#@ga

In the UX field, user-centered design isn’t just universally acknowledged as the optimal method, it is Dogma. If the user experience designer does nothing else, she at least puts the user first throughout the design process.  So, it’s extremely surprising to find anyone that pushes back against this, but Betti Marenko does just that in her piece “Digital Materiality, Morphogenesis, and the intelligence of the Technodigital Object.”

…Right? Don’t worry about the jargon. This piece comes out of Deleuze studies where an esoteric lexicon is used as a minor language to deterritorialize a multiplicity of machines in the hopes of producing emergent lines of flight to be reterritorialized though nomadic trajectories that smooth striated spaces. But in all seriousness,  I’ll do my best to avoid the jargon.

Marenko’s bold claim is that design and especially UX/UI need to push away from user-centered design because it is, overly anthropocentric. User-centered methodology fails to take into account the real nature of interfaces. A human does not just use an app for example. Instead she comes in contact with it in a much more mutual engagement of agencies. What then takes center-stage, instead of the human is the event (jargon!). In other words, the connections, interactions and mutual changes between all the things and forces at play.  According to Marenko, a focus that takes processes and events, rather than things and objects as the primary mode of existence in our world implies that “as objects become open-ended, relational, intelligent events, so the user subject is shifting accordingly” (109).

More simply,  the processes that make up our technological objects are evolving to a point that their complexity and capacity for change - their adaptability - rivals complexity ad adaptability of the processes that make up the human users. Technologies are no longer inert pieces of flint to be used to create fire for warmth. I generally think there is a lot of value in this line of thinking. Digital things/processes  are complex agencies that function in our ecosystems. They are no longer things to be mastered, but things to with which we enter into mutual engagement. Living in a time of ecological crises does a pretty good job showing us that when human’s try to master complex ecosystems of which they are a part, they are more likely to fuck it up, and one of the kernels of the such behavior is the belief that humans are outside and above everything else. That there is us, and then there is the environment. Perhaps the idea that we are fully separate from technology we use isn’t far off.

So what does this mean for Users? I think there is  a weak claim and a strong claim, both of which have consequences for how we go about design. The weak claim is that the user is one bundle of processes amongst many bundles that enter into an interaction. Each bundle of processes has its own specific capacities, but no bundle generally has more agency than the others. When interacting, bundles connect to share with each other, enable each other to do things they could not have done alone, and provide each other feedback on the fitness of recent adaptations. From this point of view, design is then a matter of facilitating the connections and directing the flow of interaction. It is a matter of taking the strengths, weaknesses, capacities for connection and adaptability and patterns of behavior into account, not just for the user but for all the bundles of processes involved. In a way, it is an extension of empathetic design - a principle of stepping into the shoes of each of these bundles of processes in order to design the interaction. Additionally, connections end up taking center stage as opposed to the user. The right types of connections and interactions enable the capacities and adaptability of the various bundles of processes. In the same way that social media can be extremely useful by connecting humans, connecting other sets of processes, and creating more useful feedback loops amongst them has the same type of potential. Marenko gets at her idea when he says, “design as a problem-finding activity has to do with an increase in complexity, problematization of the existent, and development of a material sensitivity via design.”  

The stronger version of the claim that processes and events are more critical than users is that we have to take each process in into account on its own instead of thinking of them in terms of bundles. This would lend itself to a much more fine grained analysis - to the point of considering how particular algorithms interact with the ecosystem of bacteria in our guts. This is probably too fine grained for an industry leaning in toward lean UX, but it might be worth considering the how particular features of an app affect certain processes in a user . For example, some music has been found to increase the production of particular white blood cells. Perhaps an app used for self-diagnosis could be improved with music that will help the user fight off the disease or infection that prompted him to open the app in the first place. It can go the other way, too. User reviews are biased by mood, this is can be a problem that for places that provide experiences that put people is less happy moods - like an indie theater that specializes in heart wrenching documentaries. Connecting ticket apps, movie data, GPS, and Yelp could result in expectation of being in a lower mood when about to write a review. There could then be funny funny prompts or pictures to lift the mood of the user for the sake of a fair review of the business.  

o this morning i came out to my mum during an argument. I locked my door and slid a note under it that said "I'm Gay". She came over to the door and continued to yell at me as she picked up the note. She stopped her sentence half way through and paused for about 30 seconds before asking me through a locked door "Is this true", i replied "Yes, Surprise". She was in shock, she started crying and started asking me questions like, "Who knows?" So i get no beautiful daughter in law?" How could you tell your friends?" Is your friend Rhys gay? Have you been having sex with him" "We can't tell dad" and all of that jazz. After a awhile she calmed down, i told some gay jokes to lighten the mood. She kept on saying "You would be the last person i would expect to be gay". But after an hour talk she got over it. The next issue was my dad. My dad is homophobic, the "Gays should have been drowned at birth" type guy. My mum is going to tell him today or the next. However, knowing my dad he will be the type to just never talk about it, i know he will always love me, he just might not like the subject. I don't think he could deal with a feminine gay son, if i was one.

This is amazing!!!! I went to the hackathon and ended up paying but I didn't know before this day how to go into  and do this. I have some rudimentary knowledge now so that is really cool. 

require 'pry'

require 'httparty'

#When going to the digital undivided hack test :

view-source:http://www.digitalundivided.com/hacktest.html

#the test was if you knew to search into the source code or the inspector element to find this image:

name = "Tasha"

url = "http://www.digitalundivided.com/hack"

url = url + "?name=" + name

#p url

#get appended to url

response = HTTParty.get(url)

p response

So this week’s blog is a little different to the previous weeks. I’ve been thinking about what I knew about all of this web development stuff, and what I really wanted to know about learning web development, before I even applied for this class. Perhaps some of my thoughts might be useful to some future students considering a similar path. I’m lucky that I made a good choice in coming to General Assembly, but I want to write about my process in getting here, and what I think about choosing a web development immersive program.

