nickd

6. Writing for future issues.

This is the sixth post in a seven-part series about Distance, a quarterly journal for long essays about design. Support Distance on Kickstarter. Earlier posts:

• Distance’s introduction.
• 1. Essays and rants.
• 2. Editorial strategy.
• 3. Citation technique.
• 4. Rebuttals and responses.
• 5. Revisions in the afterlife.

Because so few people knew what we were working on, we could take as much time as needed to publish Distance’s first issue. Because Distance is a quarterly publication, though, we don’t have that luxury for future issues.

Accounting for the time to write, edit, print, and any padding in case things go wrong in authors’ lives, we’ll be planning issues x+1 and x+2 when we are printing issue x. So many things can go wrong during all three simultaneous processes, and many of them are out of my control, so I’m left balancing the desire to make something truly great with the rigors of a quarterly schedule. Those of you who have known me for a long time know that deadlines are a fake idea that I am willing to shirk with great aplomb, but this remains the scariest proposition of the whole thing.

Issues 2 and 3 are being planned right now, and issue 4 is starting in small ways. Issue 2’s authors have already been announced. Each issue has a theme, which will be divulged once the essays’ first drafts are in. Essays can fit these themes as loosely as the writers want, and I expect them to be all over the map, because (as an editor and reader) that is part of the fun of it.

I am contacting a lot of people myself, but if you want to write, or know somebody who might be interested, you should get in touch right now. Imagine me putting my beer down and looking you straight in the eye and saying that sentence very slowly.

There.

In the past few process articles, I’ve talked as much as I can about my editorial strategy and current expectations. I hope that I have done this in a way that sounds appealing to prospective writers. I am very much selling the idea as much to writers as I am to readers. I know that readers are really excited about it, but a publication is only as good as its writing, and that writing could very well be penned by you. So let’s make something great together, something we’ll both feel really proud of.

The blurst question.

First, second, and third, you should read the thoughtful conversation between my friends Buzz and David about the cultural and ideological differences between New York City and San Francisco, both as towns and as professional communities. They do a good job breaking down the broad differences between each, and the relationship that companies often have with their environment.

Buried within the latter aforelinked is a reblog that mentions somebody moving from Chicago to New York. Which comes on the heels of my apparent coercion that somebody move away. And that all follows a year where dozens¹ of talented designers and developers left town. And two days ago, I had lunch with somebody who expressed dissatisfaction with Chicago and was super pumped about applying for jobs in another city. Based on everything I’ve seen over the past year, Chicago is facing a massive talent retention problem, and I believe it isn’t alone. (Nor is it alone in a rural/urban split, but that’s for another day.) Which is kind of a total bummer, and it makes me wonder why mid-sized communities are unable to stably sustain themselves.

Despite our being the third largest city in the country, our design and technology scene is similar to others in mid-sized American cities; New York and San Francisco are currently the biggest two. Chicago tends to sustain its identity among a handful of outgoing people that have stayed here for many years – around which orbit hundreds of others, usually younger, who come and go.

But it is there. Collaborations exist all the time, with people creating their own spaces and opening forward-thinking agencies. There’s a nascent VC-funded startup scene and an incubator doing good things. There are three great companies within three blocks of each other, and others all over town. The ethic in this city tends to involve bootstrapping your own thing, supporting your own, and – yes – calling people out when you think they might be going down the wrong path. It’s more akin to NYC’s scene than anybody else’s, from what I know, but it’s also very much its own thing in many ways.

Which brings me to the worst question that you can ask me: when are you moving to [SF/NYC]? While I’m sure that it’s asked with the best of intentions, this question de facto assumes that Chicago is inferior, and I would be upgrading to a better city by leaving. It comes off as condescending to people who have made a conscious, deliberate choice to live somewhere – not just in Chicago, but I imagine anywhere. What about the tech scene in Oklahoma City? When are they all moving to San Francisco?

Conversely, this is the best question that you can ask me: why do you live in Chicago? This gives me an opportunity to talk about the great life that I have here. I’m aware, as much as anybody else, that I could pack up and leave at any point. I would be able to make friends wherever I moved. I would have no shortage of interesting work. And while it would be stressful in the short run, maybe things would be fine for me and Erin in the long run. But I haven’t moved, and I’m probably not going to. Why?

