Design – Minotaur Design

Review: How To Start A New Country

My thoughts on “How To Start A New Country” by Balaji S. Srinivasan

Balaji S. Srinivasan is a prolific writer, founder and entrepreneur. His article from April 9, 2021 proposes starting new countries as digital communities:

The network state is built cloud first, land last. Rather than starting with the physical territory, we begin with a digital community.

Generally he can be depended on to expound at length on widespread topics in what some might call informed forward thinking, and others derisively label as science fiction, wishful thinking or technopositive propaganda. What is propaganda though?

“communication that is primarily used to influence an audience and further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts in order to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language in order to produce an emotional rather than a rational response.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda

I would argue that this piece on a rather bold topic IS in fact communication being used to influence an audience, and to FURTHER AN AGENDA. I would not agree that it fits the definition beyond that, as it takes great pains to present facts clearly, perhaps anticipating such accusations and heading them off at the pass.

The article encourages both an emotional AND rational response, and in fact encourages rational thinking as it lays out the thinking behind the initially eyebrow-raising premise – starting a new country.

What case is it trying to make?

The author works to point out and get consensus on the concept of ‘a fresh start’. Why “new” is attractive, beneficial and feasible, comparing the rationale of a new country to that of a new company, new canvas or an empty page. This comparison escalates quickly, to buying vacant land with the idea of development, to new cryptocurrencies being created despite hundreds of perfectly sound ones already being in use.

Why Start a New Country?

Spanning ancient history and modern day events, Balaji quickly and compellingly lays out the “Why”, and moves on to “How”, detailing the specific ways new countries have come into being historically: Elections, revolutions and war. Next up are several modern additions to that toolbox: Micronations, Seasteading and Space. While these are interesting and worth keeping an eye on, his focus is on the concept of Cloud Countries.

Our idea is to proceed cloud first, land last… we start with the digital community… people interested in founding a new virtual social network, a new city, and eventually a new country… we organize our internal economy around remote work, we cultivate in-person levels of civility, we simulate architecture in VR, and we create art and literature that reflects our values.
https://1729.com/how-to-start-a-new-country/

Again, the language implies that every objection to this premise has been captured and countered, including “but, but countries have physical land, and measurable imports and exports, and quantifiable populations!”

Physical land need not be contiguous, and country-scale leaderboards already exist that track the population, solvency and outputs/inputs of countries across the world – so what’s the big obstacle again? Balaji feels path towards building a country lies in a reverse diaspora: a voice into a trickle into a chat room, then a recognized few enclaves in the physical world that correlate to digital communities – call them neighborhoods or call them what you will, the progression seems feasible.

Shared belief as a concept is identified as the fundamental mechanism in how currency works in general, with cryptocurrency specifically as an example of consensus belief, and that other measures of belief include voting with one’s feet, wallet, or even one’s mind via editorial content creation. Beyond simple belief though, the case is made that all the ingredients for this shift are already in place.

… the cloud country concept takes the most robust existing tech stack we have – namely the suite of technologies built around the internet – to route around political roadblocks, without waiting for future physical innovation.

Defining what a country truly is boils down to both quantifiable and societal elements. A country must have numbers, from how many citizens live there and contribute/benefit from statehood, and what it consumes and produces – these things define the impact it has on the global stage. A country must have recognition and representation on that stage, and be able to govern itself effectively.

Comparisons are made between Bitcoin and a new cloud country’s formation – the slow onramp, the gradual building of legitimacy and stored value, and the eventual societal acceptance and financial institution buy-in of Bitcoin we’re seeing in recent times. Another comparison case is made between digital networks like Facebook and Twitter, their longevity and robustness, and the size and robustness of actual nation states:

20% of existing countries have a population of less than 1M and ~55% have a population of less than 10M. This includes many countries people typically think of as “real”, like Luxembourg (615k), Cyprus (1.18M), Estonia (1.3M), New Zealand (4.7M), Ireland (4.8M), Singapore (5.8M)…
https://1729.com/how-to-start-a-new-country/

Wrapping Up

Everything that has been laid out here makes sense, on the surface, but the question of scale and timeframe seem the most pertinent. How large will these cloud nations be, and how long will they take to manifest effectively in the world we’re living in now?