In late October 2012 I left my job as an architect in Sydney, where I worked for about four years (not to mention the five years of study) and decided that it was now or never to finally do something I loved – programming and web development (from the various brief experiences I had in the field). I did a lot of research on what skills I would need if I wanted to become a web developer. At that time, I probably didn’t really understand the difference between a web designer and web programmer, but I did know I wanted to do more than just graphics, fonts and layout. I knew enough about coding and web design to know that there is much more to wed development than html and css. I wanted to understand the logic and functionality. I wanted, without knowing it, to become a full stack developer.

So of course I began looking for courses in Sydney where I lived. None of them offered more than front-end development courses (apart from Sydney Dev Camp, not launched at the time, but which has now been launched since I moved to NY, beginning their first class in April). There were a few brief moments when I considered doing a graduate degree in something that was programming-related. But none of them would have given me the skills I needed to actually get a job creating web sites and apps - not to mention the huge time and money commitment involved. I started to really wonder how does anyone get into this field without having studied computer science at university?

After a little bit more research and a few short courses in PHP and MySQL, I found that there were these “bootcamps” mostly in the US, for people wanting to learn every aspect of creating apps and web sites from start to finish, and who have little to no programming experience. And all of them seemed to be in this thing called Rails, using a programming language called Ruby. After getting my head around the fact that Ruby on Rails (aka Rails) is a web development framework written in the programming language called Ruby (very confusing for a newbie), I realized that Rails is where it’s at and that’s exactly what I wanted to learn.

I began teaching myself Ruby and applied for App Academy in San Francisco, Flatiron School in New York, and General Assembly, also in New York.

At the time I didn’t really know what I was looking for, I was honestly happy and willing to go to wherever would accept me. In hindsight though, the program you choose could really make or break your chances of really learning this stuff in the time given.

App Academy’s approach to the application process was to respond very quickly to my application and then give me about 80 hours of pre-work to start on. They said they were always filling up classes every three weeks or so, and to try and submit my pre-work ten days before the next class started. This was confusing; was I accepted and just had to submit the pre-work? Should I book flights? This put me off going there as it felt less selective and more like a factory churning through classes. This may not actually be true, but I’m just writing honestly what I felt at the time about the process. Nevertheless, had I been accepted there and nowhere else I would have attended App Academy without doubt.

Then I read about Flatiron School in New York.  It's in Silicon Valley obviously, but then if anywhere could compete with Silicon Valley it would be New York. There may be a lot of startups in SF, but when it comes down to it, New York is New York, and if it’s happening anywhere it’s happening here. After my first Skype interview with Flatiron, they asked me to complete a coding challenge. I spent three days straight, with very little sleep, coding a tic-tac-toe game in Ruby, whilst basically teaching myself Ruby at the same time. I managed to get the game to work – you could play against the computer, win, lose or draw, and the computer would block your move if it looked like you were about to win. In hindsight, I didn’t yet understand how classes and methods really worked, so my code was not elegant, but it worked, so I was pretty damn happy with my effort. Here's a snippet of the running program - it looks a little rudimentary now that we've learnt Rails and Javascript!

And on and on it goes until there is a win, lose or draw.

And a snapshot of the Ruby code below…how cute!!!

This was a fantastic way to learn Ruby initially. I was certainly straight in at the deep end, but the challenge and satisfaction of getting the code to work on my own really confirmed that I loved doing this.

The General Assembly application process was all about how you think and how keen you are to learn and persevere when solving a new problem. General Assembly accepted me to the Web Development Immersive course, running for 12 weeks and starting in late January 2013. I accepted, booked my flights, and within three weeks was in New York and embarking on the 3-month program.

Honestly, though, in all the research about the various programs, one thing I didn’t focus much on was the quality of the course itself at each school. I didn’t ask anyone who the teacher was at each school. I tried to read blogs written by past students from each course, but that didn’t help too much in distinguishing between the different programs.

In the last few weeks, and as the material we’re learning has become more complex, I really recognize the value of excellent teaching, and a really rigorously produced curriculum. I understand some schools have a less structured curriculum and more of a do-it-yourself approach to learning. Having done five weeks of this course now, I am fairly certain I would not have learnt anything near this much at any other school. I already know Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, JavaScript, HAML, lots of APIs and Ruby gems, Sass, AJAX, JQuery, CSS and HTML, Foundation, Twitter Bootstrap.... If it wasn’t for a really well planned and structured curriculum as well as the energy, enthusiasm and depth of knowledge of the instructor and the four teaching assistants, I’m sure I would not have learnt this much this quickly. Through no skill on my part, I really feel lucky to be learning here.

The other thing that is also apparent now that I’m at General Assembly every single day, is the passion and enthusiasm of all the staff involved in designing and running the course. I had no idea it was such a large operation and how much brain-power has gone into designing the program itself. You can tell they really love what they do and really believe in the idea of rethinking how education can be.

The end of this current week I’ll be halfway through the program, so we’ll see what happens in the next half. But if I am able to absorb as much as I have in the first six weeks, then I’m really excited to see what I’ll be able to do at the end of the 12 weeks.