Words as Materials

I want to start with a quote from writer, activist, and teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh. In Being Peace, he writes:

“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in every sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist.”

Thich Nhat Hanh calls this concept interbeing. He goes on to say that the sun is also in the sheet of paper; and the lumberjack who cut down the tree; and his parents; and the wheat that made his morning bread; and so on. All of these things make it possible for the paper to exist.

I bring up this story, because it helped me understand systems at a deeper level. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it takes to make a design project successful and even possible in the first place. I have a few hunches and I believe words play an important part in the process. But before I get to that, let’s look at how the paper metaphor relates to us as designers.

Our work depends on many things: time, money, technology, materials, constraints, and most importantly,:the lives, attention, and experiences of other people. We participate in and often orchestrate a process that’s bigger than we are. Design requires collaborators, contributors, customers, toolmakers, factory workers, marketers, postal workers, call center agents, you name it. If we look closely, we can see that people are at the heart of everything we make.

When I started writing this talk, I asked my designer friends on Twitter to answer this question: What’s the number one thing that sabotages projects for you? Here are a few of their answers:

a lack of clear understanding between myself and clients, which basically comes down to communication. Ian Marquette (@ianmarquette)

difference in expectations/poor communication Mark Forscher (@garbnzgh)

feedback from 18794387294 different people Zak Greene (@zearl)

Miscommunication. Handoffs to silos. Whatever the opposite of collaboration is.Matt Felten (@mattfelten)

lack of extroverted thinking. One step at a time.Jonathan Myers (@jnthnmyrs):

Same as life really… lack of clarity around intentDavin Risk (@davin)

These problems boil down to one thing: communication. Sharing ideas with other people. Working through decisions together to make something new. We’re here to make meaningful changes in the world, but we can’t do that if we don’t understand each other. We can’t ignore people or work around them.

If we want design to communicate, we need to communicate in the design process.

So I’ve been thinking about what communication looks like in the design process. Here’s my take:

Self: We start by thinking alone. We may be collaborating with friends or colleagues, but we still need space to make sense of what we’re making. We have to put it into terms we can relate to.

Team:We also have to talk through it with our team. That’s where extroverted thinking comes in. We may need to sketch, or brainstorm ideas, or summarize what we’ve heard from interviews or user research. We have to get on the same page or find a shared language. Once we have a sense of what we’re doing, we can express those goals as requirements, come up with an approach, and move forward. All of these messy conversations help us gather consensus and work through the details.

Product: After choosing a design direction, we can prototype it, refine it, and try to make it speak for itself. The product needs to reflect the goals and intent we set out to achieve—and in some ways, it needs to stand on its own.

PublicOnce we’re clear on what we’re making, we build it. And if we’re lucky, we get to announce it and share it with the world.

As we move through each of these steps, the idea starts to solidify and become visible to people around us. This is why I think of design as a process of articulation. We join together to express an idea in a coherent form. We bring ideas to life. We connect the dots or build bridges for our users. That often means being specific about what a product does, who it’s for, why it matters, and how it works. We have to trek through a pile of ambiguity to do this.

This outward arc or continuum is the same one that I go through as a writer. I think and sketch and jot down notes; I question my assumptions; I struggle to understand. Later, when I have a sense of what I need to do, I share drafts and take in feedback; I try different variations and keep refining the work until it’s ready for the public.

I work on digital products and physical goods, so I’m deeply involved in the design process. But I also want to call out early that my process is the design process. I don’t write fiction or short stories; I use language to solve problems—whether that’s behind the scenes or in the product itself. I use words as material.

Earlier this year, Matt Jones gave a talk at Interaction15 about his experience running BERG and directing interaction design at Google’s Creative Lab. He said:

“[Writers] are the fastest designers in the world. They’re amazing at boiling down incredibly abstract concepts into tiny packets of cognition, or language.”