If you don’t believe they’ll manifest at all, the question is really of no concern. However if you see the promise, the potential in this concept – the question is vital, as are the implications.

What can you do to prepare for this? How can you contribute to its inception and guide its evolution? I believe it’s by learning everything you can, keeping an open mind, sharing your insights, hopes, and doubts. Participating rather than standing by, pointing out flaws and looking for solutions, and choosing to have hope for the future rather than assuming things will only get worse.

Read the article, and post your thoughts online. Let’s talk.

Welcome

I’m Richard Lee, a designer, commerical drone pilot, podcast host, voiceover actor, musician and artist – ie. a learner for life.

Helping teams and individuals learn and grown is a constent passion – whether I’m leading teams or acting as an individual contributor.

I’m interested in applying insights and craft from my time in design, development and leadership roles to solving new challenges in exciting spaces. Healthcare, AI, Automotive, and HR (helping humans do better work in the right roles) are domains that I’m passionate about.

I focus on understanding user needs first. Within technical constraints, I balance them with business needs – and then the win/win path becomes evident.

Ask me how.

It’s Users All The Way Down

Sometimes in the process of defining your users, you’ll discover that, much like turtles, there are layers upon layers of them just waiting for their stories to be told.

Background

Joining a company late in 2014 as their new UX professional (and founding member of a growing team) has been an eye opening experience. Not only have I been able to finally practice what I’ve been preaching and learning the last few years, but I’ve been exposed to the healthcare industry – which is entirely new to me. Tons to learn = tons of fun.

Anyone in experience design must carefully consider their users’ goals, circumstances, capabilities and habits. This is one way for us to get out of our own heads and as far into our users’ heads as possible – avoiding the trap of designing for the users we’re most familiar with: ourselves.

Identify the users we’re serving is a great place to start. This sounds simple and it can be – but it can also be a complex puzzle (with all the edge pieces hiding and the corner pieces eaten by your dog.)

What my company does

At a high level, we provide a secure and efficient communication platform for the healthcare industry. The platform helps patients, practice staff and hospital staff efficiently contact physicians.

The problems we solve:

handling the bazillion ways that physicians within a hospital or practice setting need to be contacted depending on situational context.
sending information to a physician in a way that is secure and does not violate laws around the privacy of protected healthcare information (PHI).
maintaining a fine balance between the needs for privacy and accessibility on the part of the physician.

Who are our users?

User (Turtle) #1: Our external users

This group includes doctors, nurses, acute care staff and hospital / practice management. They’re the obvious answer to the ‘who is our user’ question – the system was designed to meet their needs and everything revolves around maintaining and enhancing the capabilities that our platform extends to them.

If we push out a buggy feature or misjudge the utility of an enhancement and sacrifice something more vital, these are the people who feel it the most. We should be in close contact with representative members of this group, testing things out and gathering feedback constantly. This group will (and should!) receive the highest prioritization when it comes to evaluating features, to doing user research and to planning and executing usability testing. That said, don’t stop here!

User (Turtle) #2: Patients

Our healthcare professionals are themselves serving another group of users: their patients at member hospitals and practices across the country. These are the folks that our external users are under oath to care for, and who they went to school for a dozen years to serve.

This is the group who pays the price for inefficient communication practices. It’s the folks who have seen their premiums and deductibles climb year after year and who in too many cases don’t have insurance at all. They pay dearly for any healthcare they receive. This is you and me, when we visit our family doctor or when we land in the emergency room after falling off the roof in an ill-advised attempt to save money on chimney repair.

While we can’t prioritize designing for this group over the others, we should always consider the impact of our decisions on these people.

User (Turtle)#3: Internal Users

We have another group of users not immediately obvious to the naked eye: our internal users. These are the folks that use a suite of applications to onboard new external users and that support their needs on a 24/7 basis, 365 days a year.

