Short Thoughts

The Blurb Experiment

Web development has been a large part of my technological life for quite some time now: I started making websites at a very young age, and for two summers starting a couple of years ago, I co-taught a web development course at my old high school. People have often asked me “can you teach me how to make a website?” “Sure!” I frequently reply, and we vow to set a time when we can start working on it.

To this day, I have yet to teach a single person how to make a website. So I started trying to figure out why.

This evening, a conversation over a wonderful dinner with my friends Meagan and Hilary inspired me to start reexamining my desire to share knowledge. When I talk about software and computer-y goodness, I get excited, and I want other people to get excited about it, too. But it’s not just that I want other people to become nerds like me, that’s not what it’s about.

Any science, when done well, becomes an art, a thing of beauty. That’s how I see technology, and I don’t believe it’s just because there’s something terribly wrong with my mind (which is a point that in and of itself is open to debate). I believe that beauty isn’t just in the eye of the beholder: everything has some form of inherent beauty, and for some people, it’s just more challenging to find it in some things than others.

I, for instance, happen to think that most German-designed sports cars (most Mercedes models excluded) are exceptionally beautiful — not because of what they represent, or how they perform (which is exceptional in its own right), but because some individual or group of individuals put a part of themselves into each design. When I see a Cayman R drive by (which, granted, is rare ), I see love: somewhere, some industrial designer put more thought into every contour of that car than you or I could possibly imagine, and they made damn sure that by their own personal standards, it’s perfect. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what Porsche thinks, because that designer left the workshop satisfied.

And it occurs to me that that’s where true beauty comes from: humanity. Beauty in any contrived object comes from its human attributes, or rather, what some live person put into it to bring it to its present form. Would anyone be moved by the Starry Night paintings if ol’ Vinny had felt like he was just slapping oily crap onto a canvas? Just as van Gogh infused his paintings with emotion, you can be sure that the design team behind the Cayman did the same.

John Maeda (the president of RISD) speaks about technology becoming progressively more human, and that the job of computers should not be to alienate us from our workflow, but rather embrace our mindset, and adapt to our needs. To me, technology is human in a very real way, and this is where its beauty lies. I put a piece of myself into every piece of software I write, and that’s what I want to show people. To self-servingly quote myself in an IM conversation earlier this evening with my friend Sarah:

I want to take a group of people who either don’t know much, or might be a little frightened of technology, or maybe know how to do things but not why they work that way, and show them something beautiful about my job, in a unique way.

But I digress. More than a little. (See what I did there? I put the real subject of my blog post after my self-indulgent rambling, so you’d have to read it to get to the good stuff; kind of like putting the day’s weather report after the story about the cat beauty pageant on the news).

The Experiment

It dawned on me that the biggest impediment to my ill-fated agreements with others to teach them how to make a website is time. People barely have enough time to do what they need to do in their lives, and “I want to learn how to make a website” gets relegated to the low priority scale of the life-calendar, along with “someday, I’ll learn how to play the guitar” and “I’ve always wanted to visit Iceland” (to all you guitar-playing world travelers out there, we salute you). Often, the problem is more perceived commitment than anything else. So I have an idea, and I call it The Blurb Experiment.

The idea is simple: teach something using daily “blurb” lessons, each one not more than a sentence or two, combined with a link to a live example, or more resources for people who want to learn the subject more in-depth. Each lesson should be no more complex than a Facebook status update (we already read dozens of them on a daily basis, what’s one more?) — in fact, I’m debating actually using Facebook statuses as the format for the course. The goal is that after reading a sufficient number of these status updates, someone will have learned something.

The concept comes from comic strips, in fact. I make time to read Cyanide & Happiness every day, because it only takes a few seconds, and it’s fantastically irreverent, and usually makes me smile, or think, or both. It’s low-pressure, and easy to catch up on if I miss a day or two. I figure, why couldn’t someone learn something that way?

The challenge, of course, is making the blurbs (as I’m calling them) engaging and focused enough to keep people’s interest. For that reason, I’ve decided not to start with web development, but rather do a test run of the format with a course I’ve been kicking around in my head for a year or two now: the thought process an interaction designer goes through when making an app, or in other words, the steps someone like myself takes to psychoanalyze a user I’ve never met, and probably never will. It’s low-pressure (because the reader doesn’t have to do anything except read), certainly entertaining, and just might change the way you use your computer (if you know what I’m thinking when I make a program, you’ll be able to figure out how to use it that much easier).

I’m thinking I’m going to get started on this in a week or two. We’ll see how the format works, and if it’s successful, I might just try a Blurb-based Web Development course.