I have been asked the worst question several dozen times over the past year, usually by folks from other cities who don’t know me well, and think they are just making small talk. I try to be gracious, and think I handle it okay: again, they’re likely well-intentioned. But in the past three months, people have asked me the worst question who already live here. As if it’s taken as law. As if I’m going to leave because I’ve encountered some fleeting modicum of success in my field. In the same time period, I’ve been asked the best question twice.

I tend to answer the worst question by example. When people visit, I try to introduce them to my awesome friends. I show them what’s going on here. I take them to my favorite bars and restaurants and prove that we have a great food scene. I’ll invite others over and somebody will give a talk in my living room over a couple growlers of beer. If they need to get some work done, I’ll drag them over to one of many coworking spaces. Because I can’t realistically answer the worst question in a way that satisfies anyone, other than by proving that I don’t live in a windswept hellscape.

While it’s sometimes a useful way of framing things, I’m heartbroken to see people distill tech rivalries to a binary that ignores smaller towns. It isn’t surprising – they are the two largest scenes out there right now, after all – but it implies the worst question all the same. Somebody from Chicago (or Oklahoma City, or wherever) is going to read those posts and think that they’re somehow missing out – and then, someday, they’re going to leave. But we can do our jobs from anywhere that has an internet connection, and it’s easier to connect with kindred spirits across time zones every day. As the scene increases in size across the world, perhaps we’ll reach the point where there will be some stability in mid-sized localities – ideally, people will look down the street and build a great community around their own home, rather than move someplace out of disillusionment with their existing surroundings.

Which is all to say: every single one of the people who left Chicago in the past year gave it a chance, and we screwed it up. We get the scene that we deserve. Let’s try to deserve something better. This is on all of us, but I’m resolving to build a great local community in whatever way I can.

¹ I counted 54 after a cursory glance at Twitter, and that’s just from my own perspective; I imagine there were quite a few that I missed. That said, it could just be that Chicago has a high turnover rate, and I simply haven’t met a bunch of people who have already moved here from other places. But even if that’s true, I worry about people using Chicago as a stepping stone to get someplace else; that it doesn’t represent stability or finality.

5. Revisions in the Afterlife.

This is the fifth post in a seven-part series about Distance, a quarterly journal for long essays about design. Support Distance on Kickstarter. Earlier posts:

• Distance’s introduction.
• 1. Essays and rants.
• 2. Editorial strategy.
• 3. Citation technique.
• 4. Rebuttals and responses.

While there’s no undo button in print media, publishing a text doesn’t have to freeze it in time. Distance’s essays deserve to have a life beyond their publication date. Inaccuracies and typographical errors are bound to appear, but more broadly, new research can change the findings, previous research may exist that we didn’t find while writing, and new technological developments can undermine premises. Essays gain value for authors and readers when they adapt to their unforeseen futures.

And so, as developments warrant, we plan to update Distance’s essays after each issue’s release. Edits will be included in the digital edition, and major revisions will be pushed to existing customers. The original version will always be included, changed content will be subtly highlighted in the PDF edition, and all changes – no matter how small – will be posted to Distance’s errata page.

There may come a point when we deem that this revision process isn’t necessary anymore, at which point we’ll declare an essay closed to further modification. When that happens, errata will continue to be published to clarify minor points or correct issues of proofreading, but the broader argument will remain frozen in time.

Whatever’s next; whatever’s good.

It’s now-or-never-o’clock. I quit my job on Friday, primarily to focus more on getting Distance off the ground and moderately profitable. And while that’s indeed occupying a large chunk of my time, I now have way more time than I need to launch the thing. And I’m curious, and I like dabbling in small projects with good people, and I like making tiny amounts of money so I can eat burritos in a city with a comically low cost of living.

Here’s the overview so far:

• I’m an interaction designer by trade, and I focus a lot on what most folks call “product.” I blathered on about this once, and I continue to dig up examples that I find interesting. If you cofounded a startup in the past year or six, I can throw darts at it with great aplomb.
• I’m also a writer, editor, and printer. Probably as a result of all that, I’m a rather extreme type nerd, and I have a fondness for physical typesetting. I know how to work letterpress machines that weigh twenty times more than I do. So, if you want me to poke at your writing, I can do that. And if you want to collaborate on any hands-on projects with metal type, I can also do that. Or, anything with typography that doesn’t look like this stuff? I’m probably game.
• I always keep an open mind about any sort of projects that involve some degree of research, play, and curiosity. So if you want to plan anything off-the-wall funny or pranksterish, then get at me. I love outlandish, ridiculous projects. Let’s scheme together.