They don’t use the exact same set of tools as our external customers, but they’re touching the same data and hitting the same systems. Their needs are also much more diverse since they service every type of external user and must become experts in the task flows for those users. This is no small feat, as the training required for these folks to become proficient runs from a full week to a staggering 3 months.

When considering the needs of this user group, striving to avoid introducing further complexity is a big priority. Beyond that, a large part of your backlog might revolve around taking steps to reduce that complexity even further (and therefore lighten the cognitive load of using the system).

If you’re in this situation, your company’s bottom line could be affected nearly as much by internal facing changes as it is by changes that affect your external users.

User (Turtle) #4: Executive Team

You’d think we had all the bases covered, but there’s actually one more group of users to touch on. Let’s call it the owner/executive team, made up of company ownership and senior leadership in both your external users’ companies and your own organization.

The goals and tasks of this group tend to be pretty straightforward, and sometimes seem pretty far removed from what the other three groups of users are concerned with. That said, while I don’t recommend placing too much weight on designing for this group, I do believe it’s a mistake not to consider their needs. Pulling off a win-win effort that enables this group to hit their goals tends to be a self-reinforcing success for a company.

Wrap Up

If you only take one thing from this article, know that accommodating anything less than every group of users in your designs is a Bad Thing.

Imagine that your executive team has seen the effect that your team’s UX design and development work has had on the bottom line – and so they foster a culture that values and encourages such efforts on an ongoing basis. This belief is folded into the company’s core values, and soon the sales, support and product development teams are all on the same page.

Your external users consistently see improvements, enjoy using your product and feel that their feedback is valued and acted upon. Inevitably these happy professionals pass those benefits on to their own customers . For our patients user group that manifested through cost savings, less time in the waiting room or waiting on a surgery date, and better quality of care.

Your internal users don’t have to jump through hoops to support the customers since the support tools they have been given are performant, intuitive and easy to use.

Wouldn’t that be a beautiful place to work? Are you ready to make it happen?

Thoughts On Proprioceptive Feedback

The literature:
Spatial Updating Of Self-Position And Orientation During Real, Imagined, And Virtual Locomotion (1998)

For efficient navigational search humans require full physical movement but not a rich visual scene.

The research done by Klatzky, Loomis, et al. as well as that of Ruddle and Lessels both indicate that proprioceptive feedback is a crucial factor in our ability to accurately gauge distance, size, heading and rate of movement. While my own experience echoes their findings, the reading left me with a couple questions.

First, what are the differentiating factors that separate those of us with what appears to be a more developed innate sense of direction (or perhaps a more advanced and accurate sense of place) from those who have difficulty with even the most rudimentary way finding operations when removed from familiar environments? Are there biological factors at play, or are the differences primarily acquired through life experience? Can we train to be more receptive to proprioceptive feedback, learn to interpret it more accurately, or are we consigned to our genetically disposed navigational fates, as it were?

Second, what are the implications of this kind of research on purely digital mediums, in which physical feedback is minimal or nonexistent? Are there natural corollaries between physical locomotion or visual perception and our navigation of pages on the web or through various states of an application? Could connections between these modes of ‘navigation’ be yoked more efficiently, enhancing a user’s innate ability to find their way about within a complex application?

What do you think?

Design Constraints Are Awesome

While reading some material recently I was particularly struck by a correlation between the sentiment of “designing for monochrome first” (for color deficient users) and the design movement termed “Mobile First”.

In both cases, the designer aims to build their interface elements such that the largest % possible of users will have accessibility to the data, based on the real and perceived limitations of the environmental factors imposed. After baseline accessibility and usability you can worry about nuances and aesthetics.

Monochromatic vision strips the designer of color-based tools and techniques, forcing you to fallback to the use of shape, contour, contrast and pattern. The Mobile First design sensibility forces the designer to carefully prioritize what elements of the design are truly needed to accomplish the goal(s) of the product, framed within the limits imposed by a smaller display. You also have to consider the contextual differences in usage between a mobile device and a desktop computer, and within the vastly different feature sets of modern devices.