Going back to Thich Nhat Hanh, I believe that writing is part of every design. If you can clearly define what you’re making and articulate its value, the steps to bring it out into the world will go much faster. It’s easy to put pixels together when you’ve already made decisions. And since we work across systems and borders, there’s no better way to articulate design than with writing.

The gap between us

I want to focus on writing today, because I’ve noticed a huge gap between writers and designers in the professional world. And I think it contributes to the larger communication problems we face. We’re often on separate teams in separate buildings. We have the same goals and audiences, but we’re rarely seen as partners or equals.

I first noticed this gap 10 years ago when I was working at Apple, and I’ve seen it again and again since. Designers are invited to product meetings; writers hear about them afterwards. Designers sit close to the CEO; writers are in the call center or brought in right before the launch. Designers make things; writers support them. You can probably trace this separation back to how we’re taught in grade school or high school. In the U.S. at least, we learn to write in English class, to draw in art class, and to understand shapes and numbers in math class. But I’ve realized this intentional separation weakens our work and limits the contributions we can make to the world.

When I’m on a team, I always try to sit with the designers and engineers—whether in person or on IRC. But most product teams don’t even have a writer. And unfortunately, I don’t think I can solve this particular problem myself. So instead of trying to restructure every product team out there, I’ve been thinking about how you can use words as material in your own design practice.

These are some of the questions that have come up for me along the way:

• What does writing contribute to the design process?

  How can designers use words to articulate what they’re making?

  How can we, as humans, benefit from clear language?

  How can writing make products easier to adopt and understand?

  How can I broaden the definition of “writing” for designers?

I keep using that phrase “words as material,” so let’s talk about words for a bit.

Words shape our ideas, how we see the world, and how we relate to one another. As design teacher and researcher Anne Galloway says:

“Language doesn’t just make things—it assembles, cobbles together, entire worlds and all the relations within.”

Language makes it possible for us to navigate places and relationships; to express needs and requirements; to name and categorize things; and to understand our place in the universe.

Last year, I had the pleasure of editing Abby Covert’s marvelous book about information architecture, How to Make Sense of Any Mess. In it, she says:

““Language is the material of intent… Language is how we tell other people what we want, what we expect of them, and what we hope to accomplish together. Without language, we can’t collaborate.”

As a technology, writing has many merits. It complements verbal and visual communication. It’s sturdy and can stay put. It’s cheap. It’s easy to change or reproduce. And it moves faster than ships or airplanes. Writing makes it possible to propel knowledge and intent forward through time.

Historically, writing has served us as a force of stability. It gave us a way to record history, exchange information, and establish legal systems. We wrote to preserve knowledge, transmit ideas, and pass on traditions. And of course, we still do those things, even with hypertext. We still treat writing as a product of the editorial process.

But I’ve also come to see writing as a material in itself. Something we can play with and manipulate. Something that can change over time as questions come up in the design process or an idea evolves. Writing can be a tool for talking to ourselves when we’re still figuring things out. A sort of mirror or feedback system. A way to understand and articulate design.

When we put ideas down into words, we give them form and make them malleable. We bring them out into the light and make them visible to other people. And that’s super important, because we can’t read each other’s minds. We need to be able to examine what we think we know, question it as a group, and refine it. That’s the only way we can get closer to the truth together.

Writers sometimes talk about this idea of casting a sentence. You throw a line out there and see if it catches. And if it doesn’t ring true, you reel it back in and keep trying. You may use the same words in a different order, swap them out for synonyms, or start over completely. It’s kind of like sketching with words.

When I sit down to write, I don’t usually know what I’m going to say. It’s only through the act of writing that it becomes clear that I need to say anything at all.

If you want to use words as material, I highly encourage you to see them as small blocks and modules you can play with. Write down the words your clients or colleagues use on index cards or sticky notes. Move them around. See how they stack and relate to each other. If clear writing is clear thinking, we have to be willing to get messy first. Anne Lamott talks about this in her classic book, Bird by Bird. She says:

“What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here—and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing.”

I like this idea of writing as a way of figuring things out and exploring possibilities—and that willingness to experiment fits right in with design.