I would like to make cool things with good people. Maybe you’re one of these good people. And maybe you know other good people, too. I’m in a rare inflection point in my life where I don’t have to juggle competing priorities to take on new stuff. I would love if you got in touch (nickd//nickd/org or @nickd), and spread this far and wide. I am a little scared these days, but things are really only worth doing if they’re scary, so I figure I must be at least a little right.

4. Rebuttals and responses.

This is the fourth post in a seven-part series about Distance, a quarterly journal for long essays about design. Support Distance on Kickstarter. Earlier posts:

• Distance’s introduction.
• 1. Essays and rants.
• 2. Editorial strategy.
• 3. Citation technique.

When an essay is released into the wild, its life begins. People read it; then they say something about it. It used to be that you would handwrite a letter to the editor and send it in the mail. These days, though, commentary takes the form of content on the internet, ranging from emails to comments to blog posts to tweets. But that is just the first step. People can respond to the responses; authors can think about these responses, and revise their own work accordingly. That’s how discourse works, and I think it’s a very good thing. And while this all sounds pretty elementary, it’s hard to get right, to encourage new ideas and insights. With Distance, I want to support and nurture it however I can.

When a new issue is released, I’ll be paying attention to what people say about it. If a response is thoughtful or insightful, I’ll reach out to its author and ask them to reprint or excerpt it. Each of Distance’s issues will have a digital edition, and bundled with this (and posted to the issue’s page on Distance’s site) will be an ever-increasing, forever updated corpus of interesting commentary from other people. Anybody will be able to respond, including the authors themselves, so hopefully this will create an interesting conversation with many different threads. Distance’s essays are meant to last, so the longer they’re in the wild, more discussion will accumulate around them.

I think this is a great way to moderate a conversation around big questions, and I graciously hope you’ll participate.

3. Citation technique.

This is the third post in a seven-part series about Distance, a quarterly journal for long essays about design. Support Distance on Kickstarter. Earlier posts:

• Distance’s introduction.
• 1. Essays and rants.
• 2. Editorial strategy.

Distance exists in many forms. There’s going to be a book, of course, but we’re also releasing a digital bundle for PDF, ePub, and Kindle formats. The PDF is a different page size than the book, so every single format is going to paginate differently. And because journal citations usually go by pagination, this poses a problem: how do we know we’re referring to the right place in the text?

The Bible actually does this fairly well. You know that John 3:16 is going to be at the same place between differing copies of the same translation (i.e., King James version) of the Bible, no matter what page number it may be on.

So in this spirit, but holiness notwithstanding, Distance doesn’t have page numbers; instead, it has paragraph numbers at the beginning of each paragraph, which direct readers to the right place in the essay. In the PDF and physical book, these are to the left of each paragraph. Kindle’s and ePub’s paragraphs begin with them. And in ePub, Kindle, and PDF, each of these is represented by a permalink that can be used in a specific citation.

We know this isn’t entirely novel, but maybe it is for interactive texts. And we’re well aware that it proscribes a specific citation style that “breaks” traditional citation schemata, which may frustrate some people – but we didn’t take this decision lightly, and think it’s for the betterment of our writing to generalize citation across analog and digital platforms. It’s increasingly unreasonable to assume that readers will keep their content in just one form, and we’re well aware of that, and trying to account for that in the best way that is as reverent to the text and the reader’s habits as possible, meeting everyone halfway.

We take a page at the beginning of each issue of Distance to discuss how citation works for that particular medium, and to advise people on the best way to cite Distance’s essays so that readers and researchers can find what they need as conveniently as possible. We hope this may be helpful for your own research efforts, but we’re always thinking what we can do to improve, so we seek feedback on what works and what doesn’t work for you.

2. Editorial strategy.

This is the second post in a seven-part series about Distance, a quarterly journal for long essays about design. Support Distance on Kickstarter. Earlier posts:

• Distance’s introduction.
• 1. Essays and rants.

Mandy Brown has discussed the nature of editorial strategy in many publications, and when I first contacted her about Distance, that was the first thing she asked me. So I’d like to talk a little bit about what I’m doing with authors’ essays for Distance. Everybody is a unique snowflake, so this process has never been precisely followed for any particular essay – but going into it, this is what I tend to ask for and expect from people.