I often hear about project constraints in terms of drawbacks, of obstacles to building the perfect widget. It’s much more helpful to think of constraints as helpful wayfinding elements on the road to successful project definition. If you know what they are, you won’t waste time in rabbit holes and you’ll be able to focus your time and attention on crafting the best product possible – one that will meet the unique needs of your users, whether or not they can see colors and regardless of what they’re using to access your offerings.

Thoughts On Medical Decision Making

Original article by Jerome Groopman

We all fall victim to habitual behaviors, and more so when we are unable to focus sufficient attention on tasks at hand, believing (consciously or unconsciously) that we can accomplish some process or task without conscious thought, instead thinking about ‘more pressing’ matters.

What is more difficult to detect are those biases not based on habit, but instead on other factors. Groopman’s article on medical decision making explored this issue in the light of decisions made every day by physicians in practices and hospitals across the world.

Several types of errors were explored, including Representativeness error (thinking that is overly influenced by what is typically true), Availability error (the tendency to judge likelihood of an event by how easy relevant examples come to mind), confirmation bias error (cognitive cherry picking – confirming what you expect to find by selectively accepting or ignoring information) and affective error (making decisions based on what you wish to be true).

The stories he shared demonstrate how a very skilled and educated doctor can make incredibly dangerous mistakes, due in some cases to the fast-paced world of medicine but in other in reaction to common human urges such as the desire to be merciful and spare a patient embarrassment or further fatiguing tests.

At my workplace we are tasked with making medical industry communication more secure and much more efficient – resulting in better patient care and increased physician and clinician satisfaction. After reading this article and having learned a great deal about how complex the communication needs of a hospital or practice have become, I have to wonder how many mistakes are made due to the very real problems of workflow dissolution and workplace communication breakdowns. How many errors of the classes described by Groopman could be avoided or reduced in severity through more frequent and higher quality peer-to-peer interactions in the medical industry?

GapMinder Data Analysis

In my HCI cognitive science class we’ve been studying visualization and how a given interface can enhance our mental processing power, bringing more of our wits to bear on a challenge. Here’s a look at comparing a few layers of data as reported by two very different nations.

Denmark vs. USA – Charitable giving related to income & life expectancy

I chose to compare the nations of Denmark and the United States, examining their respective records of charitable giving and comparing that to each nations’ income per person and their life expectancy. The data available ran from 1960 to 2008, and so it’s worth noting that the period studied spanned several wars with worldwide impact, numerous financial recessions and a gradual but accelerating trend of climate change.

The United States
The United States in 1960 was quite a charitable one, donating 0.54% of the gross national income (GNI) while only reporting $18,175 in income per person. We had a change of heart it would seem, as the % of GNI given to charity fell steadily for 37 years before finally ending at 0.18% of GNI in 2008.

During this period, while our incomes rose by $24k and our life expectancy by 8 years we gave 0.54% less to charities.

Denmark
Denmark in 1960 was a hard place, donating only 0.09% of their GNI while reporting only $11,569 in income per person. They seem to have buckled down and gotten industrious, as the % of GNI given to charity rose for 21 years to 1.03%, with a high of 1.06% before finally ending at 0.82% of GNI in 2008.

During this period, their incomes rose by $20k and their life expectancy by 6 years. In the end Danes increased their charitable giving by a staggering 0.97% over the period.

Reflections
An interesting measure to add to this comparison would be an index of reported happiness & contentment – does charity or income have a greater effect on happiness?

I would also have enjoyed seeing an overlay of world events across political, economic and climate scopes, relating those factors into the changes in life expectancy, income and charitable giving.

The animation was quite helpful, and illustrated the rate of change between compared parameters over the lengthy collection of data ranging over 48 years, clearly calling out the rapid rise of Denmark’s charity while the USA gave away less and less each year.

