom of my femur while playing with some icicles. Really fucking pretty icicles.

5. I have a nearly indiscernible but sizable birthmark on my left iris. Ball’s back in your court, David Bowie. 

6. I was once voted “Most Sarcastic Representative” and “Best Debater” at the same awards ceremony by my university’s Student Association. I am hell on wheels with Robert’s Rules, and still occasionally catch myself blurting out “Point of order!” during office meetings. 

7. When I was a wee tyke I thought the Chrysler Building was the Empire State Building and vice versa. Everyone always talked about how great the latter was, but the former struck me as so much damn nicer. They must’ve meant that one, right? I now live a block away from it (and still think it looks nicer).

Next Victims

The following esteemed gentlefolk may feel free to carry on in like fashion or, barring that, take this nomination out behind a barn and gently smother it. Please note this does not preclude additional shunning at The Next Big Social Event of the Season, where we will undoubtedly stand around exchanging awkward pleasantries and wishing like mad hell the cocktails were stronger.

• Chris Fahey (@askrom)
• Anthony Armendariz (@mantwan)
• Chris Harrington (@octothorpe)
• Erin Kissane (@kissane)
• Mandy Brown (@aworkinglibrary)
• Ron Newsome (@ronsome)
• Pete Brown (@downdb)

Go forth and testify.