First, a proposal. Write a paragraph-long pitch: what you care about and how you hope to write about it. This can be something as short as:

I want to use the history of video games to justify that gamification and virtual currencies are damaging the form.

Or it can be longer. The more the better, really, because it helps convey that you’re passionate about what you do, and that you’ve already started to think through some of the details.

Second, we talk about it. We’ll get on a Skype call or IM or whatever and I’ll throw some ideas out there, and we’ll bat things around.

A couple of weeks later, you’ll have finished the outline. Build an argument, tell me what you plan to write about, and try to fit it in a couple of pages. Some people feel more comfortable simply writing the introduction; other folks are rigorous, providing a proper Harvard-style outline. Do whatever works for you; I’m not here to impose structure on the planning. Then I revise the outline, we might talk about it a little more, and you start writing. Around this time, I’ll also dump a ton of research on you in the form of books, articles, blog posts, and academic papers, so that you can start to research things better and frame your argument more cogently.

Fourth, the half-completed draft. This gives me enough ground to stand on and recommend some ways to build your argument. Often I will say “this part needs a few sentences of examples that prove what you are trying to say.” Or: “now that you have finished half of the essay, consider this direction to bring it home.” Or: “move this part up here.” Or: “cut this paragraph, it doesn’t help.” High-level stuff. I don’t proofread much at this point, but sometimes I’ll give in to my grammar snob impulses.

Fifth, the three-fourths completed draft. Sometimes missing an intro and conclusion. Sometimes missing one major part. Doesn’t matter. Things are taking shape. We could start proofreading and doing more significant edits, and it would be passable, but not great yet, and we are here to make something that is great. No matter how we get there, I tend to work better with more collaboration and iteration, and I try to be nice about it, too.

Sixth, the complete first draft. Fewer high-level edits, and proofreading is starting to kick into gear.

Then we bat drafts around until the deadline or we collapse from exhaustion. Push it until it’s great. Shine it until you can see your reflection in it. Make it the best thing you’ve written in your life. That’s what I aspire to.

Maybe this is the wrong or unconventional way to do things. I don’t know. It will probably change in the future. Sometimes it happens organically, but it’s okay if it doesn’t. Today, though, writing this, it feels right, knowing what I know.

1. Essays and rants.

In my work, the difference between a rant and an essay is: an essay offers a solution. This does not make rants any better or worse than essays; it just makes them different in their scope, their goals, and their strategy around research. An excellent rant is Bret Victor’s A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design, which meant to discuss the state of the art and why he thinks it’s bad – but the lack of solutions came from the subject matter, because it was discussing theoretical interfaces and notional directions for future research. All fair ground.

Essays take a confident stand that a certain idea is (or isn’t) preferable within a set of prescribed bounds. Rewriting Bret’s essay, it would say something like “touch interfaces are preferable right now for this reason, and going ahead we need to start researching in this specific direction for this other reason.” Whether or not this diminishes the quality of his writing isn’t at hand; the real question is how much it changes the form of his argument.

If Bret were to take that particular tack, he would have to find different sources for research; he would have to build his argument in different ways, likely citing more real-world examples than conceptual videos; and, most importantly, the conclusions would be far more closed-ended. I believe there is a place for rants – in fact, I think Bret’s rant was one of the best pieces of writing to be released in 2011 – but that is not the goal of Distance’s essays.

Distance’s essays – and yes, that is why I call them essays – are meant to take a confident, unambiguous stand on an issue, and they are meant to back those up with enough research to state their case without coming off as flame bait or invective. In a very high-level way, that is how I edit essays: they should say “I believe this, and here is the context, and thus here is some research, and knowing that, there is why.” So that’s four points – three and a half, if you’re picky – that all contribute to the central conceit of each essay. This form isn’t new, but it is something we seem to have largely forgotten in our field, and so the broader goal of Distance is to shed light on that form, signify why it’s important, and prove by doing that it can help us out. It’s an attempt to write better, and to encourage readers to read better, too.

Distance.

We don’t write well enough. Linkbait invective spreads quickly because it angers people, in turn prompting a degradation in the quality of writing. People write opinions unchecked and unedited, leading to thoughtless arguments and shoddy research.

We don’t read well enough. We deal with problems of curation and moderation, which both stem from finding trusted sources to sift through the morass for us. We don’t focus on writing of substantial length, and we place rants on a pedestal, even though they don’t offer any solutions.