It’s purely correlative, but it appears that given the much larger percentage they gave to charity (from their noticeably lower income) the Danish were not overly burdened and lived to nearly the same age. Many factors could have been at play, but I’m given to lean towards the old adage that money CAN bring happiness as long as you spend it on others.

Using Vision To Think (a nod to Stuart Card)

In an HCI class I’m taking currently, we’re studying the cognitive science behind the long human history of visual-spatial displays. We’re talking caveman drawings up to the latest in Minority Report-style virtual interactive displays – fun stuff!!

Here’s an article to soak up if you’re interested in this kind of stuff: The Cognitive Science of Visual-Spatial Displays: Implications for Design

And here’s some thoughts of my own about that article:

More than anything else, this week’s reading of Mary Hegarty’s paper on the science of visual displays made me realize why it’s much easier for visually-minded folks like myself to understand something best when we’re able to interact with a subject on a visual level.

“Representations that are informationally equivalent (contain the same information) are not necessarily computationally equivalent”…
“task performance can be dramatically different with different visual displays of the same information”…

These are dead on. Whenever I’ve encountered a complex problem, whether facing it alone or in a small group (or mentorship, etc.) I often kick off the process or discussion with something along the lines of “Are there other ways I/we can look at the issue?” This is helpful in many cases because in representing the object or process with an iconic, relational or complex display allows us to augment our thinking, to enhance our understanding and to bring additional inferences or insights to bear.

Displays allow us to externalize both the storage and the organization of a massive amount of data, freeing up our fragile and limited minds to process that data in different ways. It also lets us explore the relationships between groupings of related elements, i.e. chunking – freeing us to a degree from the limitations of short term memory by compressing these complex associations or concepts into a fewer number comprehensible objects.

I understand the world through my visualizations of it, both in reality and in my internalized efforts to understand the world around me, so my favorite blurb by far was the author’s reference to Stuart Card’s sentiment “Using vision to think”.

Notes from GiantConf 2014′s “Building a Whole Team UX Design Team” presentation by Phillip Hunter

In his presentation on day two of GiantConf 2014, Phillip Hunter talked to us about “Building a Whole Team UX Design Team”. Here are my notes from his talk.

Phillip Hunter – Building a Whole Team UX Design Team
@designoutloud
http://www.minotaurdesign.com/blog/wp-login.php

His belief is that in the UX community, team building is much like early days in baseball scouting.

The focus on stereotypes:
on rock Stars in the industry…….
(is that a person w/ diseases and who trashes hotel rooms? lol)

On Ninja’s….
(is that the person who kills people in the night? lol)
Focus on design mishmash – (beanie/knit cap and glasses, lol)

– Stereotypes don’t help us build better UX teams. Avoid them.

(slide of the major pieces of most companies) – All these people are ENABLING the user experience.
– most of us are in Product development team.
– so it’s silly to think of one small piece of the org as wholly responsible for the UX of a company

4 primary capabilities (as a grid):
– engineering leading technology
– maintaining strong teams
– running a successful business
– enabling great experiences

The practice of creating experience is a SERVICE – look to service design for cues

Strategy means defining and inspiring before hiring

Hiring a dev, designer, tester because you need to developer, design and test is premature.

Context + capability to help you know the best way to create that holistic UX mindset.

OAQH- Orient, Assess, Question, Hypothesize

Setting the team-building CONTEXT:
– what are our goals, values, constraints and principles as a corp?
– what do we need to get done?
– why?
– how much/how fast?

Setting capability requirements:
– What do we need to be god at?
– How good? How will we know?
– What are our priorities?
– Not who…. (yet)

Liz Bacon’s infographic on her definition of user experience design
– pie chart of sorts
– ranked herself within each facet

Building effective structures within the company:
– Complementary strengths vs homogeneous development
– Breadth and depth of skill across people
– Increase participation

Beyond hiring and skills:
Shape align and inform with biz goals
Aim for impact, scope, scale, diversity, resilience, sustainability

Crazy list of necessary skills (all of which mapped back to the grid of 4 above)

Atomic elements of necessary high level skills

Have the right project members been identified?
In what areas will augmentation be the best thing?
What kind and from where?