We don’t talk about writing well enough. To be sure, we’ve made inroads here, but I don’t think it goes sufficiently far. Comments aren’t moderated well enough on most sites, and thriving communities are difficult to build.

I want to create a space where we can do all three of these things better, so I’ve spent the past few months working with several others on the beginning. Presenting Distance: a quarterly journal for long-form essays about design and technology.

The first issue has essays from Ben Jackson, Vitorio Miliano, and Jon Whipple; you can read more about the content and authors at the journal’s aforelinked site. Subscriptions and single issues will be available, in both print and “digital bundle” (PDF, Kindle, and ePub) form.

But, the most important thing: Distance is on Kickstarter, and because Kickstarter is all-or-nothing, this can’t happen without your support. If you’d like to follow along, Distance is on Twitter, too.

This represents the first step in a very long process that, by design, cannot involve only me. I don’t make Distance; I help other people make Distance. So now that we’ve begun the beginning, I’m tremendously excited to see where this takes us, and I can’t wait to share all of this with every single one of you.

The timeline and the periphery.

When Twitter was first created, you could only write 140 characters of your own choosing. Now there are all sorts of other services that tweet on your own behalf, often without your noticing: Foursquare posts your checkins, Instagram posts your images, and all sorts of in-beta services tweet that you signed up for an invite. On the other hand, there are other apps that primarily exist to post your own content. The former I’ll call peripheral clients; the latter I’ll call timeline clients.

In order to make my timeline easier to read and understand, and in order to make my Twitter experience more about the things that I value in it, I run a timeline client that allows me to remove all tweets that are posted by specific client names. So I browse Twitter such that I can only read timeline clients.

As a result, my client-based filter list is formidable:

• Amazon
• Camera+
• Chill
• Colossal
• Fab iPhone
• Facebook
• Flickr
• foursquare
• Geeklist Inc
• Goodreads
• Google
• goscoville.com
• Gowalla
• HootSuite
• Instagram
• Instagram on iOS
• iTunes Ping
• Kinetik iOS
• last.fm
• LastfmLoveTweet
• LinkedIn
• Mashable Follow
• Mixel on iOS
• Momentile
• MyZeus
• Nike Application
• Nike+ GPS
• NYTimes on iOS
• Ohours.org
• Oink App
• Paper.li
• Pinterest
• Posterous
• Rdio
• Readmill
• Retro Camera for Android
• RunKeeper
• Songkick
• SoundTracking
• SoundTracking on iOS
• Stamped for iPhone
• StumbleUpon
• The Visitor Widget
• Tumblr
• Turntable.fm
• Tweekly.fm
• Tweet Button
• twitterfeed
• Untappd
• With
• WordPress.com
• Words with Friends on iOS
• Year in Status
• Yelp

Thankfully, client-based blocking is effective at removing peripheral clients while preserving timeline clients.

Some scattered explanations:

• The worst offenders by far are foursquare and Instagram. They comprise around 20% of my unfiltered timeline. Draw your own conclusions.
• HootSuite: I know you can turn off the little ow.ly bar that appears on shortened links, but I disagree with its premise, and the whole client just skeezes me out writ large. Blocking HootSuite, a timeline client, poses the biggest risk that I’ll miss out on insightful, volitionally posted tweets from other people.
• Tweet Button: I don’t think link sharing should be reduced to the cognitive level of starring a tweet, and I prefer to read people’s thoughts on why they share the things they share, and what they have to say about it.
• Google and Facebook: Filtering these clients preserves only tweets from people who are posting specifically to Twitter. I don’t have a Facebook account and I never sign into Google+ (and would delete my account there if I didn’t think G+ accounts will become compulsory in the coming months).
• I turn off retweets from the vast majority of folks that I follow. I prefer to read what they have to say.
• My timeline client has hashtag blocking, but not string blocking, so I can only block e.g. conference hashtags that begin with a #. I desperately wish I could block any free text, e.g. 4sq, @Fab, deck.ly, rd.io, Herman Cain.
• When I see a new peripheral client hit my timeline, I block it. This doesn’t take much effort to maintain.

I feel like following somebody on Twitter has way too much importance attached to it, partly because we end up following every other internet-related product that they use as a result. We see all their posts on Instagram and Flickr and all their checkins and all the things that they Oinked or ifttted or whatever else.

But I want to keep my focus on what they have to say, and what we have to communicate to each other. Bringing excellent, like-minded people together is what makes Twitter great, and cutting out peripheral clients is a good way for me to do that better.