Building Your list of necessary Skills
Skill name
-skill 1, 2, etc becomes `> color, line, shape 2. Latent need identification, ebrand integration, prototyping, etc.

Gathering list items:
Ask your UX leaders and ICs, your UX enthusiasts, your Product owners, your Execs and sponsors.

(ranking 1-5 etc)
Skill name – Current Level – Desired Level – Priority
– – – –
– – – –

Perceived skill gap
– gap value on its own wasn’t that compelling/illuminating
– Gap value multiplied by Priority – this really surfaced the true GAP in context

Conversations that can come out of the above types of analysis?
Who does that already?
How can you get them involved?
What do your colleagues want to be good at?
X is how we need to craft our job description for HR!!!

sixboxes.com
framework for aligning people’s desires with their roles, and ultimately their ideal internal path that also benefits the company

– issue challenge to add UX to everyone’s job
– Let people find their point of contribution

HIRING (since sometimes you just have to…..)
– understanding and implementing the strategic framework from above
– involve the team to determine fit and talent
– Hire the inspired

Phillip’s slides (Thanks, Phillip!) – http://www.slideshare.net/philliphunter/building-a-whole-company-ux-team

Notes from GiantConf 2014′s “Embracing the Suck” presentation by Chris Harrison

In his presentation on day one of GiantConf 2014, Chris Harrison talked to us about “Embracing the Suck”. Here are my notes from his talk.

Chris Harrison – Embracing the Suck – 10:45a Thursday, June 12

@cdharrison
cdharrison.com

Embracing the Suck: Military phrase meaning to make the best of whatever situation you’re in..

Background:
– Weight loss – 529 to 377
– weight gain due to being depressed, hating what he did, etc.
– Making sites since 1996.
– Former fulltime freelancer
– now: frontend dev for Morris Communications (magazine division)

2013 state of the workplace
30% engaged and inspired
18% actively Disengaged – sabotage their coworkers (cost 450-550 million a year)
52% permanent case of the mondays – do just enough not to get fired

Sometimes you just gotta suck it up.
– Consider the alternative – it could be worse.

– dan willis, “great takes work”
– choose your battles and spend your energy wisely

Negativity is a cancer! (this could be a talk topic!)

Sometimes complaining takes more effort than just getting things done.

Don’t fear new. New = opportunity. (he was told he’d be doing all joomla and drupal work. This was not happy news)
– learn on the companie’s dime
– doubtful he could have learned this stuff as a freelancer (no time/money in it)

Everything you do is a learning process for everything.

– thomas edison’s quote about opportunity and how it looks like work.
– fabio at mailchimp, lead html email designer. was hired to do ui/ux, but they approached him to do HTML emails.
– we know as an industry that html emails suck.
– when he heard this, he embraced the challenge.
– 5 years later he’s an innovator in a field where it was thought there was no room for innovation left.

Opportunity opens doors…

Help your team…
– concept of jumping on hand grenades (someday you’ll need help from the person you help today)

Small wins are still wins. (make it something awesome despite the scope)

Make learning a priority
– learning about sass etc and givng talks about it.
– things suck less when you share what you know with your coworkers
– codeschool etc. as good options for continued learning.

“Sneak” new technology/techniques into projects, but strive to get buy-in from your coworkers (if not management)
– Demonstrate the benefits of incorporating these new techs into an existing workflow

Find creative outlets
– draw more.
– starting doing illustrator avatars for friends
– take pictures! (vader, ninja turtles)
– lilvaderadventures tubmler

Scratch your own itch – side projects rock
– itembrowser.com – his first responsive project
– learned media queries, etc.

Start using your powers for good
– jingle jam (10k) benefiting safeHOMES charity
– design + development + marketing
– someone could really use your talents!

Happiness depends on ourselves – aristotle
Even sucky work can make you happy. Give it a chance.